Guess where I’ve been. Give up? I’ve been home working on my next novel, or at a coffee shop working on my next novel, or at my friend Ashley’s house, working on my next novel while she paints her next painting.

Or, more likely than that, I’ve been procrastinating and making excuses for not working on my next novel. Other than that — including that, actually — life is pretty great here. Hope yours is, too.

Come see me at the Inprint reading in Houston, at the Alley Theater on May 3, if you want to see me. They let you submit questions, so someone submit a hilarious one. Don’t submit something like, “How did you become a writer?” or “What advice do you have for people who want to be writers?” because someone else already submitted those. Also, don’t submit, “How are you Hispanic if you look white to me and I don’t know you or anything about you and I’ve never read your writing but you look white to me so is that your husband’s last name and why are there Hispanic people around you saying they’re your dad and your cousins, I mean you look white to me so why are people saying that you’re Hispanic?” because someone will undoubtedly stand up and ask that at the reading without submitting it beforehand. It’s pre-ordained.

(My answer is always, “Meet me outside after the reading for a Taco-Off and we’ll find out who’s Hispanic, then, motherfucker.” Then, after the reading, I just leave. But I do usually have a couple of tacos at Taqueria Laredo on Washington Avenue the following morning. They make the best picadillo — reminds me of my Aunt Sylvia’s.)

Pop Culture Obsessions

I was going to ask y’all if you knew of a DJ/electronica/hip-hop person named Dabrye, and if you liked him as much as I’m starting to, but then I refrained because I’m starting to realize that i have sort of unusual taste in music.

I used to think that I had excellent taste in music and that most other people didn’t, but now I’m just accepting the fact that there are different kinds of tastes in music and everyone has whatever works best with the active nerves in their brain. See, I’m reading Oliver Sacks’ Musicophilia right now, and all the stuff he’s saying fits in with my newly hatched theory that the brain of any given human who likes music must like it in a certain range of frequencies. A lot of people enjoy a higher frequency range than my brain enjoys. Like Passion Pit, Fleet Foxes, the Raveonettes, the Whatever-Os, and the Whosits… all those people sound too high and tooth-grindy to me. I like stuff that I can only describe as lower, but which my husband might describe as too minimal, too repetitive, too subtle, too depressing, or just too. Just too not-Passion-Pit, he means.

And that’s okay. Our brains are different. Why would you want to be married to the same kind of brain as your own? Wouldn’t that be boring?

We had this raging argument about taste in music the other day — it’s one of the few things we really argue loudly about — and it lasted us all the way home and ended up concluding in front of the kids. But we took little breaks to add footnotes for the kids’ edification, and each of our footnotes had the same gist, which was that we’d rather argue about who has better taste in music than live with someone who doesn’t care about music at all.

Oliver Sacks says that people whose brains keep them from loving music have “amusia.” The very idea makes me feel sad and sick — it’d be like losing my peripheral vision or something.

Not to be an asshole. I’m just saying. Well, and maybe saying that makes me an asshole, anyway. But I can’t help it — I’m just telling y’all that it freaks me out when people say they don’t care about music, and I can’t even imagine.

Um… I subtitled this part “Pop Culture Obsessions” and not “Raging Music and Neuro-Type Snobbery” because I wanted to also ask who else out there is watching RuPaul’s Drag Race and letting it eat their insides apart, like I am. Anybody? Anyone? Crickets in the back? No? Well, whatever.

Oliver Sacks instructs Dallas and me.

I hardly get to see my son Dallas anymore, because as long-time readers know, he lives with his dad while his two brothers live with me. And all three of them are teenagers now, so they have weekend stuff going on all the time, just like little adults, and we’re all at the post-divorce phase, thank-God-fully, where we can be flexible and miss a weekend visitation here or there for the sake of the kids’ scholastic and social obligations.

But, so, the other day…

[I’m about to say something to do with Dallas having Aspergers, and you might wonder why I’m saying it here and not on my ChronMomBlog, and I will tell you that it’s because the Chronicle now has two mom blogs about moms with kids with autism, so I feel like talking about my kid’s autism there would, at this point, look like horning in on other writers’ territory.]

So Dallas was here the other day, and I was reading him little bits from Oliver Sacks, because Dallas has synesthesia and absolute pitch (which I used to refer to, incorrectly, as perfect pitch) and Mr. Sacks talks about each of those.

