Is it weird that I’m starting to know all the paint counter employees at Lowe’s-es and Home Depots in a ten-mile radius? Today I got my least fave. I brought in actual paint chips (chips of paint I scraped off our peeling baseboards) and asked them to please match. This dude (the manager) calls me to look at their computer monitor while his underling stands slack-jawed and listens to this conversation:

Him: We can’t create a perfect match. It’s .56 off.

Me: Point five six? How off is that?

Him: [Very obviously refraining from rolling his eyes at my stupidity] It’s point five six. So there’s point one, point two, point three, point four, and then point five six.

(Also, he has extreme halitosis. This is how I remember I’ve had unsatisfactory dealings with him before–I remember not his face, but the smell of his breath at three feet away.)

Me: [Considering the fact that, in his mind, these fractions represent something–something he can see in his mind very clearly. And he’s the kind of person who thinks, because he can clearly see the thing that was beaten into his brain during Lowe’s Paint Manager training, I should be able to see it, too. But I can’t, because I’m stupid, and probably because I’m a woman. This is all sort of interesting to me, but not uncommon and not surprising and not worth getting into right now, so I’m not going to say “You’re just telling me numbers. I understand that point five is bigger than point one,” etc., etc.]
So… Is point five six like half a shade, or a whole shade? Is it visible to the naked eye?

Him: Oh, yeah. Are you trying to match something? People will be able to see the difference.

Me: And that’s the best you can do? You can’t make a match at all?

Him: No. UNLESS….

Me: ?

Him: Unless you want to go [waves at paint chips all around us] look at these paint chips and try to find one that matches.

Me: You’re saying you can’t match it from this sample, but if I find a paint chip that matches the sample, you can match that?

Him: [Obviously satisfied he’s finally gotten through to my stupid brain] Yes.

It takes me five seconds to look at the various Glidden whites and see that mine is a violet white. It takes me five more seconds to decide between the closest two violet whites. It takes me ten seconds to walk around with a bit of the sample on top of the paint chip, checking it in various lights afforded by Lowe’s and imagining the paint chip in semi-gloss form. I like doing this. I love colors and paint chips and matching and imagining. I think about the guy who worked at the Home Depot near my old house, who is the only person I’ve ever met who’s more obsessed with paint colors than me. He seemed like he had Asperger’s, the one time I worked with him. I couldn’t tell if he got pleasure from deciding on colors or not. But I had the impression he respected me. I wonder how he’s doing. I miss him.

I take my selected paint chip (“Pegasus”) to the counter and Halitosis Point Five says, “Did you find one?” in a supercilious tone that indicates he knows I picked the wrong color. It occurs to me that it’s probably a liability issue for him. He doesn’t want to make me a color and have me come back later, bitching and wanting to return the custom-made and therefore un-name-able and therefore probably un-re-sell-able paint. Maybe that’s happened to him a few times in the past and he’s learned it’s easier to force the customer to pick a paint chip. He’s probably not a bad person. He has no way of knowing I’m not a bad person, who would ask for custom paint and then return it and try to get him in trouble. I guess I can’t blame him.

As I’m waiting for my quart of semi-gloss Pegasus, another customer walks up and asks the Paint Underling, “If I bring in a paint chip, can y’all match it?”

She says, “Uh huh. We can match anything.”

I refrain from commenting. I focus on the poster board this paint department has prepared with handwritten labels. It’s the four exact colors of the Texans’ logo. (Or is it? Within how many tenths of a mystery unit are these reds and blue a match?)

I receive my paint can and walk to the cash registers, happy I had an excuse to look at paint chips today.

Duality of Dog Ownership

I am either the best dog owner, because I walk my dog three times a day, or I’m the worst dog owner, because I can’t train him to go to the bathroom in our backyard, and I yell at him about it.

