Buddhist in the Bible Belt

Talk Thursday: The Buffet Rule

2012-01-26T16:21:00.001-08:00

Ah, you say. At last, Jen is going to stop fooling around and do something serious. She's going to talk business, high finance, politics. Explain how the middle class tax rates are higher than the tax rates on millionaires and how capital gains taxes are largely to blame. How instituting regressive taxes now, in the middle of a recession, will only cause a greater drag on the economy and cause more people to fall into poverty while causing millionaires to remain largely unaffected. Yep, that's what I have in mind, all right. Have a seat on the La-Z-Boy, pop open a bottle of Chateaubriand and pour it into your Waterford crystal glassware, because I--

HA HA HA HA HA!!! I knew I wouldn't make it through that paragraph with a straight face. I'm amazed I got as far as I did. No, people, I'm here to talk about food. The Buffet rule. Possibly the most important rule ever instituted in the life of Jen. The Rule is, or was, very simple: Stay the hell away from buffets. They're dangerous. Forget regressive taxes, we're talking regressive eating. Because, honestly, does anybody ever go to a buffet with a plan to have a nice simple meal and hang out with friends? No. You go to a buffet to chow down. To eat until it's coming out your ears, and then to stuff it back into your ears. If you don't knock down at least two thousand calories, you're going to have to stop at an Outback Steakhouse afterward and eat an entire Bloomin' Onion just to keep the universe from falling out of balance. It's all about the food, and as much of the food as you can possibly manage.

The first year I was in OA, I wouldn't have gone within a hundred yards of a buffet. I was having enough trouble with this whole idea of just eating enough food to, you know, live and be healthy, rather than enough food to feed India for a year. Going to a place with scads of food, lots of it being stuff I wasn't supposed to eat anymore (like a dessert table--who in hell needs an entire dessert table?) was just Right Out. Restaurants were trouble enough.

But then something happened where I had a Dr. House kind of epiphany. Our friends T and T wanted to go to the Golden Corral for dinner. (I dunno if you've ever been to a Golden Corral, but it's the buffet to end all buffets, bested only by practically every other buffet on the planet. Let's just say that beauty queens and supermodels do not eat at Golden Corral. Once in a while you might see a decent-looking dude, but he's usually there with his mom.) Anyway, I tried to talk them into the nice Mexican place down the street, but they were pretty dead set on Golden Corral. I think it was shrimp night, or something.

So I pulled up in my car and sat there for a minute. I couldn't believe I was going to walk into a Golden Corral, and I likewise couldn't believe I was going to walk into a Golden Corral and not eat two or three of everything on the dessert table. (Addicted to sugar, remember?) So I sat there, and I fretted, and then I started to have a conversation with myself as though both of us were rational adults. "Jen," I said to myself, "you live in America, in our time. There are going to be buffets. Someday you're going to be at a wedding or a business meeting or something, and there's going to be a buffet lunch or dinner, and you're not going to be able to avoid it, so you might as well start learning how to handle them, like, for example, now." And I thought about Buddha and the Middle Way, neither grabbing for nor pushing away, and I thought, "I would like to go into this restaurant, have a single plate of food, and enjoy the company of my friends."

And I'll be goddamned if that wasn't exactly what happened.

Since then I have been to other buffets. In fact, I went to a breakfast buffet with Joan last Sunday (took my own cute little container of sugar-free fake maple syrup so I could have pancakes). And while all of them have been challenging in one way or another, I've never been as intimidated by any of them as I was by that first Golden Corral. My friend Kellum took me to lunch at Afrah once and when he saw it was a buffet, he stopped and said, "Hey, is this okay? We can go someplace else." And I was able to say, "Yeah, actually, I think I'll be fine." Which was huge. I mean, I've had this eating disorder since I was about four, people. I don't even really have childhood memories that don't in some way involve food. And I'm a whole long way from cured, but that part of it--the buffet part--is worlds better.

Which, you gotta admit, is a lot cooler than high finance and tax rates. At least, I think so.

Talk Thursday: Dance in the Dark

2012-01-19T04:08:00.001-08:00

Okay, that's really last week's topic, but I don't see this week's yet and I have exactly twenty minutes and another cup of coffee to churn out a blog post. Let's hear it for deadlines. People, I am pleased to report that the Web site I was managing for a certain nonprofit has been taken out of my hands, by popular vote, and placed into the hands of another, equally competent (probably more competent) person. My stint is done. It ain't my problem no more. Well, actually, it is in that I've got to get this new person the software and the passwords and everything, and show her How It All Works (oops, I said her--well, that narrows it down to 51% of the human race) but in a few weeks I can Wash My Hands of the Whole Thing. I have never in my life been so happy to hand over a task. Happy dance! (In the dark, where no one can see me and think I might be, you know, ungrateful to have had this Service Opportunity or something.)

You see, I have this disease, which I believe is hereditary. I call it Civic Responsibility Syndrome. My dad has it, too, and I think my mom and sister have a touch of it also. It's like this: If I join an organization, the odds are very good that within a year, I'll end up being President. Not by choice or anything; the job just tends to open up, and I just happen to be standing there, and and and. Which was why, when the opportunity arose, I volunteered to take over the Web site. (Western accent, quoting Seth Bullock from Deadwood: "I volunteered to be the building inspector because I didn't want to be the god-damned sheriff!") Yep, that probably says it all right there. If you're in charge of one thing, then you can't be asked to be in charge of the whole thing. And as they say (well, Alison Bechdel said it, anyway), "She who controls the details, controls the organization."

So. I am no longer in charge of the Web site. This is a good thing. Now, I've got to find some way to not be President, or anything else for that matter. This organization is awesome, but I'm fine with just being a rank-and-file for a while. Maybe forever. Because, well, people, I am having a hard time over here.

Yeah, it could just be one of those mood swings. Or it could be encroaching menopause (I've got some of the symptoms, and yes, I know I'm only forty-two.) But, seriously, things are not going well. I'm not getting to the pool on time, and consequently spending less time swimming once I finally show up. I've (ahem) gained ten pounds since Halloween. I've been on and off sugar, which messes with my meds and sends my brain into the outer stratosphere. This last week I've had an ongoing battle with cake frosting, which is the Jen equivalent of heroin (minus the projectile vomiting). I feel like aliens have possessed my body and are plainly out to kill me. All I have to do is start drinking again and--

No, that would be bad. That would be very very bad. You think sugar messes with my meds...

The trouble is, try explaining to anybody that you're addicted to sugar. They look at you like you're crazy. (Hi.) I mean, you need sugar to live. Everything you eat is eventually broken down into simple sugars. True fact, but large quantities of refined sugar still hit my system like--well, more like cocaine than heroin really, but cocaine addiction really doesn't convey the same sort of picture that heroin addiction does. Lack of needles, maybe. And no, just for the record, I haven't tried either one. Just going on What I've Been Told here. Given my lack of funds (my parents are rich; I am a salaryman, or salarywoman, whatever) and my tendency to abuse any substance available until it's gone, I think that's probably Just As Well.

So, anyway, I don't know what to do about this. Except what I've been doing; keep going to meetings, keep working the Twelve Steps, keep emailing my sponsor, blah blah blah etc. And stay out of the kitchen at work to the extent possible. I wish they'd move the ice machine closer to the door.

Talk Thursday: Meditating in Traffic

2012-01-12T16:30:00.000-08:00

No, this isn't an approved Talk Thursday topic. The topic-o-meter is stuck again. Besides, who knows if I'd be able to crank out a genuine Talk Thursday column in the slightly less than thirty minutes I have here at Afrah tonight. Not my fault. Talk to the Dallas drivers, whose collective insanity made both the Tollway and the 75 virtually impassable this evening. One was at a dead stop, so I tried the other, which was at a slow crawl. Better than a dead stop, you say? Well, you'd say wrong. Apparently I annoyed the guy behind me, an oilman type driving a BMW, because he honked at me. As he pulled around me and roared into the other lane, I experienced a momentary thrill because he had to immediately slam on his brakes. That lane wasn't moving either. Ha, I thought. Serves you right, jerk. And immediately felt bad for being un-Buddhist-y. I should, of course, have wished him every happiness and a safe journey.

You know what I'm talking about. If you're a Christian, you've probably said or done or thought something less than charitable to somebody or about somebody and immediately felt guilty because that wasn't very Christian of you. Jesus would definitely not approve, in other words. Or Buddha, in my case. (Well, Jesus and Buddha. They would have gotten along.) But darn it all, we can't be saints 24/7. Sometimes we return to our inner cave man, and when that happens, we can just be mean-spirited little weasels.*

This sort of thing seems to happen quite a lot in traffic. I haven't exactly researched this, but I think it's a combination of being in a car, which feels about as familiar as being in your living room, and being terrified out of all reason. As Gary Numan put it, here in my car I feel safest of all. I can lock all my doors. It's the only way to live. You're anonymous, merely a shell of paint and metal zooming down the freeway. Or crawling down it, more to the point. Now add in the extreme terror (Watch! BMW guy pulling around Jen at great speed! See! Some idiot on a motorcycle popping a wheelie at 65 mph! Thrill! To the unrivaled stupidity of the guy in the pickup dragging a metal cart that's lost its wheels and is spraying sparks all over the freeway!) and it's only a matter of time before you get pissed off. As soon as the panic starts to fade, the angry rushes in. I'm not sure why. Maybe it's how-dare-you-scare-me. Maybe it's more like I've-been-made-a-fool-of. I'm not sure, but it definitely happens to me. Scared to pissed in 4 seconds.

Which is why, when they teach driver's ed in high school, they should teach meditating in traffic.

Not traditional meditation, where you sit with your eyes closed and your legs crossed. That'd be a recipe for disaster (though in Dallas, one might not even notice the difference). A kind of meditation that's even easier. As you drive, you take a breath and you let it out. You take another breath and you let it out. You don't take your eyes off the road, and you don't take your hands off the wheel. You just breathe, and you watch the traffic, and as long as your attention is taken up with traffic, and breathing, there's not enough room left to get scared, or pissed off. And if you start getting scared or pissed off, you take an extra long, extra deep breath and let it out slowly.

I do this. Practically always, when I'm driving, and I've been working on doing it when I'm just, you know, walking. At some point along the line, I stopped yelling at other drivers. Just stopped, after doing it from the time I got my license. One of these days, maybe I'll stop having un-Buddhist-y thoughts about other drivers, too. Or at least remember to think something nice about them when I catch myself doing it.

*Apologies to Zev and Scooby. I realize that real weasels are not mean-spirited.

Sunday Morning, 10 A.M., Sky Harbor Airport.

2012-01-08T09:26:00.000-08:00

The day has been a smashing success so far. I haven't been killed, gotten lost, or been otherwise inconvenienced. Besides stupidly walking through security with a bottle of water in my backpack (can we say major oops? I'm lucky I wasn't strip searched) my trip through the airport has been uneventful. Somebody who works for American Airlines has explained to me how I got a first-class upgrade; it's a perfect storm of empty first class seats, frequent flier miles, who checks in first, and whether or not they're willing to part with a few bucks. And now I'm sitting outside a bar -- not open on account of it's Sunday and before noon --and writing this, while munching on a breakfast burrito the size of my head and some little fried potato thingys that taste primarily of salt. And sipping another bottle of water. And hoping to God that the woman behind me in the check-in line with the yappy Papillon is not on my flight.

But never mind all that. How did the speech go, you ask? Uh, surprisingly good. In fact we might even say shockingly good.

As I believe I mentioned, I had no idea what I was going to say. My sister tried to help me out. She wrote us notes about various time periods in my mom's life, certain facts that were interesting and pertinent, funny stories and so on. But I think what did the most good was when I broke out of the speech notes and said something like, "My mom likes things to run smoothly and be well-organized. She likes everything to have a plan. She likes everyone to get along. And then, she gave birth to me. I think this was a grand cosmic joke on someone's part. But on the other hand, maybe it was a test. Can she continue to have everything run smoothly and be well-organized while she's raising me? Possibly the most challenging child in the universe to raise, apart from all the ones that end up in jail? And I think she did a fine job. Rose to the occasion. Never shrank from a challenge."

At which point my sister grabbed the microphone back out of my hands (it was, to be honest, probably time) and tried to say something about how much it meant to her to have a mom that raised her to be an independent young woman. Tried to say it. She burst into tears instead. And that brought the house down.

We spent most of the rest of the party shaking hands with near total strangers and saying "Thank you" when they told us what a great job we'd done with this party. (My sister did most of it. I just showed up and helped decorate.) And was a good time had by all? Yes, I think so.

Anyway, my mom is 70. I'm 43 in June. My sister's 41 in March and yes, actually, both of us do a pretty good job of taking care of ourselves. And yes, that's mainly my mom's fault. She rocks. Happy birthday, Mom.

Talk Thursday (on Friday): The Challenge of Uncertainty

2012-01-06T09:33:00.000-08:00

Hi all. I'm in Phoenix, or rather Chandler, which is a town outside of Phoenix. The occasion is my mom's 70th birthday party, and I just found out about half an hour ago that I'll be giving a speech. You know, one of those tap-on-the-glasses things where you stand up at the table and address the gathered company and try really hard to say something funny without embarrassing hell out of the guest of honor. This is hard enough to do at a wedding, where everybody's already drunk and won't be remembering what you have to say anyway. I get to do it at a birthday party, and who knows what sort of substances will be in play. My mom grew up in the 60s, after all.

So you might say I'm powerfully uncertain about what I'm going to say. In fact, you might say I haven't a single effing clue what I'm going to say. I will probably make it up as I go along, at which, actually, I am pretty good. If it weren't for extemporaneous speaking I'd probably not be alive right now (though any number of fiascoes, like the one in Sweden, might not have happened, if one must look at the minus side).

I am a creature of routine. I get up, do my fifteen minutes on the meditation cushion, fire up my laptop, cruise the headlines on CNN and MSNBC. Then I get into Word, write a little, maybe send a query letter or two or three, then power down and head off to work. Depending on what day it is, I go to the pool first. On the alternate days I'm found at the gym on my lunch hour. And I find it very soothing to know in advance where I'm going to be at just about any given hour of any weekday. Then the weekend shows up and all bets are off.

Most people like this sort of thing. The uncertainty of weekends is what makes them fun. Maybe they'll go to the lake and do some wakeboarding (I have no idea what that is, but a colleague of mine has recently become a fanatic, and it sounds like fun). Maybe they'll take in a few football games. Maybe they'll do nothing more exciting than catching a nap on the sofa. It's the maybes that captivate. For me, it's the maybes that bring on Fang, the Velociraptor of Sudden Panic. (For more on the dinosaurs that live in my kitchen, see this post.) Unstructured time? What in hell am I going to do?

So I end up doing what lots of people end up doing: I make lists. I make chore lists, fun lists, household stuff lists. I cross stuff off and feel like I've accomplished things. I leave myself notes, too, often at work: "First thing -- motion to compel; second thing -- Chronology." The idea is to bring order to chaos, to have a nice set of expectations to fill up that unstructured time. To challenge the uncertainty and chase Fang just a little farther away.

I am, of course, putting a Band-Aid on a giant gushing split artery. There will never be certainty. Life throws me and everyone else Derek Holland-style curve balls all the damn time. Sometimes you have to jump on a plane and fly to Phoenix. And sometimes you just have to run out and catch a movie. Or make a speech at somebody's 70th birthday party. I could try hiding under the desk in this hotel room, but I imagine they'd find me eventually. So I'll do what I resolve to do every New Years: I'll wing it and see what happens. Watch this space.

"Now What?" She Said.

2012-01-03T16:08:00.000-08:00

There comes a time in the life cycle of every novel, when the person writing it has to stop and ask herself just what in the fuck she thinks she's doing. For me, this usually hits around page fifty, when I have to start making the Big Momentous Decisions. Not whether it's going to be a comedy or a tragedy--most of my stuff has elements of both--but all the other ones I've been dodging while I was flying by the seat of my pants and just, you know, making it up as I was going along. Such as: Where am I going with this? The Lifetime Movie Channel or The Horror Channel? Is it gonna be an Oprah's Book Club reject or would it be more properly rejected by Fangoria? I mean, okay, we've established that our protagonist wants to kill himself, and we sort of know why, but what are we going to do about that? Is he going to snap out of it? Be dragged out of it kicking and screaming, like George Bailey in It's a Wonderful Life? (See this post.) Or is he going to be plunged into some crazy adventure, in which he has to keep risking his life over and over again, and when it's over he suddenly realizes he doesn't want to die anymore?

Knowing me, it's almost certain to be that last thing. But then we've got to get to how. What kind of crazy adventure? We're in Central America, so the possibilities are pretty darn endless. Hey, how about he goes swinging through the jungle, being chased by monkeys and Shia LeBouf, looking for a crystal skull so he can keep it out of the hands of the Russians? Oh, wait, that's been done. Badly.

