Category Archives: Anxiety

May2

Flashback Friday: The Cheerleader and the Bookworm

Posted on 2 May 2014 by The Reluctant Girl Scout

Sunday, May 21, 2006

Once a month when the bill is due, I go to the gym. I can’t say it does much for muscle tone or weight loss, but I am dedicated even though I don’t see results. Once a month. Like clock work. I go to the gym at 10:00. This is the perfect time to go because the only people who are there are usually older people who have either had strokes and are rehabilitating or older people who are healthy and trying to ward off the strokes. Nobody is there who looks like they’ll be on the next series of Real World in other words. There is no spandex or neon. The older people don’t really work the machines right. They do things in a lopsided fashion. I say this not to make fun of them but to point out that in order for me to feel good about the hour I sometimes spend in a gym requires me to be surrounded by people bent over with osteoporosis and propping themselves up with canes. I am not what you would call a natural.

When I was in high school, I was one of those girls who always had her nose stuck in a book and who was always the last one in from the mile run around the track in gym class. Because there were no books involved with gym, I considered it a waste of my time. I didn’t particularly like my body (though I would certainly like to have access to that version of myself again) and so tended towards maximum coverage in oversized Amy Grant sweatshirts and army jackets. Gay men loved me. Boys who read The Lord of the Rings found me a worthy enough companion.

On the other end of the mind/body spectrum was a girl, let’s call her Trixie, who wore her parachute pants so tight that little was left to the imagination. She was spoiled and cute with a horrible reputation though I was never clear if it was warranted or created by jealous girls and hopeful boys. She was just someone in general math and English classes whose wardrobe and body were enviable, who had gone out with a lot of different guys, and who had a contagious laugh. Also, she was a cheerleader.

Yesterday when I got the gym, there on the steppy-uppy machine I haven’t the stamina to use, was not one of the geriatric regulars, but Trixie, chewing gum, reading a celebrity gossip magazine, and talking to a trainer. She saw me and greeted me warmly, as she always does though we were never friends, and we talked about school and old acquaintances and life. She was sheepish because the last time I saw her was at a restaurant where her eleven-year-old son announced across the aisle separating us that she’d been married and divorced twice and that he and his brother had different fathers. This announcement caused her to clam up and me to eat the rest of my deep friend dinner in uncomfortable silence.

At the gym, we were able to laugh this off. Obviously, this is her domain. She effortlessly talked to me as she climbed an invisible K-2 while I huffed and puffed on the 0% incline of the treadmill. She told me how good her boys are—how they are so much better than she was. She said she wished I had a kid that would spill MY secrets to her in restaurants, and it struck me how sad it is that we humans go through our lives worrying about what other people think of us. Trixie thinks I sit in judgment of her because she’s been married twice, didn’t go to college, and knew how to have a good time. Meanwhile, I think Trixie is judging the size of my treadmilling backside, judging me for my lack of mate or children, and poverty of fashionable workout clothes.

Why do we torture ourselves this way? I allowed myself about 120 seconds of masochism (Why don’t I go to the gym more so I too can speak without huffing and puffing? Why don’t I wear something more attractive than my relaxi pants and “Guinness is Good for You” T-shirt?) and then forced myself to focus on her and what she is: a thing of beauty. Not just because she is firm or tan or has long blond hair or looks ten years younger than I do, but because she still cracks her gum and giggles and tells you she likes your shoes instead of mentioning how you look fatter or older or more single than you did in 1985.

As we were getting ready to leave, the trainer she had been talking to earlier was rubbing a kink out of her back. In six years of semi-irregular gym attendance, no trainer has bothered to smile at me let alone rub a kink out of any of my muscles, but here was Trixie, getting a post-workout backrub and telling the trainer that she thought perhaps she was so tense because she hadn’t had sex for so long.

Gum crack. Gigggle.

Apr24

A Good Girl’s Praise of Courtney Love

Posted on 24 April 2014 by The Reluctant Girl Scout

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A couple of weeks ago I spent an entire morning trying to compose a perfect post celebrating the 20^th Anniversary of Hole’s album, Live Through This. My attempt was an epic failure in that every line I wrote made me sound either angry or clueless. I’d write a line. Read it twice. Stare out the window. Imagine someone reading it and thinking less of me. Delete it.

It was not easy going.

Nor could I determine to whom I was writing since I already knew how I felt and since Courtney Love detractors would lob all the regular criticisms (ranging from her craziness to her talentless-ness to her a bad mothering skills) regardless of what I typed out, and since my own mother—my most loyal reader aside from Z—was likely to say, “Courtney who?” what would the point be of writing a praise hymn to a two-decades old grunge anthem anyway?

I gave up and wrote my friend Jane an email instead. Forget the anniversary. Enough people online had mentioned it in passing that it’s not like Courtney herself was waiting for me to post.

Z, who hates grunge and doesn’t understand how this album could have ever been the soundtrack to my life, was particularly puzzled by why the last several days Courtney Love was wailing on the stereo whenever he’d get home from work, why I kept grousing under my breath all week that the “real” anniversary we should be commemorating instead of the 20^th anniversary of Love’s husband’s suicide is the release of this album, or why I seemed kind of angry at the world for no real reason.

We are a “pop” couple. Though I spent years despising bubble gum music, he has shown me in our four years of marriage the pleasure of listening to music that doesn’t make me sad or angry: music that literally goes in one ear and out the other and in the process might make my body move a little more rhythmically. Before Z, there was mostly angry feminist music, Irish rebellion music, a little punk, some classic rock throwbacks, Van Morrison (for the love), and for a period of time, a lot of Nanci Griffith that left me in tears every morning as I’d drive through Indiana cornfields on my way to work because the storytelling was so sad and true. Before Z, I liked to feel affected by whatever I listened to. But then Z arrived on the scene and he runs about 50 degrees happier and 42 degrees less complicated than me, and after I banished his country music to his office, we found happy, common ground in the land of Gwen, Gaga, Fergie, Katy Perry, and whoever else Pandora dished up for us on related channels.