Synesthesia is when someone mixes the senses a little bit. In Dallas’s case, he sees a different color for each note on the musical scale. Some people might see different colors for each letter of the alphabet, or different shapes for each number, but Dallas has the color/music variety, which we’re interested in because he’s a musician.

So I’m reading aloud to him that, “Composer John Doe sees D minor as a bright yellow.”

And Dallas interjects, “Well, he’s wrong.”

I say, “Hold on, baby,” and read that John Doe, furthermore, sees D major as blue.

“That guy’s totally wrong,” says Dallas.

I read from the next paragraph: “When I told this to composer Joe Blow, he said, ‘That seems all wrong to me.'”

“Yeah. Because it is,” says Dallas. “What colors does that guy see?”

“He says D minor is light green.”

Dallas snorts. “At first I thought that guy might have some sense, but now I see he doesn’t, either.”

It cracks me up, his confidence. His arrogance, you can go ahead and call it. It took me forever to convince Dallas that not everyone can see what he does, and not everyone can tell what note a rubber band makes when it snaps against a wrist. He would not believe me — he couldn’t imagine a mind that didn’t work like his. But eventually I managed to convince him, and he finally said, “That explains a lot, actually.” It explains the infuriating confusion caused by certain band teachers, apparently. He wondered if they were lying or purposely tuning the instruments wrong, maybe because they didn’t like him and wanted an excuse to give him bad conduct grades when he argued or covered his ears in annoyance.

I read in Mr. Sacks book that synesthesia occurs in one of every 2,000 people and absolute pitch (the ability to identify a note on its own) is more like one in 10,000. That surprised Dallas and me.

Mr. Sacks said that having very fine absolute pitch can be a nuisance for some people — that hearing very slightly off-tune notes can irritate them while the rest of us can’t even tell the difference.

“Does it ever bother you when I sing a tiny bit flat?” I asked Dallas. Because I know that he knows that I sometimes do. Not flat enough to lower my score on Rock Band, but flat enough that he’ll very honestly tell me if I ask.

“My pitch isn’t that good,” he says.

And I see that he’s learned, finally, how to tell white lies to spare feelings. And I’m glad that I’m one of the people for whom he’ll commit that sin — number one on the list of Asperger commandments: “Thou shalt not lie,” followed by “Thou shalt not not make sense.”

But I see, also, that I’ll never understand the way he sees the world, or how much it bothers him to put up with the rest of us. No matter how hard I listen. No matter how much I love him and want to understand.

What doesn’t kill us makes us stronger, right? That’s what I have to tell myself, to keep from crying when he gets on the bus to go back home.

If someone were to torture you mildly a little – say, for information, or because he/she was a crazed stalker – would it make the torture more tolerable to have one of your favorite mellow songs playing in the background?

Probably not, I guess. Or could it depend on how much you liked the song, and how mild the torture was?

Then, afterwards, could you ever like that song again? Or would it just be bittersweet?

I would tell y’all what song made me think about this, but I don’t want to give potential crazed stalkers any ammunition.

something less weird (but related)

Since iPods have been invented, are y’all hearing your old favorite songs in a new way? For instance, do your earbuds, shoved all the way up in your earwax, suddenly help you to hear lyrics that you couldn’t hear before?

Or do you hear the instruments and harmonies more distinctly?

Maybe I just need to get my hearing checked, in general. But I have to say that I never noticed until the other day how awesome the background singers are on Todd Rundgren’s “Hello It’s Me.”

something weirder than the first part, suddenly

I went to Wikipedia to see if they’d tell me the names of the women who sang back-up on “Hello It’s Me.” Instead, they told me that “[o]n the day he shot and killed John Lennon, Mark David Chapman left an eight-track tape of Rundgren’s album The Ballad of Todd Rundgren, along with other artifacts, in his New York hotel room in an orderly semicircle on the hotel dresser.”

But more fascinating and curiosity-whetting than that: “Stephen Colbert, on his Comedy Central show The Colbert Report, invited former Cars vocalist Ric Ocasek to add anyone of his choice to the ‘On Notice’ board. Ocasek chose Todd Rundgren.”

This requires further investigation. I see that Rundgren briefly took Ocasek’s place in a reformation of the Cars called The New Cars. How come no one told me this? Plus, how come nobody told me Ric Ocasek was going to be on the Colbert Show? Is it because I never watch the Colbert Show? Come on. I need people to help me out, here.