And let's not forget about those other tangled threads of plot that I've tossed out there. That's the problem with just writing fifty pages and not planning anything. You end up with these little story lines that have to go someplace or else you'll have people asking you for the rest of your life what was the deal with the aunt and the lawn chairs, anyway, and there's only so many times you can say, "Oh, uh, the editor cut that part." Yeah, right. As if editors have that kind of power. Half the time you're lucky if they even catch your spelling errors. (And that's assuming I even have one. You would assume wrong. No agent, no contract; hence no editor--and I spell the word "the" wrong all the darn time.)

On the other hand, sometimes half the fun of all this is solving all the problems. If there's any one particular skill I have that Looks Good on a Resume, it's that I like to solve large complicated problems. And I'm good at it. What is a lawsuit but a large complicated problem? Scheduling a deposition? Same thing. Motion to compel? Line 'em up, I'll knock 'em down. And yes, writing a book is the largest, most complicated problem of all. That's probably why I do it. That, and my brain needs a regular vacation from this thing called Life. I'm a Buddhist, so no drugs, alcohol or gambling (or sugar--working on that, working on that)--so it's either this or watch a lot of television, and trust me, there isn't a channel out there worthy of that much attention. Except maybe SyFy on Horror Night, and even then they tend to show a lot of movies with titles like "Sharktopus in 3D." I mean, eesh.

December was kind of peaceful around here. I just wrote, churning out that first fifty pages. The Query Letter Express more or less ground to a halt. All the November Novel folks start querying on December 1, and nobody in New York works in December anyway, so there's kind of no point. But now it's January and I've gotta not only start working on the letters again, I've got to sort out what I'm going to do with this large complicated problem that I've dropped in my own lap. I'm sure I'll think of something - I always do - but for the moment I sort of want to distract myself with a video game or another online legal course or maybe just another decaf Americano with sugar-free vanilla syrup.

Okay, okay. You don't need to nag. I'm getting back to work, already. If you see Shia LeBouf, tell him to swing this way. Er, on second thought, I don't need to know which way he swings.

Talk Thursday: Year's End

2011-12-29T16:20:00.001-08:00

Aaaaaand suddenly it's the 29th of December. I'm not sure how that happened. I'm pretty sure I haven't missed any days, but how so many of them squeezed into that little span of time between January 1 and now, I can't explain. It seems like the older I get, the more time slips into fast forward. Somebody told me once that it had to do with my relative perception of time; the longer you've been alive, the greater the frame of reference you have for which to view time, so a year seems to go by faster at 45 (when you've had 44 years to view how long a year is) than at 9 (when you've only had eight years). To which I say, hooey. Sounds like something Einstein came up with when he was tossing a ball around on a spaceship and trying to prove that it got to its destination before it left. There's no excuse for clumsy theories of relativity.

Anyway, I'm at Afrah, munching on a piece of pita bread and trying to figure out if I have any great rituals to mark the passing of another year. I know I used to, but that was back when A. I drank alcohol and B. I felt like it was necessary to actually go out on New Years Eve. That I can't remember what they were is, you know, just par for the course. I got home, that's the important thing. At some point I began staying home, which was just, you know, smart. The year that 1999 begat 2000, Joan and I drank an entire bottle of Asti Spumante and began firing a cap gun off the balcony of our overpriced San Diego apartment. Then Joan staggered back out onto the balcony and yelled, loud enough to be heard in Tijuana, "'Sokay, everybody! 'Sjust a cap gun!" because she was worried somebody might call the cops. So far as I know, no one did, though a scared little voice floated in and said, "Thank you," very faintly from another balcony. (Call the cops. Ha. In our fine Texas neighborhood, a whole gang of morons, no doubt led by my idiot neighbor, open fire on the sky right around midnight, and the cops don't even bother to call back.)

New Years Eve is the one time of year I kind of miss alcohol. Not enough to go back, but there's something kind of homey about lolling around on your couch, pleasantly drunk, playing "spot the facelift scars" on Dick Clark's head while the crystal ball (made in Ireland, by the way, at the Waterford Crystal Factory) descends over Times Square. This is, of course, assuming I can even stay awake until midnight; I'm pretty sure that last year I curled up in a blanket, rang in the New Year with Maine and Florida and promptly fell asleep. And that was without alcohol (six years sober, y'all.) I'm gettin' old, Zeke.

So, apart from falling asleep, I don't really have any rituals to ring in the New Year. Every year I plan to get the house clean before the ball drops, and every year that kind of doesn't happen. House blessing? Burning sage? Casting a couple of spells? Nah. Never happens. The guns go off, if we're still conscious we hide under the dining room table, and in the morning we're about the only two among our circle of friends who aren't hung over. Which is great, but no claim to fame, really. We're also the only two that probably didn't go anywhere.

Some friends at work who happen to be from Mexico were talking today about "the grapes." Apparently on New Years Eve in Mexico and other Latin American countries, you try to swallow one grape for every time the bell tolls at midnight, and each one begets a wish. (Allergic to grapes over here, so can't do that, but that's an easy way to get a dozen wishes, if you ask me.) There's also something you do with a suitcase, but I was a little unclear on that. Maybe you put grapes in it. In France they're fond of fireworks, in Russia everybody's supposed to be quiet for the last twelve seconds of the old year, and in Scotland your year's luck is determined by the first person to set foot in your house after midnight. (Ouch. I wonder what happens if the first person is a lost American tourist with a full bottle of whiskey, a set of plastic bagpipes and a really bad map of Edinburgh? I mean, that could herald the Apocalypse.)

What do Buddhists do for the New Year? Well, hey, if they're part of Brother ChiSing's gang, you have a New Years Purification Ceremony. (Buddhists are big on ceremonies.) If you're more Zen, you're probably just going to meditate quietly somewhere. And if you're me--well, yeah, you're probably hiding under the dining room table. Dang, but those guns are loud.

Happy New Year, everybody!

Boxing Day Deathday

2011-12-27T04:58:00.000-08:00

Hope you all had a fine Christmas/Hanukkah/Kwanzaa/Solstice. We did. There were presents (small ones, but presents all the same), a Christmas ham, twinkly lights on the tree and a whole lot of lazing around not doing much. Oh, and we went out for Chinese food with friends. That should become a trend. I ended up with a bunch of gel pens (whoo hoo!!), a new scarf, gloves, a cover for my nooky nook nook and some credit at Barnes & Noble, also for my nook. Joan ended up with a book about Doc Holliday, a gun that fires ping pong balls (don't ask), a cute li'l Irish wallet, the download of a Shakespeare play starring David Tennant and one of the other Doctor Who regulars, and a ticket to see Hal Holbrook in Mark Twain Tonight!. She's really excited about that last thing.

Then, the next day, things got weird. I don't know why I'm surprised, things always get weird around here sooner or later. Have you guys ever known somebody whose birthday was right around Christmas? And they always had people buying them gifts and saying, "Now, this half is for Christmas, and this half is for your birthday" and stuff like that? I did. I had a boyfriend (no, really, I did once; high school and early college) named Noah. His birthday was the day after Christmas. I used to joke that since his birthday was on Boxing Day I should take him to a boxing match. I don't think he ever thought that was funny. But anyway. For reasons on which I am unclear, I Googled him yesterday, to see if he was on FaceSpace or MyBook or whatever and maybe told us what he was up to on his birthday. Was I ever surprised to discover that he wasn't up to anything on his birthday because he was dead.

No doubt, I had the right guy. His first name is Noah, which is not exactly common, and his last name isn't exactly common either, though I'm not going to list it here. The birth date was right and the middle name was right. He died in October. I sat here and blinked a lot. I mean, hello. People aren't supposed to die at the age of almost-45. Particularly without explanation (all I could find was a mention in the Arizona Republic obituaries and the Social Security death registry). There was no mention of a funeral home or a burial site, no listing of "the deceased is survived by." It was about the loneliest obituary I've ever seen. This morning there were two notations in the guest book, left by me and a mutual friend that I emailed with the news yesterday. That's it. That's all. The rest is a mystery.

I might add, we didn't break up under the most pleasant of circumstances. Our relationship was stormy, with frequent fights (some physical) and even a call to the cops one time, courtesy of my neighbor. (Thank you, neighbor.) He was both mentally ill (I know, I know; I see untreated bipolar disorder in everybody--but I think he really did have it) and physically not-well, and he was in the process of flushing his entire life down a large toilet when I decided not to see where all this was going to end and left. He maintained for some time afterward that I left him for a woman, which was partially true but had the unfortunate effect of making it look like he drove me to become a lesbian. (Yep, he drove me and dropped me off. I told him I'd call when I was ready to be picked up. I haven't called yet.) So, this thing about him being dead is a little weird. I'm not sad. In a way I'm kind of relieved. He's probably a lot happier, wherever he is now. (Hopefully not haunting the ASU Library looking for books on art history, critique and semiotics. In all seriousness, you librarians over there at Arizona State may want to have an exorcism.)

What is sad, is adding another name to my list of dead friends. I'm not even very old and there's already quite a few. I don't know if 1987 was just a particularly dangerous year to graduate from high school, or if my generation is just monumentally unlucky. Brain aneurysms, car accidents, "unknown causes" and suicides. Maybe we're cursed.

Or maybe that's just the way baseball go.

Talk Thursday: The Christmas Letter

2011-12-22T16:09:00.000-08:00

Is it just me, or has the whole year been stuck on fast-forward? I'm positive by this time last year it was just barely August. Now here it is December, and all kinds of things that I was counting on haven't happened yet. I haven't dropped forty pounds, for one thing. I don't have an agent yet, for another (came really, really excruciatingly close, though. Damn, I hate the near misses.) Haven't taken off on a six-day cruise down the Volga River between St. Petersburg and Moscow, with a two-day stop at the Hermitage to, you know, take in some art. (Well, realistically, that's one for a fatter budget year.) And now all of a sudden it's about to be Christmas and I haven't (gasp!) written the Christmas letter yet.

(Do Buddhists write Christmas letters? Heck, do Buddhists even celebrate Christmas? There's a question that you can ask ten Buddhists and get twenty different answers, never mind forty deep discussions. As far as I can tell, there's one big Buddhist holiday and it's in the spring. The rest of the year is pretty much holiday-free. Or, as I like to think of it, every day is a celebration of life. So Buddhists celebrate everything. Which I guess makes us the anti-Jehovah's Witnesses. If one of those folks knocks on my door and we happen to shake hands, will we explode? Somebody needs to tell the people at the Large Hadron Supercollider.)

I don't know why so many people have a beef with Christmas letters. I like them. There are plenty of people in the world that I used to hang around with a lot but since more or less lost touch with, used to be good friends but our lives went different directions and we drifted apart but I still care about them, that I'm tied to by blood but haven't seen in a long time, and so on, and I really don't think hearing from them once a year is such a huge imposition. Maybe I would mind if the Christmas letters I got were all about their kids winning the Tri-State Spelling Bee with their rendition of psychoichthyspaliadosis while their husbands were busy getting promoted to junior partner at Jackal Jackal Jackal Hyena and Slug, but they're not, usually. Most of the people I know are pretty ordinary. Some of them have some pretty extraordinary stuff going on (like living in Trinidad, or with twenty-six rescue cats, or with stage-four lung cancer), but they, themselves, are just ordinary folks. The older I get, the more I appreciate ordinary.

I try to write Christmas letters that are funny, engaging and (most important) true. By nature I'm basically incapable of lying, but I can (and sometimes do) shamelessly exaggerate. So I need Joan to keep my feet on the ground. She has the ultimate thumbs up or down on whether something gets included in the Christmas letter. She also rules on cute, which is a much harder quantity to, uh, quantitize. I mean, it's adorable when the tuxedo cat with only one eye climbs up onto one of our chests and buries her face in an armpit, but to other people, is that cute or just gross? I wouldn't have any idea, see. That's where Joan comes in. (And...expecting a thumbs down on that one. Just in case you were wondering.)

There's also the picture issue. We try to send a couple of pictures along, so people can see that we're aging gracefully. Or not. What few pictures we have of us tend to be on our cell phones, though, and apart from emailing them to myself (which takes ages) I still haven't figured out a good way to get them off. Yes, it's a little faster on the new BlackBerry than it was on the old one, but it still crawls along at a glacier pace. (Obviously I need a Torch. Somebody who has $400 bucks to spare needs to get me one for Christmas. Of course, if I knew anyone who had $400 bucks to spare, I'd probably talk them into donating it to Heifer International for a couple of water buffaloes. I've always wanted to give someone a water buffalo. It just seems like a good thing to do.)

Well, anyway, the Christmas letter isn't gonna write itself, nor is it gonna copy itself, stuff itself into envelopes and mail itself to households in North Dakota, Arizona, Oklahoma and, uh, Trinidad. So wish me luck. Who knows, maybe next year at this time I'll be writing from the Hermitage. Between reading emails from my agent. And forty pounds thinner. Hey, it could happen.

Talk Thursday (on Sunday): Accountability

2011-12-18T07:20:00.000-08:00

Tonight marks my last night of ferret-sitting, which is both interesting and sad. I've gotten kind of attached to the little weasels, though I have to admit that they, uh, stink. (Not their fault, really; like skunks, polecats and mongooses (mongeese?), they belong to the family Mustelidae, which translates from Latin as something like, "little weasel-like critters that stink.") The white one (I've forgotten their names) is trying like hell to pull the book away from underneath the door so she can go romping down the hallway, and the brown one is somewhere in the closet doing God knows what and making some strange noises. I hope I don't have to go in there after him. I mean, a man's closet is a pretty private place. Kel is a good friend but I'd still hate to get in there and find out he has, say, a selection of fine evening gowns, high heels and pantyhose or something. There are just things I'd rather not know about people.

Which brings me (however obliquely) to the subject of this week's somewhat neglected Talk Thursday topic: Accountability. That is, the condition of being liable to, answerable to. or otherwise responsible for. I'm accountable for these ferrets, for example. I need to make sure they get back into their little house and that all the doors to that house are well latched. The ferrets will tell you (in ferretspeak, which seems to consist of squeaks and chirping noises) that I'm good for that. Which is to say, I have accountability. In this grand topsy-turvy world of ours, I, a human being, can be counted on for that one thing. We haven't all tumbled into the maelstrom just yet.

Then we take a look at what's going on in Congress and dear God, are we sure about that whole maelstrom thing?

Look, I try to stay away from politics. It depresses me. Especially when we have Joe Joe the Idiot Boy and his seven dwarfs (dwarves?) running for the highest office in the land, railing about what a lousy job the current man-in-charge is doing. (To which I say: You think it's that easy? Go try it sometime.) Besides that, though, we've got all the dwarves (dwarfs?) in charge of doing stuff like deciding about taxes, utterly unable to come to a decision about one lousy tax that they've been talking about for better than a year. It is, ultimately, a complete failure of accountability with these people. As in, they've forgotten who they work for. And to whom they're accountable. And that it has nothing to do with some election that may happen a year from now. And before I get off on a rant here (too late), I'll just ask one question: Is anybody else as sick of this bullshit as I am?

Don't tell me to write my congressperson. He's like talking to a brick wall. My Senator's an even bigger problem; she's retiring and the one Democratic candidate who was going to run has changed his mind and bailed out of the race. (Again, lack of accountability. So what if he'd spend bazillions of dollars and ultimately lose?) I'm to the point where I don't know or care who to complain to about this mess. I just want it fixed, so they can go back to doing things like, I dunno, fixing the economy. Working on the ginormous national debt. Stabilizing Social Security and Medicare. Getting our troops out of Afghanistan. The little things in life. You know. Showing some accountability.

Remind me never to run for public office. I've about had my fill of chasing weasels.

Ferret Sitting and the Collision that Wasn't

2011-12-15T16:05:00.000-08:00

I forget how I got talked into this, but some friends of ours are out of town and I've been drafted into ferret sitting. And lizard and cat sitting, but, primarily, ferret sitting. No, that's not really them in the picture. I've been trying to get a shot of them with my cell phone for the last twenty minutes and the little darlings won't hold still long enough. (Well, okay, to be totally honest I've got dozens of shots of them--of their backs as they run away, blurry images of something that looks like a fuzzy worm, a floor panel, half of a guitar--the list goes on.)

Apparently, ferrets have to be let out of their enclosures to run around for about an hour a day or they go stark staring raving mad. I can understand this. One of these two is exhibiting symptoms already, unless those impressive leaps and whirls were actually the chasing of her own tail (and I think they might have been). The other one's been in and out of my backpack several times, and tried to abscond with an empty water bottle on one of the trips. If we could bottle the energy these guys have, we could probably free the nation from OPEC. Seriously, I get tired just watching them.