But pop didn’t cut it while I was having my Courtney Love epiphany. I spent way too much time listening to interviews with Love, reading reviews of the album, and remembering 1994 and how I would drive down the road screaming the lyrics to “Gutless” or “Violet” at full volume, full of some weird rage that didn’t really fit the circumstances of my life: I wasn’t a heroin addict, I didn’t have a suicidal spouse or a baby people didn’t think I was fit to raise, I had a newly minted master’s degree in fiction writing, good friends, and good health. (Plus, I had just discovered the internet, roughly five minutes before many other women had, and so I was experiencing what I like to call my “Belle of the Ball” era, which was a glorious though short period when men were falling in love with my words and no one was expecting any nude photos because modems just weren’t that fast yet. It was the Golden Age for a smart girl who was good with language.) What was there for me to rail against? But the rage then was real, and even last week when I was trying to piece together all of these retroactive feelings, I was, at the very least, cranky as I tried to name what those twelve tracks had meant to me all those years ago.

The week before, I’d gone to hear an Important Writer talk about structure in creative nonfiction. We were there, stuffed onto tiny plastic chairs in a dark, crowded room, waiting to hear this man’s brilliance. The room was full of his devotees who were all a-twitter and he announced that he was about to read an essay that he’d written for us the night before while sitting in the café at Elliott Bay Books drinking wine. Maybe if I hadn’t paid $10 for the privilege of hearing him talk at length on a topic he’d only bothered to start thinking about the night before while drinking, or maybe if his devotees weren’t cooing quite so loudly, this wouldn’t have annoyed me, but he did and they were. I felt distanced from him. He didn’t help matters much by referencing multiple male authors and only two females, thus reminding me that my own writing will never count quite as much as a man’s, though I’m not sure why since it’s hands that usually do the writing, not genitalia.

During the course of the two hours, I simultaneously loathed him, loathed his devotees—all wearing some variation of a writer uniform (including one or more of the following items: black, pilled sweaters, pencils as hair props, giant glasses, ironic T-shirts so obscure only a select group of people could possibly understand, and boots)— and loathed myself for not being more talented, fabulous, and appropriately attired.

Despite the fact that the Important Writer did not know me, I was certain he would judge me harshly or, worse yet, ignore me entirely, and so I spent much of my time there feeling angry. And while I was feeling angry at him, I started feeling angry some more at any male artist or critic who dares to criticize a female one. Not because female writers and actors and painters are above criticism, but because so many of them do it in this dismissive way against which it is impossible to argue and which seems to be relegated only to females. (More enraging yet, the male artist or critic who doesn’t notice female artists at all. In an email during this week of angst, Jane reminded me that in college one of our male instructors started a lit course announcing that we wouldn’t be reading any female writers because history had yet to produce any worth studying. Maybe I’ve been carrying that annoyance around since I was 19.)

At the Important Writer’s presentation, I suddenly realized that a few years ago when I was applying to MFA programs, I had applied to his program and one other, which was less well-regarded than his. Based on some voice memory, it occurred to me that it was the Important Writer himself who had phoned me at my office to tell me the happy news that I’d been accepted. There was pleasure in his voice, as if he had just handed me the keys to some kingdom of which he was already a resident. I thanked him but told him I’d decided to go with a slightly less well-regarded, definitely less well-known program, and he momentarily lost all power of communication. Clearly no one had ever rejected his offer of a place at the table with him and his cooing devotees. He spluttered and finally managed to get out a, “Well. Okay then.”

Since making that decision almost six years ago, I’ve second-guessed myself countless times. The program I chose was largely nurturing, and though there were plenty of male mentors there—from many of whom I learned much—there was a decided “feminine energy” at this school. Since my graduation, I’ve wondered about my choices. Did I skip “the best” because I didn’t believe in myself? Was I afraid I couldn’t handle something more cutthroat, more “masculine”? Had I sabotaged my career simply because I’d wanted the opportunity to spend a residency in Ireland? Did I purposely avoid what might have been a “harder” program? What was wrong with me that I’d make such an impetuous decision based on nothing more than intuition with no basis at all in logic?

Aside from hearing the Important Writer, it was a week in which I was doing a lot of self-questioning for a variety of reasons including how good of a host and friend I am to how good of a wife I am in any given week (I get full marks for love and devotion on the Z front, but I think you know my record on the Domestic Arts and general productivity). There was a lot going on in my head in terms of whether or not I was good enough at any of the things that I generally believe are my better qualities.

Good. Things get twisted up in my head around that word because “good” was always my thing. It’s what I was. I was a good child, a good student, a good girl, a good friend, a good writer, a good teacher, a good listener. The problem with being the kind of good I was (and the kind of good I still struggle with daily) is that it was—is— always contingent upon someone else’s opinion of me and the quality of that goodness. They are the ones who are the deciders about whether I’ve hit the mark, those strangers and teachers and critics and loved ones and friends. And while I value the opinions of some of these people, I don’t ever want their view of me to matter more than my view of myself.

When I left the auditorium last week after hearing the Important Writer, my step was lighter than it had been going in. For one, he hadn’t rejected me five years ago—I had rejected him. But more importantly, it was clear after having listened to him that I would not have thrived in his environment or under his tutelage. I would have spent two and a half years feeling angry and either stupid or shunned as I tried to meet some goal of his or his idea of what it means to be a good writer, a literary writer. My intuition hadn’t failed me. I’d done exactly what I wanted when I made the decision about which program was best for me and ignored various voices of reason (none of which were in my own head). I was fine and finally the second-guessing could stop.

There are advantages to being good (the lack of track marks, legal battles, and bad celebrity tweets to name a few), and probably attempting goodness is so tightly coiled around my Midwestern DNA that I couldn’t change now if I wanted to. Yet, when I hear 1994 Courtney Love screeching and misbehaving and not giving two shits about whether other people think she is a good person—a good girl—a part of me still remembers that unfettered satisfaction of wailing along side her voice, breaking the speed limit (slightly) as I careened down country roads in my Dodge Omni, and imagined myself as the sort of woman who knew what she wanted and took it without waiting for someone else to hand it to her with a gold star for good behavior affixed to it. A small part of me still aspires to that kind of honesty, ugly and unattractive as it might be at times, standing there in its too-short baby doll dress and smeared make-up, looking less pretty than people would like, making no apologies for wanting to be the girl (good or bad) with the most cake.