Wouldn’t it be cool if

you could have an intern (or even a paid assistant) who would spend all day finding things that would interest you? For instance, I loved the Cars and Ric Ocasek, but not so much his solo work. I loved him with Paulina P, but don’t love him enough to keep up with a fan site or anything. I’d read his Twitter, maybe, but not his blog. Meanwhile, I love the song “Hello It’s Me” but never felt compelled to buy a Todd Rundgren album.

A skilled Interest Mining Assistant Professional could take all those parameters and deduce that, while I don’t want to see The New Cars in concert, I do want to be informed if and when public cattiness occurs between Misters Ocasek and Rundgren.

I mean – hello. It’s all right there for someone to figure out and act on, isn’t it?

As soon as I get rich, I’m putting an ad on Craigslist….

We went to the Fleetwood Mac concert here in Houston last night. It was good — they’re very good musicians. We were sad that Christine McVie didn’t tour with them. But it was still good.

While sitting there watching Lindsey Buckingham tear it the hell up on his guitar, I remembered that I’d mentioned Ms. McVie and Stevie Nicks in my first book. I was talking about being a child and imagining myself a successful grown-up, and that picture, in my mind, involved looking like Stevie and/or Christine.

See, when I was a kid in the ’70s, there were those two, and then there were Ann and Nancy Wilson, of the band Heart*.

That was it, for me. Those were the four women who were allowed to be in rock bands, because they were so bad-ass that they apparently got to bend the men-only rule. And they were*, therefore, my role models. I could say my goddesses or my muses or whatever, but really, only Ann Wilson reached those proportions in my mind. Ann Wilson was, to me, awesomeness personified. I was singing “Magic Man” in the back seat of my parent’s car, back when I was three or four I guess because I remember my mom still being there and encouraging me — she liked that song a lot, too.

I remember staring at the cover of my dad’s Dreamboat Annie album whenever he let me, reflecting on the perfection of the Misses Wilson on it, believing that they were exactly how women were supposed to look.

I remember pulling out the inner album sleeve and staring at the beautiful, beautiful guitarist in the band with them (Roger? Steve? can’t remember who I thought was so handsome) and imagining that he must be in love with either Ann or Nancy, or both. And thinking that they probably kissed him sometimes. Both of them.

(Way later, I read that I’d guessed right.)

I remember, also, playing my dad’s Tusk and Rumors cassette tapes. Listening to Lindsey Buckingham sing “won’t you lay me down in the tall grass and let me do my stuff” and inferring that he was probably singing either to Stevie or to Christine, and that “do my stuff” undoubtedly meant kissing.

I remember wondering if I’d ever sing and play the guitar, like my mom used to, and if a handsome guitar player would ever want to kiss me.

So… I sat in the Toyota Center with hundreds of other people — all chilled out and seated, mercifully, because we’re all getting too old to jump around — and I thought about this stuff. And I knew that the people behind me were more likely remembering actual kissing that they themselves performed to those cassette tapes, since they were a little older. Same with the people in front of us. Lindsey sang that song, and three women near by jumped up and screamed and danced like they must have danced as teenagers, and I knew that those words about the tall grass had had a striking effect on them, too. In a way I felt embarrassed that when the band announced a song name, I usually didn’t know which song they meant until they started playing, because I was so young back then and I just listened to the tapes all the way through, without picking favorites or even looking at their titles, like you do when it’s an album you’ve always known and loved. But then I relaxed and realized it was okay not to know the song names.

I sat there looking all around at the hundreds of people, knowing that they all had special memories that went with these songs. Lindsey and Stevie stood on stage and told us their own memories, too. And it was — you know — magical and stuff.

* When I say Heart, I mean, of course, Heart in the ’70s. Not in the ’80s. I pretend that ’80s Heart didn’t exist, or was a different band with the same name. Actually, same goes for Fleetwood Mac, too. Don’t tell my Gen Y fiance that I said that, though.

My favorite song by Fleetwood Mac, as played by a young man on YouTube with a really nice voice.

The kissing-in-the-grass song, with Lindsey B’s remembrance intro.

Stevie on the same tour, week before we saw her, wearing the same gold shawl for “Gold Dust Woman,” which made our friend June suggest that I find one for my wedding. (I look better in silver.)

