This book’s release is similar emotionally, for me, to that of the first book I wrote, which was a short prose collection, because:

1. It’s made up of small works, so readers delve into it faster and give feedback faster.

2. Reader feedback contains disclosure of favorite pieces, and so far, everyone has different favorites. That makes me very happy. (Because if everyone liked the same few, I’d assume it’s because those were the only decent ones.)

3. I imagine that other people read collections the way I do – flipping through and stopping on the pieces that resonate with them, skipping the others for “later.”

4. The pieces display comparable levels of horrifying intimacy and therefore vulnerability. So I’m afraid for people to read them. But, because of points one through three above, I can tell myself that people are only thoroughly reading the parts they relate to. And they wouldn’t relate to my intimate thoughts unless they shared them on some level. And realizing that others share your thoughts is the purpose of writing and reading. Therefore, I am safe and should stop worrying.

We are moving.

I sold my house and we bought another one, and we’re moving in three weeks, and we’re very excited about it. We believe that the new house represents a higher level of happiness in our lives. It will usher in a new era for us, basically.

I’m a tiny bit sad because, during the pest inspection, we found out that the new house had carpenter ants. Not termites, but carpenter ants. No, not carpenter bees–carpenter ants. At first I was disgusted by them. But then, as I learned more about carpenter ants in general and our population of them in particular, I came to admire them. Apparently, the ones who live at our house are pretty good at property development. They built a subdivision (in our walls) walking distance from a crape myrtle tree that contains particularly tasty sap and fat aphids. We were joking that they advertised it as “convenient to excellent restaurants.” They also built a little cemetery in a corner of our ceiling, because burying their dead is something they do. Their leader is a queen, and she lives in a tree in our yard.

We’re going to have them all killed. I asked if it was possible to remove them from our house without killing them, but I was told no.

I feel bad about killing them, but that’s real estate. And our new era of happiness requires some sacrifice in order to keep balance in the universe, apparently. So I’m honoring the carpenter ants now, in my mind and on this Internet. Raise your glass to them, if you happen to be drinking. I’ll raise a few later at our bitchin’ new wet bar.

Our Sad Pets

We don’t have babies or toddlers to worry about, but we have these cats, who are almost worse when it comes to a move. They don’t understand anything. They live in constant fear that we’re going to suddenly stop caring for them and turn to murderous sadists. We had to day-board them several times throughout the house-selling process, and that scared them to death. Starbuck, in particular, thought she was in mortal danger and went postal on a teenaged kennel worker.

I can’t explain to them what’s happening. We keep trying. We tell them we’re going to a new house and they’re going to be happy there. But they don’t listen, or they don’t understand English, or something. They won’t be reasonable. They refuse to understand.

There are two more car trips planned for them: one to a new boarding place, near the new house, so that they’ll be safe during the move. Then there’s the trip to their new home. I get stressed just thinking about because I know how they’ll cry in their carriers in the backseat. But then I think about how much they’ll like the new house, and I know it’ll all be worth it.

How many cats do you have? Are they poets, too?

I have two cats, Starbuck and Toby. If they are poets, they haven’t shared that with me. Starbuck enjoys mail and other pieces of paper and protecting our windows from the sight of stray cats. Toby’s hobbies are cool surfaces, hiding, and extreme napping. Starbuck watches a lot of TV, or else watches reflections of the TV in our glasses. Her favorite show is True Blood. Toby doesn’t care for TV much but will listen to Law & Order SVU at a safe distance, as long as there’s a clear path of escape for when the dialogue gets too intense.

Why no mention of the cats since Xmas 2010?

I talk about them on my Facebook page (i.e., my ersatz mini blog), maybe more than people would like.

Have they ever considered having a blog themselves? Why not?

They’ve considered it, yes. But it seems like every time they bring it up, some other cat starts a blog, and then Starbuck and Toby worry about looking like followers. Also, they have concerns that I’m too busy or lazy to type the things they want to tell y’all at the moment they want y’all to know it. Also, they think I’m too free with the camera sometimes, and they can’t physically delete their photos on my Facebook. So we have creative issues to work out. They’ve also talked about doing a graphic novel instead of a blog, and I think that would probably work better, some time in the misty future. I actually have a big, giant plan involving that, and I just need to get them to okay it.