Apr18

Flashback Friday: It Feels Good to be a Gangsta (An Easter Post of Sorts)

Posted on 18 April 2014 by The Reluctant Girl Scout

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Sunday, April 16, 2006
Easter was always hard for me as a child. I’d been taught that I should be pleased about the news of the risen Christ, but what I really cared about was the basket of goodies. Eternal salvation sounded like a good thing, but with Brach’s jellybeans and Marshmallow Peeps right in front of me, it was difficult to see that the less immediate thing was the important bit. I always hoped by devouring one white chocolate cross on a yearly basis, I was participating in a sort of sweet holiday communion that would guarantee a Get Out of Hell Free card later. I never liked white chocolate but ate it out of sense of religious obligation. Just in case.

I say this in the past tense, but even though I know an angioplasty and diabetes are going to be in my future if I don’t cut out the Peeps and other sugary, fat-laden goodness, I have a hard time wrapping my mind around future when the present is so delicious. I’m not a stupid person, but somehow I’ve never gotten how heavily buttered potatoes in front of me now are going to equal too-snug jeans and shortness of breath later. I keep thinking medical science has to have it wrong–that one day they’ll realize Coke cleans out your arteries, that a thick layer of subcutaneous fat around a knee is actually _protecting_ the joint, not putting its owner on the short track to knee replacement surgery.

Last week I saw “Office Space” for the tenth time and somehow the Geto Boys song “Damn It Feels Good to Be a Gangsta” got stuck in my head. All week. I don’t like Rap, I don’t like those lyrics, but if you could have heard inside my head, that’s what would have been there. On campus on Wednesday as I drove past the one-day-only talking speed limit/radar detector sign and it told me I was four miles over the ridiculous 25 mph limit and said “SLOW DOWN!!” as if I were driving 75 thru a school zone, I curled my lip, shot an imaginary gun at the sign, and thought, “Damn it feels good to be a gangsta.”

Of course part of my cockiness stemmed from my having just seen the campus police SUV parked at McDonald’s.

Today, aside from being Easter, was my maternal grandmother’s 85th birthday. There’s no real story, but I thought I’d make note. She hasn’t felt good for my entire life and now has trouble getting out of chairs and down steps and her redneck neighbors plague her with late night ATV rides, but hey, 85 is one better than 84, and genetically speaking, I’m happy to have had a couple of grandparents who made it to that age even if there is gout affliction and high blood pressure pills. However, I’m hoping I won’t be as thrilled with “Deal or No Deal” as she is. Somehow that just seems like something that would be playing on the televisions that must line the walls of Purgatory. [Grandma died four and a half years after this post was written, but I still think of this as her time of year even though whenever you’d wish her happy birthday she’d give you a “pshaw” face and say, “It’s just another day.”]

While we were eating Easter/Birthday dinner, a family member was revisiting his romantic past. It was a story about a girl who once beat him up for kissing someone else. A girl whose family was likely Midwest mafioso. Then we talked about other people we know who seem to work beneath the radar of the law, who make bank deposits like Carmella Soprano’s $9,999 so it doesn’t get reported to the government, who drive big, expensive black cars, who always pay cash, and who live behind huge iron gates, but if you ask them how they make their living they’ll say they’re on disability or that they sell Hot Wheels on eBay.

Just simple folk, trying to get by.

I don’t know why this intrigues me so much. Despite my four miles over the speed limit last week, I’m the kind of person who would admit to a crime I didn’t commit just because I feel guilty about almost everything. The fact that I use non-rechargeable batteries or don’t recycle peanut butter jars because they are too hard to wash causes me moments of self-loathing. I can still feel my face turn red when I remember being lightly reprimanded by a teacher as a child. I also worry over much that when I make a judgment about someone or something, that perhaps I don’t have all the data. It’s the reason I don’t believe in the Death Penalty–400 eye witnesses could see a man shoot a convenience store clerk point blank and I’d always wonder if maybe it wasn’t the defendant’s doppelganger. I feel guilty. I question. I fret. I would be a jury foreman’s worst nightmare.

Which brings me to another family member acquired through marriage. I don’t have anything against this woman in particular. This afternoon though she and my mother were talking about trouble in the Middle East. It was a non-religious conversation, but this woman said, “Well, it’s all predicted in the Bible that this stuff will happen. The End is coming.” And then, without missing a beat, she said, “Ohhh. Are those Clark’s shoes you have on? Those are so cute.”

My life would be so much easier if I didn’t have to think so hard about stuff. Your reading it would be a lot easier too. No pondering the mysteries of the criminal mind, candy, religion, justice, my own psyche and trying to find meaning in everything. Instead, it would be one stream of consciousness thought after another: “400 dead today in train wreck. Cottonelle on sale at K-mart. Cute shoes!” It’s another kind of gangster life…where you just live your own life and don’t think too much about it…or anything else. It must feel good. I’ll never know.

Mar28

Blind Taste Testing

Posted on 28 March 2014 by The Reluctant Girl Scout

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Spoonbridge and Cherry, Minneapolis Sculpture Garden

Probably I signed something tonight before I participated in a two-hour focus group or collected the $100 gift card for my time that swore I wouldn’t divulge the nature of the product being studied. I can’t remember. Mostly, I think what I signed meant if they gave me something that made me break out in hives (or die) I wouldn’t sue them. It’s only the second time I’ve done one of these things. The last time was more fun because it was about trailers for a cable-style TV show and they were clearly trying to figure out how middle aged women felt about guns, rock music, and women in pasties and G-strings. Tonight’s study, alas, was nothing so exciting. Instead, it was all about various non-dairy milk products and what would make us buy one, and then, as the coup de grâce, a taste test so we could say definitively which one we liked most.

I’m an almond milk user and they didn’t foist any cow’s milk on us this evening, but as I write this—after having had a Coke and a delicious pasta dinner prepared by Z—I am here to report that sample A3 has left an aftertaste in my mouth that I just can’t get rid of. I wish I knew what it was so I’d be sure to never, ever buy it when I see it on sale at Bartell. It was like no substance made in nature, though I have little doubt that whatever packaging it’s in suggests that it was made in the forest by woodland creatures (wearing gloves and aprons) of all natural ingredients.

