I Hear the Secrets that You Keep

Someone recently blogged that this song was stuck in her head (Count Mockula, I think?), but apparently I don't have to close my eyes and go to sleep to blab my lame "secrets." No, a low grade fever, a medium dose of insomnia, and a high level of rue for something stooopid I did, combined with Facebook status chatting, is all it takes. Last Thursday night/Friday morning, I confessed to my 7th grade (possibly part of 8th grade, I get confused about timing) crush that I liked him back in the day! Ooooooooooh.... (No, it wasn't "Arnold" from Always. I feel like such a slut. Ha! That's sadly about as slutty as I get - overlapping school crushes. Oy vey iz mir!)

Whatever the case, I sat at my computer blushing like an idiot. (Or maybe I was flushed from fever? It was not a super high fever, just a smidge above 99, although for me that's a bit higher than it is for others because my usual body temperature is 97.5 or something low like that. Husband says it is because I am a cold-hearted bitch. He is hilarious, no?) You know what's funny? For a second, I was actually sad when he didn't say that he had also had a crush on me. I had kinda believed, back in the day, that my crush was not unrequited. Like, this was over 20 years ago, but I still took it as a rejection.

On a related note, earlier in the week, I tried quizzing Husband about his junior high days to "get into the head of a 13 year old boy" so I could maybe fix up my young adult novel. He hesitantly submitted to my questions:

Me:"Did you go to junior high dances?"
Husband: "No."
Me: "Why not? Weren't you interested in them?"
H: "Yes, but no one would dance with me because I was a loser. Do I have to talk about this? I prefer not to relive those days."
Me: (Kissed him on the head) "Well, this cold-hearted bitch would have wanted to dance with you."
H: "Thanks."

Yeah, junior high just sucks.

And That's the Whole Story

Since the job search is going slooooow, and I'm caught up with my school work, I figured I'd stretch out typing up Always until tomorrow. Then I found out that Planned Parenthood needed volunteers tomorrow for a health insurance campaign, so I figured I could at least do something productive with my time. Plus, I got an email from a friend complementing me on my "sweet" story, noting that my "use of dramatic irony was pretty sophisticated for a middle-schooler." And nothing motivates me more than flattery, so I got my ass in gear and got the rest of the story online.

I'm glad that someone is enjoying the cheese-tastic goodness of my weird 13 year old ego. Regardless, I definitely watched too much LA Law, Hill Street Blues, and St. Elsewhere. Oy vey.

"Those People"

After days of cold rain, the sun is out today. Yay!

I went to the gym and had a good weightlifting session. Yay! (Or at least yay until I can't move my arms tomorrow.)

Two interviews that I went to last week yielded follow up interviews. Yay!

The shocking - shocking! -climax of Always is near. I should finish by the end of tomorrow. Yay!

So I was in a pretty good mood when I sat down to eat lunch. I read an article in the New York Times about Giuliani's stumping for Bloomberg in the mayoral election. He said:

“You know exactly what I’m talking about,” Mr. Giuliani said at a breakfast sponsored by the Jewish Community Council in Borough Park, Brooklyn. “This city could very easily be taken back in a very different direction — it could very easily be taken back to the way it was with the wrong political leadership.”

Not that I am surprised at all that he would say such a thing. His tactics led to enormous civil rights abuses and lawsuits against the city that cost taxpayers tens, if not hundreds, of millions of dollars, with no conclusive link to a drop in crime in the city. (Crime was down in large cities across the country, something Giuliani probably tries to take credit for, too.)

I've always hated Giuliani. He's always done his best to exploit fear and act as petty as possible in any given situation. The first thing I thought of after I threw the paper down and stomped around swearing was a recent post on BlogHer, Top Ten Reasons I Am Not a Racist by Nordette Adams. (The actual, brilliant top 10 list appears in Part 2.) I have no doubt that Giuliani would be offended at the mere suggestion that his tactics are racist. Sigh. You know how "those people" are.

Truth or Dare

Two new chapters are up at Always. I must have been drunk with words as I typed them up, as I could not stop hiccuping. The force of the hiccups jerked my head and hands each time, so there are probably more typos than usual or intended. (I'm copying exactly what's in the notebook, so the punctuation is not great.)

