What I learned on my summer vacation

That would be the beach vacation, not any of the other three I took this summer.

- A walk along the beach provides absolutely the best environment for meditating on your next story developments.

- Grease burns hurt like the devil. But they're a great way to take your mind off the minor sunburn on your shins.

- I need to learn to sail.

- If you must put pieces from two different puzzles in the same box, due to box shortage and complete absence of ziploc bags, you really ought to make them puzzles with notably different-sized pieces (really I think I could have worked this one out via common sense. So perhaps the real lesson here is that the owners of our beach house lack common sense in the area of puzzles.)

- My family has higher standards in the way of kitchens and kitchen appliances than just about anybody I know. Much, much higher than those of aforementioned beach house owners.

- The Outer Banks wireless network is kind of a ripoff. Nick the tech support guy is very nice though. Spent lots of quality time talking to Nick.

- Excellent summer beers include: Dogfish Head's Aprihop, Delirium Tremens, and Unibroue's Ephemere.

- The ocean is happiness. But I knew that already.

fading everything

it's been a long December

Oh I am in a college mood. It's glorious fun. It's been a while since I had one. College mood means I listen to Counting Crows and sip my drink (it used to be wine but these days it's beer... Old Rasputin tonight, and if you've never tried Old Rasputin with fresh avocado then your life is incomplete, as mine was until about twenty minutes ago) and I think about love and loneliness. I do not cry, in college moods, that's reserved for nights when I have a specific reason for meditation or discontent. I just sit here and sip my drink and listen to music that reminds me of all these times in my not-so-distant-past (remember when we met Jacob's new friend, I don't even remember his name, but we knew he was cool because he could sing along with all the words to all the songs on August and Everything After? Remember when we listened to Long December and thought, yeah, man, this yearwill be better than the last, and we were completely, utterly, impossibly wrong? Remember when we were walking back from the Counting Crows concert, where Adam Duritz wore a pink bunny suit 'cause it was Halloween, and I called you "Ginny" by mistake?)

step out the front door like a ghost into the fog

And we would sit around then and talk about love and loneliness, and it was basically the same thing then as now because neither of us knew anything about love, and both of us were lonely, except not really that lonely because here we were together talking about it. And we talked about lots of other things too, philosophies of life and lots and lots of decisions about our futures, and you switched from business to philosophy and I committed to English because reading stories is what I love to do most in the whole entire world... and papers and problems and people spun through our conversations always, never concluded, never old.

It is impossible to go back, and I know that. And I like to think that if I come again to live with you it will not be because I'm trying to go back, to recapture this time. Anyway I don't want to recapture it, because I know what comes next: I know how bitter, bitter, those conversations will become, all filled with the darkness and futility of existence, all driven by a demon neither of us yet understand... and that one night where I honestly believe that I will never, ever be happy again.

I bought myself a grey guitar

And while I would never for even a second want to relive all that, I am so so glad it happened, because now sometimes I am driving down the road and I remember that once I thought I would never ever be happy again, and if I was wrong about that I am probably wrong about so many other things too, and this is good.

And so I am not trying to recapture the past, but I am absolutely trying to recover a bit of it, a piece of it at least, because in the years between I have thought I am too adult, too mature, too conscious to engage in this kind of ridiculous omphaloskeptic brooding, and this self-indulgent writing about my transient little moods. And I was emotionally superior to it all, and much much too wise to hope for anything worthwhile to come out of falling in love. And yet what did I do, not even twelve months ago, but drive five hours at dawn and plop myself on your floor and pour out all my thoughts and confusions and frustrations about-- what else?-- a boy.

lay me down in a field of flame and heather...

And you of course listened well, and because you have known me for six terrible and wonderful years, you could say things that made perfect sense and that helped me to understand why I thought what I thought and felt what I felt. And on that day, without at all trying, you gave me back to myself, and all my confusion was -- not resolved -- but for the first time it made sense, and I knew how to fit it into the rest of my world. And I received it, as a repayment I never expected for a trial I never resented, grace upon grace coming back in return for a pain I took on gladly in the first place. Astonishing.

and when you wake the morning covers you with light

Anyway what I guess I'm trying to say is that it is time for me to re-enter the world of love and loneliness and meditative late-night drinking while listening to Adam Duritz, and to shake off the frozen paralysis that has been partly pride and mostly fear.

surprise surprise another pair of lips and eyes

And perhaps there will be other nights when I honestly believe I will never be happy again, though probably for different reasons, and all that is okay because these nights become a part of your history, become something you meditate on on other nights, nights mellow with the taste of avocado and Old Rasputin (no really... you must try it) and dulled for a minute from fear because you remember how rich it was to feel so many things at once.

