Writing Archives
The devil’s darning needles
11:02 pm | 0 | Blog | Watching, Writing
The worst thing about working in the museum is that, when I’m not at work, the last place I want to hang out is the museum. As a result, I have not yet seen the two biggest exhibits.
When Nan Goldin was there I did manage to eat lightening-fast lunches nearly every day so that I could spend my remaining 45 minutes sitting in the velvet-dark, cold gallery, watching her disturbing slide-shows. I first heard of Goldin when she was referenced in a passing comment on MetaFilter, and since then I’ve been borderline obsessed with her work. There doesn’t seem to be anything special about it, and that might be the draw. Each photo alone is a glimpse into her strange and sad life, but look at them as a whole and you get a very vivid and complete picture of who the woman is, who her friends are and what her life has been like. After sitting through one of her slide-shows I leave convinced that I know this person, that we are friends. I get this feeling from other creators too, people who seem to have selflessly invited us into their lives, no matter how superficially, and who address us with the kind of familiarity with which one would address a sibling.
It might not surprise you to learn that two of these people are bloggers. It’s the nature of the medium.
Art and music and movies seem to have synchronistically melded into my life lately. There is a scene in CQ (which we just watched again) where Paul is talking with his French girlfriend about the film he’s trying to make. Frustrated with his own pretenses, he tells her he just wants to make something that is real and honest. Marlene turns right around and says to him, “But what if it’s boring?” Could there be a greater comment on our self-obsessed narcissistic blog-addicted generation?
Later in the movie Paul meets his father at the airport. Dad tells Paul that his grandmother used to believe dragonflies would come in the night and stitch up one’s mouth if one told lies. Dad finishes by saying “Maybe you can use it somehow. You never know when some little overheard story or image can find a place in your work.”
When my Inprint instructor Randi found out that Christopher and I met through some scootering buddies she was fascinated by the story. She said to me, you don’t think there’s anything special about that because it’s your everyday normal life, but to me that sounds like a great beginning for a story.
Which leads me to Barton Fink, another movie we just re-watched. Throughout the movie Barton is surrounded by inspiration and muses and he remains willfully ignorant of them. Thus the beginning of his self-imposed writer’s block.
Not sure where I’m going here, just a few things I’ve been thinking about lately.
Writing links for your weekend perusal
9:32 pm | 0 | Internerd | Writing
How do you choose to alert people who appear in your books that you are writing about them…?
I have been commiserating about the good bad old days with some former coworkers from the newspapers I worked at in Oklahoma. There is a kind of bond, a camaraderie, between those who have weathered the debilitating hours and humiliating assignments of working as a small-time journalist. It’s been fun, the reminiscing. Anyway, guess which post I wrote at Angry Journalist.
What would Jesús bring?
I bravely (foolishly) volunteered on the first night of my short story workshop to turn something in by the following evening so that the group might have something to read over the week and critique at the second class. Not having anything actually prepared, I then had to spend all day Friday writing, and was able to get ten pages worth of a story which has been foating in my head for a few years. here’s to deadlines and being accountable to someone else.
I also volunteered Thursday to go first. Getting critiqued consists of sitting silently for 15-20 minutes while the others in the class talk about your writing. It wasn’t as painful as it sounds — I came away with a very good understanding of what works about my story and what needs work, and I drove home feeling validated and refreshed and optimistic and ready to get right back to the grind on it.
The challenge for the evening was to bring a snack that a character in your story would bring if he or she were attending a writer’s workshop. It’s a whole “get inside the heads of your characters” exercise. One of my characters is named Jesús. The other characters are a family of German descent who are meeting in St. Louis for a family reunion. I had grand plans for cooking something, perhaps some kind of family reunion food like deviled eggs or ambrosia salad, but I ran out of time and ended up buying grocery store-made mini strudels. (Because strudels = German? I dunno.)
“CD-ROM disk”
7:47 am | 0 | Internerd | Writing
Common errors in the English language.
Two Thousand and Great!
12:29 am | 6 | Blog | Two Wheels, Writing
Thus begins The Year of The Experimental Living Apart Project, round one of which is a week underway. (Please ignore the fact that we are already 8 percent finished with the year. I have been spending my days moving more than 2,000 pounds* worth of possessions from one hemisphere to another so can we just pretend that the past two months of blogging negligence never happened?) My beloved house-husband is somewhere in the rough vicinity of the African continent for three weeks remaining and in the meantime I have been tasked with both finding a job and setting up home in our fair southern city.
