A Car Horn is Not, Repeat NOT, a Doorbell

You know, I'm a patient person. A very patient person. And I'm quite forgiving, too. My demeanor is pretty much even at all times.

But, seriously, all it takes is five seconds of car horn honking from the street -- which I can only assume is to alert someone that their ride is here -- to drive me to the point of fantasizing ridiculous acts violent rage.

Today, it drove me straight to the blog. Is this not the age of cell phones, people? USE them! Or park your damned car and walk your lazy ass to the door.

Or else I'm going to think very bad thoughts about you!

Phew, I feel better.

That is all.

I'll Take the Non-Smoking Section, Please

When I was a kid, both my Grandma and Dad smoked cigarettes. Did I ever hate their habit, mostly because it made them stink. We spent years helping Grandma pretend that she didn't smoke, even though her bathroom was sprinkled with ashes, had yellowed walls, and smelled like a wet ashtray. Dad never brought it in the house and mostly smoked in the car, so it stuck to his clothes and followed him everywhere he went. I vowed that I would never smell like that when I grew up.

My first venture into the real world was to college in Washington, where everyone smoked. It was inescapable. When I was back home attending community college, there was still no escaping it. One of my favorite memories from that school was overhearing someone scolding a smoker, "You just lost seven minutes of your life." I was never sure if he meant each cigarette has been proven to shorten a smoker's life by seven minutes or if he just meant they wasted seven minutes during which they could have been doing something other than smoking.

Doesn't really matter because, within a matter of months, I moved to Santa Barbara and became a smoker myself. It's hard to say how it happened exactly -- though it's probably safe to blame it on a combination of cute boys and beer -- but soon I was involved in a pack a day love affair...er, uhh, habit. There's just something about cigarettes that go so well with the immortality complex of being twenty-one and single. Besides, everyone was doing it!

Turns out the future husband smoked, too; and we smoked together for a long time. Of course, we made it our resolution to quit just about every New Year's until it finally stuck. Now, it's been five whole years since we officially gave up the cancer sticks, cold turkey.

It wasn't so bad, actually, until I woke up on Monday morning of the third week and couldn't move. The husband had to call in sick on my behalf because I literally was too weak to hold the phone. The Great Cigarette Detox of 2003 ended up lasting a full two weeks. It was pure misery. There was the fever portion, the wretched coughing episodes, the inability to eat syndrome, and total lack of interaction with people other than a few grunts of sick-person communication to the husband. By the end of it all, I lost fifteen pounds that I didn't really have to spare and it was months before I started to really feel like myself again.

As I recall, the husband was the more resistant one in our initial pact to quit smoking. One of the conditions of the agreement was that smoking would be permitted only in times of extreme stress, such as a death. I agreed since it wasn't likely we'd have do deal with anything like that for years and years.

Wrong again. Just under three years later, we ended our cigarette fast to try to cope with the loss of my sister. It felt weak and lame, but that's what we did. Actually, we've spent the last few years saying that we're non-smokers when it's not exactly the whole truth. Our current routine is to smoke when the husband's band plays or when a loved one does something so frustrating that it feels like there's no other rational choice.

Still, we have successfully broken the daily habit. Thank you, thank you very much.

These days, my reaction to cigarettes has two sides. Sometimes, when I walk by a smoker on the sidewalk, I have this ridiculous urge to rush at them and steal drag or to go in for a kiss just for a shot at their exhale. But, mostly, I have my childhood gag reflex and wonder what the hell I ever saw in those evil little things anyway because, man, they sure do stink.

Ahh, Technology

The husband and I seem to have been technologically cursed this Xmas. There's a laundry list of possessions that are letting us down and just begging to be thrown into the street in a fit of frustration. But it's the camera that stings the most.

The camera, which spends more time with my man than I do, broke two weeks ago and it won't be fixed until after the New Year. We'll just have our mental snapshots to remember the Holidaze 2007 and The Xmas Eve Ash Storm. Damn, I wish my memory card was bigger.

"Umm, you guys, do my eyes look funny?"

Giving

With every trip I take around the sun, my empathy for my parents and grandparents grows. This is especially true during this most wonderful time of the year. As the husband and I pulled down our boxes (upon boxes) of fabulous Xmas decorations last week, I thought of my childhood holiday decorating routine. What I thought was, "Oooh, so THIS is why Mom made us wait to decorate until she was good and ready."

