I don’t have time for a proper entry, but as much as I enjoyed the responses to my last one, I feel compelled to state that I did not intend to create a meme per se, with everyone logging their numbers in the same categories I used to sum up my past five years (categories to which, I admit, I gave relatively little thought), and am anxious to assure you that these are not categories I would necessarily hold forth as definitively defining. Whether you have had children needn’t be a measure of what you have done with your fifth of a quarter century, and “men married”…well, I would never. Maybe you married a woman, or would have married a man but for the preposterous one-penis-per-union marriage laws currently on the books, or perhaps you didn’t feel compelled to marry anyone at all. It is none of my nevermind, certainly (and extra points to those who recognize the movie reference). It may be a silly point to be driven to clarify, but I am sensitive about such things. Having children is not a prerequisite for fulfillment and marriage is not a prerequisite for anything save a host of unfairly hoarded legal benefits. (And if any of you felt chagrined about not having had a single kidney stone, rest assured that I’ve heard you can live a full and happy life without ever passing a calcified anything through your ureter.)
Probably none of this bothered you at all, because you were too busy wondering the same things as everyone else: does Jodi live in a mansion, or is she just really hard on couches? And why do Lu’s answers make one feel so depressingly inadequate?
This final bit is entirely unrelated, but as long as I am up, allow me to offer some guidance on a matter that seems to have discombobulated the media. I am speaking, of course, of rompers—specifically about who ought to be wearing them. Personally, I would have thought that the name alone would be enough to clear up any confusion (How old are you? Would you say that you romp, nowadays? I thought not.)
Alas, this is not the case, and so I offer a photograph of a romper in—or on—its natural habitat:
You’re welcome.
I have been doing this, whatever it is, for five years today. Five years! It astounds me. Five years ago, when I told people that I wrote about my personal life on the Internet, they looked at me as if I’d just said I spent my free time masturbating in public parks. “Why?” they’d ask, disgusted, “Why would you want to do such a thing?” Now they just nod, like: Of course you do. Now they ask me how much money (which I just typed as “munny,” a sure sign that I should be asleep) I make doing it, this writing online, this blogging, and when I tell them I don’t make much of anything they revert back to their suspicious “Why?”-ing of yesteryear.
There have been so many unlikely and strange developments in this exchange over the past half-decade that I am not sure where to begin discussing it—with the fact that blogging is a THING now, that people no longer uniformly regard as a sort of electronic literary streak across the quad (though it may be that, sometimes)? With the fact that blogging is viewed as a moneymaking enterprise? With the fact that, to the general public, the acceptableness of blogging is seemingly in direct proportion to this aforementioned compensatory aspect? Or with the way the intersection of opportunity and something else has conspired to make the idea of a hobby seem quaint and obsolete?
I think about that last one a lot. With Etsy and Websites and Paypal oh my, an unprecendented number of people are being paid for their knitting or painting or whittling or whatever it is they used to do for sport. This is undoubtedly a wonderful development, a development that allows me to buy all manner of covetable handmade items without leaving my home, but it has also created a sense that one should be selling and publicizing and, I’ll say it, MONETIZING (it sounds like spinning straw into gold! Possibly very apropos!) one’s every avocation. It’s an odd world for the lazy and dilettantish among us, I must admit.
But back to the point: five years. Sixty months. Where has the time gone? What have I done with it?
Children conceived: 3
Live babies acquired: 1
Men married: 1
Apartments lived in: 4
Books written: 1
Degrees acquired: 0
Unfamiliar countries visited: 1
Unfamiliar states visited: 1
Couches owned: 3
Pets felled by disease/neglect: 0
Days admitted to hospital: 16
Literary rejections received: 3(?)
Pounds gained: 20
Kidney stones passed: 2
Correspondence unanswered, television hours consumed, friends made, perspective granted, and storms weathered: all too great to measure with current technology.
An unidentified woman in underpants, having consumed one ladylike gin and gingerale, wanders into her living room, where her husband reclines on the sofa. She sprawls beside him.
“I wish I had a million dollars,” she says, apropos of nothing and everything, “If I just had a million dollars, everything would be great.”
Her husband pauses the television.
“No, it wouldn’t.”
“I said ‘great,’ not ‘perfect.’ I know money has limitations, but in this case it would solve all of my major problems.”
“And you’d need a million dollars.”
“Fine, 500,000.”
“There is no way that you are suddenly going to get your hands on $500,000.”
“300,000. That’s my final offer. That’s as low as I can go.”
“I’m not—”
“10,000. 10,000 dollars.”
A few minutes later, her husband reaches for the remote. She muses aloud:
“We should get a metal detector. I’ll bet there’s all kind of valuable stuff around here. It’s one of the oldest neighborhoods in St. Paul. We could find F. Scott Fitzgerald’s, like, fountain pen. He lived down the block, you know.”
“And you think F. Scott Fitzgerald’s fountain pen is just lying in the grass somewhere?”
She snorts.
“Well, no. We’d have to dig, obviously.”
“How would we know it was his?”
“It would say.”
“It would say. It would be labeled? It would say ‘F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Fountain Pen?”’
“No! God! Don’t be stupid. It would say ‘Scott Fitzgerald,’ or something. Engraved. Or maybe we’d take it to an antique dealer and they’d recognize it from an old photograph.”
“Uh Huh. Maybe we’ll find F. Scott Fitzgerald’s rare old 50-cent piece, too.”
“Oh, stop. Now you’re just being silly.”
She’s quiet again for a while. But not long enough:
“I mean think about it. Think how many pens we lose.”
“Simone,” the man mutters.
“Even before her. We must lose dozens of pens a year! Why should things have been any different back then? And HE was probably DRUNK, knowing him. We can figure it out with Math. If we calculate how many pens we lose a year on average and how many years F. Scott Fitzgerald lived in the neighborhood…the place must be CRAWLING with pens! People would pay for those,” the woman finishes, sagely, adjusting her underpants.
“And he lost all these pens outside, did he?”
“Maybe they fell through the floorboards. And then there is erosion, or a mouse carries them out.”
“A mouse carries them out.”
“Where are OUR pens? You explain it. I’m just saying: metal detector. It would be an investment.”
Five years ago yesterday, I registered this domain name—though my first post wouldn’t go up for another two weeks or so. Five years! There’s even a David Bowie song about that.
I have several entries percolating that I haven’t had time to finish—and am a little afraid to finish, honestly, because then I’ll have to post them and at least one is the written equivalent of a impotent foot stomp and sometimes, looking back at my five years of writing online I worry that the one overarching theme, the constantly percolating and reappearing motif, the mode subtending my entire electronic oeuvre, such as it is, is auditory: namely a whiny, nasal “iiiiiiiiiihhhhhhhhh!” of complaint. This troubles me.
But, believe it or not, this is not a complaining post! This is a post about something that makes me very, very happy. Happier, even, than the fact that whenever she sees the below picture Simone says—with a touching certainty—“MOM.” {fig. 1: I carry it around now, to show to her whenever I need a pick me up.}
(For the record, it would be difficult for me to look LESS like Keira Knightley than I do already without serious, and possibly surgical, effort.)
To get to the point, I am delighted to tell you that there are now actual, honest-to-god events on the books for an actual, honest-to-god book tour. I will be at BlogHer from August 5th through the 8th, and then POW! the very next day:
Monday, August 9th
Iowa City, Iowa
Prairie Lights Bookstore
7:00 p.m.
Reading, Q&A, Signing
Prairie Lights is quite possibly my favorite bookstore. It’s in my book, even, and seems a fitting place for a first event. Though I feel a little faint when I read this.
(STREAMING OVER THE WORLD WIDE WEB! That means live, people. Need I remind you that I am not at my best live?)
The next day, my book is officially on sale. In stores. Of course, BlogHer attendees will be able to buy it ahead of time, at the conference bookstore (I hope—still waiting for confirmation) and if you show up at my Iowa City reading there will be copies there. But Tuesday the tenth is THE DAY, and I will probably celebrate by—well, first by driving home from Iowa, but then by drinking champagne with my cousin Amy and showing up at local bookstores with a pen. And a photo ID, so as to avoid charges of vandalism.
My official local release event is the day after that:
Wednesday, August 11th
St. Paul, Minnesota
Common Good Books
7:30 p.m.
(Exciting details forthcoming, but that is a whole other post.)
And then my schedule looks like this:
Thursday, August 12th
Chicago, IL
Women and Children First Books
7:30 p.m.
Tuesday, August 17th
San Francisco, CA
Book Passage
6:00 p.m.
Wednesday, August 18th
Portland, OR
Annie Bloom’s Books
7:30 p.m.
Thursday, August 19th
Seattle, WA
University Bookstore
7:00 p.m.
Do you notice the part about being in three different cities in three days? I’ve never done that! In fact, I have never been in three cities in three months, even, unless you count layovers, or my home-city, which I do not. I might as well admit that when I first saw the itinerary I thought it was odd that I was scheduled in BOTH Portland and Seattle because…well, because I thought they were more or less the same place. Like Minneapolis and St. Paul, or D.C. and Arlington, and thus everyone who would want to come to see me would show up on Wednesday in Portland leaving noone to come the next night in Seattle. (You can laugh at me, if you like. Heather already did.) Geography has never been my subject. I have many talents, but knowing where Kansas lies (East of me? West?) is not one of them. I am excellent at reading maps, however. A good thing, too.
The West coast part of the tour is especially exciting to me because I’ve never been to any of these places. I mean, I was in San Francisco when I was five, but that was a quarter of a century ago, and I mostly remember the wedding—my wedding, to my god…brother? Awful sounding, yes, but he was only the son of my godparents, so no real, incest-y relation. We were married in the living room of his parents’ house, He-Man peeking out from between the lapels of his father’s tuxedo jacket, my gown an adult-sized “Oh No, It’s Mr. Bill!” t-shirt turned inside out (borrowed AND blue!) For a veil, I wore a lacy nightgown on my head, and our rings were plastic and featured characters from Disneyland. In the picture (which I do not have, or I would scan it for you), Beau (my husband) looks properly gleeful and five-year-old-ish, whereas I look inappropriately solemn and have one hand over my heart. The other hand is reverently displaying the ring (Goofy, I believe).
That isn’t really a “city-specific” memory, as you can see, and though I also have vague impressions of beautiful bay scenery and houses arranged below us like colorful stair steps, I consider myself a San Francisco virgin. Now, when I think of San Francisco, I think “Holly Lives There! And Moose! And Leah! When I think of Portland/Seattle—because let’s be honest, until a few days ago I thought of them as a single unit—I think immediately of Linda.
(All three cities, incidentally, are on my list of Places I Would Live If Only. Portland and Seattle look beautiful, and Scott and I are constantly tempted when we see them on television, but they don’t get enough sun to keep us from taking our own lives. San Francisco seems perfect, save for the whole dropping-into-the-ocean thing. We talk a lot about moving to another stop on the tour—Chicago, and though I have never really explored the city beyond its center, I wouldn’t be a bit surprised if we end up there eventually. It is urban but near family, it has the lake and public transportation. Oh, how I long for public transportation!)
With such a gap between Chicago and San Francisco I am thinking I should spend an extra day in least one of those places to explore, or something, because won’t going home in between just be jarring? I’d have to leave Simone all over again, and it adds a whole other flight. On the other hand, the extra flight expense is probably less than extra lodging, and if I DON’T go home, I have to pack for a million days, probably without checking a bag. And it’s not like the extra days will be in a city like New York, one I know well and in which I have many friends to occupy me. On a third, anatomically anomalous hand, there is something appealing about turning the whole Chicago-through-Seattle leg into one long multi-stop trip instead of coming and going and packing and un- in the middle of it all.
I don’t know yet where I will be staying, because I feel so lucky to be getting a tour at all (if you follow publishing news, you know that you don’t even have to play anything backwards to hear BOOK TOURS ARE DEAD ABORT ABORT APOCALYPSE!) that I am trying to save money for my publisher by finding cheap places to stay whenever possible—you know, youth hostels, the homes of strangers I find on Craigslist. (Kidding! Kind of.) This will help me feel slightly less guilty if no one shows up to the readings, and hopefully keep open the possibility of more events in the future.
