A Rock To Tie A String Around

I don’t like turkey. There, I said it. I know that it makes me a pinko commie nazi Canadian sympathizer, but I really, really don’t like turkey. In fact, I don’t like much about Thanksgiving, stuffing, yams, green beans drowning in cream of mushroom soup, cranberry sauce that slides out of a can. I have no use for these foods. The only Thanksgiving food that I actually enjoy is mashed potatoes, and I would say I’m at best lukewarm about them.

For years, I’ve been pushing for a new tradition, and so far I have not won the battle. But now that we have another Thanksgiving under our belt, I’m starting my campaign for next year’s enchilada celebration.

And before you say it, I don’t mean to sound ungrateful. I’m extremely glad that I have access to Thanksgiving food, shelter and family. I just think that we blow November 25th a little out of the proportion.

There are several logical fallacies in perpetuating the traditional Thanksgiving feast. For one, we must keep in mind that the feast that was started by the pilgrims was started out of necessity, and near starvation. They were making the best out of what they had – which happened to be root vegetables, corn and wild turkeys. No matter the political and social ramifications of Thanksgiving – the menu was based entirely on what they happened to scrape up around them.

It’s the equivalent of looking in your fridge at the end of the month, and pulling out last week’s leftover pizza, the rest of the yogurt with an indeterminate expiration date, a block of slightly frozen cheddar cheese, and a zip lock baggie full of what used to be tuna casserole and serving it to your family for dinner. I’m not saying that you shouldn’t do it, but is it worth making a tradition out of this?

I don’t think the pilgrims would approve of our nostalgia. I think if the pilgrims were here today, they would want enchiladas and really good dark beer. We don’t have to actually harvest our feast anymore people, let’s stop the madness.

Part of my Thanksgiving dread is based on my holiday experience growing up. Thanksgiving to me as a kid meant helping mom to madly scrub the house from top to bottom. We would wake up early, and immediately begin scrubbing, scouring and hiding all the unfolded laundry. In between polishing things and vacuuming every square inch of the house, mom would cook. If I found a chance to sit down, I was immediately handed a cutting board, an enormous bag of grapes and a spoon. My job was to scoop the seeds out of the grapes for some kind of grape/mayonnaise salad.

Lately I have wondered why Mom didn’t just buy seedless grapes.

Then, around 1pm or so, we would madly scramble to shower, dress and look calm and relaxed. Guests would arrive and we would serve food, pick up dishes, fill coffee cups, make small talk. Then, as soon as they left, we would start scrubbing again. Dishes, serving plates, sauce pans, you name it.

The next three weeks would be a continuous montage of turkey casseroles, turkey sandwiches, turkey potpies….until Christmas came. On Christmas Day we did the exact same thing, every once in awhile we would substitute the turkey for a ham. January would then be filled with ham casseroles, ham sandwiches, ham and eggs…..

It’s time to stop the madness.

My husband and I have been on our own for Thanksgiving for the last five years. The first year was blissful, we pretended it wasn’t Thanksgiving and went to Disneyland. We ate junky enchiladas with the Japanese tourists and Canadians. The last four years, however, we have fallen back in to the turkey trap. Thus, I opened my fridge this morning to see five pounds of turkey and 1,000 Tupperware containers of harvest leftovers staring back at me.

No more. I’m drawing a line in the stuffing. I think that we should serve what we serve on Thanksgiving and any guests we might have will have to deal with our eccentricities. I suspect, however, that Thanksgiving enchiladas and beer will become wildly popular.

The husband is not supportive of this measure. He says the harvest tradition goes way back, before pilgrims. Thus, Thanksgiving is not about eating pilgrim food, it is about celebrating our bounty and our harvest for the dark months ahead. Okay, I get it, not about pilgrims. However, my bountiful harvest comes from the grocery store, and the grocery store sells many, many different foods. Thus, if I am harvesting for the Autumn feast, it makes as much sense to harvest the ingredients for enchiladas and black beans as it does to buy pumpkins and turkeys.

I don’t know if I’ll be successful, it’s worth a shot. Right now I’m off to find turkey recipes that will completely mask the flavor of turkey.

I consider myself a realist, although my husband tells me that that’s the pessimist’s rationalization of negativity. I like to think of myself as being erringly objective, to the point where I don’t always have all the little human sympathies that my fellow realists carry with them. I rooted for Grendel when we read Beowulf in high school. I was the only one rooting for Grendel and more to the point, Grendel’s Mother. I understood why she would take out the entire army, they pretty much deserved it.

I’m usually on the wrong side when it comes to post-apocalyptic/disaster stories too. I don’t see much compelling evidence that we, as a species, deserve to be saved from the giant tsunami, or global heat wave or malevolent alien invasion. In fact, the more I read the news, the more I think we have it coming. Not all of us, of course, but the horrible few who cause pain and suffering in the world are like the noisy kids in a classroom. They become the representatives for a group, whether the group likes it or not.