So, over the past year or so, I’ve been thinking a lot about blogging and its evolution and about “online brands” (for want of a not-annoying phrase). For various reasons, I decided to pull back on how much personal writing I put online, such as on this blog. Not so much because of privacy concerns, but concerns about putting information into inappropriate venues and maybe accidentally boring strangers. But lately I’ve been asked about my long-time blogging and have given this URL to interested parties, and I feel guilty when they come here and see nothing new. So I’m going to try to write something aimed at the people who asked, without alienating the people who’ve read everything up until now.

(Did you know that I put this much thought into my blog entries? Well, I do.)

(Sometimes.)

I Am Houston’s First Poet Laureate

which is a supreme honor, and which actually made me cry a little bit when they told me. And which, apparently, surprised a few people because they hadn’t previously known about me, despite my ardent yet maybe inferior attempts to promote my work.

No more intro. Time for random anecdotes.

1.
When I was a teenager, my best friend worked at a bail bonding firm in our neighborhood. On Friday nights, I’d go visit her at work because they had air conditioning, phones that didn’t cost a quarter, and sometimes pizza. Usually I’d sit in the chairs meant for clients, but once in a while I’d get to sit at the desk next to my friend’s. They had typewriters, and I’d type away, pretending to be a bailbondsperson. I typed letters to another friend who’d moved to Baytown, and I typed poems.

I remember feeling very free and sort of wicked when typing those poems. I was getting away with something, one. (Fooling people into thinking I was a business lady while banging out a long column of couplets about some boy.) And, two, the things I typed would be thrown away, so they could be anything. However dirty or sad or mad, however inane, however “You think you’re better than me because you’re in AP English?” they emerged? Would not matter, because I was going to get rid of them. Immediately.

But I never did. I couldn’t bear to. I folded each one and put it into my purse or between the pages of whatever book I was carrying around. One poem became a school assignment, eventually. One became a song in a short-lived rock band. One accidentally made its way into an ex-boyfriend’s hand and confused the hell out of him. Most went on to father children that now live in the deep reaches of my hard drive.

Today, I can’t use Capital Bail Bonds as a writer’s getaway. Instead, I use the parking lot of JC Penney’s. You think I’m sitting in my car feeling buyer’s remorse, but instead, I’m writing. I’m fooling you.

2.
As a published author, I’ve visited a few writing groups and fielded questions from more than a few aspiring novelists. They always ask the same questions and I get tired of giving the same advice, so I become blunter and more succinct with each visit, until they stop inviting me.

The most common question is “How do you find time to write?” and my blunt answer is “Stop cleaning your house.” (Corollary: If your house is already dirty, then stop playing video games.) That answer widens eyes. I don’t know if anyone follows my advice, or if they go home and think, “Well, I may never finish my novel, but at least I’m not a slob!” (“I may never finish my novel, but at least I’m a Level 138 Paladin!”)

The second most common question is “I want to be a writer, so what should I do?” And my curt, mean, brutal answer is “Instead of going to parties and telling people that you’re going to be a writer, you have to go home and write.” The second-to-last time I said that to a group – let’s call them the Southwest Dilettantes – we had a little reception afterwards, and several members of the group walked up to me with wineglasses in hand and told me all about their writerly networking activities and how they were going to finish their novels some day soon.

Exactly one year later, I visited Southwest Dilettantes again. They asked the same questions and I gave the same answers, and I saw in their eyes that I wouldn’t be invited the following year. But this time, during the reception, a young man came up and told me in whispers that he’d heard me speak the year before and had spent the interval sitting alone nights, writing instead of talking about writing. I said, “Oh, okay.” (What do you do when someone actually takes your advice and comes to report to you? Do you feel pride, trepidation, both?) He told me that sitting home writing, while others were having fun at parties bragging about their potential accomplishments, was very difficult. I said, “Yeah.” He said, “So I just wanted to thank you.” And then he slipped away, I guess to his apartment, where he presumably had a blue IBM Selectric all raring to go, just like me twenty years before.

3.
I told part of this on the radio the other day, so sorry if you’ve already heard it, but actually I’m only sorry if you heard it and it sounded different because I change it a little each telling, and if realizing that upset you. But actually, even if that happens, I don’t mind. Stories change. We edit our memories and add special effects.