I am starry-eyed at the prospect of going to new places with new bookstores and meeting new people and thanking my readers up close and in person. All of these events will have a reading and signing, per usual (she says as if this sort of thing is old hat, as if she has ANY IDEA AT ALL what part of the book she will be reading), and all feature a Q&A. Please come, if you are nearby, and during the Q&A ask me something I know, like Where Was I Born? (Boston!) or Do I Care For Hockey? (No!)
While I am understandably clammy at the prospect of standing up in front of as many as HALF A DOZEN people, reading from my book and then enduring a Pop Quiz, worse still would be if nobody comes at all and it is just me and my Media Consort (that doesn’t sound right—escort, maybe?) surrounded by angry bookstore employees. So please, if you live in or near one of these (presumably) fine cities, come and see me! It would be so wonderful if you were to come! I want to meet you! Please! Come! Please come!
(And for those of you willing to show up, I have a few suggestions for how you can help my readings seem less sparsely populated. I have already talked to my friends and family about this, and it’s simple, really. The main thing is to bring a lot of props—scarves, hats, fake mustaches, that sort of thing—and keep changing them up while milling around in a busy fashion, to approximate a crowd. If two or three of you are doing that, I figure it will look like a good ten or fifteen people. This is especially important for the local event, because I have a secret fear that I am not going to be able to get people to come to an event even in my own hometown, and then I will be driven out and deposited outside the city borders, exiled and pitied.)
Wherever I am, I sincerely hope to see some friendly blog-reader-y faces (under the scarves and mustaches, I mean), and I’d love to have some sort of bloggy meet-ups–perhaps after each event we could all retire to my hostel hotel for a pickpocketing sidecar? I’ll let you locals suggest the details, maybe.
UPDATE: If your city isn’t on the list, you can vote to have it included below. (Link is also in the sidebar.)
Oh, how I envy the reasonable. The reasonable are able, as their name suggests, to see reason. They know that just because they are emitting coughs of the sort which, when heard in a movie, suggest that the character coughing will be dead before the credits roll DOES NOT mean that they, themselves, are in danger of departing for a less corporeal plane. They know that even though they have been sick for a long while—a whole week, now—it is unlikely that they will go on being sick forever and ever and evermore.
The reasonable do not believe that antibiotics are Out to Get Them. Should they be prescribed amoxicillin for a sinus infection, their third in a year after nearly three decades of pristine and healthy sinuses, they are not inspired to concoct elaborate conspiracy theories, nor are they heard to remark tearfully about their health Obviously Going Rapidly Downhill, and Probably It Won’t Be Long Now.
Yea, though it was a full week ago, the reasonable have no trouble remembering “what it feels like to be well.”
The reasonable see no reason why two months of immunological pratfalls shouldn’t be coincidence, and are not disposed to sudden wee-hour convictions that their children’s current illness will one day be looked back upon as a warning sign they tragically ignored.
The reasonable do not ask their significant others to lay a hand upon their foreheads every quarter of an hour to confirm that they are still, indeed, warmish.
The reasonable do not find that spending all this time in bed makes one really crave madeleines, nor would they rationalize a sudden spike in cake consumption by remarking upon the body’s ability to communicate its dietary needs, for the reasonable would know better than to entertain the specious premise that whipped cream has antiseptic properties on a cellular level.
The reasonable would spend more time catching up on correspondence and less wondering whether, if they WERE dying, some foundation might work on their behalf to entice members of various World Cup teams (a proportional international contingent) to visit their deathbeds in order to massage them with therapeutic oils while wearing only the flags of their respective homelands—miniature flags, the sort you wave at parades. The reasonable would not abruptly end a blog entry because of a coughing fit.
Let’s play a game! Can you guess what this is?
If you went with “fast-growing tumor” or “inept method of cocaine concealment” you are incorrect. It is my new workplace accessory, a handful of ice cubes sealed into a sandwich baggie and arranged beneath a tight-fitting sleeve. You know, for the pain.
It is beginning to feel a little Mr. Blandings Builds His Dream House around here, what with the slapstick-worthy (if mundane) succession of things gone awry, most recently a new unathletic injury to add to my history of Shopper’s Elbow and Biographer’s Lung—Writer’s Wrist? Typist’s Tendon? I haven’t settled on a name yet, but what it boils down to is tingling fingers, a swollen forearm, and a stiffened, painful burning sensation, the result of wedding myself to my laptop until my muscles shortened and entrapped my nerves. Or something.
At first I was certain it was a blood clot—or maybe, given the arm-tingling, a heart attack. Scott cleverly pointed out that it was the wrong arm for a heart attack, and at last I put two and two together and got “Pernicious InterneT Addiction” (or “Pain In The Ass”), which answer I ignored until my arm hurt too badly to use at all and I was forced to slink off to have my wrist bones popped and clicked back into alignment and an odd muscle in what I can only describe as my wing (somewhere no longer shoulder but not yet breast) stretched and massaged by a professional. This helped a little, but it’s still painful to be on the computer for more than a few minutes at time. I’m going to try using a laptop desk to make up for my not-particularly-ergonomic couch-working posture and I also ordered a devastatingly stylish fingerless glovebrace. This glovebrace gets excellent reviews from video gamers making it de rigueur in parents’ basements around the world, so I’ll be in excellent company. However, until it arrives I am reduced to writhing with pain and annoyance whenever I want to write an email or scroll through my feed reader. At this point I’d just as soon cut my arm off and replace it with something sturdier, like a prosthetic made from gleaming titanium.
On Friday, having recently finished a two-week course of antibiotics for the ailment that had dogged my child since the beginning of May (the antibiotics alone should tell you I was desperate—only after a month of lingering snottiness did I cart Simone to the pediatrician to procure them), we went to Iowa, source of the original pestilence, for the weekend.
I know. It looks so STUPID, typed out like that.
On the drive back yesterday, Simone’s nose started running. Sprinting, really. We had to pull off the highway in search of a gas station to buy tissues, so that I could spend the remaining two hours of the trip turning around every three minutes to staunch the flow. By the time we got home she was burning with fever, and a few minutes after she’d fallen asleep for the night she woke again, sat up, and leaned over to puke in my lap. We’d gone to Iowa to visit Scott’s family, and had thought we’d caught my sister-in-law’s (gonad-rendingly adorable—this was the first time I’d seen them) seven-month-old twins between colds, but no. And now I am paying for it, or Simone is. She’s coughing and congested and fevered and miserable and I swear to god, I cannot take another month like May, it will break my spirit.
This was a lot of whining for one post, I know. So here! Let’s have some cheerful pictures!
First, the poster my brother brought me from a recent trip to Seattle:
There is plenty to find amusing, but the reason I love it is that my brother and I are both MOST amused by the same line—or more specifically, the same two words of that line, the two words that, for us, take this poster from kitschy fun to actual hilarity, and thus this souvenir will always remind me of my beloved Max, and the cozy feeling of having such perfectly matched senses of humor.
(The two words, obviously, are “STAGE VERSION.”)
The next photograph requires explanation. Imagine the scene: after a long day of work, you arrive home, put your key in the door and enter to see…
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.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
…a FERAL BABY, drinking from your kitchen faucet! How did it get IN here? you wonder—but there is no time for idle speculation: it has turned at the sound of your footsteps to bare its wee teeth at you before scampering fleetly off the counter. Now its wet feet are slapping against the floor as it races about like a trapped moth and oh, hell, not the vase!
At last you manage to shoo it out an open window with a tennis racket, and surveying the damage, remind yourself to buy traps the next time you’re at the store.
[Actually, Scott has been giving Simone baths in the kitchen sink because she is so distracted by the spray of the removable hose-faucet that she forgets that she's too busy with important pen and spatula related business to make time for bathing, and last week she insisted upon a refreshing quaff of tap water before getting out. But the first story was much better, I think.]
Next, proof that Simone is beginning to grow hair:
It’s only fluffy like this during a slender window after it is washed and before she sleeps upon it, but still, I was shocked by how much there is, all of a sudden.
As Simone herself is fond of saying these days, (demonstrated below), “UH-PIIIIIIZE!”
(That’s “surprise,” for you laypeople.)
I woke up on the morning of my signing feeling deranged with nerves, missing the shuttle when my shaking hands resulted in a dramatic mascara wand mishap and I had to wash my makeup off and start from scratch.
Here I am, averting my eyes so that you will not see the CRAZY! in them:
It helped that it was a beautiful, if blisteringly hot, day, and that I had a view of the Chrysler Building from my hotel room window. So much prettier than the Empire State Building. Height isn’t everything, you know.
It also helped that in the cab on the way to the convention center my phone buzzed, and I got the following photograph via text from my mother-in-law: This baby has only a bucket to shield her from the elements. A naked baby doll and piece of discarded Tupperware are her sole companions. For only three cents a day, you could at least buy her a bigger bucket. Won’t you please help?
Javits Center is huge. HUGE. This shouldn’t have been a surprise, but when I entered to find myself in what appeared to be a multi-level warehouse the size of two train stations, with banks of escalators before me carrying bookbag-laden people from floor to floor, I was rendered motionless, and tried to look nonchalant while I waited for my publicist to fetch me. My publicist, Nicole, is a tiny and formidably accomplished seventeen-year-old. Oh, ok, she is older than that—eighteen, maybe. I kid, but she doesn’t seem old enough to account for her job experience and easy, confident competence. I’m a little intimidated by her, honestly. She is one of those put-together people who instantly make me feel I am about to trip over something or possibly accidentally set my handbag on fire.
I was fetched, and given my badge.
You will notice it says “AUTHOR.” (Do you think real author-authors get to a point where they can see themselves referred to as “AUTHOR” without an internal giggle of disbelief? I doubt it.)
I also took a copy of the special “Show Daily” edition of Publisher’s Weekly, a giant glossy thing that looks like this:
…and which I opened to find a full page ad taken out by Perseus (my publisher, or rather Ur-publisher) to promote their author events. Like mine.
See me? Above EMPIRE OF ILLUSION and next to ALEX AND THE IRONIC GENTLEMAN? Also, please note that the sort of border at the top of the page made up of tiny little book covers has mine in it. This was all very exciting.
Even more exciting was what I saw when the escalator spit us out upstairs onto the convention floor and into the gigantic Perseus area in the center: a long wall of light-up marquee sort of things, like they have for movies.
Holy SHIT, you guys:
From about this point on, I was just a floating, disbelieving, grinning presence. I bobbed on over to the booth, sat at a table, and began signing my name to things. I did this for a couple of hours, and it was wonderful. Some notes:
• They gave me a Sharpie to sign with, which is apparently Standard Signing Equipment, but made me feel a little rude, as if I were defacing the books with graffiti—tagging them, if you will. It felt scandalous to write in someone else’s copy like that. (Of course, I am also the person who gasped and then fiercely scolded a friend when I entered a room to see her book splayed gruesomely on its SPINE.) (I could hear its feeble screams!)
• I signed willy-nilly, on whichever of the first non-text-y pages I happened to open up to, until one woman made me do hers over and informed me that the PROPER place to sign is the title page, NOT the half-title. Remember this, all of you.
• I never did think of anything clever to write. I mostly stuck with “For X” and my name, and added my profuse thanks verbally. (Indeed, I felt misty with gratitude the whole time.)
• Apparently, not every author asks how a name is spelled before signing, which surprised me to hear. I got a lot of “Oh! Thank you for asking!” and a wide variety of spellings. I asked because how annoying would it be, if you are a Cathy, to have a book signed to Kathy instead? My inscriptions may not be clever, but at least they are correct. Maybe that will be my thing?