Changing subjects at right-angle turns: I dunno how many of you watch American Horror Story, but if you don't, you're missing one of the best shows on TV. All the same, one of the conceits of this show has to do with this haunted house being the hub of evil, or one of the hubs of evil, anyway. If you die there you get stuck there, and can't leave the house except on Halloween (don't ask me why they would make an exception for Halloween; I don't write the silly thing). Another one of the conceits is that being dead isn't all that different from being alive. In fact, you might die and miss it completely. Spoiler alert! Violet, the fourteen-or-so-year-old daughter of the family that's unfortunate enough to be living in the house, accidentally killed herself and didn't figure it out for weeks. And it's terribly unfortunate that I'm such a fan of this show, because today I wasn't in a terrible car wreck.

Or was I?

This is what happened. I was coming back to the office from a doctor's appointment. The traffic on the freeway was moving at a pretty good clip; then suddenly it came to a halt, as traffic will do. All the cars in my lane slammed on their brakes. Including yours truly. But I slammed mine on a little too hard, and it had been raining and the road was slick and I went into a skid.

The whole time my brain was yelling at my leg to forgodsake let up on the brake pedal and pump it (my car not having antilock brakes), and the whole time my leg was having none of it. It was pushing the brake pedal all the way to the floor and to heck with what anybody else was doing. I slid down the lane and to the left and right into the guy in front of me. I heard the screech of brakes behind me and was pretty sure the guy behind me was going to crunch me like a bug. There was no way I could possibly avoid slamming into the guy in front of me, and I was going to hit him pretty hard, so I did what I always do in a dire situation. I closed my eyes.

Nothing happened.

After the two crashes should have taken place, I opened my eyes again. Nothing. The guy in front of me was still in front of me, a foot or two ahead. The guy behind me had stopped behind me and a little to the right. And I? I was still sliding, but I hadn't hit anything. And I finally got my leg to unlock so I could pump the brakes and crank the wheel and regain control of the car.

A second or two ticked by. The screeching of brakes gradually stopped. Everybody just sat there for a second. Then, as if we'd all caught our collective breath, we slowly started to pull forward again.

So I drove back to work. Parked the car. Went up in the elevator. Greeted the receptionist, to make sure people could see me. (She could.) Called Joan to make sure people could still hear me. (She could.) So apparently, I am not dead and this is not American Horror Story. But, on the other hand, here I am in a strange room in a strange house, watching two pint-sized weasels roll around on the floor and typing this. That's not exactly normal, you know. And I don't know how in the hell I didn't hit that guy in front of me. Even if the guy behind me managed not to hit me, I should have plowed into that guy ahead. His grey minivan should be a mangled heap of metal in an insurance-company scrapyard right about now.

(Says the litigation paralegal.)

Well, anyway, I ate a sandwich from Afrah a little bit ago, so I'll take that as one more sign that I'm still breathing. But seriously, if I get to my OA meeting tonight and nobody can see me, I might just freak right the hell out.

Talk Thursday: Time

2011-12-08T17:52:00.000-08:00

Has come today. Is on my side, yes it is. Keeps on slippin', slippin', slippin' into the future. Makes lovers feel that they've got something real. Only. In a bottle. For me to fly. Too much on my hands. If I could turn back. Nothin' but a good. Of the season for loving. Feels like the first. Love me two. Big. Back in. For the longest. Does anyone really know what it is. And they are a'changin'.

Oh, right. I'm supposed to be writing a blog post.

Well: Today I had jury duty. This is a thrilling prospect for a legal professional who knows she has a greater chance of ever being named a Supreme Court Justice (without law school, or a law license, no less) than she does of ever sitting on a jury. Why? I dunno. Could have something to do with my big mouth. Last time I thought I was getting close--at least, I was part of a group that kept getting hauled in and out of the courtroom and asked many questions--but the district attorney kept asking the same question forty different ways, and at one point I got impatient and said, "Objection. Asked and answered." She turned around and stared right at me, thus making me realize I'd mistakenly used my out-loud voice. And as Neil Tyson would say, five minutes later I was out on the street.

This time was better. I didn't even get near a courtroom. After being stuck in a hallway for about fifteen minutes, which turned out to be entirely the wrong place, I finally got redirected to the Central Jury Room (TM), which was a lot nicer than the hallway. There were chairs, for one thing. It was unseasonably warm and I fell asleep. Twice. Groups of people would get called and go someplace. After a while some of them would trickle back in. I kept waiting for them to call me but they never did. I got through several chapters of this new book I'm reading (Needle in a Haystack by Ernesto Mallo; check it out, and then check out everything else he ever wrote--I just became his No. 1 fan), played with my phone, tweeted a lot and pondered the absurdity of my blown afternoon. Then, right around the time it was too late to really go back to work and too early to really go home, the bailiff-in-charge announced that they were done and everybody else could leave.

Which left me with ninety minutes to account for and no real clue what to do with them.

Ordinarily, on a Thursday afternoon, I leave work and drive up to Afrah, the (stop me if you've heard this one) World's Greatest Middle Eastern Restaurant. I write a blog post, eat some of the (stop me if you've also heard this one) World's Greatest Pita Bread and then go to my OA meeting. But somehow I didn't think Afrah would have wanted to host me for a full 2 1/2 hours. Let's face it, that's a lot of pita bread. So instead I headed home, by way of picking up cat food and litter, with the idea of taking a nap first and heading up to Afrah afterward.

Hands up, who thinks this was a big mistake. Yeah, thanks for the vote of confidence there.

So I got home. I had a bowl of cereal. (You think that's a strange snack, wait until I tell you what I had for dinner: Peanut butter and banana sandwiches on chocolate graham crackers.) I lay down on the couch with Chloe the Cat, who's been glued to my side like an extra sweater lately. And I fell asleep. And my little phone alarm rang to inform me that it was time to get up and go to Afrah. And I...

Went back to sleep. Yep.

Woke up about seven, realized I'd missed both Afrah and my meeting, and came over here. Fished my laptop out of my backpack and wrote this, working around the peanut butter (yes, there is peanut butter on my arrow keys, and no, I don't know how to get it off). And now, with time standing still and my schedule in complete disarray, I think I'll go to bed, before I'm tempted to polish off the rest of the crackers. It's been a strange day, indeed. Most peculiar, mama. Whoa.

Talk Thursday: Natural Consequences

2011-12-01T16:17:00.000-08:00

In case anybody's wondering, the little fish-o-gram has not been retired. He's making less than frequent appearances because I'm having, shall we say, a sucky couple of weeks as far as swimming goes. Oh, I'm still showing up, but I'm late or I'm leaving early or else I'm just incredibly slow, and some days I've been lucky to crack a thousand meters, much less log a 1200, which is the lowest notch on the fish-o-gram. (And also three-quarters of a mile, in case you can't calculate that in your head. I can't, either.) I have a choice here between lowering my standards, or just not using the fish-o-gram. So far the fish-o-gram is losing. Still, I'm kind of missing it, too. So we'll see what happens.

This segues perfectly into today's Talk Thursday topic. The natural consequences of eating sugar and oversleeping: Slowness in the water, minimal meterage and missing Mr. Fishy. I dunno what you think of when you hear the expression "natural consequences", but I immediately think of driver's ed. You know, that class in high school that you had to take if you ever wanted to get behind the wheel of a car, but that seemed to have all the practical application to piloting a vehicle that trigonometry did to balancing a checkbook. "Natural consequences" were the ones you couldn't avoid if you did something stupid with the aforementioned vehicle. Take a turn too fast, for example, and your wheels would come off the street, and if you did it exactly wrong, you might even roll over. Slam on the brakes too hard and not only wouldn't you stop, but you'd careen off one direction or another and possibly spin around a few times. It all had something to do with gravity and physics and vectors and thrust and things like that, and you couldn't talk your way out of it like you sometimes could a ticket. If X, Then Y. No unknowns to the equation.

Except...

Well, except that we're human beings, of course. And despite the clear and convincing evidence that If X, Then Y, we somehow think we can beat the odds, defy gravity, turn physics on its ear and tell the vectors to come back another day. Every time I take my life in my hands and get on the Suicide Highway (or the 75 Central Expressway, as it's known to Dallasites) I see people do amazing things with cars that are apparently supposed to defy the rule, but instead end up proving it over and over again. Sometimes I come across the wreckage of said cars after they've been proven wrong. So maybe natural consequences are the ones that people don't believe in, regardless of how right-in-front-of-your-face the evidence may be.

I can use myself as another example. I can't, or at least shouldn't, eat sugar in copious quantities. It's practically impossible not to eat sugar at all. Too many things have sugar in them, like ketchup, for God's sake, and peanut butter. I managed it for twenty days once, as an experiment, and boy did I get testy. But if I just avoid things that are supposed to be sweet, like cake and doughnuts and sweet rolls and ice cream and stuff like that, I'm generally okay. Which is to say, my blood glucose isn't zooming up and down, I'm not practically losing consciousness every time I stand up, my meds are working the way they're supposed to and I'm feeling, you know, pretty good. As opposed to that lovely half-dead, dragged-naked-through-wet-grass-and-then-stomped-on sort of feeling that I get when I'm coming down from a sugar high. (I went to a chocolate tasting once--yes, you may point out how incredibly dumb that was--and was sick for three days.)

So logic would dictate that, when a cake or something shows up in the kitchen at work, my brain would kick on and say, "Ahem. If X, Then Y." Especially if it's a white cake with white or cream cheese icing; that stuff is like cocaine. Sincerely. And not wanting to feel like I'm half-dead and dragged-naked-through...yeah, I'd simply stay away from the cake. And sometimes I do. But sometimes I don't. Sometimes I stand there with a fork in my hand, like a crack addict with a dime bag, and say to myself, "Just this once."

Yeah. This once. Natural consequences be damned. If X, Then Y doesn't apply to me. I defy gravity, I repeal the laws of physics. And then the next morning, I drag myself out of bed and contemplate calling in sick. Which I never do, because it was my idiot behavior that got me into this mess. If you're gonna howl all night with the big dogs, don't whine like a puppy in the morning, or something like that. And then, as I'm now back on sugar, I have to get back off sugar. Which--pardon all the drug references, but they're really fucking apt--is like trying to get off cocaine. It's really hard. And even though I know I'm going to have to do it, and that it will be really hard, and that I'll feel terrible for days while the sugar clears my system, I still do it. I still do it.

Which just goes to show something or other.

I read someplace that in the brains of real drug addicts, the "go" signals -- that is, the ones that tell your brain to "go" get drugs after they've been triggered by something--work three times as fast as the "no-go" signals, which are the logical ones that convince you to stop. If you act at all impulsively, you're screwed. You can only kick a habit like this if you're willing to stop and take a few deep breaths each and every time you start craving whatever-it-is, to give the "no-go" signals time to fire up. In short, engage the brain. Pay attention to the natural consequences. Remember that If X, Then Y. Which is, uh, really hard.

Why? Because we're human beings. Just ask those drivers on the 75.

Talk Thursday: Comfort Food

2011-11-24T10:24:00.001-08:00

Happy Thanksgiving, everybody!! I hope you all have a place to go engage in a celebratory meal with friends and relatives, and time to think about what makes this country great and all the blessings in your lives and stuff like that.

I, on the other hand, am thinking about what I nearly always think about. Namely, food.

I don't do Thanksgiving with family for the same reasons a lot of you probably wish you don't. That said, however, I do have a gathering of friends to go to later this evening. And I'm very much looking forward to the company and the gossip and the cameraderie and the playing with the cats and chickens and so on (our friends are urban chicken farmers). But over and above all that, I'm looking forward to the food. I've been told to expect turkey, of course, but also sweet potatoes, twice baked potatoes, creamed corn, veggies, pumpkin pie, pecan chocolate chip pie and chocolate Irish cream cheesecake. In short, a veritable smorgasbord of doom for the cardiovascular system. Not to mention people who aren't supposed to eat sugar.

Um, yeah. That would be me.

I take this whole mess of prescription drugs, see. A bunch of them aren't supposed to be taken with alcohol. I don't drink, so not a problem, but guess what sugar breaks down to as it's being digested? Yep. And the prescription drugs don't know if they're being interfered with by real alcohol, or the also-ran equivalent. Either way, they don't work as well as they should, and that's not a Good Thing if you're me.

To say nothing of the fact that I'm also hypoglycemic, which is kind of like being diabetic but without the glucose meters and the toys and stuff. It can be a precursor to diabetes or it can be genetic, which is the case with me (grandmother and uncle both had it). I get the lows but not the highs, and I can tell when I've got the lows because I'll stand up from a chair and almost lose consciousness. (Actually, I sometimes make it all the way from my desk to the hallway by the ladies' room before the vertigo hits. That's even more fun, grabbing for the wall to stay on my feet.) What causes the lows? Eating sugar. Or rather, eating sugar an hour or so ago, in quantity, by itself with nothing else. As soon as it clears the system, I crash and burn. The only cure is a regular meal, but it's faster to just grab some more sugar and start the whole cycle over again. I'm kind of stupid that way.

Some people are alcoholics. Some people are drug addicts. Some people can't stop gambling. Me, it seems to be All About The Sugar. I react to sugar like some people react to cocaine. There's no such thing as just a little bit. If I have some, I want more. Lots more. And if I have more, things get all kinds of ugly.

For about the last year, I've been trying to get off the sugar. I don't mean all sugar--there's sugar in all kinds of weird foods, like yogurt and ketchup, so it's hard to avoid altogether--but to a reasonable extent, giving up things that are supposed to be sweet, like doughnuts and cookies and cakes (especially cakes with white or cream-cheese frosting; that frosting is heroin. I'm serious.). I do okay--I once went 60 days, in point of fact--but lately it's been off and on. Five days here, three days there, and I think I had a streak of like eight or ten days earlier this month. Then Something Happens and suddenly I'm back on the sugar. Which means I have to get back off the sugar. And here's a news flash: Every time I try to get off the sugar, it's really hard.

Back when I quit drinking, I went through a weird three-week period where suddenly, out of nowhere, I'd start craving alcohol at odd times. Like the middle of the work day, say, or at ten a.m. on a Saturday. It was weird, but I figured it was just the last of the stuff making its way out of my system and it would go away soon. It did, and I haven't had a drink in about five years. Still, alcohol's easy. You look at a bottle and if it says, "Contains alcohol," you don't drink it. Sugar, on the other hand--there's sugar in practically everything. In fact, your average American eats 156 pounds of added sugar every year--a lot of it in the form of high-fructose corn syrup, which is just all kinds of bad for you. In 1850, that same average American only had 5 pounds of sugar a year. Which just goes to show something or other, and not that we've made brilliant progress in marketing high fructose corn syrup.

Anyway, there's no cure for my condition except to stay off the sugar, and there's no way to stay off it unless I can get off it to begin with. Which means I just need to keep trying. One of the Buddhist precepts is about not consuming intoxicants, which is usually translated to mean alcohol. I'd take that a step farther and say that anything that separates you from your practice is an intoxicant. If you feel rotten about yourself and are on an up-and-down roller coaster from eating (and then not-eating) sugar, you're not going to be meditating in a very serene frame of mind. So I'd throw sugar onto that list of intoxicants not to be consuming. At least, for me.

I'll bet Buddha never had this problem. Heck, in his time sugar maybe hadn't even been invented yet.

Talk Thursday: Occupied

2011-11-17T16:19:00.000-08:00

Well, kids, I'm at Afrah and Joan's in class and the Topic-O-Meter hasn't spit anything out for tonight yet. So I'm stuck with either coming up with my own topic (always a treat) or just writing a random blog post on something or other. Either way, the topic will show up later and I'll end up writing a Talk Thursday on Friday or Saturday, with which there's nothing exactly wrong. I used to think that more than one Talk Thursdays in a week would cause the universe to collapse, but either it hasn't happened yet or it did but I didn't notice. Either way, I'm no longer worried.

So, tonight I'm going back to a topic I missed altogether, when I was dealing with the monsoon and the midnight shipwreck and the beautiful servant girl who pulled me from the sea, warmed my breath with hers and--oh, wait, that wasn't me. Anyway, the topic was "Occupied." Which could mean anything, of course, but I think I was supposed to refer to those folks who began Occupying Wall Street (#OWS) two months ago and gradually spread across the country, Occupying one city after another as they went. They even (gasp!) Occupied Dallas.