Then go to Loida Ruiz’s skirt! blog and enter her contest. She’s worried that the contest questions are too difficult and that’s why no one’s entered.

Let me know if you agree and I’ll post the answers here.

brief respite

Having finished and submitted revisions on my second novel, I’m now just waiting for my editor to read the whole book and write back and say, “Oh my god, Gwen, we have never before received a perfect manuscript… until now!!!1!!! ZOMG!!! You don’t have to do any more revising or editing, please just lie back and have a cocktail! Good work!”

I’m pretty sure that’s what she’s going to say.

There are 7 or 3 billion other projects I need to start right now. But I think I’ll take a weekend to myself, first.

I admitted to my fiance today, “I don’t think I feel comfortable unless I have a project to stress over.”

He just made this face, like “Why are you telling me stuff I realized years ago?”

happy

You know when I’m happiest? Don’t laugh at how cheesy/hipster/ironic/cheesy this is, but it’s when me and my brats are playing Rockband together, and we get to a song that all of us like enough to sing out loud.

I can’t explain how awesome that is, but it is.

My fiance’s a musician, and he’s been writing a bunch of new songs lately. He won’t let me sing on them because I sing too well to mimic like a pop vocalist (or something), but sometimes I help out with the lyrics and melodies. Last night I ad-libbed a new melody to one of his own songs, and he said he liked it better…

and I don’t even care if he ends up using my melody, but I liked making it up. It brought back all the good memories of making up harmonies with my friend Tania in the church choir, nine billion years ago, and writing songs with my high-school rock band 8 billion years ago, and working as the receptionist for a local arts org (7 billion years ago) and being allowed to sing in its halls with the student musicians.

And I don’t know what my point is, because you either know what I mean already, because you do music, yourself, or else you don’t know because you don’t.

But, hey, if I were to stop and ask myself what the point is to everything that gets posted here, maybe nothing would get posted, so….

I have a lot more to tell y’all but

not enough time yet. So, more later, while I’m on break. More in a couple of days. Because I missed writing to y’all, here, too. It’s another something that makes me happy.

It’s always cold on the bus. For that reason, I kind of hate riding it in the mornings, especially when I’m wearing a skirt without hose or tights or leg warmers, as is sometimes mandated by fashion in the summer time. But everyone has their crosses to bear, right?

This morning I got on the bus without hose or tights or legwarmers, and it was very cold. I put my iPod (my Sony Walkman iPod) into my ears and hugged myself into as compact a shape as possible.

The bus starts filling up, and this guy gets on. He’s a small guy, ethnic origin somewhere on the Eastern Hemisphere. He sits by me, and I take care not to sigh or jut out my elbow or even look at him, because I hate it when I’m forced to sit by someone else on the bus, and that someone else makes it clear that they’re annoyed and that they’d been wishing that their $3 fare would have somehow paid for two seats. I mean, I get annoyed when strangers sit next to me, too, and I wish my $3 bought me a force shield from strangers, too. But that’s not the way Metro works, is it?

So I’m sitting there, trying to be polite and only feeling a little bit sorry for myself, when I realize that the guy sitting next to me is hot. Not attractive-hot, but temperature hot. He’s radiating heat like a furnace. I peeked at him as much as manners would allow, but he didn’t seem to be feverish or on fire. He was just radiating heat, somehow. Like, from the inside.

I decided, then, that he must have been a demon. Either that or an elemental, but most likely a demon, because I don’t imagine elementals looking like people or wanting to ride the bus. I glanced again and saw that he was reading a text full of arcane-sounding words. (Cold fusion? HP 3200?) That seemed to confirm his supernatural nature.

I turned my face away from the demon man and, for a split second, felt uncomfortable. Then, I felt good. I felt warm. I’d been cold before, but this demon dude was literally generating enough heat to make up for the fact that I had no pantyhose on under my sandals and knee-length skirt. It felt nice, like a cozy fire.

I wondered, then, what it meant to take comfort from a demon. Was it safe? Was I unintentionally giving away my soul?

Really, there was nothing to fear. In every story I’ve ever heard on the subject, demons can’t possess your soul unless you give them verbal permission. And you have to invite them onto your premises, in the first place. Right? I’d invited this demon nowhere, as we were sitting in a public place. I hadn’t said anything to him at all. As long as I kept my Sony Walkman iPod in my ears and minded my own business, I could warm myself with the demon fire and keep my soul and its first serial rights. He wasn’t even a big demon, anyway. I didn’t think he could carry me if he wanted to.