• If I saw that the person I was signing for was a librarian, I sometimes wrote “Thank you for being a librarian!” before my name. I think I may have frightened a few librarians with my enthusiasm for their profession. (“Oh!” I kept crying gleefully, “You’re a LIBRARIAN!”) In case they are reading now, allow me to explain: When I was in elementary school, I had a particularly wonderful librarian, Mrs. Freuhling, who encouraged my writing—and advocated leniency during the meeting with the principal after I was discovered to be sneaking books home without checking them out. (There was a rule in place that you could check out only as many books per week as the grade you were in, which was not enough to keep me supplied with reading material. I was sneaking the books back INTO the library when I’d finished, but it was slow going, and after I was caught everyone was shocked by the quantity I’d accumulated.) Most importantly, Mrs. Freuhling convinced the staff of the daycare center in which I was confined after school to let me stay down the hall with her, shelving books and learning about the Dewey Decimal System. I spent many happy afternoons filing cards in the catalogues, pushing carts amongst the shelves, and stamping things carefully with the date, and I will always have a bit of cardiac real estate reserved for librarians. My dream job, before the Internet came along and ruined it, was to man the kind of reference desk where a person could wander in (or phone) with some obscure question about, say, renaissance undergarments, and I would find the answer for them. (And while I love computers, I will never forgive them for taking away my precious, precious card catalogues.)
• I felt bad for the pregnant women who picked up a copy of my book, or the people who had me sign theirs to someone they knew who was expecting. (“Maybe for AFTER the baby’s born,” I suggested.)
• Often someone would come up to me and launch into a sales pitch or question, not realizing (despite the stack of books and poised Official Signing Sharpie) that I was only an author and thus of no use to them.
• Sometimes someone would stop, pick up the book, read the back, (“It’s free!” I’d say helpfully) and then put it down and walk away.
• A shocking number of delivery men came by with menus from their restaurants (mostly Chinese, a few Thai). I take it they were making the rounds. How did they get in, I wonder?
• I began the day explaining to everyone who took a copy how ROUGH the ARC was, and how much BETTER the final version is, and how MANY EDITS AND FIXINGS I have made since the galleys were printed, but stopped when it became clear that this was frowned upon by my petite publicity powerhouse, who was also much better than I at summing up the book in a few sentences without stammering or saying disturbing things like “It’s about my daughter’s premature birth and time in the hospital—but it’s funny!” and since she was right THERE I mostly let her field the questions. It is clear that I need to work on being able to discuss my book myself. It shouldn’t be so hard. I did write the damn thing, after all.
• I felt so unfettered and celebratory, more so than I had since turning in the manuscript. I met the most delightful people, too—the sales reps were lovely! And the publisher is this very tall, kind man who said the nicest things about my book. I was struck, again, by how uncommonly lucky I have been. In the cab back to the hotel I kept marveling that any of it was real.
Me, Nicole (my aforementioned publicist), and my editor Jen. Photo blatantly stolen from Running Press’ Facebook page
Last week, a visit to the pediatrician ended with a referral for an echocardiogram, one they took it upon themselves to schedule FOR us, for the very next day. Those of you who have dealt with wrangling specialist appointments know that the helpfulness and alacrity with which an appointment is scheduled usually correlates to the perceived seriousness of your condition. I know this too, but this time I wasn’t really worried. It was all the result of one strikingly high blood pressure reading, and children are notorious fakers about blood pressure. However, in view of Solitary Kidney it was deemed time to finally get a look at Simone’s heart to see whether it had the musclebound, weary look of an overworked cardiac organ.
So I KNEW it was probably nothing, had been assured it was probably nothing, and didn’t even panic when a chest x-ray got tacked on at the last minute because the echo tech “saw something.” You have to go home and wait for them to call with the results, and so I did. And they did, and everything was, as expected, fine.
But weirdly, though I have overcome my need to worry about every little echocardiogram that comes our way (the fact that I am able to type a phrase like “every little echocardiogram” is proof of that), I have apparently not overcome my superstition—I couldn’t bring myself to post about the appointment BECAUSE I knew it was probably nothing. If I’d had legitimate cause to be worried, I wouldn’t have hesitated, but I wasn’t about to feign worry to appease whatever imaginary forces I fancied might smite me, and writing about how it was probably nothing seemed like the fastest way to ensure that it WAS something after all. (It’s okay if you had to read that over to yourself a time or two, trying to get it to make sense. It doesn’t.)
Anyhow, I am now free to move on. To New York! The Big Apple! The City that Never Sleeps, Probably Because It’s Up Late Worrying About Money!
Did you know that when you take a cab from the Newark airport to Manhattan they put a ONE HUNDRED FIFTY DOLLAR hold on your credit card? Or that the flat rate plus tip and miscellaneous charges can total $90? I didn’t! Lady Liberty’s torch burns something awful when it *@#%s you up the ass!
What I did know but had forgotten is that New York cabbies drive as if being chased by death himself—and, paradoxically, as if they are immortal. Against all odds, I made it to my hotel on Tuesday both alive and financially solvent, and was confronted by a lobby teeming with introverts acting like extroverts. BEA is a yearly reunion for the publishing industry, and the atmosphere was very Nerds Gone Wild (I was awakened at 3am the next morning by high-pitched “WOOOOOO!”-ing outside my door, possibly from librarians). I actually found it all quite charming, this Spring-Break-with-reading, but I didn’t know anyone, and was far too intimidated to join the fun. Instead I hid in my room for a while before deciding to slip downstairs to the hotel nail salon for a mani/pedi, so that my fingers would look presentable when signing books the next morning.
I am not a mani/pedi-getter. The first one I had was for my wedding, and I’ve gone a few times since then, but not many. They are excruciatingly expensive, at least where I’ve had them in the Twin Cities, invariably at Aveda salons staffed with graduates of the Aveda cosmetology school that has a near monopoly here. The nail salon in the hotel, on the other hand, was shockingly cheap, and a few minutes in, it became clear that what I’ve been paying extra for here at home is a vigorous massaging of my guilt. Having someone kneel by your feet for half an hour ministering to your toenails is much less uncomfortable when that person is a middle-class white girl with aggressively hipsterish hair than when the kneeler speaks very little English and is the same age as your mother. I felt guilty the WHOLE TIME—mortified, even—when I wasn’t feverishly wondering what they were saying in their native tongue that made them laugh that way, or failing entirely to understand what they were saying IN ENGLISH, TO ME, resulting in a horribly protracted round of “I’m sorry?” “I’m sorry?” and vibrant blushing. Eventually it was done (and very prettily, I might add) and I overtipped lavishly and scuttled back upstairs to my room, where I ordered and consumed a $20 hamburger and fell into a restless sleep.
Which is what I should be doing right now, damn it all (where does the time GO?), though hopefully without the restlessness, so you will have to wait until tomorrow to hear about the book signing, my not being a hooker, the mysterious case of the umbrella men, and my love for a whole new borough…
So, I am back, and tomorrow I will start telling you all about BOOK EXPO! and boring you with tales of New York. Tales of book signings and French 75s and also of being mistaken for a hooker! (Oh no I’m NOT. Kidding, that is. Or a hooker.)
My first day back was marvelous in its own right, however. I took Simone to the park for the first time this season.
The swing continues to be the runaway favorite, though she braved the (smallest) slide as well. Seeing that faltering split second of “am I scared or exhilarated?” cross her face brought me swiftly and immediately back to my own early slide experiences. There was a slide at the playground of the Northeast Child Development Center, a slide I remember as being about 18 or 19 (hundred?) feet tall, gleaming silver, like a broiling, gigantic straight razor. It took me AGES to work up the courage to go down that slide, and after I did I couldn’t remember what I’d been so afraid of—I went back again and again and again. Which is sort of how I feel about a lot, lately. I keep doing things that terrify me—and to my shock and delight, I keep coming out at the bottom, whole and grinning.
When I was a couple of years older than Simone is now I spent a week visiting my aunt in Mobridge(?) South Dakota, where after months of eyeing them suspiciously from afar, I tackled my fear of the Tornado Slide. You know the ones I mean: slides that corkscrew, often partially enclosed. Oh, how I feared the Tornado Slide! This was after I had mastered the regular, straight-edged version: the Tornado Slide was my white whale. I recall sitting at the top, slipping a little, clutching at the sides with my grimy hands and thinking “Alexa, you FOOL, what have you gotten yourself into?” And then off I went, like some kind of daredevil. There used to be a picture somewhere that was taken that week, of me poised in the tunnel of the slide’s entrance, my face shadowed but eyes bright as beads with the thrill of my own bravery.
Tire swings and those whirling-deathtrap-child-turntables were another story, of course, but that’s only common sense.
Simone was similarly visiting relatives last week, and though she apparently had a lovely time, I heard there was an Incident that began when she was with her grandmother at some sort of Iowan Mall Play Area, eyeing a little boy. Simone’s fascination with other children is intense—probably because she’s scarcely seen any, due to being largely quarantined for the first two years of her life. At the park yesterday, a little girl started swinging next to us, and Simone didn’t take her eyes off her the entire time.
Anyhow, there she is, my daughter, standing on the edge of the Iowan Mall Play Area, watching a boy-child gambol and play with things. Watching, and watching, and finally venturing over to join him. I picture her like a tentative fawn at this point: hopeful, innocent, eager, a little shy. And then do you know what happened?
That little cocksucking hooligan turned to my fawn-daughter and PUSHED HER DOWN. After that, Simone wanted nothing more to do with the Iowan Mall Play Area.
I presume it is only natural that hearing this story made me stop right where I was on the stairs and bend over holding my chest, my poor heart tearing in a way that was physically painful. I presume it is only natural that I cannot think of that moment without feeling a horrible howling draining of my blood at the knowledge that Simone has had her first encounter with Mean, with Rejection. It’s natural, certainly, to hate that I wasn’t there.
I also presume it is only to be expected that after the initial heart-rending had passed, my greatest desire in the world was to drive to Iowa, to this Iowan Mall Play Area, and put that (innocent, I realize, entirely inculpable!) little brat forcefully through a wall. Totally within the realm of normal maternal emotion, right?
Sometimes I wonder what I am doing, here. I know, I know, tedious: “BLOGGER SEIZED WITH SELF-DOUBT AND ENNUI, WONDERS WHAT IT’S ALL ABOUT, ANYWAY.” Oldest story in the book, if the book goes back no further than the advent of the Internet. Really, though—I’ve gotten so busy that I no longer have the time to say much of anything, or rather I keep putting off the posts I want to write, saving them for some unlikely future when I have “more time.” It’s a sort of low-reaching perfectionism, I suppose.
Sometimes I have trouble remembering how this used to work. What is this space? What is it for?
I hesitate to bring up the increasing focus on “monetizing” in the online world, because posts decrying it have become almost as ubiquitous as posts celebrating and dissecting it, and the whole “too punk rock for fiscal concern” stance strikes me as rather adolescent. I have ads, and I don’t see anything the matter with that. At some point it seemed actively wasteful not to have them, considering the slender silhouette of my bank balance these days. But if I am honest, I’ll admit that I find it a little bewildering, the “monetizing” (NOT A WORD!) and the business-y business blogging has become. I love that so many people are newly able to make money doing what they love. I understand the concept of personal branding, and if the term makes my skin crawl a little, well, I am well aware that it is something people have been doing for a long, long time, almost forever, even. Maybe less purposefully and necessarily less effectively, in smaller ways or with narrower influence, but there’s nothing new under the sun, is there? I do think that the heightened self-consciousness this brings can be complicated. I’m not trying to be an Internet Luddite, I just feel a bit of vertigo once in a while. I miss…something.
Like I said, sometimes I wonder what I am doing, here. I seldom write posts that are self-contained, that stand on their own as stories or essays, that have structure and purpose. This isn’t even much of an online diary anymore, given how poorly tended and public it has become. I’m not inspired to optimize or leverage or explore the leveraging of optimization.
I’m not going anywhere—this isn’t a Quitting Blogging Post. I’ll be back tomorrow, whining about packing or some such. This is just a Musing About Things Post. A What Next? Post. A Time For A Snack! Post.
Speaking of which, it is late. Scott and I have had a lovely weekend, just us two. This morning, I am told that Simone finally noticed we were gone. At least, she asked after her father. “Daddy?” she said, signing in a puzzled, expectant way. No mention of Mama, the little rat.