Far be it from me to suggest that Dallas has a flair for organization or anything, but the folks at Occupy Dallas had me pretty impressed. For one thing, they have their own web site, which is still operational even though the police moved in and trashed their encampment the day before yesterday, at about 1:00 in the morning. (More on that later.) The Occupy movement has been criticized for failing to have a nice party platform on which to stand. (Of course, the Tea Partiers have a "party platform" with only one plank, which states, "We hate anything Obama ever touched, and it's not because he's black, either," and that seems to be good enough for Fox News, but I digress.) A quick look at this Web site tells you that a platform is being hashed out as we speak. OD is opposed to cutting Medicare, Social Security and Medicaid. They're in favor of sustainability, especially as it pertains to economics. They like to meet and discuss things rather than have some person-in-charge make decisions for them. They're promoting the Occupation Proclamation. Oh, and just incidentally, they're not in favor of one A.M. police raids. Particularly when the city of Dallas told them that they could stay.

Here's what happened. The city manager sent an eviction notice to Occupy Dallas, informing them that they had to move out of their camp south of City Hall because of what she termed "numerous rule violations." Occupy Dallas filed for an injunction against the city, citing their First Amendment rights to peaceable assembly. A Federal judge said no, but Occupy Dallas didn't get evicted on Tuesday. In fact City spokesman Frank Librio said that attorneys for both sides would meet again Wednesday morning to discuss what would happen next. Tuesday evening, the Mayor Himself issued a statement, saying that "...no action will be taken this evening at Occupy Dallas. City attorneys will discuss the next steps with this group's legal representation tomorrow."

And true to their word, the city did not evict the protesters Tuesday. They waited until Thursday at one A.M., at which time "hundreds of cops" descended on Occupy Dallas and chased everybody out. The situation, the police explained, had just become "untenable."

Here's what I think. I think the situation had become "embarrassing." After all, if New York and Chicago and L.A. could chase protesters out of their public parks, what in hell was Dallas doing, just fooling around? Clearly a world-class city like Dallas had better evict its protesters, too, lest it look stoopid next to the bigger kids on the block. You know, the ones who will give you a wedgie at the bus stop if you aren't cool enough to join their gang. And yes, that does seem to be about the mentality we were dealing with there. From everybody concerned.

So what's next for Occupy Dallas? I don't know, but I'm keeping an eye on the Web site. The whole thing's been awfully interesting. In the meantime, I plan to Occupy Richardson. Or rather Afrah. See you on Main Street.

Guest Post: Why I Don't Exist, By God (By God!)

2011-11-13T09:55:00.000-08:00

(Jen here: I found this on a CNN chat board, where--I know, I know--I'm not supposed to be trolling. The author is a guy named Colin and that is 100% of what I know about him. If any of you know the man, tell him I put this up because I couldn't NOT put it up; it was just too darn brilliant. Whoever he is, he is a genius. Colin, I salute you. Rock on.)

Dear Evangelical Christians:

God here.

First, I do not exist. The concept of a 13,700,00,000 year old being, capable of creating the entire Universe and its billions of galaxies, monitoring simultaneously the thoughts and actions of the 7 billion human beings on this planet is ludicrous. Grow a brain.

Second, if I did, I would have left you a book a little more consistent, timeless and independently verifiable than the collection of Iron Age Middle Eastern mythology you call the Bible. Hell, I bet you cannot tell me one thing about any of its authors, their credibility or their possible ulterior motives, yet you cite them for the most extraordinary of claims.

Thirdly, when I sent my “son” (whatever that means, given that I am god and do not mate) to Earth, he would have visited the Chinese, Ja.panese, Europeans, Russians, sub-Saharan Africans, Australian Aboriginals, Mongolians, Polynesians, Micronesians, Indonesians and native Americans, not just a few Jews. He would also have exhibited a knowledge of something outside of the Iron Age Middle East.

Fourthly, I would not spend my time hiding, refusing to give any tangible evidence of my existence, and then punish those who are smart enough to draw the natural conclusion that I do not exist by burning them forever. That would make no sense to me, given that I am the one who withheld evidence of my existence in the first place.

Fifth, I would not care who you do or how you “do it”. I really wouldn’t. This would be of no interest to me, given that I can create Universes. Oh, the egos.

Sixth, I would have smited all evangelicals and fundamentalists long before this. You people drive me nuts. You are so small minded and yet you speak with such false authority. Many of you still believe in the talking snake nonsense from Genesis. I would kill all of you for that alone and burn you for an afternoon (burning forever is way too barbaric for me to even contemplate).

Seventh, the whole idea of members of one species on one planet surviving their own physical deaths to “be with me” is utter, mind-numbing nonsense. Grow up. You will die. Get over it. I did. Hell, at least you had a life. I never even existed in the first place.

Eighth, I do not read your minds, or “hear your prayers” as you euphemistically call it. There are 7 billion of you. Even if only 10% prayed once a day, that is 700,000,000 prayers. This works out at 8,000 prayers a second – every second of every day. Meanwhile I have to process the 100,000 of you who die every day between heaven and hell. Dwell on the sheer absurdity of that for a moment.

Finally, the only reason you even consider believing in me is because of where you were born. Had you been born in India, you would likely believe in the Hindu gods; if born in Tibet, you would be a Buddhist. Every culture that has ever existed has had its own god(s) and they always seem to favor that particular culture, its hopes, dreams and prejudices. What, do you think we all exist? If not, why only yours?

Look, let’s be honest with ourselves. There is no god. Believing in me was fine when you thought the World was young, flat and simple. Now we know how enormous, old and complex the Universe is.

Move on – get over me. I did.

Very truly yours,

God

Talk Thursday (on Wednesday): From That Moment Forward

2011-11-09T17:51:00.000-08:00

Hope y'all don't mind a Thursday post on Wednesday, but I have Other Plans for Thursday night. Yes, this means I'll miss my meeting, and what's worse, I'll miss the World's Greatest Pita Bread. But for once it'll be worth it; I'm going to a book signing. Yes, I know the last time I went to one of these, things got a little lachrymose, but I don't think that's gonna happen this time. You see, the book signing, for which I had to buy a $40 ticket weeks in advance (rather, Joan bought it for me; thanks Joan, you rock!) is for the King.

No, not the King of Pop. The other King.

Big Steve.

Yeah. Stephen King.

Okay, yes, it's taking place at the Majestic Theatre, and I'm in the cheap seats, and the odds of actually getting my precious volume of 11/22/63 anywhere near the Sharpie marker of the Master of Horror are extremely small. Arguing, for the moment, that I even have a volume of 11/22/63, because I don't at the moment and I don't think I'm funded to pick one up between now and then. But still. I'll be in the same room with the guy who created the Walkin Dude and Johnny Smith and Delores Claiborne. Blockade Billy and Leland Gaunt and Dr. Louis for Godsake Creed. I think that's worth missing pita bread, don't you?

So here's my Talk Thursday column, a day early and a little bit beside the point. The actual topic, from the Topic-O-Meter, was too long to fit into the title bar; it was something like, "If I had to go back to one event I've experienced and relive my life from that event forward, it would be..." See what I mean? But I think "From That Moment Forward" covers it. In any case, I thought about it for all of about five nanoseconds and knew exactly what moment we were talking about, here. We were talking, of course, about the night Stuart Adamson kissed me. And the happy-go-lucky days that followed.

Normally I don't smooch and tell, but since the other pair of lips is no longer in this world, I figure it's okay. Anyway, it's not the actual smooching I want to talk about. It's the happy-go-lucky days that followed, or hours that followed, or all the stuff that happened afterward. To make a long story short, I was in Birmingham, England at the time, which, if you've never been there, is kind of the British Detroit. I think they actually do make cars there, or did at one time, and it's a rough town where bad things happen to people sometimes (though, of course, never with guns). I was at a club, where a concert was about to happen, and a poll tax riot broke out (if you don't know what a poll tax riot is, ask someone). In the ensuing chaos I got whacked on the head with something and knocked cold for somewhere between several seconds and several hours. When I came around, a bouncer was holding up his hand and saying, "How many fingers? Who's Prime Minister?" I got the first one right but not the second one (Ms. Thatcher having retired some years before), so he figured I was fine and turned me loose.

Here's a news flash: If you're hit on the head hard enough to lose consciousness, you almost certainly have a concussion and possibly something even more serious. There are three things you need to do in this situation: You need to not drink alcohol, not go to sleep, and seek medical treatment immediately. What I did instead was chug a few beers, sing along with the crowd and then crawl back to the hostel where we were staying and fall fast asleep. Doctor? Nah. Never even occurred to me. Now this is the moment we freeze-frame so that I can go back in time, fix it and have everything turn out differently.

Instead of drinking, singing and sleeping, this is me going to the hospital and explaining I was just knocked unconscious. This is me, hanging around in the E.R., bored out of my skull, being observed by medical professionals until the following morning, when they've decided I'm not in any immediate danger. Instead of spending the next two weeks hanging around in England and Scotland and acting increasingly weird, I'm accepting the very wise suggestion of one of the medical professionals and going home early. Not the end of the world. I've already kissed Stuart Adamson; what else do I expect to do, knock boots with Sinead O'Connor? Oh hey, this is me, going to my Regular Doc once I touch down in the States. This is him, examining my X-rays and discovering -- gasp! -- a greenstick skull fracture above my right temple. This is the MRI I'm having that discovers the damage to my right temporal lobe, which has either caused (a long shot) or made worse (much more likely) my bipolar disorder.

Stars and garters, here's me at the tender age of twenty-one, seeing a psychiatrist for the first time instead of waiting until I'm forty. Here's me getting prescribed a sheepload of medication and adjusting, slowly, over the next eighteen months or so. Here's me not getting confused at work and wandering off; here's me not mouthing off at all the wrong times in front of all the wrong people; here's me not dealing with crushing migraines my whole last two years of college. Hey, see that tornado that started ripping up my life right around this time? Well, here it is not happening. Here I am getting out of a lousy relationship and being happily single. Here's me getting a decent job right out of college because I never screwed up all the jobs I had before that.

In short, here's me having a halfway normal life.

SCREECH!!! That's the needle skipping across the record and bonking against the metal thingy in the middle. (Do they even have record players anymore? I have one, but, you know, do people? Does anyone under thirty even know what one is?)

The fantasy just doesn't go that far. I may be halfway something, but normal isn't it. And let's face it; isn't normal a little--ya know--boring?

Talk Thursday: Before Cell Phones

2011-11-03T16:14:00.000-07:00

I gotta start this off with a complaint. Well, maybe just a peeve. This happens at work sometimes and it really frosts me and I don't know why. I'll pull into a parking space, get out of my car, head for the elevator. A colleague will pull in next to me and get out of her car (it's always a female; I've never seen a male do this). Said colleague will be talking on a cell phone. It's braced against her shoulder, or she's talking on her headset (it's usually braced against her shoulder, though) and she's in the middle of some conversation that Should Not Be Had In Public, often about the breaking-up of a relationship or the color of poop in somebody's diaper that morning. Said colleague will follow me, or walk next to me, to the elevator and down in the elevator and across the bridge to the building and into the lobby. And then, finally, once we're in the lobby and waiting for the main elevator, said colleague says, "I have to go, I'm about to get into the elevator," and hangs up. Whereupon she looks at me (for the first time in five minutes) and says, "Good morning!"

Too late.

Honestly, I don't know why that bugs me so much. Maybe it's being privy to the conversations I'd rather not overhear. Maybe it's knowing she was driving and talking on her cell phone, which is dangerous. Maybe it's flat-out being ignored, then suddenly being acknowledged, like I only exist when it's convenient. But anyway. It puts me in a sour mood. Do not ever let anyone tell you that Buddhists are always placid and content. We do get in sour moods. Sometimes we even (gasp!) lose our tempers. Over cell phones. Talk about attachment to material things.

It's a little hard for me to believe this now, but I actually lived more than thirty years on the planet without a cell phone. I once had nothing more than a simple land line with an answering machine and thought that was plenty. I never worried about somebody trying to reach me in class or at work or some number of other places where I might not be reachable. The guy in charge of my band (yes, I was once in a band) had one of the first car phones, and he used to leave me amusing messages that sounded something like this: "Jennifer, I'm going to be late to practice because my hearing ran over, so I need you to stop by my house and you stupid son of a bitch pick up the keys from my wife and watch where the hell you're driving go down and unlock the church..." What cell phones existed were huge and clunky and had these weird antennas that stuck up in the air. I couldn't imagine ever needing one. Doctors and lawyers and emergency managers might need something like that, but me? Hardly.

Fast forward to 2011 and try to separate me from my BlackBerry. Go on, I dare you. Many braver men than you have tried and failed.

I might point out, I didn't even have e-mail back then. I'd heard of it, but only a few people had it, and no one that I knew. My dad was on something called "Compuserve" that he seemed to really like, and I was glad he was having fun and so on, but as far as I was concerned, computers existed for one purpose only: To serve as glorified typewriters. Oh, and video game consoles. I was particularly taken with a game called "Welltris" (three-dimensional Tetris) that no one else had heard of. Now I get my e-mail on my cell phone, and play a game called "Brickbreaker" that no one else has heard of. One of these days I'll spring for "Angry Birds." No, I probably won't.

I don't just use my BlackBerry, I rely on that sucker. I read headlines on it, tweet on it, keep my appointments on it, keep my address book on it, get directions on it. It keeps me entertained when I'm waiting for something and oh yeah, once in a while I actually do call somebody on it. If I ever lost it I wouldn't know where I was, where I was going, what was happening in the world or what I was supposed to do next. The mere thought makes me a little green. I have a cartoon somewhere of a meditation instructor saying to the student, "Your posture's very good. Now drop your shoulders a little bit and try to relax your grip on your cell phone." Yep, that's about it. When they pry it from my cold dead fingers.

By the way, my BlackBerry has a meditation timer. Yes, I know I'm hopeless.

Techno-geeks rejoice! Afrah, home of the World's Greatest Pita Bread, is now on Twitter! Follow them @AfrahMedFood. And tell them Jen sent you. I wonder if they tweet in Arabic?

Talk Thursday: The Blog Post that Didn't Happen

2011-10-27T16:17:00.000-07:00

I dunno if this blog post is going to happen.

It started out pretty well. I was talking about the Rangers. I mean, what else would I talk about? Tonight is Game Six of the World Series, the Rangers are ahead three games to two, and This Could Be The Night that makes it all worthwhile. Not that it isn't worthwhile, anyway. I mean, it's baseball. It's the only sport, apart from hockey, that I can convince myself to be interested in for more than five minutes. Mainly because it's like an outdoor carnival without any rides, and the people-watching is just as much fun as the actual game (as opposed to hockey, in which everything just happens too darn fast for me to get bored), but anyway, I was talking about the Rangers.

Then I started thinking about my boss's boss's daughter again, and all the fun went out of the Rangers.

You see, my boss's boss's daughter has been very sick. She went to the hospital about three weeks ago and they found a brain tumor. The adjectives they pinned to this thing weren't exactly encouraging. Words like fast-growing and inoperable and malignant. She was supposed to go to M.D. Anderson to be examined by a specialist, but she became too sick to travel and soon after lost consciousness. Sometime during the night last night, she died. She was nineteen years old. And so I just can't quite get up the usual enthusiasm that I normally would for Game Six of the World Series.

It's a big world and bad things happen in it. I get that. And sometimes very young people die of mysterious causes and it's monstrously unfair. I get that, too. And it's Quite Normal to find this sort of stuff depressing and be mopey and out of sorts about it. Yep, no problem there. But how do you write a blog post about this? I mean, how do you combine the Rangers with your boss's boss's daughter dying without looking kind of insane?

I might add, I didn't know my boss's boss's daughter. I've never met her. I know my boss's boss, though, and I've met his wife, and they're good people. I can't even remotely imagine what it must be like to lose a child (I don't have kids, myself). I've lost grandparents, good friends, one friend in particular that felt like getting an arm chopped off, but it can't even remotely compare to losing a child. That's losing a whole future. A whole rest-of-your-life. How do you write about that? I can't even think about it for more than a few seconds at a time.

So I don't think this blog post is going to happen. I think I've given it the old college try, though, and I can slouch off to my meeting having made a decent effort. If the Rangers win tonight, it'll be the weirdest mix of emotions I've dealt with since I stole my ex's vacuum cleaner to get back at her for stealing my cat. And I'm not even going to try to explain what that felt like.

Talk Thursday: Frustration

2011-10-20T16:03:00.000-07:00

I have to be honest with you: I laughed out loud when that topic rolled out of the Talk Thursday topic-o-meter. Because frustration doesn't even begin to cover it. Pounding my head against the nearest available brick wall is more like it. People, you don't know frustration until you've been me. (Once again: Grandiosity -- common symptom of bipolar disorder.) But, yeah. Frustration? Let's talk about that.