Uh. Horrible stuff.

When I’m thrown into a group like this, I’m always kind of fascinated by the dynamic and shifts in perception as the study progresses. In a non-classroom setting, I invariably initially like no one. I don’t have good reasons for it. I make lots of assumptions about who the individuals are, how they spend their time, and what they might be thinking about me. (For reasons I can’t explain, a lot of my judgment of them and my perception of their judgment of me has to do with nail polish color and handbags.) I didn’t make it beyond Psych 101 in college, but I’m smart enough to know that this is just a defense mechanism. Like too many things in my life, I’m always horrified by how quickly I am reduced to my junior high self, and small group work with people I don’t know is the surest way to get me to 1981. No. I wasn’t going to be impressed with this sampling of humans at all.

But then we went into the room with the two-way mirrors and introduced ourselves and suddenly I couldn’t remember what it was I had against the woman with the odd sternum piercing or why I thought the young girl with the trendy glasses would be snobby. Instead, she had a sweet voice and was apologetic when she liked one of the samples none of the rest of us liked, and Sternum Piercing made all of us laugh with her jokes about how she’d put anything in her coffee if she had a coupon for it. As everyone spoke about what they did or why they drank almond or soy milk instead of cow’s milk, the ice started to thaw a little amongst us. Mid-study, the facilitator brought out some sample packaging and we all gave our opinions and then she unveiled one brand that most of us had never seen. It was in a plastic bottle that looked like an old-timey milk bottle from an old-timey dairy from some place where cows roamed free and happily gave of their bounty without us having to feel guilty about the quality of their lives. We were all cooing and calling as if she had just uncovered a basket of Labrador puppies instead of almond milk. I have no idea if that particular almond milk was one of the ones we had tonight, but it was clear that ladies feel strongly about retro packaging, and from that point on, the energy in the room changed. We might not all like the same brands of almond and soy milk, but by golly, we know how we want our milk packaged. If she’d told us this brand would be dropped off at our doors by a man in a white uniform, we probably all would have lost our minds.

Finally, seven paper cups of milk were brought in for each of us, and the taste test began. We were instructed not to talk to each other during this part, but then the facilitator briefly left the room (by design, I suspect) and we were like a bunch of bad school kids. We were making audible “ick” noises and showing each other horrible faces and then laughing. Several people gagged dramatically. The woman across from me kept saying, “Uh uh. No way.” One of the ladies who had earlier impressed us with the story of the nearly 30 pounds she has lost since the beginning of the year admitted that the real reason the pounds have come off is because the nurse at the diet clinic where she is going is “fine” and she feels so embarrassed about him measuring her body that she’s been committed daily to making herself smaller and smaller by eating less and less.

When the facilitator came back in and asked what she’d missed, we all looked at each other conspiratorially, and kept mum. As soon as our last vote was cast, we were ushered into the lobby, handed our $100 Visa cards, and pointed towards the elevator. As we filed down the hall I felt genuine warmth for all of these women who had so bravely tasted A3!

The minute the elevator hit the ground floor, however, the spell was broken. We didn’t know each other. Wouldn’t ever know each other. A woman who had been telling me earlier about a previous study she did and her barriatric surgery and how she doesn’t really drink anything but coffee and wine and is unapologetic about it, looked away from me when I smiled at her and prepared to tell her goodbye like we were perfect strangers. Because we were. We were done focusing, and so we headed back out into the city with our city goggles on that blur the edges of every crowd until individuals are no longer recognizable and are therefore easier to navigate.

Mar21

Flashback Friday: Help Desk

Posted on 21 March 2014 by The Reluctant Girl Scout

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[Today’s installment from the past includes my momentary brush with NPR fame, a continued online flirtation with a visiting writer, and concern about my feet. If I had a time machine, I probably wouldn’t go back go to early 2006.]

12 April 2006

The iMac carcass is on my bedroom floor begging to be buried or turned into an aquarium, so during the computer help segment on WMUB, the local NPR station, I emailed the experts and asked if it was possible to stuff a Mac Mini into my old purple iMac case. Only the email was funny. And they laughed, which pleased me. Though perhaps my email wasn’t funny. Maybe they were laughing at me because the color of my computer matters more than Gigs or USB ports or processing speed. One of the techs said, “Why doesn’t she just buy a new iMac or Mac Mini?” and Cleve Callison, the host, said, “Well, she admits here that she is emotionally attached to her computer. And she really likes purple.” They didn’t have any answers for me and got distracted by “invisible desktops” but I got a certain amount of pleasure out of having made three guys laugh on the air.

Though I think the PC guy was snickering if you want to know the truth.

Belle and I had dinner tonight and she asked what I’d heard from “our boy.” I had no idea who ‘our boy’ was at first, but she meant the visiting writer with the suckable lips from last month. Mr. Top 25. My phantom baby’s daddy. I haven’t heard from him because I haven’t written him since I was in Ireland. I’m trying to think of some new clever line of conversation to zip off to him. I’m just not very good at being a girl. I email him and he emails me right back, but his emails lack “hooks” and so then I go silent. I wish they would have taught useful flirting skills even middle aged women could use back when I was in Home Ec or Girl Scouts. Because in all honesty, I’ve never had to make tea sandwiches or start a campfire. It turns out you can live a big hunk of your life without having to do either or those things. But flirting? Well, I could use those skills, even at this late date.

So far I have: “Hi! How are you?!” but beyond that, zip.

Today, a student asked me what anal beads were. It was an innocent question, though I’m unsure why anything with that adjective in front of it would seem like something within a writing instructor’s field of expertise. Of twelve students, three are writing about sex and one is writing about comic books (which is sort of the same thing). Maybe the ‘laid back & open’ tenet of my teaching philosophy needs to be revisited if they are going to mistake me for Susie Bright. I just shook my head and let one of the other students do the answering.

Beyond that, today I have been obsessed with my own feet. It was warm enough to wear sandals. (Teva flip flops–a little piece of $17 heaven.) But the thing is, my feet didn’t look like mine. All day I’d look down and feel like I’d checked my feet in for a pair of bowling shoes and then, somehow, when I went to get my feet back they had been swapped for someone else’s less attractive, more worn feet. Forget the iMac. How do you rectify THAT?