I cannot believe I just lost nearly a month of my life to…whatever that was. Simone is better, though she still has a bit more nasal effluvia than is customary and the occasional cough. In the process of getting better she passed through a stage of Night Coughing violent enough to result in v-o-m-i-t (LAMBADA, as it is known here). Sometimes once a night, sometimes—if I’d heaved myself up, stripped the bed, and placed new sheets upon it—twice. Once in my hair, which was lovely.
The LAMBADA has ended, but the aftermath remains. Moments ago, just before I decided I’d better write something to reassure you of my continued existence, I was Googling methods of cleaning comforters, pillows, and mattresses. Our mattress very nearly made it through unscathed, because I am fanatical about waterproof mattress protectors, but Simone waited. She waited, biding her time until all our resources had been exhausted and then she struck.
In the course of Simone’s illness, I got ill—and progressed through the customary stages of sore throat, runny nose, congestion, cough, and renewed health/joie de vivre—TWICE. Two full runs of sickness, and for a while after the second one got underway I honestly thought it was going to be like a snake eating its tail and Simone and I would keep passing whatever-it-was back and forth and we would never be well again.
(I WANT MY MAY BACK.)
Anyhow, it’s over, and Simone has been dropped off to spend the week with her grandparents. She’s been there for more than 24 hours, now, and has yet to ask after us. Scott and I are trying not to feel rejected. The cats are delirious with joy at the SPAWNLESS state of the household. There is much laundry still to be done but I will be back to write more tomorrow (and again and again afterwards, for June, since May was unfairly stolen from me). I leave for New York Tuesday and yesterday I tried to buy jeans, which is a whole post in and of itself. (FOUR HOURS OF SHOPPING. AND DO I HAVE JEANS TO SHOW FOR IT? NO. NO I DO NOT.) (I do, however, have a dreadfully painful case of Shopper’s Elbow.)
I will leave you with the cell phone photo I received this afternoon, of Simone wearing new sunglasses, courtesy of her great grandmother. And missing us, as you can see, something terrible:
My god, Simone is STILL sick. Technically it has only been eight days, but it feels like more. Many, many more. SO many more! I haven’t left the house since…I don’t remember when I last left the house. Maybe the Monday before this past one? Did I go somewhere that day, the day before we were first visited by the Angel of Ailment, by Our Lady of Perpetual Mucus? I hope so. I hope I had a wonderful time.
I finally broke down and called the pediatrician, because Simone started doing this THING, where she will not take a breath for several (very LONG-seeming) seconds, and then breathe heavily through her mouth a few times before another pause. Now, it’s not as if she’s turning blue, or looking like she can’t breathe, or even holding her breath with her mouth closed. No: she’ll be going about her business—coloring, or feeding her baby with a xylophone mallet—yet neglecting to breathe, unruffled.
MADDENING.
It’s like when she was a baby: you know how babies do “periodic breathing?” Breathe breathe stop? Breathe breathe stop? It’s that, except she is two years old and knows full well how to breathe regularly, and it was hard-won knowledge, knowledge that involved oxygen tanks and apnea monitors and ventilators and so to see her just not…Well.
["Take a BREATH!" I've shrilled several times, with something between fury and terror, "Simone Lee Wisgerhof, you breathe THIS INSTANT!" And if that isn't the stupidest thing you've ever heard, you obviously need to move in different circles than you do currently.]
Babies are “obligate nose-breathers,” and it appears that Simone has retained her lack of interest in other channels. Finding her nose otherwise occupied, she refrains from respiring at all until she is overruled by the the weensy kernel of her brain in which reason resides, and is made to breathe through her mouth to catch up. I feel, however, that whatever nose-breathing obligations she might have had ought properly to have lapsed by now.
I tried to explain all this to the nurse at my pediatrician’s office, even going so far as to hold the phone up to Simone, who was delighted to be getting a call at last. The nurse quite patently had no idea what I was talking about, and quite possibly thought I had relinquished my grip on sanity, but gently assured me that based upon the presence of certain symptoms and the utter lack of certain others, my daughter was suffering from nothing but a cold. A bad cold, maybe, but still: Only a Cold. A common one, at that.
We have the Pulmicort, and Albuterol as needed; the problem is that I can hear her. If you’ve ever had a baby prone to spells of NOT BREATHING, real ones, the sort that come with blue lips and ambu-bags, you’ll find that your ear is sensitized to the rhythm of her breath. I’ll bet that at Simone’s high school graduation, in an auditorium filled with squealing, chattering, excited folk, I will be able to hear (or, perhaps more accurately, sense) each of her in- and exhales. Now, even if she is playing on the other side of the room, I tense when she pauses, when she is NOT BREATHING as she fills a discarded paper bag with plastic teacups and wooden oranges, and it drives me entirely, THOROUGHLY mad.
Adding icicle to injury, we have no heat. The radiators have long since been turned off for the season, based upon the reasonable assumption that by MID-MAY the risk of freezing weather would have passed. And do you know what happens when you assume? Your tenants are forced to wear heavy sweaters and run their ovens all day and implore pint-sized nudists to remain clothed and FINE, you can take off your socks, but now I’ll have to examine your toenails every hour or so to make sure they are blue only from cold and not from lack of oxygen.
As a result of the chill I’ve developed a mysterious case of right-sided Ice Hand that nothing seems to allay. I try to slip my hand into warm spaces, like between couch cushions (Still cold! Fucking leather!) or under Scott’s chin, by his neck (He shoos it away, insisting it feels like a fish) but it’s no use. Even now, I am typing stiffly with my right, while my left trips merrily over the keys.
Simone, you will notice, remained unperturbed—and was well enough to prepare a lamb dinner for two:
I think that’s a cucumber in there, but I can’t be certain. A Greek recipe, perhaps?
Tonight I had to break out the Pulmicort, again. Those of you with preemies know already what I am talking about, but for those who don’t, Pulmicort is an inhaled steroid given via nebulizer, one Simone was prescribed in the NICU and continued to get first twice, then once a day until about a year ago, when she was finally healthy enough to do without. Back when it was discontinued there was talk of resuming for the winter, but when the time came Simone was so aggressively well that there was no need. She was healthy enough that her delightfully morbid, reassuringly conservative pulmonologist even decreed she could forego Synagis, the shots she received her first winter to help fight off RSV, and that she had been scheduled to receive this year as well.
It’s not such a big deal, the Pulmicort. I don’t mean to get all dramatic about it. It’s just that it was becoming so easy to forget. I am unfazed by your standard childhood spills and fevers, but this is Simone’s first real respiratory illness, and back to watching for retractions and checking lips and fingernails for a bluish tinge, it’s amazing how little time seems to have passed in these past two years. I had to open new nebulizer tubing, and find the neglected box of Pulmicort vials, connecting the fittings and assembling the attachment and thinking as I have on dozens of occasions, so many that if I had a dollar for each I could by now surely have paid for the equipment in question: why, WHY didn’t I invest in a home pulse oximeter?
She’s fine, really. It’s only a bad cold, and I’m not sure whether her breathing is truly more labored than that of any other congested two-year-old or if I am simply more aware of the differences between my daughter (who is so extraordinarily ordinary! who can identify all her numbers!) and her blessedly normal, normally breathing contemporaries.
As of yesterday, I have been overrun with whatever power-mad microbe has colonized my daughter. I feel, in a word, awful. I would Blame the Baby, as one does, but I can’t, because she is so miserable that seeing her this way is even worse than being sick myself. At least I know what is happening and that it will end. At least I have basic knowledge of germ theory. During the best snippets of the day Simone goes about her usual W-ignoring business, only the fountain of snot reminding me that she is unwell. During the worst, however, she cries as if bereft and wounded, like a tiny medieval, certain that her suffering is the pointed and personal punishment of a vengeful God. This is by far the sickest she has been since coming home from the hospital—which is pretty astounding, when you think about it, but oh, it is brutal. For my part, I feel exactly as if I’ve swallowed a shotglass full of thumbtacks, chased with that tumbler of pus I mentioned in my last post. Thursdays Scott is gone from dawn until well past dusk, and left to my own devices it’s a miracle Simone and I lived to see bedtime. Alas, if her course thus far is anything to go by, I’ll get worse before I get better.
My delicious, bubbly Alka-Seltzer is waiting for me, but I wanted to post something, however brief and pitiful—not just to let you know that we are surviving our own private Magic Mountain but to thank you for the kind comments and email messages and Twitterings (yes, I know it sounds like chitterlings, but I can’t say “Tweets”) about the galleys. You are probably getting tired of the sappy posts saying how much it means to me, but it does, so there. Thank you. Every time one of you wrote how excited you were to read the book, I felt (after my initial reaction of “Oh no! Don’t READ it! Oh, god, people are going to READ it! What was I thinking?”) excited and proud and reassured and loved.
I know, I know. Here, look at this sad, sick baby to counteract the sweetness and light:
Today was a banner day, and not just because Simone has her first really nasty cold, and may well have set some sort of mucous-related record (how can such a small person produce such a staggering quantity, is what I want to know), no, today was a banner day because of these:
Advance Review Copies. Galleys, the things that get sent to reviewers, the things that were printed specially for Book Expo and will be given away willy-nilly to conference attendees, the things I will be signing in PUBLIC in 22 days.
The most important part of these Advance Review Copies is this:
In fact, if any reviewers are reading now (no) I want to remind them of this. Not the “sale” part: I could care less about “not for sale.” Go wild! Put it on ebay and collect your 53 cents! Mazel Tov!
I am concerned with the “UNCORRECTED” portion of the notice. That is what I would like to reiterate. UNCORRECTED. UNCORRECTED. Even more UNCORRECTED than one might be used to, because the Book Expo thing all happened rather last minute, and so there wasn’t time to, say, correct the place where the auto-changing of names to protect the innocent ALSO changed the name of my alma mater to TARA LAWRENCE. Yes, Tara Lawrence. Surely you’ve heard of it?
There have been substantive changes as well, whole paragraphs and sections since cut and bits rewritten and moved so that by the time the general public sees my book it will be much better than this particular rushed-to-press version. Though as someone who recently spent four hours Googling variants of “writer hates own work,” “author judge own work,” “writer critical own first book,” “writers with bad first book,” etc., I may not be the best person to ask about quality, at this point. People tell me they like the book, and instead of feeling reassured, I ask them about their recent head injury. I am told this is a Phase, and that I will shake it eventually.
Nothing has done more to facilitate this shaking than seeing my Advance Review Copies. They look—suspiciously, alarmingly, wonderfully—like books. To me, my book didn’t ever seem like a “book;” it seemed like a Word document, or a sheaf of paper with some typing on it. Reading it bound and printed, however, it seems distinctly book-esque—Tara Lawrence notwithstanding. Reading it bound and printed is the first time I have felt the full genuine thrill I’d been expecting all along.
You guys, I wrote a book.
Here’s the little star on the ARC cover, saying BUY ME!
Here is the very first page of text, as close to a sneak peek as y’all are going to get. I’ve blurred it a bit not to be all artistic-like but so that I don’t have to sue myself, which I sense could get extremely messy:
Here is a shot of the beginning of Part I, Chapter One (I have resigned myself to the fact that no one will find this part title quite as amusing as I do myself). I like that one of the few phrases of the first chapter you can see clearly here is “tumbler of pus.” It gets things off to a pleasant start:
Here is the last page:
Lastly, and maybe most importantly, here is a glimpse of you, in the Acknowledgments. You appear in the book-proper as well, but I wanted to show this page (or at least a part of it) in particular, to say that I know how much I owe you, and how grateful I am, and how much better my life is with all of you in it.
Simone is sick. She is draped over me as I type this (with one hand!), miserable even in sleep. She’s okay, mind you–why, before things went downhill this afternoon we had ourselves a delightful shrieking contest.
She won.
Hopefully I will be spared the hell that is other people in a pediatrician’s waiting room, and by tomorrow she will back to her spoon (excuse me, “shim”) chewing, flamenco-dancing, Shriek-Off-winning self.
• Ahhhh. I had forgotten how satisfying it is to rant, just a tiny bit, to the Internet. Thank you all. Also? I got part of the bathroom done today, so that’s something. Though if I keep going at this rate, I will be finished on…November 6th, or thereabouts.