I woke at 6 a.m. on the morning of January 13 to volunteer at the Houston Marathon. My running club hands out beer (!) and water at Mile #24 and in addition to this carb-o-licious beverage it is the volunteers’ job to yell encouragements to struggling athletes. It’s great fun to see someone perk up at the mention of their name and begin to pick up speed again. The warm-fuzziness of such community service coupled with the inspiration gleaned from watching 70,000 people run 26.2 miles on a sunny-cold winter morning put me right in the mood to re-examine Mein Überlist Oh Seven and write up a new and improved version.
I have ultra-high expectations for this year. Goal one was to get Gilda the Red 1978 Vespa running after three years gathering dust in our garage. Christopher was not allowed to board that airplane nor sleep in the bed next to me until this mission was complete. My beloved scooter is and always has been a class A champ — we simply filled the gas tank, cleaned the carb, tightened the cables, and she started right up on the fourth kick. (By “we” in that last sentence I of course mean “he”.) I immediately rode her to Biba’s One’s-A-Meal for a gyro plate and Greek chicken soup in celebration.
Christopher and I hope to buy a bona fide grown-up motorcycle as soon as he gets back so that we can embark on Texas Tour 2008 before spring is over. I rave about living in this, the largest state in the lower 48, but how is it that I have never been to Marfa? Or Big Bend or Brownsville or even the Germanic settlements outside Austin City Limits? I’ve spent the past three years traveling throughout Asia when I have the whole unexplored world right at the tip of my nose. It’s criminal.
Goal two was to do something productive with myself, so I spent several hours enduring the bureaucracy of undergraduate education in order to enroll myself in a single 5-credit-hour Spanish 1 class. After waiting in line all morning I found out I couldn’t enroll in a class without my undergrad transcript, despite the fact that I was enrolling in an entry-level class with no prerequisites. It’s penance, I guess, for failing to learn anything in Hangul beyond “beer, please” and “flying face kick” but I am determined to become bilingual again and I anticipate I’ll have way more opportunity to exercise my Spanish skillz in Houston than I had to speak French in Oklahoma.
It’s odd being back in school again a full six years after I celebrated passing my final final. I’m the only Anglophonic gringa rubia in a classroom full of cholitas and still-maturing babes who were already forced once by the Texas Educational System to learn Spanish in order to graduate high school. Still, on my way to the bike racks after class one day I totally got hit on by a totally cute co-ed who was totally eight years younger than me, and it made my heart soar with joy that I clean my face with extra virgin olive oil every night and thus still look young enough to be an actual college student. ¡Ay Dios moi! My first test is Tuesday!
I am also taking a sweet short story workshop at Inprint Houston, a non-profit sponsored in part by the U of H Creative Writing department, an MFA program so prestigious they only take 20 students a year (10 prose, 10 poetry). It’s taught by Randi Faust, who just had a short story chosen for the 2007 Iowa Book Review Award and who has a pretty wicked sense of humor. She didn’t blink an eye when I made a BJ joke on the first day of class. In February they’re sponsoring a reading with Dave Eggers and Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, which brings me to my final point: oh the glory of my newly-acquired student identification card. Conveniently sized for proffering discount tickets at the new-fangled picture show, the county historical society museum, and free student entry for an upcoming reading of some high-falutin’ writerly types straight from New York City (get a rope!). Otha suckas gots to pay five dolla for the pleasure of it.
*Not an exaggeration.
Someone talk me out of it
8:50 pm | 3 | Uncategorized | Writing
Once again, I am currently entertaining the urge to delete it all and start from scratch.
Fingertips orange
10:31 am | 4 | Uncategorized | Writing
For several summers in a row when I was a kid, my little brother and I spent spent every afternoon in the swimming pool in our grandparents’ backyard. My mother, who was single and working to support two kids, couldn’t afford day care, and so during the school year my grandparents would drive us to school in the mornings with plastic cups full of orange slices, and in the summer they’d let us have the run of their suburban Oklahoma backyard, tracking water and grass stuck to our feet into the bathrooms and inviting neighborhood kids we barely knew to play in the pool and share our Shasta sodas.
Even on the weekends, when my mom wasn’t at work, we’d spend nearly every day at the pool. It was a favorite joke of hers — in the summer of 1978, the year she graduated high school, married my father and moved out of the house, my grandparents started digging the hole in the background. All her life she and my uncle had begged them for a pool and they waited until it was too late to start building one.