It's a freakin' unholy, exhausting mess, that's why!

Truthfully, I really do love the Xmas rituals...well, at least, my Xmas rituals. I love putting the crazy, handmade, felt Santa cozy on the toilet seat lid; I love the achy-armed fifteen minutes it takes to hand-whip the eggs for one batch of Grandma's 1938 Betty Crocker recipe for Dream Bars; I love sitting on the floor with a pillow room-divider between us as we watch White Christmas and carefully sift through last year's box of wrapping paper to reuse on this year's gifts.

These days, though, my rituals involve the very minimum when it comes to shopping for gifts. The thrill is gone. The societal pressure to stack the gifts high and buy that perfect something for every person who may have crossed my path for five seconds throughout the last year pretty much exhausts the crap out of me.

Man, the cynicism which has emerged in my old age sure is a bitch. I can't even enjoy the simple rush of a last-minute holiday retail bender anymore!

SOLUTION 2007

At work, this year I asked my boss if we could replace the obligatory gift-baskets with monetary donations to a couple of local non-profits; and, he said yes. We sent out a letter, which explained that we chose to make the donation in their names, to our usual list of holiday card and gift-basket recipients. Within twenty-four hours, we had received two phone calls and one hand-delivered letter of gratitude for our unusual gesture. It worked! And it felt great.

So, the husband and I decided to try the same at home. For one side of the family, we donated money to a niece's college fund; and, for the other side, we purchased tree seedlings for farmer's in Asia. For our friends, we purchased bee colonies for villages in South America. Not only did we enjoy putting together packages of homemade cards and treats to go along with the donation, but we also were able to avoid participating in the shopping hysteria of the season.

You'd be amazed by how much energy you are left with to face the rest of the holiday obligations when you don't have to dive into a round of Xmas Eve mall shopping. Next year, I'm going to remember this alternate giving ritual when it comes time to deck the halls once again.

Mind Games Forever

For every birthday candle blow out, for every penny thrown into a fountain, for every shooting star, it's always the same wish: world peace, now, pretty please.

Hope springs eternal, right?

A couple of weeks ago, I was asked the question, "What do you feel is the biggest problem in the world today?" My immediate answer was that people aren't treating each other with enough care, that there's just not enough love being passed around.

Love. There's a true abundance of it in my own life. Indeed, love overflow-eth for most of the people I know. That's not exactly the problem. It feels more like we -- as a collective species -- are lacking a wider sense of love for one another, for the masses of people who aren't in our day to day lives.

It can be a lot to ask to foster love for total strangers because, you know, they're strange. Plus, there are some seriously idiotic, evil and smelly people out there. None of these things make you want to devote any love to them.

This notion of loving the unlovable is all well and good when conceptualizing, when discussing it with other like-minded people. But, it sure is a challenge to put it into an active practice. I certainly struggle spare any love for the likes of certain war mongering politicians, hideously awful "role-model" celebrities, or parents who can hardly figure out how to protect themselves let alone their own children.

See what I mean? It leaves me feeling sour just typing those words about people I don't know and don't really want to know.

And there it is: the people I don't really want to know.

I desperately want to find love for everyone -- friend, foe and otherwise -- in spite of whatever shortcomings they may have. But, most of the time, it's almost too hard to a little spare find love for myself in spite of my own unlovable shortcomings. Perhaps, herein lies our cultural problem: not enough love for ourselves. If we worked on loving ourselves and all we have to offer each other, would that make it easier to share our universal love? Would that make it easier to have sympathy for each other's struggles? Would that make a drop in the bucket?

Yes, people. The answer is YES.

I always suspected John Lennon knew exactly what he was talking about when he said, "Love is the Answer." It's no mistake that song is entitled Mind Games.

This holiday season I've altered my world peace wish mantra. From now on I'm going to wish for world peace through love for every single person I'll ever know and never will meet.

Wax On, Wax Off

Way back when -- in high school -- I used to butt heads with English teachers when it came to interpreting a given text. In my little mind, I found it outrageous to try to read too deeply into the written word. It made me uncomfortable and annoyed to assign any meaning that may or may not have been originally intended. Most of the time, my argument was something to the tune of "Couldn't the author actually mean what he says?" and "Why must we assume everything is symbolic?"