• I am going to start potty training Simone tomorrow. Hold me.
• No, seriously. I have no idea what I am doing. Any thoughts re: keeping the potty in the bathroom vs. in the play area where Simone spends most of her time? My plan—excuse me, “plan”—had been to leave it in the bathroom, watch her like a hawk, and just plop her on it every 30 minutes after her first wet diaper/pull-up. Maybe first I’ll let her see Hair Baby have a go, for inspiration. I’ve heard that some believe one ought to let the child roam nude and free with a potty nearby, but…really? Your advice is, as always, appreciated.
• GOD, I hate using the word “potty.” Can’t we say “small toilet” instead? In fact, it’s decided: I refuse to be held hostage by relentless diminutives just because I have a toddler.
• The few times we practiced, I noticed that Simone isn’t exactly adept at sitting down on the small toilet herself, and often misjudges where the actual SEAT is, resulting in her being startled by the weird front pommel as it assaults her from behind. I find this endlessly amusing.
• I have decided to combat my feelings of overwhelm by making a MASTER LIST of all the things I need to do—book related, other-work related, house related, Simone related. It will be a long list, I think, but it needs to be done. As a reward, I am going to make another list, of things I WANT to do this year, for kicks, things like “make pickles.” Yes, it’s already May, but I was otherwise occupied for the first four months. I will post the list, and report back/cross things off as I finish.
• Is it sad that I am rewarding myself with list making?
• I am thinking of starting Simone in a sort of preschool-y program for two-year-olds this summer, now that she is QUARANTINE FREE and allowed to run about with the great unwashed as much as she likes. She loves other children, but has only actually SEEN other children on a handful of occasions since birth. Didn’t I tell you about the time we had a playdate at Julia’s and Simone was so discombobulated with delight that she spent the whole time kissing poor Edward right on the mouth? Anyhow, for the regular school year session I am planning to send her three days a week, but in summer there is a two day option that I thought would be a nice transition and would give me some extra time with her for the next few months—I can do my work in only two days for a while, and I want to soak Simone up as much as possible now that the deadline-enforced baby-drought is over. But the registration forms say something about how the more days a young child attends the easier the adjustment, and now I am all uncertain. Is that true? Simone IS clingy, lately. Then again, she is used to having the nanny while I work, so it isn’t as if she’s unfamiliar with this sort of thing. Thoughts?
• I should probably tell you there are goats there, at this preschool. Though I maintain that this is not the reason I chose it. Not the only one, anyway.
• My daughter is obsessed with the alphabet. Thanks to neglect and Sesame Street, she can identify all the letters save “W,” which she pointedly ignores. Except for the other day, when she told me it was “elephant.” She said it with confidence, too—I think hoping that if she seemed as if she knew what it was I’d be thrown off my game and start wondering whether she wasn’t right after all. She’s also big on numbers, and points them out to me helpfully at Target, which is how I found a hidden pocket of $5 toddler jean shorts. The moral of the story is that children can be useful, if you play your cards right.
• Speaking of which, I may teach her to count them, if I can only get her to stop announcing the numbers aloud. Surely even the meanest Vegas pit boss wouldn’t break the kneecaps of a poor innocent baby who was only having a little fun?
So, Scott and Simone got home about an hour ago—a day ahead of schedule. Scott called around dinner to tell me they were driving back, so it wasn’t like I had no notice at all, but still: I am in a Mood.
It makes me sound awful, but I was not happy about their premature homecoming. I’d worried it might happen, as it nearly always does when Scott visits his family, and this morning during our phone call I held my breath, half-expecting to hear that they were leaving after breakfast. But they weren’t, so I went about my business, heading to Target for a few cleaning supplies and trying not to fret about how long everything seemed to be taking, and how few hours remained until their scheduled returnon Sunday afternoon.
Oh, I know. Either you are going to say how MEAN I am, or remind me that it is NEVER enough time. I know, believe me, I know. It’s only that I wanted so badly to get caught up, and this weekend feels like an utter waste, now. I was at that stage of cleaning where things are actually worse than they were to begin with, because everything is pulled out into the open being sorted and moved about. You can’t stop at this stage and reintroduce the entropy of daily life, you just can’t. It’s against nature, like stopping a butterfly half out of its dusty old chrysalis.
If I’d been aware of the futility of attempting a thorough apartment colonic I might have slept in this morning instead of getting up after only five hours of sleep, or ignored the apartment and concentrated on WORK work. At the very least, you can bet I’d have skipped scrubbing the baseboards in the one room I (mostly) finished cleaning, and I definitely wouldn’t have skipped lunch. Maybe I’d have opted to lounge around all day, catching up on my television. Instead I had neither a truly productive weekend nor a refreshing and relaxing one.
I am being a terrible brat, but the point was to prepare me to slip into a new routine on Monday, one that would allow me to luxuriate in Simone rather than half-working/half-engaging with her. Scott teaches, and has already proclaimed his intention to spend tomorrow planning his class; now that there is no childcare, I have to wedge my work into the bits of time he is available to watch Simone. Even during the frantic book-writing days, he hasn’t been quite as supportive about this as one might wish—especially frustrating because I would LOVE to be the one playing Duplos, you know?
I was going to MAKE PICKLES this week, you guys, and take Simone to storytime at the library, and arrange a playdate, and now I am as behind as ever, and even if I do those things, I will have this mountainous to-do list hanging over my head, oppressing me. So no, I wasn’t exactly brimming with enthusiasm when Scott got home, and now we are BOTH sulking. Oh, don’t say it. Bad Mother. Dreadful Wife. Petulant Alexa all around.
Things have been trending pleasantly uphill, here—spring is springing, and all that—but Wednesday night veered sharply off course. It was a night of mysteries: How do children know what would be the most inconvenient time for injury or illness? What counts as “illness,” anyway? If a baby falls into a wooden footboard, does it make a sound? (Yes.) Why, when we hear about celebrities buying preposterously expensive items for their offspring, do we never hear about anyone installing one of those convenient pull-shower set-ups, like the CDC uses? Something like they had in Silkwood, only without the painful brushing/eyeball-scouring component. And faster, and automated, with a dryer—like a human carwash. If I were a celebrity parent outfitting my ostentatious nursery, that would be the first thing on my list.
Scott and Simone and I were supposed to go to Iowa this weekend, but Wednesday I had the brilliant idea that I should stay home to give our apartment the thorough enema of which it is so desperately in need. The past…while has been rather gloomy and fraught around here, what with the book finishing and Domestic Difficultying, and now that things are brightening up a bit and the finally final FINAL round of edits has been sent winging editor-ward with my first-pass pages, I have a tremendous urge to clean and cull and organize and bleachify. It is more or less impossible to do this effectively with a two-year old on the premises, and a weekend to reset and get caught up on all the tasks that have remained juuust beyond my grasp sounded impossibly ideal.
The “impossibly” part came later that night—or, more accurately, early the next morning. Simone kept waking up and kick, kick, kicking at my back, pulling my hair and whining. She felt feverish. Around 2:30 I provided the bottle of milk she so piteously requested, and after she’d sucked it down I changed her diaper and carried her out to the kitchen to find the thermometer. Her temperature was only 99pointsomething, but I was holding her on my hip and considering the Tylenol when she stopped talking about the alphabet and pointing out my body parts (“ABCD! MNMOP! NOHse! Eyye! NUH-PUHL!”), gave me a funny look, and sprayed both the surroundings and my person with an impressively forceful and horrifying quantity of hot, curdled milk.
It was bad. Oh, it was bad. Bad enough that I had that moment, the one where you freeze because your brain has basically destroyed itself like the computer in War Games given the impossible Tic-Tac-Toe of finding a place to begin addressing the disaster. I’ve had that moment a few times since becoming a parent, most memorably after an incident involving a violent diaper blowout amid an intricately wrapped baby-wearing device. This time was worse, and the smell was making me nearly-retch myself—only a little, delicately, like a cat with a piece of hair in the back of its throat—but eventually I pulled it together enough to bellow (less delicately) for Scott. Honestly, I am not afraid of baby fluids, but this was…you will have to trust me, it was a ROUS compared to the ordinary white rat of child-vomit.
(Everyone enjoying their dinner? Good!)
Thank god I sleep more or less in the nude—it makes clean-up so much easier. In fact, new parents, I have two pieces of advice for you: do not unnecessarily clothe your baby or yourself, and LEATHER COUCH. (No, seriously: LEATHER COUCH.) I swabbed myself down while Scott de-chunked the floor and cabinets, and we both consoled Simone, who stood nearby, signing and saying “Sahw-ee! Sahw-ee!” despite assurances that it was okay, she was okay, all manner of things were okay! It was both pitiful and disturbing because she kept at it, all but asking if we could use the slenderer cane this time, since it was an accident and everything. I’m afraid I may have passed on the gene for being perpetually effacing—though you would think that such a gene would be recessive, and that even a pair would spend so much time saying “After you!” “No, after YOU!” that they’d never get around to expressing at all.
But the night wasn’t over! On our way back to bed, Simone tripped? Stumbled? Attempted to take her own life? and landed nose-first onto the sharp, IKEAwood edge of the bed. It was dark, and I couldn’t tell at first whether any damage had been done, but as I picked her up and she howled, something wet ran onto me. This time, it wasn’t vomit.
(Poor thing. Can you imagine? “From the diary of Simone, aged 26 months: Today I learned that nine comes after eight, that “s” and “x” are actually two separate letters, and that sometimes, after life knocks you down, it likes to give you a kick or two, seeing as you’re conveniently at foot-level.” )
I rushed her to the bathroom and attempted to corral the bleeding with tissues, but she was having none of it, preferring instead to smear gore around on her face, the bathtub, and my thighs. I wanted to clean her up once it had stopped, but she was against that as well, and Scott urged me to let her be. “She looks like a Blood Clown!” I argued (she did, too), but I was informed that there were no such things as Blood Clowns, and anyway, Simone could be bathed in the morning.
In the morning she still had a low-grade fever, and I thought for sure that any hope of my Risky-Business-only-with-cleaning-instead-of-hookers weekend was lost, because this is how it works, with children: as soon as you make a plan that mandates their health, they are stricken mysteriously green/sniffly/broken. But by evening the fever was gone, and so this afternoon Simone and Scott left for Iowa. I still have no idea what the fever was from or whither the lone episode of vomiting, but I’m not about to look a gift horse in the mouth, even if I suspect that this is where the answer lies (her two-year Satan’s Kernels are working their way through).
Anyhow, here I am. Alone. Alone! All quiet save the sound of the teenager next door screaming, and I quote: “WHY CAN’T YOU LEAVE ME ALONE! IT’S NOT ALL ABOUT YOU! IT’S NOT YOUR PICTURE! IT’S NOT YOUR GRADUATION!”
(And…door slam!)
I have toys to sort, but I am writing to you first. I’m warming up, you could say, because tomorrow is May 1st, not only my half birthday, but also the beginning of the exercise I am undertaking to get myself back into the habit of writing here: I will be posting DAILY, all month long. That means that even at Book Expo, on the Wednesday I spend putting my terrified scrawl to review copies as one of my publisher’s two featured authors—the other being Kathie Lee Gifford, who is promoting her new children’s book (for children, by children?)—I will be posting, even if only to babble nonsensically for 1300 words as I have done just now. (Sorry about that, by the way.)
One of the questions someone asked on formspring was whether I ever wish I were anonymous here, and the answer is yes, sometimes I do.
My first serious boyfriend had a website that he’d started when he was 16—it had journal entries, and pictures, and audio of his various musical endeavors. It was a blog, basically, not that I had ever heard of such a thing, and even by the time we dated, in college (1999?) my friends found the idea hilarious and mockable. A website all about himself? How bizarre and narcissistic!
He told me about it but asked me not to look, and I never did (I am a girl of my word, you see)…until we broke up. I was a wreck, then, the sort of sad post-dumping cliche you see on television, sniffing t-shirts and weeping over old photos. I finally ventured onto his online turf, only for a moment, and not five minutes later there was an email in my inbox, and all it said was: “Did you enjoy my site?”