Mar20

The Horse You Rode In On

Posted on 20 March 2014 by The Reluctant Girl Scout

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Book-reading horse-rider, Vancouver, BC.

You aren’t asking for excuses about my lack of posts recently, and I don’t have any good ones anyhow, but I still feel compelled to explain myself to you, or at least to Z, who has given me this gorgeous gift of a year of writing, and yet I spend what feels like inordinate amounts of time NOT writing.

Do I have a good reason? Absolutely not. The best I can come up with is that I’m overwhelmed by the muchness of life and my own lack of decision-making ability. This is a regular annoyance of Z’s: my inability to choose a place to eat or a show to watch, but it is just not a skill I have. I often don’t care, and even when I do care, I am certain of only two things: 1) there is a “best” decision to be made 2) I will not make it and will regret it indefinitely.

My plan this past week or so was to get several full-days’ worth of writing done while Z was finishing up his quarter. I’d completed some editing projects, the laundry was caught up, the dishes were done, and my head felt clear and sharp and ready to get words on the page. Perfect. But then I thought about how I couldn’t decide quite what to write, and so maybe while I figured that out, I’d do just one little thing on my to-do list. It was a little thing, paying an insurance bill, but the day spiraled from there. And then other days have been lost to me because of similar non-reasons. Lather, rinse, repeat.

Here are the things I obsessed about yesterday after opening my bank’s bill-pay window, did internet research on, wrote emails to friends about, and stared out the window trying to solve:

What is the best budgeting app I should be using?
Instead of a budgeting app, should I just use the old envelope system my grandparents used?
If I use the envelope system, which envelopes should I use: the brightly colored ones that might take the sting out of having budgeted only $37 for eating out during the entire month of April, or the vintage charm of the special brown ones I stock up on every time I go to Ireland that might help me harken back to the simpler, belt-tightening times of yesteryear?
Will Z approve of the system I choose? The envelopes?
Since I don’t have a regular paycheck rolling in right now, what exactly am I budgeting for?
That mildew in the bathroom? Is that deadly?
What’s the best way to get rid of mildew?
Am I the sort of person who loves the environment so much she won’t use bleach to get rid of mildew or am I the sort of person who would use the most poisonous form of it to make sure the bathroom is 100% sanitized for our protection?
Once I decide, am I really going to clean the bathroom?
How long can I not clean the bathroom before Z will just do it? He’s so much better at it than I am.
Does this make me a bad wife? A bad housekeeper?
How much money would I need to earn in order to hire someone to take care of my finances? My mildew?
What job should I get that would pay me a lot of money while still allowing me plenty of time to write, so I could afford a financial manager and housekeeper?
What about Crimea? Should I know more about it than I do (which is about .02%)? Am I bad a person if I don’t read up on it?
That crunching sound my knee has been making ever since I fell three weeks ago, is that normal? Should I see someone? Buy one of those braces? Go to the gym? Take glucosamine?

Every day there’s a new spiral to lose myself down, like Alice and her rabbit hole.

I keep thinking I might like to hang out with Thoreau at Walden Pond, unplugged, uncomplicated, just being. But then I remember that I don’t really enjoy the outdoors. Plus, I was a little put off by the idea of Walden Pond when Z and I drove by it two summers ago and there was a big illuminated marquis on the road pointing towards it and flashing “WALDEN POND” as if we were being encouraged to attend a church chili supper. Maybe it was a temporary thing due to summer road construction—I like to think it was anyhow—but the bottom line is, as much as I despise it, I am more a child of electrified signage than I am a child a nature. My idea of spending an afternoon in Thoreau’s old haunt would have been a slow drive-thru with Z in our air-conditioned rental car. Maybe parking under a tree and regarding nature through the windshield, where it’s less likely to make me sneeze. I would have looked at what’s left of it and felt nostalgia for Thoreau’s past and genuine remorse that the natural places on the planet are disappearing at an alarming rate. And then I would have urged Z to drive us back to our hotel where the wi-fi was running quick and strong.

So clearly, persuading Z to live a life of simplicity with me in a tiny cabin in the Pacific Northwest outback (wherever that is—Forks, I think), is not the cure for what ails me.

When we were in Vancouver in January, I fell in love with this weather vane of a man riding a horse backward, reading a book. (I feel certain it is some literary reference I should get, but all Google searches provide me with links on how to ride a horse backward and why I should pedal backward on an elliptical trainer, neither of which seem like a skill I need to develop right now.) The man is so intent on the page, he seems not at all bothered that he is on a horse heading in the wrong direction.

At any rate, this is how I want to write: just doing it, even if I’m lumbering along backward on a half-lame horse whose mildew-encrusted saddle is all I could buy with the money in my “travel expenses” envelope. I want this kind of focus. I want the distractions to be no more bothersome than the fruit flies currently residing in our kitchen, easily swatted and cursed at before we go back to our original activity.

(I wonder if you can use bleach to get rid of fruit flies?)

Mar14

Flashback Friday: Biopic

Posted on 14 March 2014 by The Reluctant Girl Scout

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[Like all writers across America, I’ve been working on my application for an Amtrak Writing Residency, and the week before I was recovering from a writing conference. What this means for you, is back-to-back flashbacks. I’m getting back on the writing horse this coming week. Promise.]

Sunday, April 02, 2006

Last night I watched Walk the Line, and it occurred to me that the main reason Johnny & June Carter Cash had time to write songs, make up prison identities, get high, divorce their spouses, fall in love with each other and play to an audience is because to supplement their creative inclinations they did NOT have to grade 85 papers four times a semester. They didn’t have students stopping by their offices telling them stories so sad (and unfortunately true) that they then had to shut the door and have a cry once the student left.

They didn’t have to go to faculty meetings.

I fear I’ve just opened up a portal in the universe wherein my job will be sucked because it sounds as if I’m ungrateful and I don’t like it. [Oh, 2006 Beth, you have no idea what havoc you just wreaked!] Before that happens, let me say I DO like it. I really do. I’d prefer a book on the bestseller list so successful that I could buy Neverland Ranch, but barring that, my job is the best way to supplement a creative lifestyle. Of course no one is going to make a biopic of my life. Even Joaquin and Reese are now entitled to their very own E! True Hollywood Story episodes, but the life of a writing lecturer is never going to make the big or small screen.