The warmth made me sleepy and I drifted through dreams as pawn shops and Adult Video Stores sped by. “Is this,” I wondered, “how it starts? Can people get possessed in their sleep? Is demon heat a roofie?”

But we made it downtown okay. Someone rang the bell and, like zombies awoken, several of the passengers stood up and stumbled out into the sunlight as filtered by skyscrapers. The demon got up to let me pass and didn’t even spare me a glance.

I didn’t realize why until now, after typing all this. I’ve already been marked by someone else. My soul is the property of Corporate America.

intro to bus stories 2, 3, and 4

So I recently bought myself an MP3 player as a reward for a job well done. (What job is that, you ask? The job that is being myself.) And, now that I have one, I see that there’s a secret world I’ve been missing out on but am now a part of.

Before I had an MP3 player, I didn’t want to know anything about them, because I hate window shopping. You know? I don’t want to hear about stuff I can’t afford, in general. But then they got cheap, so I decided to get one, so I did my research and picked the one with the most battery life.

(Also, I waited to get one because I just had no use for one before. But now that I have a job where we’re allowed to listen to them (and where our laptops have no soundcards), and now that I ride the bus instead of driving my van and listening to my own CDs…)

Before I had an MP3 player, I ignored people who had them. I purposely spaced out when people talked about them. But not anymore.

Now, when I ride the bus, I notice who’s listening to music and who’s not. And I notice that other people notice it, too.

bus story 2

The other day, I was on the bus and I busted out my [Sony Walkman] iPod (which I will call an ipod from now on, because screw Corporate America and their branding. kleenexes! xeroxing!! orange and lemon cokes!!!).

I turned on my music and went to the place where I go to when my music’s on. It’s a place in my mind, and it’s a combination night club, costume party, trip abroad, and Houston’s Galleria mall.

So I was there, and I don’t know if it showed on my face or what, but the guy sitting across from me smiled at me.

Not in a creepy way, but in a sort of empathetic yet wistful way. Like he could tell that I was happy, and he was glad for me, and yet he maybe wished he had an ipod, too.

He seemed like a nice guy, actually. But I didn’t smile back. I just blinked at him and then looked away.

I don’t smile at strange men. Especially not on the bus.

bus story 3

Right after that, the angry-looking man next to the nice-looking man gave us both a glare. Really, he just gave a long, long glare that encompassed us, all the other passengers, and everything else on earth.

Then, the angry-looking man looked at my ear buds. Then, he took some earbuds out of his pocket and attached them to his phone.

I don’t know if y’all know this, but a lot of newer phones are also ipods now. Seriously. They are.

The angry-looking guy turned on his phone ipod, and then he closed his eyes and pretended to sleep. I hoped that his music made him feel better. I wondered what song he was listening to, but there was no way I could ask.

bus story 4

Today I rode the bus home and I listened to my ipod. Of course. Across from me, an older woman sat there with white ear buds in her own ears. And she kept glancing at me.

“What is this woman looking at?” I thought. But that question didn’t make me as angry as it used to, because I had my ipod on and it’s hard to get angry when I’m in my music place.

The woman glanced and glanced, and then, when I had to adjust my volume, I pulled my ipod out of my bra, out of the neck of my shirt, and did so. And then the woman kept looking, but her look became very thoughtful. I thought that maybe she was noting my clever idea of going hands-free with the use of my bra. She was maybe thinking, “Wow. It fits in there so well. I wouldn’t have even guessed she had an ipod in her bra.”

Then, the woman lifted her own ipod from her lap. It was a real iPod, and it had a leather case with an apple on it and everything. When she lifted it and opened the case, she glanced at me again.

I couldn’t help but suspect that she wanted me to notice her. I suspected that she’d just gotten that new ipod, maybe for a gift or maybe she went right into the apple store and bought it for herself, for a job well done.

She flicked at the buttons and I wondered how many songs she had. I wondered which ones were her favorites.

She glanced at me again. I smiled at her and then I closed my eyes.

moral of the story

If we were in Japan, our ipods would send out signals to each other, and we’d know when we were near another person who likes the same songs that we do.

But we’re not in Japan. So all we can do is imagine, and then empathize.

Right?