I swear to god, it might as well have been THE CALL IS COMING FROM INSIDE THE HOUSE, for the effect it had on me. How had he known? Had he implanted some device in my computer to spy on me? Was it like getting the address of a phone call, where you had to stay on the line a certain number of seconds before it could be triangulated? It’s funny, now, because it illustrates how extraordinarily unsavvy I was about the Internet back then. I didn’t know what an IP address was, or how things that existed online really existed, come to think of it, and even when I started my own website five years later I took it for granted that no one I knew would find me.
When Simone was in the NICU I voluntarily gave up even the pretense of anonymity. I’d grown so tired of updating relatives about her condition that I simply sent them the link, and since then I have come to like being out and proud online, and many good things have come to me as a result of it. Every once in a while, though, there is something I want to talk about but don’t, for fear of hurting someone’s feelings or making someone worry, or simply because the idea of relatives reading it makes me die a little inside. Even if I were anonymous there would be things I’d feel ethically squeamish about sharing because they involve other people, and this is a line I walk in my offline writing as well.
The problem with these restrictions is that sometimes something comes along that falls outside them, but is so big that not writing about it feels like lying.
Probably one of the most hated sort of posts in posting history is that wherein some sort of drama or excitement is alluded to but not explicated, and yet here I am, sort of:
For the past few months, I have been having some Domestic Difficulties.
No one committed any singular, grievous wrong; it has been more of a scale-tipping situation, culminating a couple of weeks ago (around the time I stopped posting, not-at-all-coincidentally) with surreal discussions of separation and new apartments and Best For Everyone. I couldn’t even allude to it here, because we hadn’t talked to our families, and wouldn’t THAT be a fine thing to read with one’s morning coffee.
Against all expectations, things have gotten better since then, and our condition has been upgraded from CRITICAL to STABLE. Things have been so good that I thought about returning to posting with no explanation for my absence, going on in my customary vein about the book and Simone and the upcoming March of Babies walk I have COMPLETELY neglected to fundraise for and WTF, writers of Private Practice, would it KILL you to hire a medical consultant who knows something about preemies? (I’m available, BTW. Call me.) Part of the reason I considered not mentioning my Domestic Difficulties at all is that I would frankly LIKE to go back to talking about those things, about my many newly-developed theories and questions regarding Sesame Street, for instance. It’s hard to talk about this. It has been a miserable time for me, and I still feel confused and unsure of where I will be, literally, in six months.
In the end, though, I couldn’t keep this to myself, and not just because STABLE is a long way from OUT OF THE WOODS. I’ve never omitted something this big from the online record, and I’m not going to start now, even if it’s awkward, and makes me feel slightly ill to contemplate publishing this. So there. That’s where I’ve been. Glad to be back.
On Sunday, I took Simone to see her Nani, who is visiting from Zug (is it just me, or does that sentence sound like something an alien would say? Zug being a small but densely populated planet several lightyears from Earth, obviously).
Scott and I don’t celebrate Easter, per se, but it seemed unfair to deprive Simone of Swiss chocolate just because her parents are heathens, and so we called it Zombie Day.
Zombie Day! When we celebrate the resurrection of the dead by eating candy in the shape of rabbits!
It was a beautiful, temperate Sunday, and we spent it outside. Simone was exceptionally well-behaved—I am thinking particularly of when my brother’s roommate commanded one of the dogs to sit, and Simone obediently dropped to the floor of the deck, cross-legged and docile. It was a pleasant change from the day before, when she threw a flailing, boneless fit at being barred from entering a restaurant kitchen, and then lost her temper again when I refused to buy her a set of chairs (all four for only eight hundred American dollars!) that we passed at a sidewalk sale.
There was the traditional Zombie Day dancing, of course, and two whole dogs. Best of all, my mother was on hand to treat Simone with the appropriate deference, a deference she rarely receives from her own mother—me with my stupid typing and shortsighted prohibitions against eating matches or washing one’s hair in the cat fountain. You could learn a thing or two from her, Simone seemed to say, giving me a look over the decorative bell her Nani was proffering for ringing.
It was a successful celebration. Everyone left with more chocolate than they’d had on arrival, their vitamin D replenished and brains still uneaten. Miracle enough, for me.
One of the most common questions I get over on my Ask Alexa Questions page is whether or not there will be some sort of book tour, and whether this hypothetical tour will stop in Boston/San Francisco/Papua New Guinea/The Falkland Islands.
The short answer to these questions is that I don’t know (though even if there is a tour, you Papua New Guineans are likely out of luck). There will be something tour-esque, at least, but whether that means me and Simone driving cross country in a convertible with scarves in our hair (assuming she’s grown some by then) or me flying to stay with friends in Philly and then taking train-y day trips to other easily accessible cities, or both, or neither, or both PLUS flights to other places…truthfully, it is all still up in the air.
I will be doing local readings, of course. And as my book will be officially on sale for the very first time at BlogHer, I plan to do something there (A party? With sidecars? Maybe sponsored by a cognac company and the makers of fine isolettes?) but as I haven’t actually ARRANGED anything yet, that could very well end up being no more than a handful of people raiding my minibar while I hide in the bathroom, shamed.
Shame is a concern of mine when it comes to events. One of the best ways to edit a thing is to read it aloud, and so when I was in Philadelphia for my wild weekend of bed-sitting, Esmerelda (false name I just made up, because she’s anonymous on the Internet but I am quickly tiring of referring to her as “my best/dear/etc. friend”) read parts of my book to me so that I could see what needed fixing. Actually, though I do like to edit by reading things aloud, the reason Esmerelda was reading my book to me in Philly was simply that she had tired of my taking 6 hours to get through 20 pages. This is not, alas, an exaggeration: I broke sometime during the editing process, and started taking issue with paragraphs in which “the” appeared “too many times,” and sticking like a broken record upon unimportant word choices: “the,” “an,” or “my?” “the,” “an,” or “my?”
Esmerelda sensibly deduced that if I couldn’t see the words, I wouldn’t be able to invent as many problems with them, and so she read to me instead. We did move faster this way, and for part of the time we had company, in the form of Heather B, who joined us at the bar for a drink and was then enticed upstairs to our den of editorial iniquity. Being present while Heather listened to Esmerelda read my book out loud made me want to disappear into the headboard I was leaning upon. In fact, I’m not sure if they noticed, but I tried: I squinched myself against it, and when that didn’t work, I slumped down to make myself less conspicuous. I would have covered myself with pillows, but I didn’t think of that until just now.
I did seek out publication, I know, but the idea of people reading my book gives me a palpitation, and the idea of being around people who have read my book takes that palpitation up to full-fledged arrhythmia. Add me, reading my book aloud before staring eyes, amid near silence, and you have the headline “Author Suffers Cardiac Arrest During Reading at Local Bookstore.”
[“Alexa Stevenson, 30, author of the critically politely-ignored Half Baked, died Tuesday before an audience of three patrons, a homeless man, and her high school boyfriend.
“I came to see if she was fat,” admitted the erstwhile writer’s erstwhile paramour, “but she was behind the podium, and then they got her in the body bag so fast it was hard to tell.”
Another audience member was visibly shaken: “I didn’t even know who she was—I just heard there’d be wine,” he said, gulping a glass, “Jesus Christ! That’s what I get for supporting the arts!”
Raymond DiSpiro, 36, often slept near the store’s dumpster, but Tuesday’s unseasonably cold temperatures forced him inside. Coincidentally, he was the only witness who had actually read Half Baked. “Someone threw a copy in the alley. I figured I’d use the pages to roll tobacco, but I read some of it first, on account of I didn’t have any tobacco. It was ok, I guess.”]
I know the first time someone writes to tell me they liked my book (assuming such an eventuality occurs) I will rocket to stratospheric emotional heights, but in person I don’t know how to respond to compliments, except by stammering a lot and blurting out something terrible about myself to counteract the admiration. On the other hand, if people DON’T like my book, well, I will probably just die. Speaking of which: what if I am reading along and realize that an upcoming sentence should be edited, or worse, cut altogether? It’s already printed in the book! I probably have to read it anyway, right? I could make something up on the fly, but that’s unlikely to end well, given my problems with, you know, speech. And when I sign books, what do I write in them? Just my name? An impromptu limerick? Oh god, I should brush up on my limericks.
Believe it or not, I am excited about the prospect of a tour, anxiety be damned, but maybe it is good that I have some time to prepare myself. I am taking it slow.
The first step is to gauge whether anyone would even be willing to change out of housepants and leave a perfectly nice apartment just to listen to a grown woman read out loud, and for this, I need your help. I was inspired by Rebecca Skloot, and made up an interactive Google Map so that I (and my publisher’s marketing department) can see where there might be interest—in witnessing my death or humiliation, or at least netting yourself a swell new limerick.
(These are the instructions you’ll see once you click on the link below the map, but I have reproduced them here as well, for your convenience.)
Do you live somewhere? Do you want me to come to that place and read out loud and/or write my name in some books?
I am attempting to gauge where people will show up if I do, so if you would attend a Half Baked-related signing/reading/public stoning/miscellaneous event sometime after August 10th, please place yourself on the map.
Here’s how:
-I think you must be signed into Google, but once you are, click “Add to my maps” up above.
-Click “edit.”
-Do a search for your/nearby city.
-Click the pin icon, and drag it onto the map. Save.
IF you are a:
-Bookstore
-College/university writing/other things department
-NICU-having place
-Library
-Literary center, coffee shop, or baby goat hatchery
OR have connections at such, and believe you/they might be induced to host an event, please add to the map and include a brief description. (“The Page N’ Pet: bookstore/goat zoo run by my sister. Has event budget, free parking.”) Then send me an email at alexaflotsamATgmail.com.
I turned in my manuscript for the final time on Monday. By the time I sank into bed that night I had been up for 41 hours, but I didn’t care. I was done. Donedonedonedonedone.
Not that there isn’t plenty I’d still like to fix, some of which I probably will (on first pass pages), but the advance copies being printed for BOOK EXPO! and for reviewers will have my manuscript as it stands. That this inspires only standard nausea and fleeting disappointment—rather than the conviction that no choice remains but to change my name and start a new life in the lesser Antilles—is an immense relief.
The first thing I did on The Day After was fingerpaint. Well, technically I merely assisted, but still, it was glorious. I’d never had the chance before: instead, Simone painted with the nanny, and I’d emerge from my office/hovel to look wistfully at them for a minute before returning to my work.
Now though, weekends have meaning again, and I can work without feeling I am neglecting my baby and build Duplo towers without feeling I am neglecting my work, unless it is between 9:00 a.m. and 4:00 p.m. on one of the three days a week I have designated for toil. I’m even going to start leaving the house, from time to time. Because I can. Because I’m DONE.
I haven’t known what to post because just typing the news didn’t seem like enough, but I couldn’t think of any alternatives. Maybe an entry that explodes in riotous, celebratory horns and noisemakers and spurts of real confetti when you open my page? Is there html for that? < !>? < omfg>? < koolandthegang>?
The best I can do is a video of Simone dancing. Note the modified Robot she does to Ring My Bell. You can’t teach that kind of awesome, friends.
Well, here it is, a very sneaky peek of what will (allegedly) be in bookstores come August.
I didn’t know this before I entered the wild and wonderful world of book publishing, but authors rarely have any control over their covers. I had “right of consultation,” which was a big deal, and still meant that I could say “I hate that” and my publisher could respond with “too bad,” publishing the manuscript bound with an illustration of a high-heeled silhouette next to an incubator—martini in one hand, endotracheal tube in the other.
Some authors hate their covers, and while I know you are not supposed to judge a book by such things, it must be awful to see a dramatic disconnect between the work you have poured yourself into and the way it is presented to the world. I got very lucky: not only do I have a cover I love, but I have a cover that as soon as I saw it, made me think: Yes. There it is. My book.
It’s a rare thing. I am on what sports enthusiasts would call the “home stretch.” And when I get scared and confused and can’t remember what I am doing, I have a reminder:
#1.Though at 17 I could often be heard declaring Sleep for the Weak, at 30, all-nighters result in the (temporary, thank god) loss of what I estimate to be nearly 80 IQ points.