When I have three stacks of papers to grade, it seems insurmountable. It’s as if I’ve never graded before & I can’t imagine how I’ll ever slog through them. I think of all the things I need to do like organize my files or weed my books or put my photos in decorative boxes. I eat food I’m not hungry for. I get bitchy and want to smack a lot of different people who probably don’t deserve it.

Like for instance, people who aren’t concise when they speak. People who, before they will ever give you the first line of their story so you can decide how interested you are in it, will spend five minutes trying to figure out if it (whatever ‘it’ is) happened on Monday or Tuesday. People who talk slow and pause between words. People who talk about their neighbors that I’ve never met. People who think how much head lettuce costs at Kroger is a valid topic of conversation. None of these things is worthy of my wrath, but when I have stacks of papers to grade and minimal time to spend on my own thoughts, I don’t want the air crowded up with stuff that doesn’t matter. Just–please in the name of all that is holy–cut to the chase. You missed class because your tire went flat? Tell me that. One sentence. Thank you for sharing–now please step away from my office door. In the time it takes me to listen to the average why-my-paper-is-late excuse, I could have written a companion piece to “Burning Ring of Fire.”

Other reasons I’m crabby today: my dearly beloved purple iMac died. I haven’t had a technician look at it to perform last rites, but I know a death rattle when I hear it. This one, for instance, sounds like the fan purring but the hard drive not engaging. And no magical Mac chime to let me know all is well in the universe. I use it only for email and playing Snood while listening on the phone to people who commit one of the conversational sins in the above paragraph, but I love it. It’s so grapey. So roundy. Has been there with me thru the good and bad.

I’m trying not to think about all the files that are on it that aren’t backed up that I have likely lost. This is no one’s fault but my own and it disappoints me that when I learned this lesson seven years ago it didn’t stick.

When a computer dies, it’s like a place got sucked up into heaven that you can no longer visit. My mother has my old Mac Performa–it is, essentially, the one I bought in grad school in 1994 with a few minor modifications. Sometimes I turn it on and have memories wash over me of life from that time. (A much slower time.) Papers written. Emails shared with the two people I knew who actually HAD email. Wallpapers that decorated my life. Strange men talked to before a lot of women had clawed their way online, which made me a hotter commodity than I have ever been at any other time in my life. It’s like revisiting a playground from a school you used to attend. Not that I have first-hand experience with this–the playground of my youth is now a parking lot.

No movies are going to be made about this kind of loss either.

Mar6

A Little Lenten Temptation

Posted on 6 March 2014 by The Reluctant Girl Scout

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Tuesday night Z came home from the store with a bag full of ice cream, chocolate, and potato chips to celebrate Fat Tuesday. We weren’t exactly throwing Mardi Gras beads at each other so it wasn’t really a celebration, but Z is a Lent observer, and the idea of giving up his beloved ice cream for the next six weeks made the junk food buffet a necessity.

Z is good this way: making a promise and keeping it. He’ll only eat ice cream for the next six weeks if he forgets about his vow, and then he won’t let himself off the hook with a shrug. Instead, he’ll extend his frozen dairy fast by one day. Mostly though, he won’t forget.

I, on the other hand, don’t participate. Last night when Z and I were at iHop, the table of people next to us were sporting big black ash crosses on their foreheads as they devoured pancakes and talked about what they’d given up for Lent, and I admit, there is part of me that is envious of that devotion and that adherence to tradition. But I kind of stink at those sorts of things, and it seems better not to set myself up for failure.

When I was growing up, Mom and I would give our favorite treats up for Lent, but it inevitably felt more like a diet than a religious observance, and mostly I was crabby about it. My last Lenten observance was when I was nine or ten. I’d given up all manner of sweet treats and walked around for a couple of days with a penitent, mournful look on my face that had nothing to do with God and everything to do with how much I wanted a Pop-tart.

That year, my former second-grade teacher had decided that she and Mom were friends and also that we would drive to a neighboring city to meet her twin sister. I remember virtually nothing about the day except I was bored and ready to go home almost as soon as we got there. The twin’s apartment was beige and under-stimulating, as was the adult conversation, and the novelty of seeing my former teacher’s look-alike quickly wore off. But then the twin brought out a plate with Girl Scout cookies on it. In my memory, the room was like a blank canvas with no art, no knickknacks on the coffee table, nothing on which to focus my attention other than the chocolaty, biscuity goodness that sat before me on a white plate.

It is no accident that Girl Scout cookies are delivered roughly around the time that Lent begins. Satan is clearly a consultant for the Girl Scouts of America and has a hand in the cookie delivery schedule.

I lasted about five minutes. Once I caved to temptation, my next battle was eating like a lady and not inhaling all the cookies on the white plate. It was one thing to disappoint Jesus, but I really didn’t want my former second grade teacher to think I was a graceless pig. Jesus would forgive, but Miss B might gossip about me in the teacher’s lounge and I had this good girl image to uphold. It and good penmanship were the main things I had going for me.

I felt bad about this failure. Not because I’d let God down. I was pretty sure God had other things to worry about, what with the Energy Crisis and the killer bees and various other world events that haunted the edges of my childhood and that I hoped He was working on. No, I felt bad because I realized as I bit into that first Thin Mint, that I would probably always be a person who couldn’t keep promises to herself, particularly where sugary goodness was involved. It seemed better not to set myself up for failure in the future, so I resolved not to observe Lent ever again.

Maybe I’m being too hard on myself, because that vow I’ve actually stuck with.

Feb19

Trying to Step in the Same Stream Twice

Posted on 19 February 2014 by The Reluctant Girl Scout

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Santa Barbara

We hadn’t been in Santa Barbara for nine years when we arrived there last Wednesday. When we did the math and counted out how long it had been, we were both surprised. It has lived big in both of our memories all this time, and when we exited the highway and found ourselves cruising up Cabrillo Boulevard towards Hotel Oceana where we’d be staying, it felt to me like no time had passed at all. Maybe a few months.