My mom was on the swim team in high school. She told me that’s why she always wore her hair short — it was much easier to go straight to class after swim practice in the mornings when she didn’t have to blow-dry a head full of hair. Her love of the water was transferred to me — she enrolled me in Water Babies at the YMCA when I was an infant and by the time I was 18 months old I was more graceful in the water than out of it. My first swimsuit was a terry cloth Strawberry Shortcake bikini and my first birthday party was held in a highchair in the backyard by the swimming pool my grandparents had only finished the summer before.
Oklahoma summers for me meant chlorine-green hair and the chill on your skin from walking into an air-conditioned house after spending all day damp in the sun. It was fireworks that floated on the surface of the water and remote-controlled boats and practicing my back-flips and how long I could hold my breath. It was nachos and tacos root beer the smell of the grill my granddad loved to pilot. It was summer Top 40 radio hits like a hypnotist’s cue that will always bring you back to that exact time and place. It was standing on the hot driveway in my dripping bikini buying rocket pops from the ice cream man which stained my hands red and blue sticky and jumping into the water to rinse myself off.
My grandfather worked for a grocery supplier and so we always had samples of certain foods like the snack bags of shoestring potatoes he gave out for Halloween. We had every kind of spice made by Durkee Foods and four different kinds of French’s mustard for our hot dogs and peanuts and potato chips and jars of baby food though we had no baby and Oreo cookies and sugar wafers and bite-sized Almond Joys. We always, always had Shasta soda in every flavor and a cylinder of Planters Cheez Balls which I would eat with wet fingers that stuck to each piece and at the end of the day wound up a color of orange that not even chlorine could wash away. I was a ridiculously skinny, overly tall girl, and as a latch-key kid I subsisted on processed food that I could never survive on today, but even into my mid-twenties, every time I would see a canister of Planter’s Cheez Balls with the yellow plastic lid I would remember floating on my back on a summer day while munching on soggy, cheesy handfuls.
Things seemed so much more golden then, mostly because I did not realize at the time how the adults in my life were struggling to keep everything in place for me and my childhood. I rarely talk to my Grandparents anymore and my relationship with that side of my family is strained, at best. I wish I could turn this into some kind of metaphor about how things change, we grow older and wiser about some things, and we also long for the relics of our past, the innocence and ignorance of our youth. It’s a good metaphor, a true one, but it seems too obvious, so I’ll just say this — I’ve never been more depressed about the discontinuation of a food product in my entire life.
Progress is something I can always work on tomorrow
5:08 pm | Comments Off | Blog | Writing
I’m a procrastinator. It sucks, but as a result I’ve learned that I work far, far better under pressure. If I have too much time to do something, I will tinker with it and tinker with it and eventually all the original charm of it will have worn off it now it’s just too perfect and sterile to be worth anything. If I’m short on time — on deadline, say, I will work my fingers off.
I received this training in college, and by “received,” I mean I trained my own mind and body to act this way because I was usually goofing off ‘til the last minute anyway.
I encounter this a lot at work too. All day long, when I’m supposed to be writing about how the fire department at Pleasantville is short half their staff because all those men have taken up the cause to fight in Iraq or how there’s a ribbon cutting at the local olde icee creme shoppe later this afternoon, I’m surfing the Internet. All. Day. Long. I get nothing done.
I mean, I get a little done. As my pal Dr. Pants would say, there are short bursts of extreme productivity surrounded by long periods of goofing off. It possibly could be caused by my OCD, because it usually proceeds like this: write a paragraph here, check my e-mail, check the newspaper, check my e-mail again, check my favorite blogs, write another paragraph, check my e-mail again in case someone sent something to me in the past three minutes.
The whole purpose of this post is simply to say that, for the past few days, I’ve been working on a computer without Internet access, and I’ve got a lot of writing done. I’ve possibly done more work in the past three days than I did in the entire month of December.
I mean, just look at how long this post is. 328 words, when all I really should have written was the was the previous paragraph.
A disclaimer
1:59 pm | 1 | Blog | Family, Writing
For the last few summers that I was in high school, my mom spent a lot of money to send me to Europe with a company that sponsored educational school-related trips. I went to Greece, Italy, England, France, and all the places in between. I have always kept a journal in which I write extensively, and travel was no exception. Many of these stories made their way into my little cut-and-paste Kinko’s zine.