I’m either a responsible dog owner, because I carefully monitor my dog during our walks, baggie in pocket, to ensure he only pees/poops on mailbox stems and plants no one would touch with their hands… or I’m an abusive dog owner, because when my tiny but wiry and willful terrier pulls very hard on his leash, I sometimes tug the leash hard enough to yank him off balance, making him flip in the grass. And then I sigh angrily and move on (now that I know for certain the flipping in the grass doesn’t hurt him). (Because it’s happened often enough, horribly.)

Likewise, I worry about him running, half blind and half deaf, into the street and getting hit by a car. I worry about it so much, it makes me angry when he tries to do so, and I spank him. And he can tell, the few times he still tries to dart into the street, that I’m about to spank him for it, and he throws himself on the ground and makes a sad, abused, beseeching face that shows me what a monster I am. And I feel ashamed of it. But I spank him, usually, anyway.

I know a lot of people who think pets are like children. Once you get a pet, they say, you’ve made a commitment for life. Only evil, horrible assholes get tired of pets or give pets away or euthanize pets for biting their children.

I know a lot of people (who came here from other countries, usually) who believe animals are either food or employees/slaves. It’s almost immoral and certainly ridiculous to keep animals in one’s home for the purpose of decoration or affection, buying them food and getting nothing useful in return.

Between these two perspectives, I have a reasonably clear (?) vision of myself as a middle-class American woman who’s lucky enough to have time and money for indoor, full-time, named/registered/immunized pets. I’m very lucky to have the luxury, emotionally, to angst over my relationship with these pets and their emotions. “If that’s the worst thing you have to worry about…” my dad would say.

I grew up making pets out of strays and feeding them table scraps. Watching them give birth to litters on piles of dirty clothing in my closet.

I’ve lived in houses whose owners didn’t allow animals inside, from whose back doors I’d venture, out into fields, with bones in my hands, to buy a little wordless companionship.

I’m a good person because I sleep with my dog curled against me all night.

I’m a bad person because I typed a blog entry trying to excuse my sins. Used my writing skills not to make money, but to persuade you certain parts of me outweigh the others.
…
…
…

Next week my two-year term as Houston’s (first) poet laureate ends, when city officials take the laurel wreath off my head and put it on my successor’s. When I get home from that ceremony, I’ll make a pot of coffee, put on my reading glasses, fire up my Netflix queue, pull out my knitting needles, finish this scarf I’ve been making with sock yarn, simultaneously do some laundry, cook something healthy for dinner or else make an excuse to go out to eat, and then finish my next book, which is a YA novel I’ve been working on for a few years now.

Actually, I’ll do all that, but not until later in the day, when I’m done at my day job.

Also, amidst all that, I’ll do some blogging.

Right now, two people/entities are waiting for me to write blog entries for their sites: The Houston Public Library and my day job. I’m going to write the library one pretty soon. I’m going to write the day job one… never, I think. That’s not an official part of my duties–just something they thought would be nice. If everyone on my team would contribute blog entries to the team blog, they said, that would be nice. Right now I’m letting everyone else be nice in that way. Right now I have other people for whom it’s more important to do niceness.

Here’s a blog entry I wrote for someone else (Poets & Writers) a little while back, accompanied by a photo of me taken a long while back:
Houston Poet Laureate Gwendolyn Zepeda Explains her Life to Strangers

I’ll be back in a little while. Y’all be good and have fun.

Gwen

This new compulsion started when I joined Amazon Prime on a trial basis last year, for xmas shipping. I stayed enrolled and let them bill my credit card because friends were raving about the service. Even though I’m not much for online shopping and couldn’t find many things on Amazon that: 1) I needed to buy, 2) that made sense to buy online, and 3) were priced competitively.

But recently I realized what the service actually is: an instant gratification machine. I blame a coworker: Every time we hold a “virtual meeting,” she constantly searches Amazon Prime for whatever we’re talking about and then sends me links. (Kinda like “There’s an app for that!”) She influenced me to order washable post-workout car seat covers while we were talking about hot yoga, and I don’t even do hot yoga. (But I did start doing regular yoga since that purchase, so… That’s good, right?)