Remember the unnamed literary agent who requested the fifty pages? And then the hundred and fifty more pages? Well--that's where the story ends. It Didn't Work Out, as they say. Which, really, is not something to lose any sleep over; most of these relationships don't work out, which is why it's so worth celebrating when they do. All, the same, this is a lot like being out on a date, parking somewhere, getting to second base, starting to wonder if you might need a condom, hoping you in fact have a condom someplace, trying to discreetly check purse pockets without interrupting the main event, and then suddenly the other person says, "I just remembered I have to be someplace. Sorry, it was nice meeting you," and gets up and leaves. No matter what you do next, you feel about an inch high and covered in mud. And--oh hey, you did have a condom, right here next to that couple of useless pens that always make their way to the bottom of your purse. Too bad you don't need it anymore.

Seriously: The whole getting-an-agent thing is exactly, exactly like the more perverse parts of dating. Both ways. It starts out with letters, like love notes back and forth. Then, if you get past that phase (and I did once! I did, although it was a long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away), you start exchanging presents. Then phone calls, and sooner or later you have to sign the pre-nup. (That's the contract of representation, in case this analogy's breaking down.) Having signed that, everything's grand, right? Wrong. You're just getting started. There's still the taking-on of the various monsters of relationship hell (this would be the editors at the publishing houses of choice, ha-ha), more presents, more phone calls, and, if you are incredibly lucky, you sell a book to somebody. That's the saying I-do part. Now you're joined at the hip by money, a far stronger force than love if ever there was one. Now you've managed to get each other into bed. (Yes, you waited for marriage--not out of morality but just because that's how this analogy rolls, kids. You don't like my analogy, write your own.) Hope you like each other, because it's just going to get more interesting from here. Sometimes it all works out. Sometimes your agent dumps you (and his entire client list) to run for Congress. And sometimes it all fizzles out at second base, leaving you frustrated as hell and looking for a brick wall against which to pound your head.

So what do I do now? Well--so far I'm doing what I was doing before. Writing query letters, dodging Scaley and Fang,* and hoping to get another hot date again soon. As a dear friend of mine pointed out this very afternoon, there has to be something there, because someone saw it, and if there's something there, than someone else will see it too. It's just a question of who, and when, and so I'm not supposed to stop submitting places until I've submitted to everyone in the world. Tall order, considering we hit seven billion humans yesterday, but I figure I can probably scale it down to the ones who speak and read English, just for, you know, simplicity.

*For those of you who haven't been introduced, Scaley is the T. Rex of Anxiety, and Fang is the Velociraptor of Sudden Panic. They live in my kitchen and love to hang around when I'm writing query letters. Why query letters are of any interest to a dinosaur, I have no idea, but all I have to do is type the word "query" and there they are. If anybody wants them, they're for sale. Cheap. Free, even. Call me.

We Interrupt This Blog For An Important Announcement:

2011-10-16T13:59:00.000-07:00

We're goin' ta the Series!

Uh, yeah. AGAIN.

WHOO HOO!!

Talk Thursday: Shooting for Happy

2011-10-13T16:19:00.000-07:00

I spent most of today doing origami. Yep. Paper folding. This is one of those things that they file under "other duties as required" in your job description. It wasn't exactly a thousand paper cranes - more like sixty-five copies of a motion filed in the bankruptcy court - but fold them I did, and stuff them into envelopes and mail them. (Aside: How does one person get sixty-five creditors? I find that astonishing. I mean, okay, some of them went to the bankruptcy trustee and the lawyers and the judges and stuff, but still. Sixty-five. Wow.) And folding and mailing them was only the last step in the process. Before that was the copying, and the stapling, and the sorting, and the printing out all the mailing labels. And the finding of the sixty-five envelopes and the making sure the postage meter had enough postage and--well, I do go on.

When that was done, I had a motion to knock off and a set of discovery to start. In between I wrote a medical chronology and amended a petition. (Does anybody know if having a physical altercation with somebody in the seat next to you, while driving a car on a freeway at the same time, constitutes gross negligence in and of itself? Anybody? Bueller?) In between there were emails to answer and envelopes to open, phone calls to take and a bunch of things to scan and sort. I also spent an hour up front covering for the receptionist, who's on vacation. And then all of a sudden it was 5:30 and time to break everything down for the night and drive like a maniac (minus the physical altercation, made easier in that there was no one else in my car) up to Afrah. So there it is. A day in the life of a litigation paralegal. Minus all the paper folding, it was pretty typical.

I've been giving a lot of thought to this whole day in life thing, in part because Joan's been asking me about it. Why did I do this, what does that mean, what's the difference between this and that. It's made me give some thought to a whole bunch of stuff I just do without thinking. If there were such a thing as Take Your Wife To Work Day I'd have done it already and let her follow me around all day. She's about to start paralegal school, in case you all didn't know that. It's her choice for the post-librarian career apocalypse, or, how to make a living when the City of Dallas crashes, burns and lays everyone off. She's about to go do what I do, which makes me wonder what I do already. And if I'm happy doing it, which is the other big thing. I've been doing it for darn near fifteen years now, so would somebody mind telling me if I'm happy?

The truth is, I didn't come to this field right away. I graduated from college with a degree in English and not clue one about what to do with myself, apart from a job at the college library (it was a really cool job, doing patent research, but it paid next to nothing and was only 20 hours a week) and some vague idea that I'd be writing this great bestseller and be set for life. (Grandiosity: Often a symptom of bipolar disorder.) I kept doing the patent research job, though,until the governor of our fine state cut my entire department. Then I ended up at Bank of America (don't laugh) during the Security Pacific merger, doing customer service for delinquent accounts. Yeah, those jerks who call you when you miss a payment. Did that for a year and a half, then moved to California, where I landed another library job and, uh, met Joan. So that ended happily, kind of, and I bounced around the lower rungs of the library ladders in town until an attorney at one of the libraries where I worked said, "Why don't you come work for me?" So I did and the rest is history. Strange history, but history all the same.

The thing is, with a job like mine, you have to love it. Otherwise it kills you. You're neck-deep in other people's problems, your clients get frustrated, opposing counsel can sometimes be a jerk, there are setbacks and setbacks to setbacks, any resolution to a case can take years, and as the paralegal, you get to hear about it all. You're the nerve center of the whole operation.

To be honest, I don't know how I'd do anything else. If that's happy, then happy I am. More to the point, I love what I do and hate when I can't do it. Unemployment, in particular, drives me nuts. I'd rather be--well, I don't know what I'd rather be, but I'd rather be working, that's for sure. I went to paralegal school mainly to fill in the gaps that show up when you learn on the job rather than by the book. Joan's going to get something a lot more tangible than I was shooting for: A happy ending to what's become a very dreary tale. She's sharp, she's been to law school for a year, she's chosen a good school, and it's not like she hasn't given it plenty of thought. I think she'll be fine. But I wouldn't be at all surprised if her experience is completely different than mine. Not better or worse, just very different.

Classes start October 18. I'll be a paralegal-school widow. Yep, that's me, home with the cats watching taped episodes of Warehouse 13. Oh, I'll survive somehow.

On The Existence of God, Or Lack Thereof

2011-10-11T04:45:00.000-07:00

Now there's a nice lighthearted topic to discuss with friends and total strangers. If there's a better way to win friends and influence people, I can't imagine what it is. In all seriousness, though, Buddhism has been described as "a religion without a god" by some old dude who was a lot wiser than me. Buddha Himself seemed to think that this was an intractable problem, and predicted that Buddhism would die out within 500 or so years of his death. Which it did, in India, but it had already spread to China by then and was working its way into Japan. And it got back to India, eventually, which just goes to prove something or other.

(India, by the way, has millions of gods. They might have one for every Indian. If not, they at least have enough that everyone who wants one, gets one, and those that don't can afford to give theirs away to friends or family members. "Here, will you take care of my god for me while I run up to the store?" "Sure, in fact, I can adopt it if you want." "Be my guest." Polite bunch, Indians.)

Anyway, Buddhism isn't too hung up on the existence of God. When you read through the Dhammapada, you can get through all five thousand pages (approximately) without once tripping over a reference to the existence of God. Well, unless you count "divine calm," "divine edification," "purity of heart" and stuff like that. Which do sound suspicious; I mean, if they're divine, where do they come from? Gotta be a divine being out there someplace. Or is there?

Pose this question to ten different Buddhists and you'll get twenty different answers, not to mention forty deep discussions. My Buddhist monk friend ChiSing said that if there is a God, He must be an enlightened being, and if He isn't enlightened, He needs to be. I leaned on him a little more (he used to be a Baptist) and he said that it doesn't really matter if there's a God or not; our job in this life is to practice compassion and walk the Noble Eightfold Path. Not because God told us to but because it's the right thing to do. (Is there anything more annoying than the right answer that's not the answer you set out to get? Grrr.)

A long time ago, when I was running with a Lutheran street gang, I told my Lutheran pastor friend I wasn't sure I believed in God. He asked what God, in particular, I didn't believe in. I told him I didn't believe in the Old Testament God with his fits of temper and putting Moses in charge (seriously, is it me or would that guy be the first one kicked off the island on "Survivor"?) and messing with Job's head and almost getting Isaac killed and stuff like that. He said (to my surprise) that he didn't believe in that God, either; he believed in the New Testament God, who said (about Jesus) "This is my beloved Son, with whom I am well pleased" and offered salvation for the whole world, no exceptions--"that all those who believe in Him shall not perish, but have eternal life" and all that. Given some thought, I could see his point, but I didn't believe in the New Testament God either. Nor, to be fair, did I believe in Zeus, Jupiter, Hera, Aphrodite, Osiris, Isis, Qetzlcoatl or Thor. (Rather fond of Thor, though. Hey, I'm Icelandic.) I was an equal-opportunity disbeliever. I didn't tell the pastor this, though. Somehow I didn't think he'd take the one-more-god-past-pantheism disbelieving as all that good of a thing.

So if there is no God in Buddhism (and again, that point is up for debate), what's the focus? Well, the Noble Eightfold Path, mainly, and compassion and lovingkindness for all beings. I've met religious folks who don't believe it's possible to be a good, moral person without believing in God. I don't get that. Seems like all humans are born with a tendency to like other humans and want to be with them. It's the rest of the world that gets in the way. And to suggest that we wouldn't be good to each other unless we were afraid of going to Hell--well, that's just sad. That's suggesting that human compassion is moot and we're all just robots operated by fear.

I think they're wrong. I know plenty of good, moral people who don't believe in God. Some of them are Buddhists and some of them aren't. And some of them write blog posts. Cheers, y'all.

Book o' the Decade Alert! For those of you trying to navigate the Twelve Steps with no faith in God, or a healthy doubt as to whether God exists, please allow us to present to you Waiting, by Marya Hornbacher. Yes, it is possible to get sober/abstinent/drug free without forcing yourself to believe what you don't believe. Besides that, though, Ms. Hornbacher is an amazing writer. Check out her earlier books - Wasted, Madness and Sane - for some unputdownable nonfiction.

Talk Thursday: Masculinity and Testosterone

2011-10-06T05:32:00.000-07:00

I love me a good Talk Thursday topic that I know nothing about. Gives me a great excuse to display my ignorance to my legion of screaming fans (both of you). But first, let me explain something. There's this popular notion that lesbians hate men. I don't know how that got started, but it's a pretty wacky idea and I'd like to put it to rest right here, right now, please. Lesbians do not hate men. Why should they? It's not like they have to live with them.

Having said that, I now must admit that except for my father, I've never lived with a man, or even shared close quarters with one for more than a day or two. I did have a boyfriend (!) in high school and early college, but I never lived with him. Which, in retrospect, was a good thing, as I'd rather munch pita bread at Afrah than serve 20 years to life.

So maybe if I'd hung around men more, I'd get some of this stuff, but I suspect you just gotta be a man to understand certain things. Such as why a guy works his way up into a lofty position of power, like governor or Presidential candidate or person-in-charge of some huge 20,000 member megachurch, and then throws it all away to chase seventeen-year-olds in skirts. Honestly, is there a thing about positions of power that makes this happen? And if it is, why are only men affected? You never see screaming headlines that say things like, HILLARY CLINTON CAUGHT IN LOVE NEST WITH 20-YEAR-OLD COMBAT PILOT. (Ooo, but you should. What a delicious scandal that would be.) I posed a similar question on this blog a while back and got what I think might be the only honest reply; a guy telling me that no red-blooded American male would bother becoming governor or a Presidential candidate or a person-in-charge of a huge 20,000-member megachurch if he didn't think, at least on some level, that it was going to get him laid.

Something else I don't understand about the whole masculinity/testosterone thing: What is it about being a guy that switches your brain off when you get angry? I don't mean everyday, garden-variety angry, but when you pass that level and head toward homicidal. Something about being a guy means once you've reached a certain level of being angry, you must kill something or the world will cease to spin on its axis. Again I look to the ex-boyfriend for inspiration. When we were in college, we were walking across the lawn one day when a bunch of kids (and they were kids; the oldest one was probably ten) started throwing oranges at us. I doubt they really meant any harm--maybe it was just a great day to throw oranges; I dunn0--but one of them glanced off his shoulder, and he went from zero to homicidal just like that. Did he listen to me when I told him to leave them alone, they were just kids? No, he did not. He was going to kill somebody and to hell with anything I had to say on the matter. I even tried getting physically in his way. He knocked me down and just kept going. Eventually I ran into a building and called campus security, but as it turned out, he couldn't catch the kids. He was still mad when security got there -- at me, for getting in his way. If I hadn't done that he'd have caught them for sure.

So, okay, I don't understand men. I'm sure I'm not alone among women there. The thing is, though, I don't have to understand men. I'm not trying to live with them. I live with a male cat, and he's strange enough, but he's also thirteen pounds. If there's an argument, I can win by picking him up. Women who have to understand men because they live with them are in a whole different ball game, and sometimes I think they're playing with weighted bats, as it were. (Yes, it's baseball metaphor time around here again. Is it my fault the Rangers made it to the postseason?)

I will tell you, though, that I seem to have a little testosterone reserve of my own. A couple of years ago, Joan was being harassed by a colleague. For various reasons, she wouldn't rat him out to Personnel. Every time she came home with another story about what he'd done lately, I started to feel this urge to drive down there, wait in the parking garage, and then beat the snot out of him when he showed up to go home. How did Joan talk me out of it? She kept saying, "Jen, that's something a man would do." Ouch. My inner cave man fell right into line.

Talk Thursday: Do-Over

2011-09-29T16:08:00.000-07:00

The only thing more boring than writing is writing about writing. That is, to the person outside it. To the person inside it, writing about writing makes perfect sense; after all, it's not like you can talk about writing. Well, I mean, I guess you can, but it doesn't go over very well at parties. Probably because there's not much happening. If y'all could see me now (and one of these days I'll hook up my webcam and blog Live! From Afrah!), all you'd see is a fat chick hunched over a table near the counter, typing like mad on a laptop that's perpetually in danger of having baba ganouj smeared all over it. You'd probably also notice she's one of the few white chicks in the place, and that she's not wearing a hijab, but other than that, unremarkable. Just woman, pita bread, baba ganouj, laptop and much typing. Yeah. That's exciting.

But, anyway, I do like to write about writing. I think the expression we're looking for here is "getting it out of my system." Today in particular I'm practically tearing my hair out because I can't talk about writing. Not to my peeps at work, anyway. I've been working very hard at keeping my working life separate from my personal life, and for the most part I think I've succeeded. I mean, my cow orkers know I have a partner, and that I live in Far East Dallas with some cats and hang with a Buddhist street gang and swim a lot, but that's about it. That I write stuff has not intruded into the office consciousness, at least as far as I know. Course, if it had, I probably wouldn't have noticed; to paraphrase Luke Skywalker, if there's a bright shining center of office gossip, I'm in the cube it's the farthest from.

Which meant there was no one to tell when I got an email from the agent that had requested the first fifty pages of Mindbender. Last week, when I got the first email, I was so busy that all I thought about was where in the world I'd find the time to get together a package to mail and when I'd be able to get myself to the post office. And of course how I'd evict Scaley and Fang, my fraternal twin dinosaurs of anxiety and panic (respectively) from my kitchen so that I could somehow make this happen. But I did evict the dinosaurs and I did get the package together and yes! I even got myself to the post office. And I wasn't expecting to hear anything for a while, but now it's what, about a week later, and here's another email.

It took me a really long time to open this email. I darn near forwarded it to Joan, unopened, and asked her to just read it to me, but that would have been cowardly. I may be crazy, but a coward I ain't. I took a deep breath, stretched my shoulders and my fingers, told myself it was okay no matter what it said, and when I was momentarily convinced, I clicked on the email.

The guy was writing to say he wanted another 150 pages. And I about fell out of my chair.