I’ve been following the BBC coverage on Juarez, Mexico over the last few weeks. If there is anything that I am grateful for, it is that I do not live in Juarez. I’ve mentioned Juarez before in my blogs, but it is currently the murder capital of the world, drug cartels are running the city, not to mention the country, and no one thinks twice about shooting a seven year old boy in the back as he’s trying to run away. Jociel Rodriguez was killed this last week, it was his father that was targeted, but the murderers shot the child as he tried to escape.

This is not compelling evidence that we should survive the polar shift.

Every once in a great while though, I find myself hoping that we don’t blow ourselves up, I see evidence that we are special, we all are actually pretty, and that the atrocities I read about on the BBC are actually anomalies as opposed to the norm.

I know this was staged, and I know it’s a show, and I know that seven minutes of song and dance doesn’t counterbalance the atrocities in Darfur. But, still, it makes me cry irrationally every time I watch it:

I’m not sure why this affects me so strongly, especially me, the diehard realist who roots for the alien invaders. But I find myself a blubbering mess every time. Here’s another that chokes me up:

To me, the very essence of these scenes is that we don’t have to be assholes. We can do something just for the sake of doing something beautiful, and we can put great effort into just making other’s around us happy. I actually think that real lesson of these guerilla dance numbers is that if life was like a musical; we’d all be okay. No one would starve, no one would fight, and no one would murder seven-year old boys.

The problem, of course, is that life isn’t a musical. And even when we’re presented with these mini snippets of what it would be like, we immediately begin looking for the cracks in the system. Immediately we start claiming it doesn’t count because it was staged, the performers were too rehearsed, the audience was too rich, too poor, too ignorant, too happy. It becomes too commercialized or not mainstream enough, the music isn’t good enough, we claim the spontaneous dance scene would have only been effective if it had been done to Meredith Monk or Pink Floyd.
We look for every possible reason to cut it down, destroy the intent.

I have a theory that we thrive on chaos. That if things ever start to get too calm, too happy or too organized, we look for a way to cause trouble. If life ever really did start operating on the principles on which musicals are run, we would find a way to turn The Sound of Music into The Demon Barber of Seville.

I hope I’m wrong. I hope that there really is something in our nature that counterbalances evil and horror with peace and love. I want to think that even though no one can realistically expect a 1,000 person spontaneous, choreographed dance in the middle of downtown Chicago; that the better angels of our natures will continue to try.

NaNoWriMo Week Two. Oy vay. Week two is the halfway point in your 50,000-word adventure, if you follow the 1,674 words per day rule; you hit a smidge over 25,000 on the 15th. I just managed to do this, by the skin of my teeth (which is not at all expression I thought I was. As I was telling a friend this last week – I always liked to think that this referred to the primordial gunk that built up on the teeth in the time before toothbrushes or oral hygiene. Thus, the skin of your teeth was actually the built up layer of ooze, and the reason I always grimace when I see movies set in the medieval period where people kiss…ewww…anyhow that’s not the derivation of that saying. The real origin is much less disgusting, and less interesting I might add.)

Week two is statistically the week that most NaNoWriMoer’s quit. I can see why. In week two, you’ve reconciled yourself to your story idea but are smacked in the fact with all the ways that it doesn’t’ t work. In addition to this, there seems to be something about Week two that sucks all the joie de vivre from the act of writing and it all seems like a whole big bunch of nuisance and work. Ugh, work.

It’s a little like that stage of new relationships where you start realizing that your dream man, the guy for whom you learned to cook his favorite foods, the guy you started shaving your legs for, your perfect, perfect man snores, or doesn’t watch the news, or has really horrible morning breath, or has a horribly annoying laugh. You’re still in love, but suddenly this love thing feels like work, a project that must be perfected before it can move forward.

I’m in this place right, not with my husband (I’m okay with his snoring, most of the time…..like his laugh, figured out how to avoid morning breath) but my book is killing me. My plot is like a giant chunk of Swiss cheese. My internal editor is screaming at me and I am forcing myself to put on the earplugs and plunge forward.
Here’s a few of the problems I’m currently facing:

I’ve created a cult that is spread out over a residential neighborhood, living inconspicuously in houses, trying to blend in. It sounded ominous and possible when I thought it up. However, now, I’m beating my head over how the neighbors haven’t noticed that their entire neighborhood is full of cultish family pods with vaguely religious names. I would notice, why are the people in my neighborhood so oblivious?

I am following the cardinal rule of plot movement a little too carefully. NaNoWriMo alums will tell you that when you get yourself in a plot hole, you’ve painted yourself into a corner and you cannot get out – blow something up. Literally deus ex machina your way out of there. Cause an explosion, set something on fire. End the scene and move on.