After I sold my first book (a short prose collection) and finished the requested edits, back in the year 2002 or whenever it was, I was told that it’d be more than a year before anything else happened with it. At *least* a year and a half before the book was a physical thing. That made me sad. Today I’m experienced enough to inform people snottily, as if everyone should already know, that books take a year or more to get made. But back in 2002, I assumed that publishers were ON FIRE to get my work out into the world and hence would print my pages overnight and sew on covers by hand. So finding out that wasn’t the case pretty much devastated me. I cried a little. And what did I do next? I’ll tell you. I cleaned my apartment.

No, I’m kidding.

(Of course I didn’t clean my apartment. Why would I do that? Cleaning one’s home is only appropriate when one has a deadline looming. Nothing makes you finish a book like taking a break to clean your entire domicile, using a toothbrush to scrub each baseboard. You clean, you let the adrenaline from the panicked cleaning flow into your blood, you stay up all night, and then you turn in your finished book one week late, which is one week earlier than your editor wrote on her secret timeline. Hurray!)

So back in 2002, I had the year to wait, so I decided to write a chapbook. And I may have been a little angry when I put that first one together, like “Eff! This! I. Am. A. WRITER! and people-are-going-to-see-my-writing-right-now!!!#%!” I went through all my hoarded work that hadn’t gone into the book, wrote some new work to supplement my chosen themes, picked illustrations, figured out the puzzling process of turning 8.5-by-11-inch paper into a 5.5-by-8.5-inch booklet, emailed my finished file to the copy center, printed with help from the judicious yet emotionally distant man behind the copy center counter, and invited my blog readers to buy my work. “Buy my work!” I said. “Encourage my ego! Condone my bad habits! At the very least, satisfy your curiosity.”

The rest is history (depending on who’s telling it. Some archivists would care and some would recommend that Wikipedia delete the whole page).

4.
So, for me, nine books and twenty-something years after those bail bond days, there are two kinds of book-writing: 1) the kind where you sell your book-to-be on a promise to finish it, then sweat and clean your house until you somehow turn it in one week past deadline, and 2) the kind where you think, “I am a WRITER and I am firm in my belief that people are dying to read my work RIGHT NOW!” and you pull it together in a blaze of industry and inspiration and your house is still dirty and you don’t even care and you email the file to your publisher… and then spend the next few weeks thinking, “Oh my god, why did I put that one thing and then that other thing into the book? People are going to think I’m [crazy/awful/arrogant/a man/a slob]!” And then you pour a glass of tequila with diet tamarind soda and you get over it.

Both of these book types are made up of long strings of bead-like moments of sitting in my car or in a dentist’s office, writing things that maybe no one will ever see.

I wanted to tell you that being chosen as Houston’s poet laureate made me feel justified in doing the latter, this last time. My first book of poems will physically exist in October of 2013. It’s called Falling in Love with Fellow Prisoners. If you’re curious, that book should satisfy.

Additionally, being chosen as Houston’s poet laureate gets me invited to parties. If I meet you with a wineglass, tell me something true.

Sorry I’ve been the worst blog updater in the world lately. But you know how it goes. Blah blah excuses go here.

Important Stuff

I got some awesome sandals on sale at TJ Maxx today. I ate some awesome Indian food. The cats are doing good, but won’t stop date-raping each other.

Books!

I read The Yoko-something Officers’ Club, by Sarah Bird, and enjoyed it.

I read The Bostonians, by Henry James, and it totally upset and traumatized me, until finally it led to understanding of my own young life.

I read Maurice, by E. M. Forster, and it made me feel sorry for Victorian gays and for Victorian peeps in general, because they never had sex, and it messed with their minds.

I read a bunch of cookbooks, even though I don’t like to cook.

Suburban Woe

I accidentally burned up all the grass on my front lawn, with fertilizer, and finally ended up replacing it with sod. It took a long time, because St. Augustine sod is hard to find in Houston this time of year. Apparently.

So I bought all this new grass, which looked half dead, and now I have to water the living hell out of it every single day. Just like my neighbors, who don’t even have new grass. I bought a new kind of sprinkler, too. It hasn’t rained at all lately.

So then, yesterday, they started warning us that there might be a hurricane or, as British people pronounce it on NPR, hurrakin.

And my first thought was, “Oh, hell yes. Please let there be a hurracane.”

And the news was like, “Jesus Christ! Fill up your gas tanks now! Governor Perry is readying the school bus fleet in San Antonio!”

Then I talked to some neighbors and coworkers, and they were like, “I kind of hope we have a hurricane so I can quit watering my lawn.”

And I was like, “Me, too!”