On one trip, I wound up in France with two idiot girls. We’ll call them Tweedledum and Tweedledumber. Their idea of a vacation in a foreign country was to spend everyday in a three-star hotel watching bad American cable television and eating at European McDonald’s.
I chronicled these events in my little zine, and one day, my mother, knowing she was strictly forbidden to read anything I’d written, snuck into my bedroom to investigate.
I was relaxing in a bubble bath when she burst in to the bathroom, angry and emotional.
“I just want you to know I read your writing, and I’m very disappointed in you,” she said harshly, barely able to contain the cracking in her voice. “I paid a lot of money to send you on that trip, and for you to be so ungrateful…”
I sighed heavily.
“This is exactly why I don’t allow you to read anything I write,” I said. Clearly she didn’t understand the idea of creative license. Yeah, those girls were annoying, but I tended to overemphasize the negative and underemphasize the good times I had.
She was still mad.
“Yeah, but you pass this thing out to complete strangers who read about your personal life all the time,” she said defensively.
“Yes, but that’s exactly the point,” I tried to explain. “These people don’t know me, they have no personal connection to me. And more importantly, they won’t judge me. And besides, it’s fiction. You can’t take everything I write seriously.”
I’ve often thought about this. I’ve been reading a lot of David Sedaris lately, and I recently read a book by a Houston writer name Marsha Recknagel. Both these people write with intense brutality about their family and friends, using peoples’ real names, and I often wonder how they escape hostility, much less legal action.
I’m a journalist now, which requires a certain degree of delicacy. There is no creative license in journalism, which leaves me conflicted. I want to strive for absolute truth, but my personal philosophy is that there is no such thing. I believe there is no such thing as the whole truth, just several versions of it. My goal is to provide as many versions of the truth as possible, and let readers decide.
In my own writing, on the other hand, I strive for effect. Yes, most of what I write is based on true, personal events, but I hesitate to call them autobiographical. Real life is boring, folks — it’s the spin that makes it interesting. For effect, I may emphasize certain things, both negative and positive. This is not to say that these events actually occurred as I depict them. Plus, memory is always slanted. Memory is never pure, and sometimes we can only remember the bad things, and sometimes we can only remember the best things.
In my personal writing, I try my best to capture my own reactions and my own thoughts. Sometimes I’m harsh; sometimes I’m judgmental and over-reactive. Sometimes I’m hypersensitive. But what matters to me is the initial gut reaction. And sometimes, with all of us, our initial gut reaction is not as accurate as our rational reaction, which comes much, much later.
I try to write as openly and honestly as possible. But I also tend to over-emphasize the details. So in some ways, this is my apology for being too personal. In other ways, this is my apology for being too dramatic. I guess either way we lose.
Electrified
1:01 pm | Comments Off | Blog | When I was a Bartender, Writing
I had been working at the bar for about a year when my boss finally had the confidence to leave me alone during the day shift.
During times like these I slowly began to develop my personal theory that the bar had taken on a human-like Jekyll and Hyde persona — some nights it was clogged with sweaty overconfident and testosteroneous frat boys and dozens of young girls vying for their attention. Other times it was boring as watching paint dry, and on these nights I hated working because the early morning hours would drone on and I knew I’d be leaving with very little money in my pocket.
I came to dread going to work each night, and on the drive I tried my best to prepare myself for whatever kind of night it might be. Each night it was a guessing game — “Will we be busy or will I have to pay my electricity bill late again? Will we get slammed at 1 a.m.?”
My favorite times to work were the day shifts, when I would open all the windows and turn on all the fans and let the breeze clear the bar of the Houston heat and the smell of smoke that saturated every wooden or cloth surface. I found these days to be the most predictable, and between the busy-work — cleaning lamps and glass shelves — and the pleasant and often philosophical conversations with my daytime regulars, my six-hour shift always passed by quickly.
My boss was obsessive compulsive and also extremely controlling, which is a nauseating combination. He’d hover behind the bar, his massive six-foot-five body taking up the precious little space in which I had to navigate, and instruct me over and over again on how to pour a pint of Guinness just right so that there was exactly a half-inch of foam left floating on the top of the beer.
Inexplicably, once he felt confident in me, he would also leave me alone for hours on end without any supervision, any money in the drawer, any keys to the back-up liquor closet or any help in the event that I needed it.