The other day I was at a Big Box Retailer and my husband texted “See if they have those bamboo plate holders.” They did not. But I went home and saw that Amazon Prime did. Click–ordered.

Also at Big Box, I saw a child’s toy that I liked, so I bought it for myself. (I deserve the occassional cute plastic horse because I work hard, and I don’t care what anyone thinks about it!) The brick-and-mortar environment killer only had one such toy left, but Amazon Prime had all of them, so I ordered my faves and I’m getting them TOMORROW.

It’s kind of terrible. I feel kind of bad about starting this shopping-based habit, just when I’d gotten my compulsive shopping habit under control. (Hours of therapy talking about that unpurchased plastic horse = success!) But not really. I don’t really feel bad about it yet.

1. Dressed myself in workout gear, knowing full well that I probably wouldn’t work out today.

2. Decided to lie in the grass with my husband for an hour instead of shopping.

3. Ended up shopping… for expensive dog food.

4. Hurried home to watch a soap opera about football.

As I did each of these things, I imagined Teenage Me seeing and scoffing. And I had to laugh, imagining it.

One day Ray (that was his name) noted that I was having a tragic childhood. He wasn’t being mean—it was obvious. Everyone at the non-profit organization could see that I was poverty-stricken, angsty, and vitamin-deficient. It wasn’t a secret and a lot of my childhood neighbors could be described the same way. So Ray noted my “bad” childhood, said it would likely lead to a bad young adulthood, and then I’d be destined to have a good second half to my life.

I laughed. How did he figure that?

It was a theory he’d developed. He’d observed that people who had inordinately bad childhoods usually went on to have very good lives later. And the reverse was true, as well, he said. He gave me examples. Most were successful people who’d grown up poor and child actors gone wrong. He listed James Dean. I pointed out that James Dean had died young. He said that was the ultimate example: good half was fame and fortune, bad half was being dead.

I thought his theory was silly. I didn’t say so but he could tell, and he kept reassuring me that it was true, especially in my case. He invoked his ethnicity. He was some kind of American Indian—I forget which tribe—and he had a special feeling (which, as a Chicana, I had to respect), therefore his words were actually a premonition. He saw my future by looking into my eyes. Click!

I’m not a dumb-dumb. Even then I knew he was trying to be nice. Cheer up the girl and get her to smile. Guys tended to do that, some more creatively than others. His method fed into my secret hopes and made for a better photograph.

When the ‘80s ended, I embarked on an unhappy young adulthood. Of course I did—with the life I’d lived until then, it was practically my destiny.

But now I’m happy. (Like the Russian man said, every happy family is happy in the same way, so you can imagine it without details.) Everything around me is different, to the point that people who meet me now have a hard time imagining the hungry, sad child I tell them I used to be.

Problems arise in my life, yes. But they aren’t part of an unlucky existence—that unstoppable series of unfortunate events, one after another—like they used to be. They’re only temporary obstacles. Like plots on a sitcom, they’re resolved with happy endings, week after week.

I know, rationally, that my life changed because I’ve gained experience, worked hard, gone to therapy, and aligned myself with trustworthy people. But I think about Ray’s theory more and more lately, and it gives me extra confidence. Even though it’s silly, I find myself thinking, “Remember, this is the good half of my life.” That means problems are temporary. That means it’ll all work out in the end.

It’s a comforting mantra, like shorthand for everything I’ve learned. Basically, it was the modeling fee Ray paid me for my smile. #can’tstayseriousforonewholepage

Poetry Book as Personality Test?

Read my latest book, Falling in Love with Fellow Prisoners and tell me what you think of it, and you’ll be telling me something about yourself.

Someone said it’s all about sex and women striving to dominate men.

Someone said it’s about hope and being a mom.

A lot of Houstonians said it’s about urban loneliness.