Before the Lousiana/Mississippi tragedy, we were never afraid of hurracanes in Houston. They happen in the waters near here pretty often, and as long as the ground isn’t saturated beforehand, nothing really happens.

But I’m glad we have disaster plans in place now. Better safe than sorry.

But I hope we get a few thunderstorms, at least. We really need some rain right now. I hope it’s not a sin to say so.

Movies!

We saw The Dark Knight and it scared me, to imagine people being so evil and crazy.

I hate crazy people, lately. If you’re crazy and you’re reading this, don’t mess with me. Don’t talk to me. Stop leaving me comments. Got it?

We saw Wall-E, and it was beautiful. I saw it twice, actually. Tears ran down my face the whole time, both times.

You either saw that one already, and you believe me, or else you haven’t seen it and you don’t. It’s okay. I understand that some people categorically hate Disney, or hate animated movies, or hate leftist conspiracies to make conservatives feel guilty. (Or whatever.) But if you saw Wall-E and liked it, then I’m glad for you. Write to me privately and tell me what your favorite part was. If you want.

That’s all for now.

I need to get off the computer and go work out. I’m in the mood to work out! Y’all wish me luck setting up Dance Dance Revolution, without my kids here to help me. My kids are all with their dad for the moment. That means I can’t play console games or even watch TV, pretty much, because I don’t know all the wires and controllers like they do. Feel sorry for me, y’all. Wish me luck figuring it out.

But mostly, send my grass vibes, okay? Send it “grow well soon” vibes. And wish for us to get a lot of rain, but not enough to hurt anyone.

Love,
Gwen

Boys first. Boys, girls don’t want to have sex with boys who:

1. have to make sure their friends approve of their sex partners, first.
2. talk about sex and violence interchangeably. (“I’ll shoot it in your eye, man!”)
3. make it obvious that, once a girl has sex with them, every aspect of it will be discussed with his friends.

Come on, boys. Grow up. (Or admit that you’d don’t really want girls to sleep with you. That’s okay, too.)

Girls! Girls, nobody likes girls who:
1. constantly use sexual behavior to get attention.
2. constantly compare themselves to other girls.
3. think that attention from males is the most important thing on earth.

Unless… we’re talking about a boy who wants to have sex. A boy who wants to have sex with a girl will put up with all of the above and more. But then, even he will get tired of it and move on to something else.

oh, shoot

I had a lot more to tell y’all, but it all just slipped out of my mind. Man.

More later, then. Don’t forget the poetry workshop on Sunday. I’m making worksheets for it this week.

Unless you’re a psycho stalker, of course. No psycho stalkers invited. Sorry, guys. Maybe next time.

reading rainbow

I just read E.M. Forster’s Maurice. Before that, I read a bunch of Henry James. Before that, I read Gregory MacGuire’s Son of a Witch. All of those were good.

Before that, I read a little bit of Etgar Karet’s Bus Driver Who Wanted to Be God. Before that, I read A.M. Homes’ The Mistress’s Daughter. Before that, I read Madeleine L’Engle’s Camilla, which I thought was awesome when I was a middle-schooler but which now cracked me up with its heavyweight self-importance and which saddened me with its romanticization of domestic violence.

Before that, I read Nicholson Baker’s The Fermata, which was funny and clinically interesting.

I need more books to read. Lightweight books that fit in my purse on the bus.

That’s all now. More later.

Is there anything as non-physically gut-hurty as getting a rejection letter in the mail? For any reason?

It’s so painful. It’s like someone breaking up with you, but remotely, so that you don’t even get a chance to rebut or protest, much less any chance for closure. Whatever you were hoping might happen is now never going to happen, and you didn’t even realize how much you were hoping for it until you found out the potential didn’t exist.

The moment you see the letter, you know. Whatever you were doing the hours before, retroactively it gave you no pleasure. Because you got rejected. Someone said you weren’t good enough. And they didn’t even tell you to your face. By the time you got the letter, the person who sent it was riding around town in a BMW, with no thought of you on his mind. He’s partying on his yacht with his pretty blonde girlfriend, and he already forgot your name. And you just have to take it, and move on.
Ouch.

If you’re lucky, you will stop being sad and start getting mad. “I’ll show him,” you’ll say. And, if you’re lucky, you really will. You will move on and do something so awesome, the person who rejected you will wish he hadn’t. And you’ll have your closure, if you even remember his name by then.