Chapter 13 is all about a party that the main characters attend. It features, of course, the game "Truth or Dare." This is the second time that "Truth or Dare" appears in the story, but of course, nothing really interesting happens because I was/am a total nerd. It cracks me up. I was obsessed with this game through even the early years of high school. (And when the Madonna documentary came out, my dorky friends and I were rendered giddy by the title. Oooooh! "Truth or Dare!" How exciting!)

When I was in eighth grade, I once played a more risque version of Truth or Dare called Two Minutes in the Closet. Since were there three girls and only one boy, this was not such a balanced game. I was excited to kiss someone. That's about as far as I was willing to go. These days, it blows my mind how naive that was, although I am sure that there are plenty of geeks who also feel the way I did, just as I am sure that there were many kids who were doing all sorts of things that I barely even knew existed. OK, so I have no point except that I was a nerd whose heights of ecstasy didn't progress beyond slow dancing close to some guy. Whatever.

Memoir, Fiction, and Balls vs. Testicles in Literature

I read Frank Conroy's memoir Stop-Time for my lit seminar on Wednesday. What's good about it is the writing. Conroy doesn't tell his story in a linear fashion, and at times switches to the present tense. I just tried both of these techniques for a story that I handed in last week which will be workshopped on Monday, so it is nice to have another successful model to learn from. (I patterned my work on A Feather on the Breath of God by Sigrid Nunez.)

During a break from the meandering class discussion, a friend calculated that we pay $125 an hour for our classes. We resumed class. After a ten minute debate on Conroy's use of the word "balls," which our professor defended by saying, "Balls is a great word," I thought about other uses I had for $20.84 I spent for that. Not that I disagree that balls is a great word or really minded talking about whether Conroy should have used "testicles" instead of balls, but still. That's a lot of money for something I talk about for free all the time.

Speaking of balls, I posted four more chapters of Always. Chapter 9 is one of my favorites so far, and Chapter 10 (not to be confused with Chapter 10*, as I had two chapter tens) is one of the most gag-inducing. The similes flow in Chapter 11 most impressively. I actually learned a lot from myself from twenty years ago while typing up this work.

The Point

Author Binnie Kirshenbaum spoke at school on Monday night. She read from her latest book, The Scenic Route, which was hilarious and also troubling. During the Q&A, she relayed an anecdote that got Maurice* in a frenzy. Kirshenbaum said that she was telling her husband a story one day, and as usual, she went into a digression that she thought provided important context for the story.

"Get to the point," her husband interrupted her.

"What do you mean, 'get to the point?'" she asked him. "There is no point. I'm telling you a story to entertain you."

After I stopped laughing, I thought about what that meant for me. One of the things we are always talking about at school is what the point of our work is, the "so what?" that gets people to read something. When people ask me what my point is, 99% of the time I have no answer. I just want to tell a story. Maybe, if the story is told well, that's all the point that one needs.

Speaking of pointless, more chapters of the young adult novel I wrote when I was in 8th grade are ready to entertain (and I use that word loosely in this situation) at Always.

*Maurice is the hamster who runs on the wheel that powers my brain.

Cheese-tastic

My face hurts, probably due to all the cringing I did while typing up Chapters 2 - 4 of Always, the atrocious young adult book that I wrote when I was in eighth grade. Why I decided to use a male narrator is beyond me. Also puzzling: why give half the characters fake names, but then use the real names (or ridiculously close to real names - Suzannah, anyone?) for others. I wonder what Maurice* was thinking all those years ago.

What most embarrasses me and interests me about Always is the combination of how I saw myself at that time, and how I wanted to be perceived. My favorite line so far, hands down, is "I got the feeling that when Suzannah Rawlings spoke, people usually listened." Oh man, how I wished that were true!

*The hamster who runs on the wheel that powers my brain.

Always: Chapter 1

For the most boring first chapter of a young adult novel in the history of young adult novels, read Chapter 1 of my first novel, "Always." I can only excuse myself by noting that I was probably only 13 or 14 when I wrote this. Also, it sort of gets better.

Note that the description of the house in the novel is suspiciously similar to that of my parents' house... Oh, the cringe-inducing hilarity!