Par example:
I did not sleep Monday night. At all. I was up editing as the clock marked the passing of my deadline and the beginning of The Unnatural Time (Midnight), and still I typed, growing ever more unhinged, until about 10 in the morning yesterday. I hadn’t finished, but finally sent the file to my editor anyway: I had no choice, and besides had reached the point where I was so tired that I had the urge to cut whole scenes, just because I couldn’t bear to work on them—in fact, did we need that chapter, or the whole part about the baby? BURN IT ALL! I sent an email along with the manuscript, an email I will never reread, as I am pretty sure it contained the ramblings of a crazy person, a tired, sobbing crazy person with an IQ of 80.
(I need that thing that forces you to solve math problems before you can send email, except I am actually quite good at math even when my mental status is compromised, so maybe instead they should have one of those problems with a bunch of squiggles where you have to choose the next squiggle that is part of the pattern, the kind that involves spatial relations and turning things in your mind.)
I ought to have gone to sleep then, but I didn’t, which is why the following exchange occurred around 7:00 last night:
(In dim BEDROOM, ALEXA removes pants)
SCOTT: What’s that on your leg?
ALEXA: Where?
(ALEXA twists around to look, sees silver-dollar-sized BLACK SPOT on rear thigh.)
SCOTT(peering): Does it hurt? Oh—it looks like it might be ink. I can’t tell.
(ALEXA stumbles desperately from room to find better lighting, head craned backward toward BLACK SPOT all the way. SCOTT follows. In BATHROOM, SCOTT examines ALEXA who clenches fists and turns head away, eyes closed.)
ALEXA(shrill, fearfully): IS IT NECROSIS?
Necrosis. NECROSIS. Because that is the most likely explanation, surely. Maybe from sitting on my ass for six months.
(Scott is never, ever going to let me forget this, by the way.)
(It was an inkstain)
#2.Even if, once you arrive at the gorgeous Hotel Palomar in Philadelphia (for a planned weekend of medical curiosity museums and shopping and massages) YOU NEVER LEAVE THE HOTEL AGAIN, INSTEAD SPENDING THE ENTIRE TRIP SITTING ON YOUR BED WITH A LAPTOP, EDITING, you can still have a good time, if your best friend is there to help. You can even have a good time delivered, these days, in the form of lobster quesadillas and the incomparable Heather Barmore.
#3. Philadelphia has astoundingly tasty Thai food. Obviously, I discovered this before my arrival at and hermitage in the hotel, when I met with my lovely, lovely editor and publicist and accompanied them to lunch. It’s probably unhealthy, how often I have thought of that lunch over the past few days.
#4. My publishing company believes in my book, fervently. I kind of love them for that. I had a strong urge to kiss the marketing director.
#5. I miss cities. I relished the brief time I spent out and about in Philadelphia, (Ahem. That would be…the walk from my publisher’s office to my hotel). It was raining, but I loved it still. I am never afraid, walking in a city, even if I have never been there before. There is so much to look at, and so many people, and you are never really lost, because there is always someone to ask for directions. And did you know you that from 30th street station in Philly you can be in NYC in an hour and a half by train? And that I made the acquaintance of a little town that is so improbably charming I am seriously considering moving there, and THAT town is only 20 minutes from Philadelphia, also by train? Oh, how I love trains.
#6. I love having a real best friend. I love having friends. I think I even have more than one. Some people really seem to like me, I think. Or so they say.
#7. When it is or isn’t “over” has nothing to do with the vocalizations of a zaftig female. It is not over when the schedule says it will be. It is not over when you turn in the manuscript, or on the deadline for incorporating your own and the editor’s changes. It’s not over when the book goes to the copyeditor, or when you receive the copyeditor’s edits, or when you accept/reject them. It’s not OVER, motherfucker, until you must relinquish your baby to design at last (next Monday!), so that they can get started on the real, live advance reader’s copies for BEA.
#8. I AM GOING TO BEA. THE BOOK EXPO. MY BOOK WILL BE THERE, BEING EXPO’D! AS WILL I! It is in New York, in May. I have dreamed of attending for ages, because oh, all the books! Does it make me a nerd if I have a BEA poster above my bed?
So, I am loving formspring. I’m deep in editing until the end of this week, and answering a question or two is a refreshing break from work that doesn’t require a large chunk of time, which means I get to talk to you even when I can’t post. I am likely to remain frazzled until mid-month, and so suspect I will be using formspring a lot. The only problem I’ve found is a tendency to start rambling and realize “hey, this should be a blog post,” and then that I don’t have time for that, and I end up cutting and pasting the answer into a document I’ve started called “Get to the goddamn POINT, already” so that I can finish it later. (Actually that’s a lie: the document is called “Untitled 2,” but it works better the other way).
Speaking of points and not getting to them, the point of this post was supposed to be Simone, as the most frequently asked question by far was what she’s been up to. Boy, you people love that baby. I shudder to think what would happen were the two of us to run for Class President.
I can’t really blame you, because she is particularly delightful at the moment. One of the worst things about not having posted for so long is that I have no record of Simone during that time, and my memory is not what it used to be. So here we go: Simone at almost-25-months.
She is extremely talkative, like unusually-extroverted-publicist-on-cocaine talkative. It isn’t always possible to understand what she’s SAYING, mind, but she’s always saying (or yelling) something. Much of it is also quite witty, at least according to her. She holds long telephone conversations, walking back and forth in the hallway holding the receiver to her ear, saying “Hi. Hi. No. No no NOOO! HAHAHAHAHA! GoGO! Byee!” She seems to be very popular, though her relationships can be volatile: some calls are furrowed-brow serious; some merit shouting. I don’t know where she meets these people.
I got her a set of miniature enamel pots and pans for her birthday, and I have never seen her so taken with anything. Her interest in cooking is a mystery, as she hasn’t seen me do it in months. Almost as mysterious is her interest in eating/feeding others what she makes, as real food could not possibly interest her less.
She carries things around, as many as she can manage, occasionally running out of hands and resorting to holding an object in her mouth, like a dog. Incidentally, Simone’s obsessed with dogs, and every time the (actual) phone rings, is certain it is my mother’s youngest dog, calling to talk to her.
“Shau?” she asks, crowding close (the dog’s name is Scout), “Dog? Woofwoof?”
I tell her that no, actually, the caller is human, and anyway didn’t call to talk to HER, but she is never convinced, and wedges her face against mine to get at the speaker: “Hellooo?”
But back to carrying things. Usually she has at least one pot, a cup or two, a toy ladle, her baby and a pen or plastic spoon. Sometimes she adds a baby wipe, in case she feels the urge to clean, as one so often does (no). She cleans by rubbing said wipe along a cat or bookshelf, and I haven’t the faintest idea where she learned such behavior, though I encourage it whenever I can. When carrying her customary assortment she will drop something every once in a while, and there is quite a production involved in picking it up again without relinquishing her hold on the other pieces in her collection.
The doll I gave her at Christmas is still the favorite, though she has others as well—all told we have Hair Baby (the aforementioned), Tiny Baby (unfortunate backward-limbed mini-doll), Soft Baby (Aka Ursli, present from her Nani), and Cankle (Cabbage Patch Kid with one broken ankle-thread). They are named only for my own convenience, and as far as I know Simone has neglected to give them names herself. I will admit that her babies are all very well fed, unlike my corporeal, living child.
Simone is about 24 pounds, at most, and stands maybe twice the height of a dictionary, or at least that’s what I estimate from where I am sitting. She’s tiny, but an excellent dancer, and nearly lost her wee mind for a NWA song the other day. The very best thing in the world is when she sprawls next to me in bed at night, and after running through her repertoire of sounds, tells me she is happy.
“Happy!” she says and signs, “Happy! Happy! Haaa!ppyy!”
I am not sure whether it’s that my brain has been frizzled into a gray matter lardon or what, but I have been trying to post something here since Monday and failing, again and again.
Maybe it’s because I want to be able to write a straightforward FIN! HOORAY! DEADLINE VANQUISHED! sort of entry, but I am just not feeling it yet, and suspect I won’t be for another week, when the editing is complete. Right now I’m still terrified by the state of my manuscript, and fighting the urge to don a trenchcoat, scarf, and sunglasses before leaving the country entirely, leaving a trail of sweat and vomit in my wake. After I pressed ‘send’ Monday night, I surprised myself by bursting into tears. Some of that was probably just my emotional spit valve, releasing the stress that had been building for six months (and isn’t THAT a lovely metaphor!) but much of it was plain old sorrow that my book wasn’t ready and fear that it won’t be in time and that the best part about it will be the (oh so lovely) cover. And look at that, I’ve mentioned four distinct bodily fluids in one paragraph.
I shall defer my FIN! HOORAY! DEADLINE VANQUISHED! celebration for another day, but I do have something else to celebrate instead. Let’s call this the OMFG celebration, as it concerns the news that landed in my inbox this morning, the news that my book is officially available for pre-order on Amazon. Look over in the sidebar, if you don’t believe me (you have to look waaay down, because for some reason my sidebar is getting uppity with me when I try to edit it). My book has an ISBN and everything, and seeing the title in type other than my own is enough to make me believe that this will happen, my editing will be finished and my book will be a physical thing, with that delicious, familiar, book-y smell.
(Do they make air-freshener in New (or Old!) Book Smell? If not, they should. Someone get on that).
The best part of all is that after the book’s title on the Amazon page is my name, and after that, in parentheses, it says Author.
Hand to god, you guys. AUTHOR.
THIS is enough to make me believe in just about anything. Unicorns, a satisfactory outcome to the health care debacle, a race of helpful badgers inhabiting dressing rooms in order to offer scrupulously honest opinions upon your ass in those jeans: anything is possible. Butterfly in the skyyy, I can fly twice as hiiigh—I’ve got the world on a string, and it pulled me deliriously back here to tell you about it.
While I was busy working I kept this insane notebook full of things For After. Things to do, things to write about, pages and pages of notes and lists and reminders. Now, alas, I don’t know where to start, and am so sick of myself after six months of memoir-writing that I can’t imagine my thoughts about Aaron Sorkin’s weird Platonic fixation on male friendship, or my latest beauty discoveries, or my ANYTHING, being of the slightest interest to anyone.
A few months ago I signed up for formspring, and then realized that if I didn’t have time to wash my hair I certainly didn’t need another online writing venue, but now I think it will be a perfect way to ease back into this blogging thing after my long absence. You can ask me any question you like, and I will either answer on formspring or write about it here and leave a link to the post. Here is my formspring page.
(I reserve the right against self-incrimination, though I am unlikely to actually exercise said right.)
Those of you who follow me on Twitter know that we had a spot of excitement this past weekend, including a baby with a fever of 107, an ambulance ride, and a febrile seizure. It was…well. I think it was the most afraid I have ever been, including all 96 days in the NICU. Apparently these things happen, and it was just a small, fierce virus, but if some Friday you are thinking to yourself “gee, wouldn’t it be funny if my two-year old had an absence seizure while her brain began to poach?” the answer is NO. Also, if you are a NICU mother who stole retained one small oxygen tank (Just in case! You never know!) after the home medical company retrieved the rest, and if your husband discovers this a few months later and makes you return it, and if your baby then refrains from breathing after having a seizure, you should feel free to take this to mean that if the worst had happened, said husband would have been liable for all funeral expenses.
And that is all I will say about that, because revisiting that night, and the way I screamed to Scott to call an ambulance and pressed frozen sweet potato fries to my baby’s back as I thought I might very well be watching her die—is not something I can do, right now. You should know, by the way, that JUST BEFORE that happened I had started a post wondering what unpleasantness January had in store for me THIS year. Ha HA! Next year I am spending the month in a bunker.
So, let’s move on. I have another horrifying story to tell you, one I would be far too ashamed of myself to share, if I had any dignity left at all. Luckily (?) for you, I do not.
It was a dark and stormy night—or dark, anyway—when something occurred that caused me to close my laptop earlier than usual, with a terrified snap. Something that made it suddenly, strikingly clear that I was a danger to myself and others. Myself, because it was my own beloved book I was writing, and others, because they might, one day, have to read it.