The whole reading comprehension thing plain old escaped me and I have the SAT scores to prove it. Plus, a stubborn attitude and unwillingness to resort to Cliff's Notes (like most of the kids on the honor roll) probably didn't help me out much.

So, now that I'm older (and working on the wiser), what would I tell my sixteen year-old self about interpreting a text?

Well, for starters, I'd tell her that she was absolutely right to question her authority.

Next, I'd let her in on a little secret that those silly teachers were inexplicably keeping to themselves. It's not that we have to assign meaning to other people's words, it's that we get to. It's our privilege as readers to chose to stay on the surface or dive down as deep as we can go. Once the author has put it out there, the words become ours to understand through the filter of our own experiences. If we want to think about the era during which the text was written, well that's entirely up to us. If we don't feel like to considering possible symbolism of a fig tree, then screw the damned tree already.

Last night, I started reading The Fellowship of the Ring for the first time (yea, yea, the first time, I know). This edition has a foreword by Tolkien in which he addresses this issue of the reader's interpretation of his words. He actually gets quite defensive that these books are not allegory to the World War II era (when he wrote them), as many people have extrapolated. Then he makes a point that I wish I'd known how to articulate in high school.

Tolkein states that "an author cannot of course remain wholly unaffected by his experience" and "the ways in which a story-germ uses the soil of experience are extremely complex." Then he refers to his own experiences during World War I, which affected the entirety of his adult life. Basically, he's rejecting the assumption that a book is allegory for the day in which is written as limiting. It doesn't mean that it cannot be, at times, but it is certainly not a rule of reading (take that Dr. Fussell!).

The part of the foreword that sat me straight up in bed is his comment that readers often confuse "applicability" with "allegory." Aha! There it is!

This is why Shakespeare can be so wonderfully and shockingly relevant, even in the twenty-first century. Human nature hasn't really changed all that much for the last several centuries, has it? The way we treat each other and the things we do to one another are just as beautiful and just as shitty as they ever were. The stories written about them, however are almost always applicable to one reader of one era or another. The only things that really change are the circumstances, the scenery, the outfits.

Tolkein has forever endeared himself to me with his stubborn stand that the trilogy isn't allegory, goddammit. A little bit on the defensive, stubborn side, but also willing to allow the reader to have their own experience with a text...so long as they know the author might or might not have wanted it that way. He and I would have been great friends.

Twenty Minute Tuesday

For weeks now, my teacher has been exceedingly patient with my non-production of short stories, or even pieces of stories (I'm too sheepish to share the 10 million, unrelated sentences that I've started). He's been giving me all sort of fantastic suggestions and plenty of encouragement, but still I have not gotten off the pot.

One of the more confusing recommendations, for me, is to try reading books from a writer's perspective. Meaning, try thinking about how I might write the scene differently, what different choices would the characters make if this were a tale of mine, etc. Also meaning, pay close attention to the various characters and see if I can pick up on their distinct personalities...it's not as easy as one might think to write a story wherein not every character is coming from the same point of view.

Anyway, I was pretty sure this would fuck up the joy of reading for the rest of time, and I don't think I put much effort into reading like a writer. Until this weekend, that is, when I became engrossed in Speaker for the Dead by Orson Scott Card (a fabulous read, by the way, highly recommend it, but a book report this is not).

Somewhere along the way, I began to actually see how the author cleverly lets the reader know -- and gets us to care about -- each character through simple, unexpected actions and dialogue. Their vulnerabilities, their strengths, their dialects, everything is of that character, that person. And, in theory, it's so damned simple. How does this person answer a phone call differently than that person? How do they react to the choices of another and why? Personalities, turns out, are not fiction, they're reality; and I have experience with personalities.

Hopefully this is the mini-breakthrough I was waiting for. Of course, my relationship with the theory of writing a story is a whole different matter than my discipline to sit down, hash out an actual set of characters and let them lead me where they need to go.

I have two responses to these reading/writing revelations:

1. Hallelujah for this new awareness to bring to my reading. The best part of it all is that reading like a writer has not ruined stories for me, it's enhanced it exceedingly. This is beyond exciting (don't forget, it's the little things!).

2. Per my teachers sage advice: I am not on a timeline, I am not in a writing race, it is OK to feel scared, overwhelmed, crazy, intoxicated, unsure. But it wouldn't hurt to jump off that cliff and find out what...or who...waits for me below.