But you won’t remember his name, because by then, he won’t matter anymore. If you’re lucky, that’s the way it’ll all go down. Good luck.

New Adventures

I forgot to tell y’all that I had two new adventures last weekend. One: I had clothing altered, for the very first time. That doesn’t sound like a big deal, maybe, to people who get stuff altered all the time. But to me, it was. I was even kind of nervous about it, as I stood in line for a dressing room and watched the man pinch and chalk up everyone else’s clothes.

But now I’m a pro. Now, I could easily go into any tailor’s and have something else altered in the future. Who knows — I might even become one of those annoying obsessives who has her pants taken in and taken out, over and over, back and forth, until the tailor finally tells me, “They look fine. There’s nothing I can do. Please go home now.”

(There was only one woman like that at the tailor’s I went to last weekend. She took it pretty well. She accepted his advice and went home.)

Adventure Two: Shawarmas.

Oh my gosh, seriously — why didn’t one of y’all tell me how good shawarmas were? Y’all need to tell me these things in advance. I ate a chicken one last Saturday for the first time, and it tasted so right. And now I can’t stop thinking about it. The phantom taste of the garlicky sauce comes over me, late in the afternoon, and I say to my boyfriend, “Oh, Jesus, I have to get a shawarma.”
And he says, “There’s no shawarma place around here, baby.”
And I say, “Why not?”
I scream, “WHY NOT?!?”

Also, the place we went last weekend had something called Rose Drink, in one of those old-time lemonade/fruit punch/Orange Bang dispensers. I tasted it, and it seemed to be rose water mixed with food coloring and sugar. It was good. If they’d offered a sugar-free option, I’d have drank a gallon of it. But they didn’t, so I was safe. Safe from another sudden addiction.

More Stuff Later

TTYL, y’all. I have a lot more stuff to tell you, but I don’t want to overwhelm you now.

Oh, wait. Here’s one more thing.

This morning, I was carpooling to work with my boyfriend, and I was reading The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, and enjoying it more than I’d expected to.

(See, when I’d first started it, I’d thought, “Oh, god. Not another super-passive Japanese man narrator!” And I was right — that’s exactly the kind of narrator he turned out to be. But the other characters are interesting, so they’ve kept me from throwing the book aside for another.)

So I’m telling my boyfriend, aloud, what I just told y’all parenthetically in the paragraph above. And then, Eddie Grant comes on the radio, singing “Electric Avenue.” And I say, “Aw, hell yeah,” and I sing a few lines of that before going back to my book.

And then I get to this crucial part of the book, and I turn to my boyfriend and say, “I knew his wife was cheating on him from the beginning. He found out she was, then he started thinking that she ran away with her lover. But there was some stuff earlier about her brother being sort of incestuously perverted, and I’m starting to think the brother kidnapped her.”

My boyfriend shakes his head. “You’re talking about the book, right?”

“Yeah.”

“Okay. Because I was about to say, ‘Damn, you sure know a lot about Eddie Grant.'”

And I laughed heartily at that. But then I thought, shouldn’t I know more about Eddie Grant than I do?

“I’m gonna look Eddie Grant up on Wikipedia,” I said.

And I did. God, I love Wikipedia.

FIN.

The other day my friend Ashley and I went to Texas Art Supply, which is one of the most awesome stores in Houston, partially because it contains all the Dover coloring books and copyright-free image books.

Whenever I go there, I have to look at every single new coloring book so that I can purchase at least one of them, then take it home and put it in a drawer in my vanity, next to my unused box of Prismacolors. That is my habit. That is my way. Right now, I have the following Dover coloring books in that drawer:

Old-Time Children’s Fashions Coloring Book
Gods of Ancient Egypt
Chinese Fashions
Japanese Fashions
Classic Cars of the Fifties

I’m very picky about them. I can’t just buy any coloring book and then take it home and never color in it. The ones I pick must have particular characteristics as far as facial expressions, line thickness, and color variety potential are concerned.

So, like I said, I was very carefully going through the new coloring books, trying to decide between medieval fashions and fairies, and Ashley was keeping me company. She’d found a book of illustrations of scenes from the Bible and was entertaining me greatly by commenting on it aloud.

“I love the Old Testament,” she said. I don’t love it, myself, particularly, but I appreciated her enthusiasm.