In 2005 when we were still just friends, Z, who’d been in Zimbabwe for a year, returned to the U.S. to teach as a visiting professor at a college near Santa Barbara. Other than a deep affection for my Malibu Barbie collection in the 1970s, I’ve never been California-inclined. I had this notion of it as a place that was too thin, tan, sunny, and plastic to ever make me happy. So when Z invited me to spend my spring break with him all those years ago, let us be clear: I was going to see him, not to soak up the sun on some shell-strewn beach. I would arrive in Santa Barbara ready to assess the situation and see if he’d budged an inch since the year before when I’d told him I was in love with him. I even bought myself a new orange bra because I felt with such a thing beneath my clothes, I would subconsciously become more alluring and magnetic than I really am. It was huge and day-glo and I had to be careful what shirts I wore with it because it was not a bra to be trifled with. Even so, Z remained impervious to the super powers of my undergarments, despite the fact that at one point when we were on a trolley in San Francisco, my blouse came unbuttoned of its own volition and I accidentally treated about 30 strangers to my bright orange satin-encased breasts.

Z stared out the window, oblivious.

The trip nine years ago involved a mixture of emotions that started and ended with longing and confusion on my part. We were both happy, I think, to be back in each other’s company, exploring a new location, investigating the old mission, driving up Highway 1, sifting through bargain bins at what may have been the world’s most affluent Goodwill ever, and walking the beaches. Oh, the beaches! But then somewhere in my head I’d hear Kate Bush singing, “The thrill and the hurting/ This will never be mine,” and the aching would start. I’d wonder how much longer I could sustain our friendship in the face of it. Then he’d say something funny and we’d start laughing and I’d forget the hairline fracture in my heart.

I don’t understand time travel, but the first day of this 2014 trip, I felt as if time wasn’t linear after all. It seemed reasonable to me that we might bump into our younger selves, that maybe I’d see us on East Beach and I’d be able to take 2005 Beth aside and say something encouraging like, “Just hang in there—he’s worth the wait and right now he’s just moving on African time.” Or better yet, I had this notion that somehow I might be able to turn back time and reclaim those days that were lost to us. That there would be a puff of smoke and we’d get sucked backwards, and get our party started sooner rather than later. (It should be noted that in my memory, we are way younger than we were nine years ago, and I was much thinner and looked more like Malibu Barbie than I do in now or then. Also, we’re wearing really attractive swimwear and we’re much better coiffed than we are in real life.) It’s just so lovely and magical there on the beach in Santa Barbara that it seemed entirely possible that either of these things might happen.

Poor Z! That first day, I think he was wondering if he’d made a mistake, bringing me back to Santa Barbara because I was acting like we’d returned to the scene of some crime. I was given to sudden storm clouds of regret that would form behind my eyes, and worse, torturing him with jabs about what he’d been missing out on back then (for instance, I no longer have that orange bra and he never got to see it). He was good natured about my ribbing. At some point on Wednesday night, I realized I was ruining now with my incessant reflection on then and what could have been. I mean, honestly, can you imagine having to listen to Elizabeth Bennett complain about how Mr. Darcy didn’t love her quickly enough, as she sits on the veranda at Pemberley? Please. Even I was getting tired of me. Frankly, I’m getting tired of me recounting the story here.

View from our Hotel Oceana room

Eventually, I shut my mouth and directed my line of sight on the present. Hotel Oceana was delightful. It was right across from the beach and we splurged on a room with a view. Aside from the view, I was smitten with the Spanish style courtyard that the rooms opened up on. A fountain tinkled. Humming birds flitted around the stralizia. Even the opossum that was creeping up a tree right at eye level and scared me half to death seemed quaint. When it isn’t a 100 degree humid summer day in Indiana, I’m always struck by the magic of how you can live your indoor life outdoors in climates like this one.

Hotel Oceana courtyard, Santa Barbara

We speculated on the lives of the people in the neighboring room who left their door open, and when we peered in all we could see was a sea of plastic bags—we still can’t decide if they were some sort of bag people/hoarders or if they just did a lot of shopping and weren’t very tidy or safety conscious. We walked on the beach, laughed at the Californians who were bundled up like it was winter as we shuffled around in shorts and flip flops, and said hello to a host of dogs. We drove out to Z’s old campus and poked around to see how things have changed since he was in residence. Then we investigated his old neighborhood to see what houses survived the fires a few years ago. Finally, we went to his old Von’s grocery store and lamented the fact that Jonathan Winters is dead now so there was no chance of running into him the way Z used to. We had apps with his former boss in an Irish pub and caught up on nearly a decade’s worth of events. Our last night there, we walked on the beach under a full moon, the way you do when there is a beach and a full moon available to you.

Maybe all the time travel I need in this life is the realization that when we are together, we have fun, just like we always do, always have done. Even before we were us.

Moonlight, Santa Barbara

(P.S. Should they make a movie of my life posthumously, would one of you please try to secure the rights to that Kate Bush song? I think it would work really well in the “longing for Z” sections of the film.)

Jan27

Travel Styles

Posted on 27 January 2014 by The Reluctant Girl Scout

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My modus operandi when traveling for all of my adult life has been to pack as much as possible into a day. I study guidebooks and websites and make lists of the “must sees” and map out a course of action. I’m not rigid, or anything, but I’m always imagining what is just around the bend that I can observe. The most famous of these pack-as-much-as-you-can-into-a-single-day excursions was on the occasion of my mother’s 60^th birthday when we went to New York City a few years ago, and we wanted to get as much of the city explored during our few days there.

On our last afternoon in New York, it was pouring with rain but we had just enough time to go into the MoMA before it closed. We both desperately needed to go back to the hotel and put our feet up because we’d started early and covered a lot of ground. But the MoMA? How could we not go? So we did, and we saw a lot of gorgeous and thought-provoking art, and I remember being there probably better than I remember any other art museum I’ve ever been in because I was in agony. If I’d been allowed, I would have curled up in a fetal position in the room with all the Joseph Cornell boxes and stared at them until closing time. By the time we left the city, Mom’s feet were bruised and raw and she hobbled through the airport like she was 90. She had to call in sick for two days because she couldn’t move. She was happy and had 8 million photos to document everything we saw and did, but I felt like a very bad daughter for putting my greedy need to see sites ahead of Mom’s well-being (and my own body’s protestations).