College students are my favorite readers because they bravely tell me their interpretations and demand that I confirm or deny. Some students thought the poem “Girlfriend” was about a girl lamenting to a boy. Some thought it was a boy having his heart broken by a girl. All the students in the class knew “Eula in the Bathroom Stall” was about feeling vulnerable and uncomfortable… but why? Because the speaker was defecating? Masturbating? Having a really bad day at school?

A young woman asked if the catcaller’s words in “Omega Wolf” were things that had actually been said to me. I told them the actual comments that had inspired it—way less graphic but every bit as invasive—and they were shocked. Could easily imagine the fear/loathing/fascination I felt and then tried to convey in the piece.

Someone thought the poem about a spinal headache was about miscarriage. His mistake made me imagine his fears.

I hate opaque poetry and I try to keep mine plain and comprehensible. But I love hearing people’s interpretations, even when they’re totally different from my intent. All I want is to make you feel what I felt, or let you know that I feel what you felt, so we’ll feel less alone.

I’m not working on any books right now. Which is… good. I think.

The launch party for my newest book is going to be September 19 at the Julia Ideson building near the downtown Houston library. You are invited.

Something that Happened

This morning, while driving to work in gray almost-rain, I saw a man walk into the middle of the street and pick up what looked like a child’s floppy bunny doll. But then I blinked and saw it was a kitten. A dead kitten, apparently. He picked it up by the scruff of the neck, walked it to the opposite corner, and semi-gently laid it in the grass. Then he jogged to the car from which he’d apparently emerged, driven by a women who I guess was his wife. Really, she looked like a nurse to me and I can’t tell you why. He was a citizen, not a city worker, as far as I could ascertain from the clues present.

I was concerned about this man touching the dead kitten. I wanted to take the tiny bottle of hand sanitizer from my glove compartment and throw it out my car window to him. I told myself that he was wearing a glove, maybe, that I hadn’t seen. Given to him by his wife, who looked like a nurse.

After I decided he’d been wearing a glove or had used his own glove compartment sanitizer (as I had to in order to move on with my life), I wondered why he had moved the kitten. Simply to keep it from getting squished by passing cars? Because it was a kitten he knew—maybe his kid’s—and he didn’t want his kid to see it in the street later? Was it maybe, purely, an act of respect?
I don’t know. It was the most interesting thing I’ve seen in a while. I wish I could interview that man and his wife.

Fantasies

I’m going to tell y’all these recurring fantasies I cherish, embarrassing and not, because it’s raining today.

1. I’d like to make documentaries, but about really specific things that would probably only interest me. For instance, I fantasize about producing and hosting a weekly local show about people’s jobs. The more boring the job, the better. I want to meet people with everyday jobs and find out every single detail. What do they do and how do they do it? How would they explain their jobs’ places in our economy and their roles at their companies? How do they get through each day? What’s fun about their jobs, if anything, and what sucks the worst? Are they good at their jobs? Do they think they’re good at them? If it was a weekly show, I’d do two people per episode. The documentaries are actually a separate fantasy, I guess. The first of those would probably be about grackles at various Houston restaurants.

2. I’m really bad at fantasizing, because I get all caught up in nitpicky details. For instance, I can’t just have a fantasy about magically healing people, like a normal narcissist would. My healing-superpower fantasies have to be way, way more specific than that. There are two of them:

a) I have the clairvoyant power to diagnose medical issues. I can do so by touching the affected person, but I like to let them tell me their symptoms, first, because that’s nice bedside manner. For this service, I charge $100 per person. Some people take my diagnoses to their doctors and demand treatment or at least testing. Eventually, some doctors and scientists realize/believe that I have this supernatural diagnosis power, and they work with me. But they still have to order tests to confirm my diagnoses, because of insurance company requirements. I wouldn’t want insurance companies to know about my super power, because they’d want to use it to deny coverage or raise premiums.