And what I really want to say, with all this rambling that I normally do not permit myself, is that as I move back into the world of feeling and foolishness, with fear and trembling and also hope, there is no one I would rather have at my side than you.

a small taste of victory

I took two weeks off work and drove to Chicago. The freedom therein is glorious: I have two weeks that are my own, entirely, to spend however I want, money being the only limitation. I have planned to go to Chicago, and I want to go to Chicago, but if I feel like it I can change my mind at the last minute and drive instead to Mexico or Oregon or anywhere on the continent, actually. My decisions are just about as unconstrained as they get for a single woman in her mid-twenties who pulls down a smallish salary (and that, let's face it, is pretty unconstrained.)

What did I do with all this riotous freedom? I drove, as stated, to Chicago. I ensconced myself firmly on the couch in my brother's living room. I found a coffee shop that I could walk to from my brother's house. And for ten out of the fourteen days I was there I wrote, usually at the coffee shop, for three or four or five hours on end. I went to the beach once, I hung out in the evenings with friends, but mostly I wrote.

And this is the best part, this is the victory: my brother has also been writing. His kitchen is littered with scripts from the sketch show he and his roommates are writing, for which they've already booked a theater. He's acting, too, I got to see his play twice. So as I sit here, having finished the opening act of my novel, making plans to return to Chicago to see the show my brother has written and is acting in and directing... I'm just so freakin proud. Of both of us. Because we're doing what we wanted to do, what we said we wanted to do back when we were in high school. Because we haven't gotten pulled under by the necessity of supporting ourselves in the "real world." Sure we both have jobs, which means we have less time for writing than we'd like, and sure we both have fairly minimal jobs, which means we have less money for beer than we'd like, but we're making it work.

Take that, naysayers.

a small piece of perfection

I think even a lot of friends who know me well don't know that the Barenaked Ladies is my favorite band (is? are? is? most band names are treated as a singular entity, and a plural element in the name shouldn't change that... but I don't know what the article does to it, nor do I know whether it ought to be capitalized. "Are" sounds better but I feel like "is" should be correct.) There are so many bands that I like that are hipper or edgier or what-have-you. As evidenced by the crowd that showed up to the concert last night, BNL fans tend to be over 30, or under 16, and nerdy but not even real hard-core geeky quasi-hip kind of nerdy... just nerdy. There was a distinct lack of image-consciousness in the crowd. There were a lot of families, suggesting that parents consider BNL to be acceptable fun music to expose their children to. Nobody won coolness points by showing up to this concert.

But anyway, they're my favorite band, and I'll tell you why. It's because they think like me. Take their whole decade-spanning album collection, and you have a fairly good picture of my usual mental landscape. You have plenty of whimsy and goofballing, plenty of randomness and look-how-clever-I-am wordplay. You also have plenty of reflectiveness, brooding self-doubt, bitterness of futility, and the occasional raw outcry of pain. There's a dark side to BNL to be sure... but it doesn't overwhelm the landscape, it's just there. And if you pay attention you'll notice that the dark side and the goofball side are fueled by the same force: a persistently ironic view of life, a self-awareness that refuses for a minute to release its grip, and the consequent mistrust of every self-representation you make.

I am not, by and large, a happy person. Nor am I a moody or angry or bitter person. I am not capable of the single-minded passion of Nina Simone; I am hardly ever buried enough in my own emotional state to honestly produce a work of pure emotional force. My moods are always mixed; there is always another self, watching the part of me that is feeling, commenting on it. Mostly, mostly, I am an observing person. The closest I come to being single-minded, to being non-reflective, is when I am not doing anything, just watching other people do. As soon as I become a participant in a scene, I start observing myself, which means I am observing myself observing myself, and... well... if you've seen a chamber of mirrors you know what it's like.

Anyway, I love BNL because their music is like this. Being an ironist in this way seems to prevent you from being ever really depressed, or ever really elated. It's not that your emotions are shallow; it's just that they're always counterbalanced. This tends to make a person, or a band, hard to grasp. You think you know their general mood as happy or fun or easygoing or mild or sarcastic or cynical. And we the ironists have a hard time convincing you that it goes deeper than that, because to honestly express our feelings we have to also express our questioning of those feelings, and our frustration at our questioning, and our amusement at our frustration... and by this time you've forgotten what feeling it was we were originally expressing.