“Oh, God,” she said. “Look what they did to Jacob. This is horrible.” I think Jacob was the name of the guy who had to wrestle the angel. It was, as Ashley pointed out, a very lackluster illustration. Jacob looked tired and more like he was hanging on the angel, begging for lenience, than wrestling him. Ashley said this was an injustice, since Jacob (or whoever) had actually put up a pretty good fight until the very end.

At that point, I noticed a man walk near us. On the back of his calf, he had a tattoo of a red, winged devil woman. She was nude and had large, red, devil breasts. I whispered for Ashley to look at the tattoo. She said it was awesome. We went back to the Bible.

“This one’s my favorite,” said Ashley. She showed me a picture of Lot, his wife, and his daughters fleeing Sodom. “Did you know that, after they left and Lot’s wife looked back and turned to salt, Lot and his daughters went to a cave, and his daughters got him drunk and…”

“Had sex with him?” I said. “So they’d get pregnant?”

“Yes!” said Ashley. “Isn’t that awesome, that out of the four people in Sodom who weren’t sinners, three of them ended up performing incest?” We looked for a picture of the incest, but there wasn’t one.

The guy with the devil woman tattoo had a wife. Or a girlfriend. She was pushing a stroller, and the child in it let out a cry. The guy went to join them. He and his woman talked inaudibly, into each other’s ear.

I had a thought. “Find the one,” I told Ashley, “where the guy has sex with his handmaid, while the wife watches.”

“Ooh. Is that… Abraham?” She found Abraham and Rebecca, and then a grown-up Ishmael, but no actual illustrations of handmaid-impregnating menages a troix.

“Did you know,” I said, “that people think Cho Seung-Hui identified with Ishmael, and that’s why he wrote Ismail Ax on his arm? And, like, in Muslim culture, the story’s opposite — Ishmael’s the one who inherited, and Isaac didn’t?”

The tattooed guy and his family were still within earshot, I noticed. They seemed to be moving in a semi-circle around us, close enough to hear us but not close enough for me to hear their whispering. They looked annoyed. I saw the woman roll her eyes.

“I think those people want to look at the coloring books,” I said. They’re waiting for us to get out of the way.”

“Screw them,” said Ashley.

“I know,” I said. “Why don’t they just come up and look at them? It’s not like there isn’t room.”

“Okay, who the hell is this?” Ashley exclaimed, showing me a picture of the Garden of Eden. It contained Adam and Eve, obviously, but also a giant, forlorn man who looked like Rodin’s Thinker or maybe the Jolly Green Giant. “Who is this guy?”

“I don’t know. The giant guy that David fought? The devil?”

“No… I think it’s supposed to be Gabriel,” said Ashley, pointing to the winged Gabriel on the previous page. “And he took on the form of man… but why does he look so ridiculous?”

“Maybe he smelled the apple and morphed into the Jolly Green Giant. Because… you know… vegetables.” Really, I know the New Testament way better than I know the Old one, because they never read the Old Testament at church when I was singing in the choir. How did Ashley know so much about it, I suddenly wondered. Had she actually read the Bible? Knowing her crazy ways, she probably did. She’s artsy like that. She only works part time, then does art and/or reads obscure texts all the rest of the day. Or photographs her friends partially clothed near the bayou. Or takes the bus to Whole Foods and buys herself a coconut. She’s a bohemian. That’s why she fascinates me, I think. I would never, ever be a bohemian (because I grew up poor), but it’s fun sometimes to watch her be one.

By now, the tattooed guy and his lady were openly sneering at us. Was it because they wanted unfettered access to the coloring books? Was it because we were speaking of the Biblical art in a less-than-respectful tone? Was it because we were ignorant of Gabriel’s giant phase and too obviously dense for them to explain it to us? I wondered if maybe I should read the Old Testament. But then I decided that, no, I’m probably too delicate for it.

I ended up getting the coloring book with fairy tales scenes that related to flowers. And fairies. There was a gothic alphabet coloring book, and it turned out that Ashley knew the author. But I didn’t get that one because I didn’t like its lines. Sorry, Heather.

I also got a pencil sharpener, so I can sharpen my Prismacolors, now that Ashley’s shown me how to properly open their box. Who knows — I might actually color a fairy this week.

So my endocrinologist is making me take my temperature every day this month, and I’m learning ever so much. One, my temperature never goes up enough to indicate that eggs are in my uterus. Two, I feel especially sickly on days when my temperature dips low.