b) I have the magical ability to prescribe customized diets for people. This is less intense than diagnosing diseases, but still important. I’m able to touch a person and figure out what nutrients they’re in need of, and what eating habits are messing them up. Normal doctors can already do that, I know. But I can also figure out issues that maybe science hasn’t yet. Like “You are craving starches all the time because one of the bacteria in your stomach has a hormonal imbalance.” Or whatever. You know – things normal people can’t see. Mystery issues that bother us every day and yet aren’t important enough for medical science to solve. Issues that quacks take advantage of. So I’d listen to people’s complaints for two minutes, touch their arms, and then type up a detailed, varied diet plan for them to follow. The diet plan would right them. Then they’d probably have to come back for periodic adjustments, as their bodies changed. I’d charge on a sliding fee scale for this service. If I sold a person a custom diet plan and he/she didn’t try to follow it… oh, well. Not my problem. You can’t help someone who doesn’t want to help himself.

c) Yes, it would be more effective to simply heal people in my fantasies. But I wouldn’t want that power, because it sounds exhausting. And I’m not sure I believe that everyone should be un-sick at will. Plus, it seems like it’d be immoral to charge for healing. (But if I had to magically heal people, I wouldn’t be averse to bartering for my services.)

3. I always fantasy-plan parties that can only take place if I win the lottery. If I ever won the lottery, I’d have to move my birthday celebrations to summers (instead of December 27) and start throwing fundraising events in order to burn through all my stockpiled party ideas. Sometimes I shift to more realistic fantasies about becoming a professional party planner, but then I get turned off by that idea because I don’t want to use my party ideas on strangers who may turn out to be bad partygoers. Right now, my favorite party fantasy is renting out the entire Galveston Schlitterbahn waterpark for my birthday and hiring bands to play in the center of it. Second favorite is hosting a Shark Week party at the Capt. Benny’s boat-shaped restaurant on 290 and Mangum. With a band, of course, and themed decorations and shark gift bags for everyone to take home. I don’t think about the fun—I think about the details. I have long imaginary lists about guest lists, security, open bars, staffing, and food. It’s a horrible hobby, fantasizing about parties. It’s a lot of work. One of our friends recently started doing party-like events in real life. (He is a “promoter,” I think it’s called.) And we’re very proud of him. Sometimes we help out, but usually we don’t. “We” is me and my husband, who is also a fantasy party planner. He’s actually worked as a consultant on my Schlitterbahn and Shark Week affairs, meaning we talk about it sometimes in the car. Because we’re crazy.

The Future

I think I’m going to start my next book in the fall. It’s going to get in the way of my imaginary party planning, but it might be more soothing.

Talk to y’all soon. Don’t forget to look at the News & Events tab above and attend whatever events I have coming up, and don’t forget to buy my books, and [the requisite self-promoting etc.].

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.

Hobbies, Interests, and Goals I Have Now, That I Didn’t Have When I Was Young:

1. Trying to take care of this mortal husk before it’s too late and my joints are ground to powder

2. Trying to improve myself or my life, in one way or another, each day

3. Breaking goals into small chunks with ample rest time between, as opposed to plowing through pages of goals and getting upset at the length of time it took me to acheive them

4. Reassessing pending goals and discarding the ones based on outgrown neuroses

5. Thinking about bifocals

6. Doing that thing where you try to click on a word with your mouse, but you click on the word next to it, instead, and then remembering when I used to watch older people do that with their mouses and boggle at their inability to click the intended word and wonder what their deal was — Did they need glasses? Had they not played enough video games in their lives to develop normal eye/hand coordination? — and trying to forgive myself for my past lack of empathy as well as my current inability to click the damn word that’s right there on the screen in front of my face

7. Avoiding the emotional dramas presented to me by family and friends, without feeling guilty about it

8. Letting my kids make their own mistakes, instead of acting like a truck that drives ahead of them and salts the icy roads in order to keep them from ever slipping

9. Letting go of responsibility for situations that have nothing to do with me, like a volunteer fireman who only puts out fires at his own house

10. Trying to react to adversity with forthrightness instead of surpressed anger or uncontrolled anger

11. Buying good quality shoes that won’t hurt my feet

12. Ignoring lists about what women should do when they’re forty