The problem is that I have painted myself into many, many corners in the last few chapters. And instead of actually fixing the problem, I’ve literally blown up the room, set the kitchen on fire, and irrationally killed a guy, all just so I could end the scene. It’s beginning to feel like one of the later episodes of ER.

You all know what I mean, in the twilight of ER, it seemed that every episode had an armed gunman, an explosion, a shootout, a bomb or a kidnapping. That was the most dangerous, most poorly constructed emergency room in the history of television hospitals. If I were ever injured in a television show, I would never go there.

Part of the problem is that I’m hurriedly writing crappy dialogue. So I fall into a conversation pit and need an out. The scenario is basically that Los Angeles is going to be blown to bits in about an hour, and I’m writing a series of scenes that take place in the final minutes. But, there are more than a few problems with this.

1. It currently reads like trigger material for those considering suicide, but without looking flippant I can’t really ‘lighten’ the mood much.
2. All the conversations are basically the same; people are trying to get away as soon as possible.

Man #1: I know the city is about to blow! We’ve got to run!
Man #2: I know! But where will we go!
Man #1: I have no idea!
Man #2: Oh the humanity!

(Then the fridge irrationally blows up, flattening both men and ending the conversation and saving me the trouble of figuring out where exactly they would try to go, or what else they would possibly say in that moment.)

I really will edit this stuff before it goes anywhere. That’s January, and beyond. Till then I have fifteen more days of explosions.

Happy NaNoWriMo Everyone! For those who don’t know, NaNoWriMo stands for National Novel Writing Month. A global Internet phenomenon wherein the goal is to write 50,000 words during the month of November, or roughly 1,674 words per day. You don’t edit, you don’t think, you just write. Join us:

www.Nanowrimo.org

I wrote The Tree Museum during NaNoWriMo a few years ago, I wrote it in a month and it took two years to edit, and even then, as my readers know, it could have used a whole lotta more editing. But, that’s not what November is all about. November is about creating, trusting that you are capable of pushing out a product. All the good ideas that you talk about, journal about – November is about shoving them out, kicking and screaming.

NaNoWriMo was a whole lot easier a few years ago. A few years ago my only commitment was happy hour on Friday afternoons after school. My husband and I wasted god knows how much time watching TV, drinking cheap wine, eating overpriced take out. I used to come home and take two-hour baths in our ridiculously oversized bathtub.

Now we have a toddler. I haven’t seen a happy hour in three years, my writing time is delegated to his nap times, unfortunately so is a whole lot of other stuff like laundry, cleaning, sleeping, eating……the list goes on and on. Not to say it’s not worth it, it is. He’s not only adorable, but he’s a genius. He creates sidewalk chalk art that would make Jackson Pollock collapse from artistic envy. He recognizes the word ‘Moo’ in his books, he loves Andy Warhol prints. He loses him toddler mind whenever he sees a kitty, and forget about seeing dogs, a friendly dog is like toddler nirvana.

In short, I adore him, but he does make it difficult to write. Nevertheless, I’m more or less on target. Week one is a big deal; you break the 10,000 word cherry. You start your story, you realize that either you are going to write the best book ever, or that your brilliant idea is a convoluted mass of dog stuff. Either way, NaNoWriMo is not about analyzing the quality of your idea; it’s about sticking it out, for better or worse.

I think I’m on to something that could be good, and after several years of editing, I think it will be good. But oh man, is it ever a flaming bag of dog poo on the doorstep right now. Not the whole thing, just occasionally. In true NaNoWriMo style, I’m forgoing research in the spirit of writing the storyline. The advice given by the NaNoWriMo alums is to type XXXX whenever need to insert a term, address or anything that needs research. You can research in December, but not in November.

My entire sixth chapter is currently a giant XXXX. It’s starting to read like a badly translated instruction manual for home bomb disarming. Without giving away the surprise, a bomb squad is trying to disarm a potential weapon of mass destruction. Now, problem one is that I have no idea if a bomb squad would even attempt such a thing. Problem two is that I have no idea that even if that were in their job descriptions, how they would do it. Problem three is that I really don’t know what a bomb squad does. I mean, the title tells you somewhat, but my experience in police bomb squad procedure comes from Speed. So far, my main characters are a tepid version of Keanu Reeves with a little Jeff Daniels thrown in for balance. I stepped away from my laptop Friday night shaking my head. Here’s what my chapter six currently sounds like to me:

“Captain Admiral, we have a situation. There appears to be a device, a bad device.”
“How bad Lieutenant General?”
“Real bad Commander Private.”
“Is it real?”
“It appears to have all the levers and buttons required to make it a real bad bomb Commander Chief Admiral Sir”
“Well, Private Officer Detective, I think you should take whatever tool it is that you use for such things and get to work.”
“Yes Sir, would you like me to take some of the other men with me?”
“Oh yeah, the others…. I forgot about them a few pages ago, but I suppose they’re still waiting around in the hallway for something to happen….hmmmm…..quite a dilemma. If you take them into that room with you, I’ll have to think up names for them, and jobs. No, Private, I think you better figure this one out on your own, the baby is going to wake up soon, and there isn’t nearly enough time for me to establish five new characters, much less come up with jobs for them that sound believable. In fact, forget that you ever saw the others. I think it’s better if you came up here alone. Maybe I should leave too, then I wouldn’t have to figure out what my title is….and the whole bomb disarming sequence could be a dream in which you lose consciousness and wake up after the job has been completed, remembering nothing. Yep, I like that. Let’s go with that.”

