A Rock To Tie A String Around

I don’t understand fashion.  When I think that I automatically grow a new gray hair and reach for my imaginary cane to shake at the neighbor kids.  But, I really don’t get it.   Granted I was in my late teens/early twenties during the Cobain/Seattle grunge anti-beauty period where you were considered hot in slightly oversized men’s 501’s with a white t-shirt and a flannel around your waist.  My mom probably looked at me the same way that I look at my teenage students and the twenty-something girls on the street.  She probably thought I looked sloppy and messy and that the music I listened to reconstituted noise.  I get that, and I still don’t get fashion.

For one thing, I don’t understand who is supposed to fit into those super low cut booty jeans that are only fashionable if they are three sizes too small.  And I want to know who made the undershirt longer than the overshirt thing sexy, and another thing you young people (insert shake of cane and four new gray hairs) who is doing your makeup?  Back in my day it was considered sexy to roll out of bed, skip the deodorant and rub your face in the dirt.  Okay, maybe not the dirt – unless of course you were on your way to Burning Man, in which case it was a pre-requisite.

The booty jeans that are cut down to cervix level only serve to accentuate any and all loose skin in the belly region, thus creating muffin tops on girls who weigh like 90lbs.  I watch my students all day struggling to sit down, walking like they’re in an 18th century corset, all in the name of beauty.

It’s my assertion that beauty, like time, is relative.  In the same way that a year to a six-year old is longer than my year, beauty takes on a relative place of importance.  It ebbs like the ocean.  When you’re a kid, it doesn’t matter at all.  We wipe our noses on our arms, forget to bathe until our parents strap us into the bathtub, and our friends don’t care.  But then that 15-30ish span of time hits where it consumes most, not all, of our thoughts and we do ridiculous things like pour ourselves into size 2 jeans while our size 8 ass screams in protest.

As I move slowly away from my late twenties and into my mid-thirties I find that physical beauty in men and women is more and more mysterious to me.  Maybe one day I’ll be in a place where I really can honestly say I don’t notice and I truly base my first impressions on character, sense of humor and honesty.  I’m not there yet.  Right now, I’m too busy trying to figure out how women can walk in those three-inch heels to even give a second thought to anything else.

And who knows?  Maybe the Disney boy bands will be replaced with the new wave of grunge rockers and my flannel shirts will once again be in style.  I could be fashionable yet.

I’ve been having some weird dreams.  I blame most of them on Facebook.  I love Facebook; I love that I can connect with people that I never thought I’d ever hear from again.  I’ve also forged some surprising friendships, people that I never knew very well back in high school, or who I always figured thought I was too dorky for words, we now have found a common ground, albeit a virtual one, on which to connect.

But the downfall of this is also the thing I love.  There are people in my past that I never thought I would ever see again, probably for good reason.  We ended on bad terms, rocky terms.  My brain was trying to push them out, trying to forget.  But all of a sudden, they’re back….on Facebook.  I know I don’t have to be friends with them.  But I want to be friends with them.  Like most people I hate leaving things badly.  Combine that with a voyeuristic need to peep in their windows, and blam – we’re friends.

And now, to make it all even more complicated, they’ve found their way into my dreamscape.  I had a dream the other night that I was married with two kids.  This isn’t totally different from my real life, minus one kid.  The problem was my dream husband was a faceless combination of every possible awkward romantic relationship I had before I met my actual, real-life husband of nine years.  Got all that?  So Faceless Guy actually managed to embody all the terrible, mean-spirited, oblivious, moody qualities that every guy I ever dated exhibited without any of the good stuff to balance it out.  Plus we had two faceless kids that Faceless Guy was not helping out with.  So Faceless Kids and I suffered through the dream and when I woke, my real-life husband was faced with having to answer to my madness.

Incidentally, my real life husband isn’t mean-spirited, oblivious or moody.  He’s wonderful actually.  And he’s constantly reminding me he’s not responsible for any crime that a husband-like character in my dreams has committed, in the immortal words of Billy Joel – he is an innocent man.

A wise friend of mine told me once that we dream about random people because your brain is trying to sort them out and is trying to decide whether to delete them from your memory or store them in the filing cabinet for future use.  The dream either makes us obsess over them and remember something we had almost forgot (thereto filing the memory) or we laugh it off and forget the dream by lunchtime (delete).

I think Facebook, Allah love it, has taken the place of my internal filing system.  Now people that in my pre-Facebook life would have appeared in a dream only to be forgotten by noon, are now on my friend list.  And while I love this, I think my brain is having a RAM problem.  Which leads me to Faceless Guy’s existence.  It’s my theory that the effect that Facebook has on my memory is much like the problem my Iphone has reading Word Perfect documents.  I get most of the content, but it’s all mixed in with code.  So you read a line of text, and then are faced with a line of gibberish.  Faceless Guy probably would’ve had a face a couple of years ago if he’d shown up then, but now he’s been mixed up in my internal coding system so he a combination of all the old files.