What happened, you ask?
USEN.
Does that look like a word, to you?
(Hint: IT SHOULDN’T.)
I’d been typing merrily—or at least persistently—along, and when I paused to look over my last few paragraphs, I noticed that spell-check had a problem with one of my words. “Usen,” to be specific.
I reread the sentence. And again. Huh. Maybe it was some sort of glitch? I erased the word and retyped it, then reran spell check manually. Still, the accusing red squiggle remained.
I was annoyed. “Usen,” as I well knew, was the past participle of “to use.” For instance, in the past perfect: “She’d usen that verb many times in the past.” Or maybe with an auxiliary verb in the passive voice: “Handkerchiefs were usen for staunching the flow of exhausted tears.”
Typing “usen” in the first place was bad. Not noticing anything amiss until spell-check pointed it out was worse. But worst of all was that EVEN AFTER SPELL-CHECK SUGGESTED I REPLACE “USEN” WITH “USED,” I was unconvinced.
Friends, I Googled it. I Googled “usen,” determined to find evidence that it was an actual word. It was only then, as I scrolled through the results, that I realized what should have been obvious: I had been writing for far, far too long that day.
I wouldn’t have thought anything short of head injury could cause me to forget how to conjugate regular English verbs. I remembered past participles, even while insisting that “usen” was among them. I have been conjugating the verb “to use” for nearly 30 years, and I think I do a satisfactory job of it. In fact, when telling this story to my mother, I used (SEE? THERE!) that particular verb several times—correctly.
(My poor mother, by the way. You should have seen her face. The horror. The concern. The fear!
“Usen?” she kept asking, incredulous.
“Usen,” I whispered, hanging my head. I had broughten shame upon our family.)
In addition to being horrifying, I think this story is an excellent illustration of just how hard I have been working, hard enough to slowly liquefy vital parts of my gray matter, the parts where my grammar were stored. So you will excuse me if I am still more absent than I would like to be, here. (USEN. USEN!)
I’d planned to attend the Mom 2.0 conference in Houston next month, as it fell fortuitously on the weekend after my manuscript was due. Alas, I discovered that the editing part of my book schedule is as XXXTREME as the writing portion, the entirety to be completed within a harrowingly slight window. Any changes I want to make must be complete by the 22nd of February, and then the copyeditor and editor work in a flurry, and I implement their changes before the first week of March, when my manuscript is sent away to the design department to be tarted up into a book. My publication date is so near (August 10th! Unless you are at BlogHer! In which case you may buy a copy DAYS in advance!), that the pages read by reviewers and any Fancy Persons I wish to ask for blurbs will be only exactly as polished as they are when I relinquish them to design. Later I will make corrections to the typeset version, but there you have it: FIN.
For some reason, this news threw my spleen into disarray.
It’s silly, because it’s not as if I’d planned to turn in a BAD manuscript on my deadline, but somehow I thought there would be all this time afterward, for editing or changing my mind about things should I wake covered in a cold sweat, convinced that Chapter Fifteen ought properly to be Chapter Four. I have a week after my original deadline of the 15th to edit, but still, knowing that what I turn in on the 22nd may not be terribly different from what ends up on someone’s SHELF, next to real authors—James Thurber, maybe, or sandwiched between Ian Frazier and Joan Didion, the two of them drawing their covers subtly away from mine in distaste—means I’m not going anywhere next month. (Related: anybody want to buy my non-refundable Mom 2.0 early-bird registration pass?)
This weekend, I am taking my Crazy Person’s Bulletin Board to a sort of hippie Wellness Retreat Compound Center Spa Inn, where I shall lock myself in my room to work, emerging only for the occasional calming dip in the therapy pool, or to have my third eye massaged. It’s a vital and luxurious expanse of uninterrupted time, and if I DO lose my mind as I hurtle down the literary homestretch, at least I will already be at what amounts to a sanitarium, eliminating the need for padded transport.
It is odd to know that in less than six weeks, the task that has consumed the last six months of my life will be complete. Though the only reward I require is a book that doesn’t make my copy of The Fran Lebowitz Reader curl its pages in disgust, I have scheduled a small vacation to celebrate. I will be visiting Philadelphia, where I have never been, with one of my very best friends—whom I have technically never met, lengthy daily telephone conversations notwithstanding. I’ll see my editor, and plan to shuffle gratefully into her chamber to anoint her feet with sacred oils. Afterwards I’m off to peruse a nearby museum of medical curiosities, so it is virtually guaranteed to be a successful trip.
You’ll hear from me before that, though. Simone’s birthday (TWO??) is on the 8th, and naturally I’ll want to do some sort of victory lap here when I turn in my manuscript, and again after I finish incorporating the editorial changes and send my baby on its way. I will probably cry a little, remembering all the good times we had, my book and I, wrestling playfully with one another over tense and prodding newborn metaphors forward on their wobbly legs.
But THEN I will finally get back to business, the good olde fashioned business of boring you with discussions of toilet training, and what my Jersey Shore nickname would be (“The Tacit Premise”), and my newfound obsession with polygamy. So wait for me, please, like I’m in prison and you’re unexpectedly carrying my child. I think of you often.
Two years ago today, I left work around noon. I didn’t know it, but it was my last day. I drove to my doctor’s office and chatted with the nurse while she slid an ultrasound transducer along the jutting camel’s hump of my belly. Then there was the doctor: You can see here, he said, pointing, the fetus is demised.
Two years ago today, I called Scott and told him to come, because one of the babies had died. After I hung up I realized I hadn’t said which.
It has been two years since we lost Ames—or, more accurately, since we discovered that he had slipped away from us a few days before, without our notice. Maybe while I was eating or watching television or typing, like I am now, on this two-years-later morning. A few minutes ago I opened my feed reader and, through Mel’sLost and Found, discovered that a woman named Eve went to an appointment, like mine, and lost a little boy, like Ames. His name was William.
Her daughter, Abigail, is still swimming inside of her, and oh do I wish I did not know exactly how that feels. Like standing at the edge of a cliff eroded by hard rains. Blindfolded. In a windstorm. After a vertigo-inducing spin.
I don’t know Eve. But now I keep composing and deleting letters to her in my head.
I can’t promise that her daughter will be safe. She is two weeks further along than I was, past the hallowed mark of viability, but anyone who has been in a NICU knows this is no guarantee.
I can’t reassure her that despite what she wrote in her entry, she WILL be able to hold her son, and have his footprints taken. Those are Ames’ prints at the top of this post, but who knows what euphemistic changes would have occurred if Simone stayed put until the end?
I am uselessly lacking in clairvoyance.
I can tell her that it happened to me. That it was a terrible time, but I survived it, as people do, whether they want to or not. I can tell her that whatever she feels now is just what she should be feeling, and the same goes for tomorrow, and two years from then. It’s okay for her to be grief-stricken over William during her daughter’s triumphs, and it is also okay for her not to be. It’s okay for her to alternate between the two. Celebration isn’t a betrayal of grief, and grief isn’t a betrayal of joy.
Birth and death don’t belong all bundled up together in such a way, and however you sort it all out is your own business, to be done in your own way, in your own time.
There is no script for this, which will make people uncomfortable, but it is not your job to make people comfortable.
The ones who matter will be there in whatever way you need them to be, to laugh or cry or hope or despair, or to do all at once. And I am here too, if you need me. I am a font of anecdotal evidence and obsessively researched statistical information.
Kind people of the Internet, you held me up during my Dark Time. Please, if you can, stop by and link some virtual arms around Eve, today. It means more than you think.
The holidays were lovely, here. I mean, it doesn’t get much better than a baby in fake hair, does it?
I had Christmas Eve pasta at my brother’s/mother’s house, alternately gazing up at the giant tree festooned with familiar ornaments and watching my daughter discover our old wind-up toys beneath the branches. Simone developed a bizarre obsession with Ray Charles, and worked on her dancing (adding a slow, deliberate twirl.)
Having remembered a tearful and unattractively petulant pre-Christmas screed about how there wasn’t ANYTHING I wanted except more time in the day and a fluffy, welcoming king-sized bed (neither of which I could HAVE, woe unto ME), my mother surprised me with a certificate for the latter. I had a sort of shopping-related seizure at IKEA yesterday, wherein I bought not only the bed and a mattress and bedding but also a dresser and laundry hampers and bookcases to replace our VERY child-unfriendly tottering shelves, all despite the fact that our current furniture is still…here. This will presumably be worked out this weekend by fate, my husband, myself, and Craigslist. I’ve undertaken a massive apartment overhaul, which, while ill-timed, makes me happy. Being under crushing quantities of stress is more difficult when the place where you are supposed to relax is not relaxing. (I’ll post some before and after pictures, once there is an after.)
I wrote through the holidays, while it snowed and snowed. Though my overstimulated toddler required much tiresome wrangling at the family festivities, Schmutzli spared her a beating. I even gave her some presents, most notably a chair and a doll.
Finding the doll was quite an adventure. Simone is in an affectionate, doll/animal/anything-with-a-face -loving phase, and I wanted to get her something nicer than the tiny “baby” from Target that she carries about, the one with TWO LEFT ARMS, poor unfortunate thing. I thought a doll with hair might appeal to her follicular obsession, and also, yes, give her hair to pull at night besides my own. I like Corolle dolls quite a lot: they are well-made, BPA-free, machine-washable, come in many sizes, and have expressions that are neither creepy nor inappropriately blow-up-doll-esque (I’m looking at YOU, Baby Alive). But have you noticed how many baby dolls have blonde hair and blue eyes?
I have nothing against blonde hair and blue eyes—I have both, myself. But, for whatever reason, it seemed important to me that Simone have a doll that looked like HER, especially given the seeming omnipresence of blue-eyed toys. I know, I know: it’s silly, and even Simone had blue eyes when she was a baby, as most light-skinned newborns do. If I hadn’t been looking at BABY dolls, with hair, there would have been a greater variety, instead of the current triumvirate of Blonde/Blue Eyed Paleface Doll, Black Doll, and Asian Doll. Options were also limited because I wanted the doll to be small enough for her to manage, and thought short hair would be best, to reduce the odds of it becoming a vast synthetic dreadlock. I finally managed to find a discontinued model that was at least Simone-esque (brown eyes, where hers are olive; red hair, where hers is indeterminately colored), though I was given the impression that it is “supposed” to be a boy.
Simone was pleased with my selection. She kisses her baby, and picks at its eyes with affection.
In fact, Simone was delighted by everything this holiday season—from Duplos to her discovery of apples—the one fly in her ointment being the glasses she refuses to wear. She has an eye appointment next week, so let’s hope it shows that her reluctance is due to improving eyesight rather than rapidly escalating TWO-ness. Her birthday, after all, is next month.
I find it hard to believe that it has been a decade since 2000, but on the other hand, it seems impossible that I fit so much—my best of times, my worst of times—into only ten slim years. In January of 2000, I was a 20-year-old virgin, home from my first semester of college. I was very certain (and very, very wrong) about what lay ahead for me. It’s so startling when things don’t go at all how you’d planned, and yet manage to turn out better than you’d expected.
I hope you ALL had a happy start to your new year, and that only the very best things follow you through it.
Iowa City, IA @ Prairie Lights Bookstore 09 Aug 2010 19:00
St. Paul, MN @ Common Good Books 11 Aug 2010 19:30
Chicago, IL @ Women and Children First Books 12 Aug 2010 19:30
San Francisco, CA @ Book Passage 17 Aug 2010 18:00
Portland, OR @ Annie Bloom's Books 18 Aug 2010 19:30
Seattle, WA @ University Bookstore 19 Aug 2010 19:00
I Like It
•Edmund Fallot Tarragon Mustard My mother first brought this to me from a trip to Burgundy, and I rationed it out like some precious, rare natural resource. Now I find they carry it at a cheese shop in town! Joy! Mustard for everyone! Add a little when deglazing a pan and pour the pan sauce over fish, chicken, petit filet...mmmm.
•Peonies My favorite flower. Alas, the cats always bother fresh flowers, so I never bother with them anymore. WHY CAN'T I HAVE NICE THINGS, CATS?