Like today. Today I was at 96.9 degrees (Is that normal? Am I dead?) and, once again, I have the between-bimonthly-periods feeling of nausea, dizziness, exhaustion. I even managed to fit in a panic attack between breakfast and lunch.

What does it mean? I try to visualize my own insides. It means… My uterus reaches out lovingly to grasp the egg it knows should be there. (Cramp.) There’s no egg. My uterus feels a chill sweep through its bones. (Low temp.) Where is the egg? My uterus is sick at the thought of having no egg to nurture. (Sick.) My uterus sheds bitter tears. (Another period.)

That’s what I think of. Sorry to be so gross. Really, though, there’s nothing gross about it. If you can watch those plastic surgery shows on TLC (which I can’t watch), then you can read about my uterus’ bloody bimonthly episodes. (Or you can skip reading them, too, like I skip the shows on TLC.)

My endocrinologist says that hormones control everything. On the one hand, I believe that he believes that because it makes for his good livelihood. (Cynicism.) On the other hand, I find myself measuring everything in my life along with my temperature. Am I nicer to my boyfriend when I reach 98 degrees? Do I wear more makeup at 79.3? It’ll take another month of record-keeping to know for sure, I think. (Mild sarcasm.) And what hormone dosage will make me perfect? We’ll wait and see what the doctor tells me. If he knows anything at all. (Carefully controlled optimism, disguised as pessimism.)

Depressing books depress me (and yet, I read).

So I’m reading The Unconsoled, by Kazuo Ishiguro. And I’d like to say that I don’t know why people spend money on drugs, when it’s just as easy to borrow weird books from the library when you’re in the mood to alter your consciousness.

I’m also like to say, “Darn you, Kazuo Ishiguro, for making me rush to figure out what the hell’s going on in your book.” Although I know a lot of people who are always like, “Oh, I figured out The Sixth Sense in the first five minutes of the movie,” and “Oh, I figured out The Village five minutes before the movie started,” and “Oh, I figured out all of Agatha Christie’s mysteries five years before she was born”… I am not one of those people. All you have to do is hold up a sign that says, “This is a mystery,” and I will willfully suspend my disbelief and powers of deduction for weeks on end, until the mystery unfolds.

So don’t tell me what happens at the end of The Unconsoled unless you want me to hate you. But know that I’m reading it so very, very quickly, it’s making my head spin. It’s turning me crazy. I predict several daylight hours in bed, with book in hand, and a wet washcloth across my forehead. Oh my word, what is going to happen? No way to know until I read, read, read.

And then I turn the book over, to examine the blurb for clues, and two times it tells me the story is witty. What? No, it’s very dark and gloomy, you guys. It’s making me sad, but I have to read through.

More Measurements: Marking Time

I realized today that I mark my time with weekends, and that’s not a pleasant way to live when you work five days a week. I live weekend-to-weekend, and I wish it didn’t have to be that way.

A good way to live, I think, is project-to-project. I imagine Mick Jagger and Keith Richards live that way. (Although maybe, for them, it’s overlayed by high-to-high or drink-to-drink?) My weekend marking is overlaid by project marking, fortunately, so I really can’t complain.

Some rich people, I think, live purchase-to-purchase.

So many unrich people live paycheck-to-paycheck, or assistance-to-assistance, or abuse-to-abuse, or high-to-high, overlaid with crime-to-crime-in-order-to-pay-for-the-highs.

How do you live? And do you feel lucky?

We went to the Renaissance Festival on Saturday, like dummies, in the hot sun. I thought, at one point, that I might die of low blood sugar and dehydration. And yet we all had fun, I think. As our friend Richard explained it, “All these women are hot. And they’re medieval.”

Sunday Laundry List

Then, on Sunday, my loud, dirty cousins came over. Tad made fried rice. We all played DDR and drank wine. Then we ate birthday cake to celebrate the twelth-birthday-en-ing of my middle child. Also, we looked at my sexy, sexy bead collection and made plans to attend Houston’s October bead show with wholesale license in hand. Woo hoo – domestic bliss.

Female Trouble News Update

I forgot to say that the week before I saw the endocrinologist, I got off the effing Pill.

I’m the kind of person, my friend Rose observes, who lives in the moment when it comes to relationships. I’m a creature of experience. If I’m with a person and they do something weird, I just roll with it. I like to go with the flow. Sometimes someone will annoy me, and I’ll say, “Don’t do that. That’s annoying.” But it’s never a big drama. I don’t like confrontation or ultimatums to ruin a good time.