Confused yet?

In short, I love my Facebook friends, and I’m grateful for every one of you, truly.  But you’ve got to start being nicer to me in my dreams, my husband will appreciate it.

I have a small, lurking fear of dying in an embarrassing way.  I realize it’s silly.  I realize that embarrassment would be the last thing on your mind when you’re in the final moments.  I get it.  But still, it’s a small fear of mine.  Which is why when I read about poor David Carradine, it became a slightly more prevalent fear.  Which is really even more irrational because by all accounts, it sounds like David Carradine put himself in shall we say…a precarious position.

I’m far from famous, and I doubt I’ll ever really be well known outside of my Mom’s book group.  So maybe I’m missing something, but it seems to me that if you are a famous person, wouldn’t you be even more cautious?  Even more conscientious of not being the guy that got the words ‘auto erotic asphyxiation’ on Entertainment Tonight?

I feel for Carradine’s family most of all.  If my family member were found naked in a closet with a rope around my genitals, I would want someone to explain it away too.   Which is why I don’t get why Carradine would put himself in this situation in the first place.

I’m lucky to never have had any real brushes with death – knock on wood – but I do have moments where I decidedly change my actions because I realize how silly it might look later.   I have been known to turn down or off entirely the radio in my car when I approach a traffic mess just because I wouldn’t want the EMT’s first thought when trying to jaws-of-life me out to be “She was listening to 1970’s Billy Joel?  Where do you even find that crap?”

In short, I feel for Carradine’s family, but I hope to have a more graceful exit.  We should be celebrating his career; instead we’re snickering at his death.

As I have told a few of you, I received my first official bad review.  I went through the appropriate stages – denial, grief, anger….okay, so I stopped at anger.  I have yet to start bargaining and acceptance seems a distant road to bountiful….  But anger,  oh anger.  Anger has settled in, it’s told me it’s okay to obsessively ask the husband to tell me what it said (I refuse to read it myself).  Anger has reminded me that reviewers are the reason that a great many writers have gone nutso – Olive Moore, Herman Melville just to name a couple.   I used to think:  how crazy is that?  But now I kinda get it.  That’s just one bad review folks, and The Tree Museum wasn’t exactly my Moby Dick, can you imagine the magnitude of the Pierre that I would create?  Yes, that sentence was riddled with English nerd references….

Here’s the thing that’s really pissing me off – in the review and the comments that followed there has been speculation that the characters and events in The Tree Museum are a thinly veiled memoir of my personal and professional life.  It’s actually a bit of an interesting point – because where do writers get their characters?  Where do they draw their experiences if not from real life?  I can only speak for myself on this score, but I find my life, my experiences far too mundane to ever end up in a book.  Even the times when I thought the world was ending, in retrospect….not so much.

No, Rosemary and Nate are not myself and the husband.  Okay, maybe the husband looks a bit like Nate….but that’s in his favor really, I envision Nate a bit like Jonathon Rhys Meyers.  Personality wise…no way.  But let me break it down a bit for all of you – here are some pieces of evidence that I am not my characters.

1.    Rosemary puts up with way too much.  Anyone who’s ever met me knows that I’m downright combative at times.  My bullshitdar is way up, and if anything I’m not patient enough, quite the opposite of Rosemary.
2.    Nate hears voices whereas neither the husband nor myself have ever heard voices that didn’t have a legitimate cause.
3.    Rosemary was accused by bad reviewer of being a frustrated writer hence I must be a frustrated writer.  Actually, Rosemary is a frustrated teacher, and I am….wait…nevermind…
4.    Bad Reviewer and his cronies have said that The Tree Museum must be a testimony to my own failed marriage.  On the contrary, I feel pretty lucky.  On the 17th of this month I will celebrate my 9th wedding anniversary, our fourteenth year as a couple.  I’ve known my husband the entirety of my adult life and I wouldn’t have it any other way.
5.    I’m pretty far from being a vegan, uber environmentalist.  I would like to be those things, but have you tasted In and Out Burger?  Have you?  Man, that’s good stuff.

In short, my characters and my story come from me, but like my son – they are their own people.  I can’t control whether my baby boy grows up to be an Alex Keaton Republican no more than I can control what Nate does when Sweater Vest is harassing him.

If you want to see what I’m talking about and make your own psychoanalytical judgments on my state of mind…. go to your local indie bookstore and request a copy.  I’m hoping to end up on their shelves.  You’re curious now, admit it….

Okay, so I realize I’m behind, way behind.  I have lots of great ideas and absolutely no time to get them out.  I just wanted to drop a quick note to say  – please be patient – I have a blog brewing that’s going to knock your socks off…okay, maybe that’s hyping it up a bit much.  But, seriously it’s a good one.  Hmm….now the time to write it.  Anyone ever see that Ellen Degeneres bit about procrastination?  In the time it took me to write an apology for not writing the blog, I could have written the blog.  Hmmm…..