That’s what it sounds like to me right now. I know it’s not quite that bad, but it’s not good either. I have no idea what the ranking order in the LAPD is, much less what all the jobs on a bomb squad are. So, for now, I’m just writing. I’ll Google it in December; I’ll make some calls in January, maybe in February I’ll try to talk to an actual bomb squad guy. Till then, Commander Admiral No Name needs to get back to pushing the off button on the bomb.

Happy Writing everyone!

Last night a Christmas Tree and a Snowman knocked on door, chanting ‘trick or treat!” Adorable right? Would’ve been if the Christmas Tree and Snowman hadn’t been at pushing thirty years old. My first reaction was that they had kids with them, maybe dressed up as little presents or snow angels or something else completely precious. Not so much, and by the time the shock of the aged trick or treaters had fully registered, I had given them two pieces of candy each, just like I had done for the legions of children before them.

As I watched them shuffle down the street with their loot, I thought to myself “What possesses a grown man and woman to trick or treat?” I get teenagers; I don’t begrudge even the surliest teenager showing up at my door, it actually kind of gives me hope. It represents to me that they still hold a shred of childlike lightness despite their cynicism and teenage anger. I actually give teenagers three pieces of candy each, partially because I’m trying to bribe them into not egging my house or smashing my pumpkins, but also because I want them to continue their optimism, their enjoyment of the little stuff.

So why did it bother me so much that two grown, childless adults were doing the same? Maybe it should bother me that the teenagers are out begging for treats too? After all, isn’t my willingness to appease the teenagers just a lower stakes way of Michael Corleoneesque suck up behavior aimed at protecting my house and pumpkins? Shouldn’t I be outraged at the teenagers in the same way I was annoyed at the Christmas Tree and Snowman? Maybe I should adopt the same philosophy as our grumpy neighbors who open their door to anyone over twelve and stare at them, no candy in hand, until the intruders simply leave.

It’s hard to say.

I’d be tempted to say that the Christmas Tree and Snowman were simply victims of the recession, and they couldn’t afford their own candy. If this were true, maybe I should have given them a can of soup instead of a mini snickers. Maybe I should have given them my last Pumpkin Ale. I would say they were just reenacting a 1930’s soup line sympathy plea except that their costumes were really nice. Thus making me think that they could easily afford their own soup, beer and candy.

Here’s what I wish I had said to them:

“How old are you two? Ya know, there are these places called grocery stores, where you can pick out your very own candy, of your own choosing and you can eat it all. The best part is that you don’t even have to dress up in elaborate costumes and beg for it, you just buy it – with the money you earn at your jobs, the jobs you have because you’re freakin’ grown. “

Here’s what I actually said:

“Happy Halloween!”

I’m so lame sometimes; I really wish I could say what I want to say when it’s the right time to say it. Instead, I have razor sharp, juno-like wit on a thirty minute delay. Thus, whenever I finally do come up with the appropriate response, it’s so late that I look crazy if I actually say it. Plus, in this case, I would have had to chase down the Christmas Tree and Snowman, and really, who looks like the nutbag in that scenario?

What’s worse, is that when and if I do actually say what I want to say when and where I want to say it – I torture myself for sounding like an asshole for the next month. I did this recently at work. Here’s a brief transcript of the guilt causing, yet slightly satisfying conversation in question.

Grumpy Co-Worker (who spends every waking minute writing long, vitriolic emails about various subjects he feels impassioned about and/or causes of perceived persecution) “No one is hearing my voice!”

Me (bone-weary from listening to said vitriolic emails and rants) “We can’t help but hear your voice, you inflict it upon us at every opportunity.”

Grumpy Co-Worker “Well, I guess that’s kind of a back-handed compliment….”

Me “I’m sorry it came off as a compliment.”

I’m an asshole. Seriously, an asshole. And I would have looked like a bigger asshole if I had unleashed any of my surprise/frustration/annoyance on the Christmas Tree and Snowman. I don’t know what’s better – say what you want and suffer the subsequent guilt fest for looking like an asshole? Or, swallow your tongue, accept that the thirty-minute delay that prevents me from witty retorts is actually a gift from Allah, set in place to save me from myself?