Then, a year or so later, I’ll be sitting at home alone, and it will suddenly occur to me that I don’t like a certain person anymore. Suddenly, every annoying thing they’ve done will parade through my mind, and I’ll decide that that person is no longer my friend.

“Just like that?” asks Rose.

Yes. Just like that. Because, by then, I’ve already lived through several instances of telling a certain person, “Please don’t do that. That’s annoying. Please don’t be mean to my kids,” or “Please don’t tell me how to conduct my romantic life,” or “Please don’t spy on me while I’m in the shower.”

And the person keeps doing it. They know I don’t like it, but they don’t stop.

At that point, in my mind, there’s no reason to continue hanging out with that person. At the same time, there’s definitely no reason to have a big dramatic conversation with the person, in which I issue ultimatums. “I want you to apologize for poking me in the eye with your chopstick three times, and promise you’ll never do it again, or I’m not going to be your friend anymore.”

What’s the point? I don’t have time to teach people how to behave decently. That’s not my job – I can only do that for my kids. So I quit calling the person. And it’s over.

So, two weeks ago, I did the same thing with the Pill.

They put me on the Pill a year ago to make the double periods stop. They did stop, but, at the same time, I felt tired. And, as I explained to Rose, they affected my mind. Instead of fantasizing about pretty men with black hair, I found myself fantasizing about lemon-filled donuts. All the time. Nothing meant anything to me. I felt like a fat rabbit in a warm hutch, lying down waiting for my next meal all the time.

And then, the double periods came back. And then, I went back to the gynecologist, and she told me, paraphrased, “A year ago I put you on the Pill to stop the double periods, and now your double periods have returned. And, since then, you’ve gained 15 pounds. I know… Maybe losing weight will stop the double periods. Try losing 15 pounds.”

It took me a while to figure it out, and to connect all the annoyances in my mind, but then I did and I decided to get the hell off the Pill.

Go to hell, Pill. I’m not calling you anymore. You were never my friend, and I’m not going to bother asking you to change.

I feel better already. As PJ Harvey would say, I’m happy and bleeding. (And nauseated.) But that’s better than bleeding and lethargic, isn’t it?

Book Corner

Recently I read Oryx and Crake (by Margaret Atwood), and less recently I read Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell, finally. I enjoyed them both very much. If you haven’t read those yet, you should check them out. Unless you don’t like science fictiony or magicky things, I mean.

Now I’m reading (maybe rereading?) The Beggar Maid, by Alice Munro. She reminds me of Atwood, even though I probably shouldn’t lump them together just because they’re both Canadian and write about children bullying each other near bridges.

Also, as far as not-books are concerned, I’ve been reading Project Rungay. Go there now, because that shit is super hilarious.

Most nights, I read to my kids. Last night we decided to give up on Ramona and Her Father and switch over to A Wizard of Earthsea, instead. I haven’t read that one since I was a kid. Sometimes I suspect I read to my kids because it gives me such a great excuse to revisit old faves… It’s going better than I thought, even though the youngest two fell asleep before the chapter was done. (Which is the secret plan. Mwa ha ha ha!) Before either of those, we read Then Again, Maybe I Won’t, which they liked very much. It’s funny how often I have to preface our books with, “This was before cell phones and video games, so…” It’s hard to get a book that’s suitable and enjoyable for their varied ages. I try to err on the side of bigger words, and that’s why we quit the Beverly Cleary. My youngest is old enough to read those by himself, and he’s been reading the Henrys and the Ribsys at school.

When I was in seventh grade, our Reading teacher read us Flowers for Algernon. I’ll never forget the way she cried at the end. “I’m sorry,” she said, between hugely noisy sobs and gulps for air, “The end always makes me cry!” Some of the kids snickered, and some of them looked scared. I don’t know what face I made (maybe snickered) but I remember being amazed to see a grown-up so affected by a book. That freed me up in some ways. A few years after I left that school, I heard that teacher died. I didn’t fully appreciate her until it was too late. (Like you do with all teachers, in a way.)

I’m trying to read Kavalier and Clay, but it’s hard to read big-word books when you don’t have big blocks of time, and you keep having to re-read in order to get back into the flow. Or maybe this one just starts slow. If you read it, feel free to comment and tell me what you thought.