Uh, what? Another what? He wanted what? I had to do what? How was I supposed to do that? Scaley and Fang immediately materialized in my cube and started making a big mess. Then it occurred to me that this was actually good news and I should be celebrating with the Spirit of Happy, not chasing around the Dinosaurs of Angst. But I couldn't. Celebrate, that is. Because I was at work and no one at work knew anything about this and--then the phone rang. It does that. Often at the most inopportune times.

When I got rid of the annoying insurance adjuster on the phone and the smoke cleared and the dust settled and I'd managed to convince Scaley and Fang they'd be much more comfortable in the conference room, I suddenly realized I was going to have to do it all again. Head back to my kitchen. Get to work. Put another package together. Convince Microsoft Word 2010 to number pages without drawing a cute little border around each one (Whose idea was that? Bill Gates, I hope somebody tattoos a black outline around your face). And do it all in the next couple of days, no later than Monday for certain. Eesh. My first thought was to skip my usual meeting tonight and head home immediately, but Joan (who, seeing as she lives with me, does know about this writing thing) told me no, I'd better go to the meeting. Something about when I get all angsty and start bouncing off the walls, a meeting helps. It's probably safer for any ceramics she might have around, anyway.

So I go forth for a do-over, or a do-it-again, or a same-task-different-pages. Or something like that. Wish me luck. And yes, I know I'm a little manic right now. But be honest; can you think of a better time? And do you think I should take out all that smooching on page 137, or should I just leave it there and let the lips fall where they may? And why am I asking you, anyway? Have a nice evening, y'all.

URGENT Mini-Post: From His Holiness the Dalai Lama on the Matter of His Reincarnation

2011-09-24T04:07:00.001-07:00

This was released yesterday. You can read the whole thing here. It is long but quite interesting and sets out the Tibetan Buddhist understanding of reincarnation--sort of a "how to" manual, as it were. The two paragraphs you're probably the most interested in are reproduced below.

As I mentioned earlier, reincarnation is a phenomenon which should take place either through the voluntary choice of the concerned person or at least on the strength of his or her karma, merit and prayers. Therefore, the person who reincarnates has sole legitimate authority over where and how he or she takes rebirth and how that reincarnation is to be recognized. It is a reality that no one else can force the person concerned, or manipulate him or her. It is particularly inappropriate for Chinese communists, who explicitly reject even the idea of past and future lives, let alone the concept of reincarnate Tulkus, to meddle in the system of reincarnation and especially the reincarnations of the Dalai Lamas and Panchen Lamas. Such brazen meddling contradicts their own political ideology and reveals their double standards. Should this situation continue in the future, it will be impossible for Tibetans and those who follow the Tibetan Buddhist tradition to acknowledge or accept it.

When I am about ninety I will consult the high Lamas of the Tibetan Buddhist traditions, the Tibetan public, and other concerned people who follow Tibetan Buddhism, and re-evaluate whether the institution of the Dalai Lama should continue or not. On that basis we will take a decision. If it is decided that the reincarnation of the Dalai Lama should continue and there is a need for the Fifteenth Dalai Lama to be recognized, responsibility for doing so will primarily rest on the concerned officers of the Dalai Lama’s Gaden Phodrang Trust. They should consult the various heads of the Tibetan Buddhist traditions and the reliable oath-bound Dharma Protectors who are linked inseparably to the lineage of the Dalai Lamas. They should seek advice and direction from these concerned beings and carry out the procedures of search and recognition in accordance with past tradition. I shall leave clear written instructions about this. Bear in mind that, apart from the reincarnation recognized through such legitimate methods, no recognition or acceptance should be given to a candidate chosen for political ends by anyone, including those in the People’s Republic of China.

The Dalai Lama
Dharamsala

Talk Thursday: Harried

2011-09-22T05:19:00.000-07:00

I just reread my post about writer's block and thought: Wow, I'm not bipolar or anything, am I?

Anyway. This is a great Talk Thursday topic because it perfectly describes the last month of my life. At work, at least, I've been positively slammed. I've had eight sets of discovery responses due this month. For you non-legal people, sets of discovery means that both parties have asked the other side in the case a set of formal questions, which need to be answered in Proper Legal Language according to a strict set of rules (the Texas Rules of Civil Procedure, in case you're curious). Discovery sets usually come in threes, which means three documents to which to respond. Each response can take upward of a couple of hours by the time you sit down with the client, get their answers to the questions, go over the questions themselves, object to anything that might be objectionable, turn the client's answers into Proper Legal Language, and then take the whole deal to the attorney for review. (After which, of course, it comes back with lots of changes, which can then take another x number of hours.) One set of discovery can pretty much knock down your timetable for the week. Two sets of discovery can pretty much become your week. Eight sets of discovery--well, that's two sets a week for four weeks in a row, folks. That's--that's just insane.

Now, here's the rub. While the sets of discovery are getting done, nothing else is. And it's not like everything else understands that there's discovery due and politely waits in the background for its proper turn. Oh no. Life and the law firm moves on. There are still motions to write, chronologies to create, records to order, filings to file, letters to crank out, depositions to schedule. In your copious spare time, of course. Because discovery trumps all. Miss a deadline for a set of discovery and you've "waived all your objections," which means, in short, that you've totally screwed up your case and are probably looking at a malpractice lawsuit. Miss one of those other deadlines, though, and you're at least in big trouble, and maybe fired.

So it's been an interesting month. I've tried to refrain from running around like a headless chicken trying to do everything at once, but hey, I get manic as hell sometimes, so it does happen. And then right in the middle of all this, when I was wrapping up Set of Discovery No. 8, I got The Call.

Okay, it was actually The Email, but The Call sounds ever so much more religious, doesn't it? And this being a religious blog and all, I couldn't help it. The Email was from a literary agent, asking for a partial on Mindbender. And everything came to a screeching halt for about five minutes while I stared at this email and said something that contained numerous swear words. Hard to say what this felt like, but I guess the best analogy is that I went fishing, fell asleep on the dock, and woke up to find that I had a bite on my line, only to discover I had forgotten my net, my cooler and some other vital piece of equipment fishermen need for when they actually catch something (the last time I went fishing, I was fifteen, so please pardon me for not having a clue). In short, I was utterly emotionally unprepared. I was off in discovery-land, remember? I mean, I'm not complaining here, but it was the apotheosis of bad timing. Five minutes after I stepped off an airplane in Thule, Greenland, without my laptop and miles from electricity would have been a better time. For serious. I think they have electricity in Thule, though.

And so a mad scramble ensued. First, I had to evict Scaley, the T-Rex of Anxiety, and his adopted older brother Fang, the Velociraptor of Sudden Panic, from my kitchen so that I could at least try to get some work done. Then I had to tell Joan I loved her every five minutes so that she wouldn't strangle me for muttering ceaselessly about how sucky this narrative was and how a reasonably well-trained chimpanzee could have written it and that obviously it wasn't worth mailing to an illiterate troll living under a bridge in Zaire, never mind a literary agent in New York. Then I had to figure out how to number the pages (curse you, Word 2010) after the first attempt left this fine-line border around each and every page (nice, kind of decorative, even, but, no. Just no.) Then I had to get myself and my pages to Office Depot to pick up a couple of big envelopes, get myself and my envelopes to the Post Office, and get back to the office before my lunch hour expired so I could get back to the discovery before I blew my deadline. And, oh yeah, get something to eat. I think I scored an apple and some string cheese.

Pant. Pant. Gasp. Whew.

So that's how I spent Tuesday and Wednesday. Some fun time, huh? But, pleased to announce, the package got mailed, the world did not crack asunder, Scaley and Fang are afraid of Ativan and today at four P.M., the last of the eight sets of discovery left the building. Which means I can relax and, uh, concentrate on that huge pile of mail that's about to fall on me. You know, from all the other cases.

October will be easier. I keep telling myself that.

Talk Thursday: Red, White & You

2011-09-15T16:26:00.001-07:00

Yep, two blog posts in one day. For a chick with writers block I sure do write a lot. Oh, hey, I can slap sentences together all day as long as they're not in a fictional context. I can essay my head off. I can also do all the stuff that starts out "COMES NOW Plaintiff, Ernie Dinklefwat, and complains of Defendant, Sam Sinister, as follows..." It's just the, you know, writing stuff that might actually sell and get recognized part that I can't seem to manage. You know, writing actual books and stuff. Like I used to be able to do without half trying. You think it's maybe the Topamax? It could be the Topamax. Course I blame everything on the Topamax. Just today I've blamed my post-nebulizer jitters, my sore left foot and Sarah Palin's lower jaw line on the Topamax. Tomorrow: Sex trafficking, Lady Gaga and the demise of the iPod Shuffle.

Anyway: This thing called patriotism. I think we liberals are way too prone to letting the conservatives tell us we don't have any, without even making them define the term. When it comes to slavish devotion to whoever's in charge, unquestioningly following orders like "Go invade that country, it's pissing me off" and agreeing not to ask the uncomfortable questions, then yeah. They're right. We're a bunch of unpatriotic cowards. But when it comes to honoring the place where you were born, wanting it to succeed against impossible odds, and loving the people and the land that raised you up, then we've got just as much of it as anybody, thankewverymuch.

I kind of found this out the hard way. Not too long ago, there existed for a brief time period the possibility that Joan might get a job in another country. The particular country was Western European, friendly, kind of cold in the winter but otherwise hospitable. Our marriage would have been legal there, which was really cool, and I could have come with as a spouse instead of having to prove my way across the border on my own wildly overeducated two feet. Naturally the subject arose; if this worked out, would we want to remain citizens of the U.S, or become citizens of the new place? For Joan this was a no-brainer; become a citizen of where you are. For me this was also a no-brainer; stay a U.S. citizen and vote absentee. Otherwise there'd be one less vote against Vice-President Palin.

Both perfectly valid points of view, yet it was amazing how much we argued about them. At one point, the question was raised: What's your country done for you, lately, anyway? It's run by idiots, a good number of your fellow citizens want to kill you, another bunch will only tolerate you if you promise not to breathe their air, the smallest corporation in Texas has more human rights than you do and the only reason to even vote in an election is to see what kind of jingoistic bullshit they come up with next. All of which is true, to some extent. Yet, again, to me it's a no-brainer. You just don't bail on your country when it's having a hard time, even if you happen to live on the other side of the world. You sit with it and hold its hand and hope it gets better.

Anyway, Joan didn't get the job, which rendered the argument moot. But I had no idea she felt that way and I don't think she had any idea that I felt the other way. Fifteen years of marriage and we still surprise each other. (And it would have been legal in--oh, never mind.)

Another Whiny Post About Writers Block

2011-09-15T05:10:00.000-07:00

This is the time of day when I’m supposed to be writing something.

It doesn’t matter what; poetry about garden gnome babies would do. Unfortunately for me, I don’t write poetry and I can’t stand garden gnomes. In the last five or so years I’ve written five books and I don’t think I have a chance in hell of getting any of them published. Well, except for No Accounting for Reality, which I self-pubbed on Lulu and sold maybe fourteen copies to raise some money for Children’s Hospital. Yay. And that may have killed my chances of getting anything published in the Real World, if I had chances, a point on which I am far from certain.

I wrote this trilogy, see. Mindbender, Spellbinder, Soulmender. Nifty titles, huh? And they’re good. I just don’t know if they’re good enough to be published. The third one probably is, but it doesn’t exactly stand alone; you gotta read the first two or you’ll have no clue what’s going on. And someone I trust told me that Mindbender comes off the rails in the third act, which is basically true. And yes, I’m still sending out query letters, somewhat, but with less and less optimism as the months roll on.

Meanwhile I wrote a little YA novel, Taken by Storm, that was loosely based on the first three. And it did stand alone, and it might be good enough to be published, maybe. (My mother liked it. That’s a great literary hurdle around here.) And yes, I’m querying on that one, too. But again I’m not optimistic. I don’t know if it’s really in the category of Good Enough. In short, after all these years and all this drama I still don’t know if I’ve yet written something good enough to be published. And I may not have anything left in me to write about.

In short, I may have dried up. I heard the song “No New Tale to Tell” on the radio and thought it described me perfectly. Yep, that’s me. If it’s not set in San Sebastian and something vaguely supernatural isn’t happening. I have no new tale to tell. I mean, what do I do now? I’ve sort of got this thing going about a musician who disappears and an old friend who’s trying to find him, but it’s turned out to be more about the old friend than it is about the musician, which is, I guess, okay. And it’s not bad, it just doesn’t have that pop and sizzle that it would if it were set in San Sebastian and things were exploding nearby. Maybe because I set it in Dallas. Things tend not to explode in Dallas.

When you’re down it’s a long way up. When you’re up it’s a long way down.

2011-09-11T10:25:00.001-07:00

Talk Thursday: Rewards

2011-09-08T16:16:00.001-07:00

As I hump my way through this obstacle course called life, or rather, this one called my life, I frequently call to mind the Big Question. No, not the one about whether or not there's a God (no) or what is our purpose in life (to be servants and built-in heated mattresses to house cats). I'm talking about the other Big Question, the one that occurs to me when I'm about to snarf down a piece of extremely decadent dark chocolate cake (thereby giving my psychiatrist apoplexy; large quantities of sugar and Topamax should never be combined in one's bloodstream) or after I've spent the hour from three a.m. to four a.m. sorting the screws in the junk drawer because the fact that they're all different sizes bothers me. This is the ultimate Big Question, the one I never seem to answer to anyone's satisfaction, least of all mine: Why Am I Doing This, Anyway?

The Big Question arises in all kinds of contexts. At five a.m. when I crawl out of bed to make my way to the Baylor Tom Landry Pool (and I try very hard not to think about it very much, because if I thought about it I'd never do it). At four o'clock on a Friday when I'm sorting all the junk I've been dealing with during the week for the purpose of, eventually, filing it. When I'm churning out query e-mails (queermails?) to agents, a lone snowflake in the blizzard being swept across the Internet in hopes I won't melt before I land in the right agent's snow shovel. Well, there must be a good reason. I must, on some level, expect some kind of reward. The answer, then, is what kind.

At this point I could sniff somewhat self-righteously and announce that virtue is its own reward, but my bullshit detector is way too sensitive to put up with this for even two seconds. In the case of getting up before dawn to get mostly naked and throw myself into cold water, it's pretty much gotten to the point where I can't not do it, at least for very long. Two or three days away from the pool and I start getting all twitchy. I seem to have a minimum chlorine requirement. I suppose there's that whole post-exercise glow and that warm satisfaction of knowing I've done something good for my body, too, but for sheer unadulterated rewards it's hard to beat the jaccuzi and the heated towels afterward.

In the case of filing stuff, I get the reward of a clean desk, at least for a few nanoseconds. We office workers take our moments of clean deskitude where we can get them. Currently I have at least five different piles of papers, in priority order, taking up space on my admittedly huge desk. Just seeing formica once in a while is its own little miracle.

And in the case of the query emails--well, here the analogy just falls apart like a badly strung necklace.

Okay, I admit it: It's been over a month since I sent any out. I don't know why I stopped and I don't know how to get started again. It just started seeming like a complete waste of time all of a sudden. I usually didn't get a response, or if I did it was one of those "Sorry, but buzz off" replies. No "Sure, kid, send me a couple of chapters" or "Hey, can't use it, but nice use of the word 'the' in the second paragraph." In short, no reward. If there's no reward, is there any point in doing it?

Yes, I know; I'm never going to get the silly thing published unless I write a lot more letters. I haven't written nearly enough to give up or even slow down. The Help was rejected by over sixty agents -- over sixty! Be impressed immediately!--before it was accepted and became a runaway best-seller (that I still, for the record, have no desire to read). Wait, hold it, let me channel Linus of Peanuts here: "Just think, Charlie Brown, (Mrs. Tolstoy) wrote ('War and Peace') seven times with a dip pen! And you're telling me you can't read it once?"

Still, same problem. No reward. No pats on the head for getting query letters out. No one says "Good job!" or gives me an extra smooch. I'm just supposed to keep plodding along, churning them out like a highly sophisticated riveting machine on an automobile assembly line someplace. But honestly, most of the time I feel more like Mrs. Tolstoy with a dip pen.

Talk Thursday: Drought

2011-09-01T16:14:00.001-07:00

Yes, I know we're in a drought. It's about the only thing they talk about on KEOM radio's Texas State Network News, after they get finished talking about Governor Goodhair running for President. (About which I know very little because I refuse to listen. The reporter gets as far as, "Governor Per--." and I've changed the station to the 24-hour classical channel.) I don't exactly need reminding. My entire backyard is dead, even the very stubborn asparagus. I'm doing what I can to keep the trees alive, and the front yard still has a little green here and there, but pretty much this is the year that lawn care became moot. A neighbor of ours is losing his magnolia tree. It's falling down, limb by limb, in a spectacle that's both ghastly and heartbreaking. And us North Texans are really getting off easy compared to the rest of the state. Lots of farmers have lost their entire crop, cattle are dying all over the place and there are wildfires - of course there are wildfires - chomping through all the dead vegetation, taking out homes and businesses and just in general destroying things.