While Z and I were in Vancouver last Saturday, a large family was behind us, kind of pushing us along the sidewalk as we walked from our Sky Train station down to the spot where we could pick up the ferry for Granville Island. A couple of the people in the group broke free and moved quickly ahead of us, darting in and out of pedestrians, and one of the younger members of the family behind us said, “Why does Mom have us on a forced march?” A sibling, perhaps, said, “We’re running out of time in the city and she has things to do.”

It struck me how in just a few short years—and whether it is being married to Z or the icy hands of middle age, I cannot say—my traveling style has altered. Before, if there were 14 sites to see, I would, by golly, see them all in a single day even if I were miserable by the end of it. Z is not that kind of traveller. If I had to choose a single word to describe him, in this regard, I would say Z is content. He doesn’t want to get up early, he has no delusions about how his life will be better if he gets to see x, y, and z, and mostly he just wants to have fun. When the sight-seeing ceases to be fun, he’s ready to head back to the hotel, and he never has regrets about what he might have missed.

Oh, to be Z.

My body may be begging me for a rest and I may be snappish because of excessive tourism, but mentally, it goes against my grain not to do as much of everything as I possibly can. When I was younger and read “I Shall Not Pass This Way Again” by Stephen Grellet, I failed to pick up on how the poem was about being kind and helpful to those whose path crosses yours and instead I thought it was some sort of travel manifesto. I may never be here again, so I better do it all. But Z is laid back. He’s not ticking anything off a list. He’s having a good time, hoping for a nice snack, and just generally more content. He has the Zen quality of Pooh Bear traveling, while I, instead, have a combined personality of Rabbit, Owl, and Eeyore. When I start making a huge “to see” list, he reels me in and reminds me that he likes to do one or two things only. So I push him to do more and he pushes me to do less, and we end up somewhere in the middle. I don’t put up much of an argument when he declares he’s ready to head back to the hotel anymore because I’m beginning to understand the merits of leisurely.

So our two nights in British Columbia were not jam-packed. We stayed in New Westminter at Inn at the Quay, and had a room overlooking the Fraser. It’s a working river, so it wasn’t idyllic, but it was peaceful and we enjoyed the view until later in the evenings when the fog swallowed it whole.

Other things the fog swallowed: the mountains. What I remember from my only other trip to Vancouver several years ago was the shock of such beautiful mountains being so close to a city. The views were gorgeous. On this visit, we could have been in Kansas City if there was a lot of waterfront there. Still, lovely though.

In some ways, I’d remembered B.C. and Canada in general as more perfect than it actually is. For instance, I’d told Z how amazed he would be by how much cleaner it was than Seattle, which ended up being completely untrue. I’ve never nearly stepped in so much dog crap in my life. (The upside: loads of dogs for me to oogle, one of my favorite past times.) There was litter. Some areas were sketchier than I remembered. None of it was bad, certainly none of it was worse than what we see every day in Seattle, but it wasn’t the utopia I’d remembered, which was a good realization for someone like me to have; I always think somewhere else is better than wherever I am.

In New Westminster, we explored their revitalized waterfront, sampled some of the wares at the Rivermarket, which was right next to our hotel. At the market, on the first or “hungry” floor, you could devour a variety of local foods, and on the second or “curious” floor you could take classes, including learning a few tricks at the drop-in circus school. (We ate food but did not learn the trapeze, fyi).

We were right across the street from the Sky Train—fully automated and mostly elevated—into Vancouver. It reminded me more of the Chicago El and less of Seattle’s light rail. It was clean and quick and I enjoyed peering into the apartments and condos of people as we whizzed by to see how they decorated.

On my last trip, I’d never made it to Granville Island, though several people had suggested it, so we decided this should be our destination. I’d read about it, so knew what to expect, but poor Z was picturing a leisurely ferry ride to a wooded island like Bainbridge, instead of the half a minute Aquabus ride to what felt like the other side of False Creek. He was happy when we disembarked, however, and made our way to the public market. It was reminiscent of Pike Market (particularly in the way I got crabby after about ten minutes because there were entirely too many people there), but had more food stalls. Z was particularly pleased with the Cornish Pasty he had, and I, because I eat like a picky four year old, had spaghetti and meatballs. Delicious, but not very adventurous. (This will never turn into a Foodie blog—sorry to disappoint you.) We walked around the island for a while, investigating the artisans’ wares in Railspur Alley, and tried to investigate the little bookstore and stationery store, both of which looked delightful but were way too crowded for it to be enjoyable. Then we hopped on the Aquabus and made our way back downtown. On the walk, we visited the museum store (and loo) at the art museum, where it was nearly closing time. The building looks lovely, even if we didn’t make it in to see the collection. We continued our walk, peering into the Fairmount Hotel, where I hoped to see the resident yellow Lab, whom I met last time I was in town, and then on to the waterfront to try to find a view through the fog.

Eventually we arrived in Gastown. It was a particular favorite of mine, before I moved to Seattle and was introduced to Pioneer Square. The two places remind me a lot of each other: both have roots to the oldest part of the towns’ histories, both fell on hard times and became “skid row”, both were on the verge of being demolished when some forward thinking person realized the value, both for history’s and tourism’s sake, and the areas were saved and revitalized. Our biggest Gastown disappointment is that we’d stuffed ourselves so full on Granville Island we weren’t ready to eat dinner yet. It niggled at me a little that we were headed back to the hotel when everyone else was just headed out for the evening, but if I’m completely honest, I was looking forward to the quiet, un-crowded hotel and foggy view.

On Sunday, before heading home, we had lunch at the Dubliner Pub, which is housed in what used to be part of the penitentiary. It was cozier than you might imagine and the brunch there was delicious. We may have stopped at the Hard Rock casino for a flutter before directing the car towards the border, and we may have cleared $33 of the bizarrely plastic-y and see-through-y Canadian dollars, which we have tucked away for our next trip north.

Are there other things on our list to see in Vancouver like the observatory or Dr. Sun Yat Sen Garden (or the neighboring free park) or the scenery we’ve been promised on the drive to Whistler? Um, yeah. But for our inaugural trip, we were content. And it didn’t hurt that we made it home just in time to see the Seahawks make it into the Super Bowl.