Ah yes, that amusement... elation and depression and rage might be rare and fleeting for us, but one thing we've got in bucketfuls is laughter. We laugh at everything. We laugh at inappropriate times. We laugh because we keep seeing where all this stuff came from and where it's going. We laugh because we're having so much fun watching this bizarre game play itself out. We laugh because we keep seeing our own consciousness rising in a recursive tower, that we can't even stop because as soon as we try to stop ourselves we see ourselves trying to stop ourselves...

You'd laugh too.

rest

Lloyd Alexander died on Thursday.

Molly I know will join with me... as will Libby... as would Megwin if she had any idea where I am. What the emotion is I'm not sure. There is not grief or loss, since I didn't know him, nor can there really be much sadness, since he was 83 and (I think) had had cancer for some time. Also, his wife died just two weeks earlier. They were married for sixty-one years, and I can only imagine that, like my grandmother, he wanted little more than to follow his partner through that darkest of doors.

So I cannot be sad for him. And I cannot feel mournful when the only thing I ever knew of him, his writing, is as accessible to me as ever. I do not even feel sad that he won't write any more books, since his recent writing has grown dramatically weaker.

All the same, it was a physical shock when I saw his name in the obituary column. This man was important to me. This man created worlds I loved to live in and people I love to know. He was arguably the foremost living writer in the genre I love best, the genre I will probably do much of my writing in. Stories, like Olympian gods, are strangely begotten, breeding and interbreeding over decades, centuries, and millenia. We writers and passionate readers are also part of this tangled genealogy, and we can trace out many forebears.

In real-time, flesh-and-blood life, I have lost both my grandparents this year. In the world of stories, I have just lost another.

the man I love

Really I just put this here to practice my html mojo. But now that he's here, I find I can't take him down.

9 and 10 may be hotter, 4 may be funnier, but 5 will always have a special place in my heart.

I was going to post a deep and reflective birthday post, but this is much more urgent

Can you drink Attic milk?

This question drifted up from the nether reaches of consciousness, as I was trying to convince my brain that it really did want another hour or two of sleep, despite the bright sun and the sticky green leaves outside my window and the kids hollering at each other from the sidewalk. I was quite lucid for most of the time surrounding this question, thinking more or less alternately about my in-progress assessment of pragmatism and objectivism and about love. But in the midst of this, the question was asked: Can you drink Attic milk?

I don't remember who was asking; it was definitely another voice, not native to my identity. It followed naturally enough from the conversation which preceded it (of which I can't remember a word), but I felt, a minute after it had been asked, that there was more to it than appeared on the surface. It was a test, of sorts; much was expected from my answer. No mundane "yes" or "no" would do, I must try if I could to be witty, or insightful, or encyclopedic.

This posed a problem because I had no idea what the question meant. Attic milk? What is Attic milk? If, as I first guessed, it was milk left over from the time of Attic Greek, my answer was easy: a dryish, deadpan response about the milk's probably having spoiled by now. But even that was problematic. Surely milk from the 5th century BC would have long ago not only spoiled but hardened, crusted, turned black and finally discomposed entirely. My answer contained its modicum of wit, but it left an opening for my interrogator to up the ante, to come back with a correction which, if also phrased wittily, would leave him or her indisputably victorious in the conversation.

On the other hand, the "attic" could mean the upper storage area of a house. If so, did that mean milk that is stored in an attic? What special properties would such milk have? Intuitively I imagined it being very cold, and therefore couldn't see how it would be different from regular old refrigerator milk. On reflection, though, I'm recalling that most of the attics I've been in were oppressively hot. In this case the milk would probably be well on its way to following the other kind of Attic milk, and also the attic would smell horrible. But even so I feel there must be more to it than this. If attic milk is a substance distinctive enough to have its own name, there must be something particular about it, beyond its storage temperature. Only I can't imagine what.

Wikipedia's disambiguation page lists, apart from these two usages, only the names of three companies: the US and Canadian branches of a record label, and a German computer game developer. I can't make any sense of milk in either of these contexts.

The interrogator is gone, of course... disappeared almost immediately after posing the question. I haven't even had an opportunity to pass or fail the test contained in it. I suppose this is a good thing, since I'm pretty much at a loss. Can you drink Attic milk? Can you drink attic milk? Attic milk...

Well? Can you?