So it seems kind of ridiculous to use up my allotment of cubic Internet inches whining about a drought of the mind, but that's just what I'm gonna do. You see, while y'all weren't looking, I went and wrote another book. Okay, some of you were looking. That's okay, I forgive you. That makes a total of five (count them! Five!) since I started this blog. This last one is called Taken by Storm, and it was all about the daughter of the heroine in one of the earlier books realizing she has some of the same problems Mom has, as well as some new and different crises that Mom never got around to. This one was remarkably short (72k words), definitely YA, and kind of a departure from my usual stuff. What's more, my mother liked it. No, she really did. And I started writing query letters and I started getting the usual rejection slips and then--

Nothing. I dried up. It was like somebody pulled the plug, and all the good words went straight down the drain.

When you're used to writing for about an hour a day, every day, at home or at a Starbucks or at Afrah or maybe the back room of Half Price Books, and you're used to churning out a page or two at least, and you're used to having two or three projects going at once, all in different stages of done-ness, and everything just comes to a screeching halt one day, it tends to throw you off your stride a little bit. The first thing I did, after a few days had gone by and the words still weren't coming, was panic. Oh dear God that I don't even believe in, what if this was forever? What if I'd said everything I had to say, and told the tales I had to tell, and the rest was just silence? What would I do for the rest of my life? Where would I go when my brain needed a vacation? Would I have to start doing drugs? Play video games? Find a real-life version of being wired, like in Strange Days?

Well, that's why I write. I dunno why anybody else does.

As the days trickled by and the words still didn't come back, I got depressed. Easy to do if you're bipolar - in fact it happens on a regular basis, like day follows night - but it's easy to forget that, too, when you're in the middle of it. So I moped around and spent ridiculous amounts of time trolling the CNN chat boards - yes, I know I'm not supposed to do that - and just in general felt sorry for myself. Washed up at the age of 42. Done in by a drought of the mind and left to wander the earth as one of the walking dead. Well, only about 40 more years and I can die for real, I guess. Obviously I'm not gonna have anything to show for having been around, so I might as well just be quiet and not upset anybody. I started to avoid the computer during my regular writing time. I started eating sugar again (yes, I know, don't lecture me -- I'm getting back off it; my psychiatrist was livid) and just in general did everything I wasn't supposed to do. Except swimming. I kept swimming.

Then, a couple of days ago, something happened. I dunno why, but I sat down at the computer and wrote a couple of pages. This morning I did it again, though it was only about half as much. Who knows if this is the rain returning after La Nina or just a rogue low-pressure zone; the result is the same--productivity. And perhaps the first little glimmer of hope that things might possibly get better.

(Attention literary agents: This would be the perfect time to throw me a bone. I'm soft-spoken, housebroken, won't bite and have had all my shots.)

So we'll see what happens. If things keep getting better, great. If they don't--well, let's just not go there. Meantime I hope it keeps raining in North Texas. I hope we have a hurricane, in point of fact, and a wall of water floats away a DART transit bus, just like last time.

Especially if I lay off the sugar.

Talk Thursday (on Friday): Time Changes Everything

2011-08-26T12:24:00.000-07:00

You guys wouldn't have liked me very much when I was younger. Really, I was a whole different person. Long ago and far away, when I was, oh, about twenty-six, I had some very definitive ideas about the world. I had opinions, and by God, you had better listen to them because they were right. If you had different opinions, that was fine. You were entitled to them, just so long as you understood that they were completely wrong.

Time changes everything. These days, I don’t even know if I have opinions, much less if they’re right or not. I was in the Company Lunchroom a couple of weeks ago listening to a group of people shoot the breeze about Some Topic of Supreme Importance (I think it involved a heavy metal band) and someone asked me, “You’re pretty quiet. What do you think?” I said, “I don’t know. I guess I’d rather hear what other people think.”

Well, smack me upside the head. Are we sure that was me talking?

I realized not too long ago that I don’t yell at other drivers anymore. I stopped doing it at some point. You gotta understand here, I’ve been yelling at other drivers since I started driving a car. Usually it was not-terribly-polite commentary on their style of driving, their parentage, what they might and might not have lodged up their rectums and certain acts of intercourse they might wish to perform in the future. Then one day I stopped. Just stopped, and now I don’t do it anymore. I dunno if it’s the Buddhism or the Twelve Steps or what, but somehow some maturity has crept into my system. Only took forty-two years.

One of the things that annoyed me the most about a certain person that annoyed me at work was that she reminded me too much of myself. She was just like me when I was twenty-six, and I couldn’t talk to her or give her any advice because I remembered being twenty-six and how I would take no advice from anybody. So I didn’t even try, which was frustrating beyond all reason because I used to love giving advice as much as I used to love telling people what their opinions should be. But somehow I’ve stopped doing that, too. Giving advice, I mean. Well, I still do it once in a while. But not nearly as often as I used to when I was twenty-six.

Time changes everything.

Back about 2001, the Twin Towers were still standing and my mother-in-law was still alive and I went to see Warren Zevon on the opening date of a new tour in downtown San Diego. He had a new band and you could tell they were still working out the kinks with each other but sooner or later they were going to be great. It was just a question of when. I remembered happily noting that the band was going to be back in San Diego again on the second leg of the tour, and I put the date down in my date book (this was before BlackBerries) because I really wanted to see them again when they'd pulled it all together. I thought they would be fantastic. Then Warren got diagnosed with a rare, particularly lethal lung cancer, the tour was canceled, and I never saw the band again. And of course 9/11 happened and my mother-in-law died and Stuart killed himself and with all that going on who knows if I'd have ever gotten back there, but I like to think I would have. Because it would have been fantastic. Rest in peace, Warren.

When I was twenty-six I had written some pretty good stuff and I actually (gasp!) had an agent and I was just moments from literary glory and bestsellerdom, so there was no real reason to worry about my career (though I went to paralegal school, anyway, just in case) and I drank heavily and freebased chocolate. Then I got really sick and my agent dumped me to run for Congress (he lost) and I never did find another one (or at least I haven't yet). It's now 2011 and I'm sober and (mostly) abstinent and I've written some more cool stuff but it has yet to attract any official attention. I work for a law firm. I'm a paralegal and I'm pretty darn good at my job, thank you. I hang around with a Buddhist street gang and I'm married (15 years and going strong!) and if you'd asked me where I thought I'd be when I was forty-two, when I was twenty-six, I'd have told you something else. I don' t know what, but something else. That was before time changed everything.

Even me. No, especially me.

Talk Thursday: Resisting The Urge

2011-08-19T19:20:00.001-07:00

Okay, what urge am I supposed to resist this week? I hope it's not the urge to consume frozen yogurt, because I'm off the sugar (mostly) but the frozen yogurt just ain't going away no matter what I do. Probably because it's summer, it's hot, it's dry and frozen yogurt is Just That Summer Kind of Thing, if you can't eat ice cream. This here's a lactose-intolerant household, but for some reason frozen yogurt makes the cut. (Hey, don't look at me. Talk to Joan's weird metabolism.)

Lately there's also been the urge to scream bloody murder from the depths of my cube. One of my friends at work gave notice, and as often happens when somebody gives notice, the Powers That Be say, "Hey, thanks for giving notice, you can leave, uh, now." There's somebody new starting but not until September, and the first week or so that anybody spends with us practically always involves sitting down with the assistant manager and getting to know a nifty computer program we use that basically runs the whole office. So my dearly departed colleague's cases (most of them) landed in my lap, and I've been frantically trying to figure them all out while keeping my own cases rolling. This is a recipe for insanity, or at least large quantities of stress. So far no screaming has happened, but I've been spending serious quality time with my stuffed fishy. (Yes, I have a stuffed fishy on my desk at work. Everyone else can have a cute li'l stress ball if they want one; I'm a stuffed fishy kind of gal.)

Let's see what else: I've been resisting the urge to buy a new car with money I don't have. There's a reality check waiting for me out there, but in the meantime I have a Serious Handling Issue and I've been through several rounds of "Let's try this and see if it fixes it." So far none of them have. I do have a solid diagnosis now, though; a bent wheel. Unfortunately, a diagnosis is not a cure. It was suggested that I look for a replacement wheel on -- get this -- E-Bay. Apparently it's not as easy to find a new wheel for a '98 Corolla as one might expect.

Yes, I drive a '98 Corolla. Hey, that car and I have been places together. Including Tombstone, Arizona and a little place outside New Mexico called Willcox.

I've also had a mad urge to buy a new washing machine, and for that I might actually have the money, provided it's a floor model and I'm getting it from an outlet store. Seems that right around the time my wheel decided that bending was a good idea, my washing machine thought it would be a great time to go kablooey, in the middle of a load of towels, of course. Chaos and mayhem ensued while the towels were hauled out to the line, hosed down (yes, with an actual hose) and left to dry in the unbelievably harsh Texas sun. Then there was to drain the washer, which was its own version of fun. Then there was to call a repair guy. Then there was to realize we couldn't afford a repair guy until after the car thing was taken care of. Then there was to reschedule the repair guy to right around my next pay check. It's possible that the silly thing can still be fixed. If so, I'm just out the money for the service call. It's also possible that after only seven years, the washer has lost its last sock. In which case I'm out the service call and the cost of the new washer. Meanwhile, I'm out quarters, by the roll, as I haul our stuff down to the Tom Landry Laundry and reacquaint myself with that denizen of my pre-homeowner years, the coin-op washer. How nice to see you again, machine. NOT.

Last and not least, I'm resisting the urge to write about all this in blog format and publish it on the Internet for all the world to see. God knows it'd be the most writing I've done in a week. I'm having this other mad urge to throw out everything I've ever written -- all of it, even the

completed manuscripts--and just start all over with the word "The". But then, that would be stupid. I may be crazy, but I'm not stupid.

Book O'the Decade Alert! Joe Hill's Horns, in which an ordinary guy wakes up one morning with an extraordinary growth on his head, should be checked out by all who are not faint of heart nor hairless of chest. Warning, this is a violent and often shocking tale

that upset me greatly, and one scene in particular has carved a great big screaming red furrow in my brain that I'll probably never get rid of (thanks a lot, Joe), but that said, a terrific read from the man who would be King.

Oops, I said the K word.

Talk Thursday: Garbage

2011-08-11T05:03:00.001-07:00

Prescient topic, especially since, according to Texas State Network News, Governor Goodhair is going to announce his candidacy for President any second now. Of course they've been saying that for two months - on a daily basis, in fact - and it would serve them right if he instead announced he was going to shave the good hair and become a Buddhist monk. Unfortunately, uh, no. Just no. Mr. Perry will join a crowded field of Bible-thumping, flag-waving, crowd-inciting, gay-bashing, woman-hating celebutantes and declare aloud again and again, at every possible opportunity, that he's a Christian who loves his country and by that and that alone, we should vote for him.

I don't get it.

See, here's the thing. I wish I could be a Republican. Way back in the 1940s, and even before, in the age of Lincoln, the Republicans had a platform I could get behind. Small government, conservative spending, keeping the official nose out of private business, letting states regulate most areas of life and only sticking the federal arm in there when absolutely necessary. That kind of thing. That's a Republican platform that's gone, baby, gone. In its place is a platform to regulate women's uteruses, let poor people die for lack of access to medical care, restrict marriage to people who are white and normal, establish Christianity as the official state religion and build minarets to issue a call to prayer five times a day. Okay, I may be wrong about that last one. Then again, maybe I'm not.

Apparently, to be a Republican candidate for high office, you have to be a Christian, and what's more, you have to be a loud Christian. You can't just be one of those guys who sits in the back on Easter and Christmas; you have to be one of those women with the big breasts and clipboards who chases other people around to form committees (you know who you are). You have to be evangelical. You have to pray out loud in public (in direct contradiction to Matthew 6:5; don't understand that, never will). You have to have big prayer dates with other evangelicals and refuse to invite people of other faiths. Unless, of course, you're Mormon. Then you sort of have to be quiet about your faith, because people aren't sure if you're a Christian or not and you don't want that to become an Issue.

Well, here's my take on that Issue. I don't care. If you call yourself a Christian, then you are one, whether you're a Mormon Christian or a Presbyterian Christian or a Flying Spaghetti Monster Christian (long live the noodle of Christ!). But why do you have to be a Christian to be President? Can't we have a Jewish President? Or, hey, maybe a Buddhist president? No, I don't want the job, but here I was just thinking that Brother ChiSing would be perfect for it. (Ducking in case he throws a Thich Nhat Hanh book at me.)

I'm gonna say it: I'm an atheist. Yes, I'm also a Buddhist, and no, that's not a contradiction. I've pondered this long and hard lately, and I've come to the conclusion that while Buddhism acts like a religion, it's really more of a philosophy. You don't need to believe in God, or any supreme being, to be a Buddhist. Buddha was a man, not a supernatural being. He found a way to be happy with ordinary things, and he taught it to his followers. If you follow Buddha's path, you, too, can be happy with ordinary things, and if you pass it on, you will be happier still. And you will not need to meditate out loud in the middle of a busy street in front of hundreds of people in order to show what a pious Buddhist you are. (I don't think it's possible to meditate out loud.) You will know what you are, and you won't need to prove it to everybody every ten minutes.

I once asked Brother ChiSing if there was a God, and he said (in a typically obscure Brother ChiSing way) that it did not matter if there was a God or not. If there was one, and He was enlightened, that was great. If there was one, and He wasn't enlightened (and to judge by the Old Testament, He wasn't, at least then) then He needed to be. Either way, that was His problem to worry about, not ours. Try running that by your local quorum of evangelicals at the latest prayer breakfast. Somehow, I don't think they'd find it at all comforting. And I have to tell you, living in a nation run by some guy (it's usually a guy) who feels the need to host prayer breakfasts for other Christians makes me very uncomfortable. I'm sure it's all about the money (Presidential campaigns can get expensive), but still, there are 300 million people in this country and only about 80 million of them are evangelical Christians. What do the other 220 million do on Saturday or Sunday mornings? And do they mind being alienated in the pursuit of the almighty campaign dollar?

I do. Just for the record. I think it's garbage. That's all.

Talk Thursday: Way Safe?

2011-08-04T16:11:00.000-07:00

Well, kids, Ramadan has started. I know I should not complain; I don't have to fast between sunup and sundown every day for a month. But I do have to abstain from the World's Greatest Pita Bread for thirty days, which is plenty bad enough when you're as hooked on it as I am. That is, unless I can talk someone into coming with me to the nightly Iftar bash at Afrah. Afrah closes after lunch and then reopens at sunset, where they put on an Iftar spread that's supposed to rival the palace of the Sultan Himself. I've always wanted to go, but I've hung back for two reasons: 1. I haven't been fasting all day, so I'm not sure I could do it justice, and 2. It's kind of not my party. I mean, I'm deeply indebted to the Muslim community of Richardson for letting me hang around on the periphery, listen to their Arabic and their wild pop music, and eat their unbelievably wonderful food, but I kind of think crashing their party would be pushing it. It wouldn't be, you know, safe.

I don't mean safe in the physical-danger sort of way; Afrah is about the safest place you could possibly hang out. Besides the clientele, which is mostly couples and young families with children, the restaurant is right across the street from the Richardson police station. I'll bet they never get robbed. I mean safe in the I-don't-want-people-to-stare-at-me sort of way. I am sort of an outsider; I don't look terribly Middle Eastern, I don't wear a hijab and if you didn't know I could be counted on to be there, snarfing down baba ganouj, every Thursday from six to seven, you'd probably wonder what in the heck I was doing there.

Safety is an odd concept to someone who basically grew up without it. That I even know to look for it from time to time surprises me. I somehow missed all the lessons about the things a woman needs to do to stay safe; I don't understand that there are certain parts of town I should never venture into, for example, or that I shouldn't go out by myself at night. Don't know how I missed 'em, but I did. They must have been right after the lessons about how to put on pantyhose and how to combine a hair flip with giggle for maximum attractiveness to the male sex in an alcoholic watering hole, because I never got those either. This whole being female thing is a mystery to me.

Also, the things I expected to be safe never were. School, for example, was not safe. I know I'm not alone in that one; school wasn't safe for a lot of people. But all the Dick and Jane books sure led us to expect that school would be the one place where all our peers would be on our best behavior and nobody would get hurt and everybody would be friendly to everybody else. (Pause here for hysterical laughter.) Church wasn't a whole lot better; between the same kids I spent hours trying to avoid at school and some old white dude in the sky threatening to fry me alive with lightning bolts, it was actually worse in some ways. And home? Uh, forget home. Home is probably the most dangerous place on earth for a ridiculously high number of kids. You'll notice hardly any kid ever gets beaten up or sexually abused or kidnapped or locked in a closet by a complete stranger. No, it's usually mom and dad, and they usually get away with it unless, as sometimes happens, the kid dies.