Normally, this was not a problem. Even when I was busy and working all by myself, I was happy that he wasn’t around to criticize me for not saying thank you after a customer left me a fifty-cent tip on a round of five drinks.
I usually worked the Sunday day shift. Often, Midtown types would come in after brunching, already slightly tipsy and loud, and demand from me the most complicated and poofy drinks on our menu. Also on Sundays, Doug, the customer who rode his bike from the zoo, where he worked, to the bar, where he practically lived, would visit me, along with Larry, Richard and Kevin. Collectively, they called themselves “Team Martini.”
Part of the charm of the bar was its rustic feel. The owner’s wife and sister-in-law were South American, and the bar was decorated with lamps made from dried gourds and masks depicting the Mexican Day of the Dead. The phone that hung behind the register was an old Princess-style model with an actual brass bell ringer inside, the receiver held together with black electrical tape. All of our drinks, most of which contained rum or tequila, were made by hand, and I spent countless hours in my time there mashing fruit with a muddler and pestle.
One day, I got to work just in time to greet my boss as he was walking out the door. He explained that he had just come in to unlock the place for me and that he was going out to run errands and wouldn’t be back for a while. I was pleased.
When it was slow, I passed the time by doing dishes or cleaning. I walked in the bar and set about the task of setting everything up. I opened the heavy wooden shutters on the back patio, and slid the windows to the main part of the bar open.
There were no customers yet, so I filled the well with ice and put menus and ashtrays on every table.
Then, I moved through the bar systematically, turning on all the lights and fans. It was early in the day, but the Houston heat was already making me sweat.
We had recently began serving food at the bar, and had compiled a small but extensive menu of tapas. As a result, the already small kitchen, if you could call it that, was getting more and more cramped with the items used to prepare this new food. All the surfaces in the kitchen were stainless steel, and hordes of stuff, from pots and pans to gallons of olive oil, were stored both above and below the shelves.
If the bar was hot, the kitchen was like a Roman sweat bath. It got so humid in there the drops of water on the freshly washed glassed had difficulty drying. So, like in the rest of the bar, we had a motley collection of several huge, old Westinghouse fans that blew from both above and below to dry and cool the racks of glasses.
I stood on a milk crate to turn on the fan above my head. I then had to get down on my hands and knees and crawl under the stainless steel counter suspended from the wall to plug in the other fan. I wiggled under there, balanced on the balls of my feet with my knees tucked to my chest, and used my left hand to hold on to the leg of the counter while I stretched my right hand as far as it could go under the table to plug in the fan.
And then time stood still.
I am vaguely aware of the noise that emanated from my body. It was definitely a cry of pain, but primal, deep and guttural, like no noise I have ever made before or since. It was almost like a roar.
I am keenly aware of what was going through my mind. My first thought was “I am being electrocuted.”
I sat there, huddled under the counter for what felt like a full minute, my left hand firmly gripping the stainless steel leg, my right hand still holding the plug, which was now engaged in the socket, completing the circuit that was allowing 110 volts of electricity to surge through my body.
It’s a funny thing about being electrocuted. Your body becomes stunned, but your brain is still fully functional, and, devoid of other sensory information, is extremely clear. So while your synapses are so stunned by the electricity they can’t obey your brain’s order to “Move your hand,” you are able to think in detail about what exactly is happening to you.
For what felt like an eternity, and which I’m sure was at least 60 seconds, I sat there, unable to react physically but thinking all the while to myself, “I am here, alone, and I am being electrocuted. Nobody is here to help me, and it could be a number of hours before anybody comes in to find my body. This is how I am going to die, alone in the kitchen of the Volcano.”
Finally, my body caught up with my brain, and simultaneously, I let go of the socket and fell back onto my back on the kitchen floor. I laid there for a few seconds, trying to catch my breath and slow my heart, repeating over and over again, “Jesus Christ. Jesus.”
I lay there a few seconds more, then turned my head to the left and looked out the door of the kitchen to see Larry, standing on the other side of the bar, watching me silently with his mouth slightly open.
I jumped to my feet, brushed myself off and ran out to the bar awkwardly.
“Hi, Nu,” Larry said flatly. “Nu,” or new, was the nickname he had given me when I first started working there, and he continued to call me that even after I held the most seniority at the bar.
“Larry,” I breathed with a sign of relief. “I didn’t know anyone was here.”