So you'll forgive me for thinking this world we live in is maybe not terribly safe. I took karate lessons for about three years there, with this idea that at least I'd be prepared when whatever-it-is came at me. Unfortunately, karate wasn't terribly safe either, and I eventually had to quit because I was getting too close to brown belt and I didn't, uh, look the part. (Seriously, whoever heard of a fat karate instructor? That would be like Mr. Miyagi on steroids or something. Crazy.) I could probably still give whatever-it-is a run for its money, though. And stomp on it a few times.

Anyway. For the next thirty-ish days, I'll be having my Thursday night dinners at La Madeleine, where I'm currently munching on an overpriced shrimp salad (oh, excuse me, a salade) and wondering if there's somewhere besides La Madeleine and Hooters that has free wi-fi. Starbucks, maybe, but Starbucks is definitely not safe. They sell frosted scones at Starbucks. That's like the end of the world, worse than doughnuts.

Mini-Post: Channel This!

2011-08-01T17:25:00.000-07:00

Pleased to report that after 31 days of July, yours truly pulled off not 34 but 35 kilometers in the ol' pool. That translates to 22 miles, or the breadth of the English Channel. Whoo hoo!

Yep, that's me to the left there, at the 2k marathon swim. Well, half-marathon, anyway; I think 5k would be more fittingly marathonish. Maybe next year. As it was, I started off too fast, didn't realize it until I was almost through with the first hundred meters, tried to slow down, really didn't manage it all that well, and almost crashed and burned at about meter 900. But I kept plodding along, and roughly half an hour later I was done. If I'd known they were gonna let me finish the silly thing, I don't know if I would have signed up. I mean, they said I only had 45

minutes. I figured they'd stop me around meter 1600 or so. But no. They let me go the whole 2000. Those guys.

By the way, look at that crummy foot position, willya? Geez. Gotta work on that.

In other news, I finally have a sun-resistant bathing suit. Fittingly for this, the first day of Ramadan, it's called a burqini. No, this is not me; pictures of me in my burqini are not ready for prime time. But check it out! Hood covers neck, shoulders, and all the easy to burn areas. Long sleeves cover arms and, in my case, even fingers. I had to dispatch the pants forthwith; they were way too long and, uh, floopy. Swapped them for a pair of white leggings, which work fine. I can now go out and swim in the sun without fear for the first time in--like ever. Where was this thing when I was a kid? I could have saved myself certain melanoma. Well, possible melanoma. Well, it could happen, okay? I can't even tell you how many nasty sunburns I had between one and eighteen. I test-drove it last weekend at Hurricane Harbor and it worked fine. No, I didn't wear it for the marathon swim; it does have an unfortunate habit of slowing me down just a little.

And, by the way, to my Muslim readers, if I have any: I get it. Muslim women have told me time and again that they feel safe when they cover up. Yeah, it's a religious obligation and it shows their devotion to God and so on, but my tour guides to the Muslim world (both of them) told me that they just feel safe under the hijab. I get it. The second I put on the burqini for the first time and realized that nobody would be staring at my ass because they wouldn't be able to find it, I got it. Safe from the sun, safe from prying eyes. Too bad Buddhists don't make a fashion statement this way because I'd do it. I really would.

Talk Thursday: My Rights and My Wrongs

2011-07-28T16:17:00.000-07:00

Kilometers swum in July: 32.2

Goal: 34

The big 2k swim is tomorrow night. I don't actually expect to swim 2k in 45 minutes but I'm hoping against hope I can knock off 1800. Because, really, it'd be awesome to hit 34 during the Big Swim. That would be serious grounds for a party at the beach. Well, we don't have a beach here in Dallas (unless you count the wave pool in Garland, and frankly, I don't), so I guess it will have to be a party at the pool. It's a nice pool, the SMU Natatorium. Just dodge the occasional shark and you're fine. Okay, I'm kidding about the shark. Mostly.

Up until this topic crawled across the Talk Thursday topic-o-meter, it never occurred to me that there might be human wrongs. Oh, sure, the world's full of them-let's start with slavery, religious warfare, the Exxon Valdez and John Boehner's spray tan-but it never occurred to me that there might be traits inherent in the human animal--bad ones--that just come with the package. That there could have been a clause in the Declaration of Independence that read, "We hold these truths to be self-evident; that all men are created evil; that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unenviable traits, and among these are greed, wrath, envy, gluttony, sloth and the pursuit of seventeen-year-olds in skirts." (Thomas Jefferson had seven kids with a woman who was not his wife, if memory serves.) Are there such traits? And do I have them? I expect I do, except possibly the one about the seventeen-year-olds. I prefer not to get arrested when I date.

So, if one wanted to establish one's rights and wrongs, where would one start? With the best and worst thing one ever did, I imagine, or at least the best and worst things about oneself. Not only don't I know what those things are, I'm not even sure how to narrow the list. I've been busy over here. Besides, are we talking about the best thing I did as far as its immediate benefit to me? Because if that's the case, it was definitely marrying Joan. But if we're talking about its immediate benefit to other people, it was converting to Buddhism and joining OA (tie). I was, let's face it, not a very nice person before those two things came along. They came along at roughly the same time, so it becomes a chicken and egg sort of thing. Whatever, it's an omelet and I'm in it. There was Before Buddhism and OA, and there's After Buddhism and OA. Two totally different people, really.

As far as the worst: again, how to narrow the list? The worst thing I ever did to myself was believe the stuff other kids told me in school, and repeat it to myself long after I'd ceased to hear it on a daily basis. The worst thing I ever did to another person? Cripes. I have no idea. I have an entire notebook full of Fourth Step meanderings in which I tried to figure this out. Dumping my ex by a long-distance phone call? That was pretty bad. Pouring shampoo on the back seat of my dad's car because I was mad at him? Serious mess, but bubbles aren't the worst thing in the world to clean out of the back of a car. (Hint: Do not use a hose.) Taking advantage of a good friend's obvious gullibility to get her to do things I was afraid to do myself? Ulp. Yeah. That was bad. But was it the worst?

Here's a sobering thought. What if I haven't done it yet?

Good thing I don't believe in predestination, or I'd get the heebie jeebies right about now. Imagine, if you will, that it's encoded into your DNA to do one of each. That you're on this planet to do one really good thing, and one really horrible thing. You don't know what they are, but you gotta do 'em. There will be a big gaping hole in the fabric of reality if you don't. You may go your whole life without knowing, until the very end of it, when you suddenly realize that you did them both when you were six. Or you did the Bad Thing when you were seventy-four and the Good Thing when you were eighteen. Or you did the Bad Thing when you were fifty-one, and--and you haven't done the Good Thing yet. You haven't done the Good Thing, and you're running out of time, and what if it's not going to happen until after you die? What if you're going to donate your body to science, and because of you, some kid in medical school will grow up to, I dunno, cure Shy-Drager syndrome or something?

Anyway, like I said, I don't believe in predestination. And I reckon all of us do both good and bad things, just because we're human beings. But wouldn't it be awesome if, instead of yearning to be rich or thin or powerful or famous, more of us yearned to be nice or wise or smart or compassionate? If I could convince a few people that that would be a better path, I'd settle for that being my One Good Thing. I really would.

Mini-Post: August Cometh

2011-07-27T18:05:00.001-07:00

km swum in July: 30.8

Goal: 34k

WILL SHE MAKE IT? ONLY THREE DAYS LEFT!! OH, THE SUSPENSE!!! Tune in Sunday for the thrilling conclusion...

Talk Thursday: How Many Times...

2011-07-21T16:15:00.000-07:00

...do you need to experience it before you learn?

Well, if "it" is sitting next to the table with the screaming baby at Afrah, and then being surprised that there's so darn much screaming, I'd say, uh, quite a few. But then, it's not a big restaurant. It's not like I can haul myself into the other wing and chill out there. Anyway, Mom and Dad always take Budding Opera Singer away, eventually, and I have half an hour or so of relative peace and bouncy Arab pop music before I have to tear out of here. So not the end of the world or anything, just a startly annoyance.

On volunteering for thankless jobs, however, I apparently have a limitless supply of without-clueness. Because I keep doing it. You'll note in my last post that I seem to have this thing for stumbling into leadership positions in my various forays into organizations. Well, this one particular organization to which I belong is no exception. I can't tell you what organization it is because someone I know would then be bound to read this and sue me for libel or something. But, anyway, I have a job in this organization, and in my copious free time I do this job and most of the time nobody has a problem with it.

Once in a while, however, I run into somebody who isn't content with just letting me do my thing. Once in a while, I run into somebody who's so determined to tell me how I should do my thing that he can't see the forest for the trees, can't see the water for the stormy seas. ("One Track Mind" by the Swingers. Look it up on iTunes.) This person--we'll call him Joe Joe (Disclaimer: His name is not Joe Joe.) -- contacted me twice last week, because once wasn't enough for some reason, telling me that not only wasn't I doing my thing properly, I hadn't done it at all. He could tell, he said (interesting that he turned out to be a he; I was positive he was a she, because I figured only a woman could bitch like that; yep, that's me, the sexist pig, talking) because if I'd done my thing properly, his phone would be ringing off the hook, and since it wasn't, it must be my fault. Joe Joe said a lot of other things, too, many of which weren't very nice.

Well. I very calmly responded to Joe Joe (twice) and told him that if he were to go to a certain location, he would see obvious evidence that I had, in fact, done my thing. I couldn't speak as to why his phone wasn't ringing, but, uh, there was my thing. There was no reply. What was more, my cell phone rang some twenty minutes later. Somebody who's kind of sort of a friend of mine from the organization was calling to say that Joe Joe had now contacted him to ask him to contact me and find out why I hadn't done my thing.

Mind you, I'm at work while all this is going on. Trying to do work things. You know, like handle people's lives. Having to talk about this whole ridiculous business while balancing my BlackBerry on my shoulder and typing at the same time is not, I repeat, not my idea of fun. But, again, still being polite, I said, "Miles," (Disclaimer: His name is not Miles.) "Miles, honey, where are you?" He told me. "Can you get to (location)?" I asked. He could. "Miles, what exactly do you see at (location)? Do you perhaps see, oh, maybe, (evidence that I've been doing my thing), or something?"

Silence on the BlackBerry. Then Miles said, "Oh yeah. There it is."

"Yeah. There it is."

"Well." Pause. "That's the first time I've seen it." Another pause. "Maybe you should make it bigger."

"Maybe I should paint it orange, too."

"Well," he hedged, "it would attract more attention."

"Would you tell (Joe Joe) that you saw it?" I asked. "Maybe, I dunno, point it out or something?"

"Okay."

"And I'll paint it orange."

"Make it bigger, too."

Well, I haven't yet gotten around to either making it bigger or painting it orange, but I will. In my copious spare time. But two things are really bothering me about this whole exchange -- no, make that three things. One, it happened several days ago and it's still bothering me. I'm a relaxed, easygoing Buddhist. Things don't tend to bother me to this degree, so I'm not sure what's going on with that. Two, I haven't heard a peep out of Joe Joe. Generally, when somebody takes enough time and energy to lay that much of a diatribe on somebody else (and a mighty diatribe it was), you usually expect them to say something when it turns out they've been getting their way all along. I mean, I'm not naive enough to expect an "Oh, sorry" or anything like that, but is a "Hey, thanks" too much to hope for? Or even an "Oh, okay"?

The final thing that's bothering me is that I'm a frick'n volunteer. I don't get paid for this. One shouldn't rant at one's volunteers if one wants to keep them. Now I'm thinking about whether or not I should quit, which isn't where I wanted to be at this point in the life of my tenure with this organization. Plus, I hate quitting. And it would be un-Buddhist-y.

Guess I haven't learned my lesson yet.

Talk Thursday: When Next I'm President...

2011-07-14T16:17:00.000-07:00

...actually, I should be very careful what I say about that sort of thing. I seem to have the same weird disease as my father has. I call it Civic Responsibility Syndrome. It manifests like this: Every time you join an organization you become President. I watched it happen to my dad over and over again; band boosters, soccer leagues, Kiwanis, model railroaders. In my case I've managed to dodge at the last minute and end up as vice-president, but I gotta tell ya, vice-president of a homeowner's association is not much different than president, particularly when the actual President bails on you, moves to Oregon and leaves you holding the bag two weeks before the termite tenting. Which she scheduled for Easter Weekend. I repeat, Easter Weekend. Only the biggest holiday of the whole year for the 60-some-odd percent of residents in our complex who were Hispanic, and she thought that would be a great weekend to kick them all out of their homes. Thanks, lady. Don't think I've forgotten.

I've also managed to dodge becoming President (or "chair," as it's politely called) of our local OA intergroup. I did it by hastily volunteering for something else. We have a rule that you can only hold one office at a time, so I'm safe for a while. As Bulluck said in "Deadwood," "I said I'd be the building inspector because I didn't want to be the goddamned sheriff!" But I'm on borrowed time here. Sooner or later, people will start looking at me with that godawful smile and say, "Wouldn't she make a great President?"

Eesh.

For this reason, and this reason alone, I never went into politics. But imagine if I had. A bipolar Buddhist blue dog Bachmann clone, making up stuff about the Revolutionary War and insisting that straight people could learn to enjoy gay sex with counseling and enough alcohol. What a fun campaign that would be. And when I won, I'd make my very first phone call to Harvard University, where, probably in a state of mild panic, I'd say, "Send me your very best professors of psychology, philosophy, religion, U.S. history, foreign relations, social psychology and cultural anthropology. No, make that two anthropologists, I want them to argue with each other. And an economist. No, two economist, and make sure only one of them is a Keynesian. Thanks. Oh, and a bottle of anything. And a glazed doughnut. To go." When my illustrious panel arrived, I'd say, "Congratulations, guys (and ladies). You're my new cabinet. Somebody fire the old one. Shouldn't there be a doughnut around here somewhere?"

Because, seriously, a president is only as good as the person he talked to last. Well, at least Clinton was. So I'd like to talk to someone last who actually knew what the fuck he (she) was talking about. I might have a snowball's chance of surviving the first year if I did that. It'd sort of be like an episode of "House." I'd walk into a Cabinet meeting and say, "Al-Qaeda is threatening to harm puppies and say bad things about the nation's children unless we withdraw our big ugly mugs from Libya. What should we do? Discuss!" and then stand back and listen to what everyone has to say. Once everybody's wound down (and I've pried the two anthropologists away from each other's throat, and one of them has managed to get in the last 'Not in my village' and the other one has tossed off a 'Chagnon proved that years ago'"), I'll have some idea of what to do. How anybody runs a country without a Panel of Learned Experts, I have no idea.

Let's see, what else would I do: I'd immediately declassify all the documents about Area 51 and hand them over to WikiLeaks. I'd tell them to make their release look like an accident and make sure my Army chief dude made some loud speeches with some nice big scary words. Then, once the tizzy died down and everybody got over the fact that all we ever did there was make top-secret aircraft and there were never really any alien bodies, I'd radio !X'to on L9 in the M-51 and say, "Okay, they bought it. You owe me 50 quatloos."

I'd close Guantanamo and turn it into a beach. It's in Cuba. It ought to be a beach. As for anybody still there when it closed, I'd get them all jobs at Disney World on the "It's a Small World" ride. That should keep them out of trouble for roughly the rest of their lives.

I'd raise everybody's taxes by the same nominal amount and lower spending across the board by another nominal amount, every year until we had a balanced budget. Then I'd ask what was so hard about this and wait for someone to tell me.

Finally, I'd tell Nancy Grace to shut up. And when she started in on the First Amendment thing, I'd tell her to shut up again.

Unless, of course, that would clinch my re-election. Maybe I'd just tell her to keep it down in there.

Fat Kids and Fat-Headed Harvard Doctors

2011-07-14T05:27:00.000-07:00

Looks like it's gonna be a two-blog-post kinda day, because I just cannot seem to shut up about this article in Time Magazine. Or its counterpart on CNN. I've been all over both comment boards, spewing all kinds of rancor and sarchasm (that's the gap between my witty remarks and people's inability to understand them).

In case you don't have time to read the links, some wit at Harvard University has suggested that childhood obesity is actually child abuse, and if kids get morbidly obese, their parents should lose custody. Yep, better to throw them into an already-overburdened foster care system, where they would seem to run a much higher risk of being raped, beaten or killed than they would in their own families, rather than let them get too fat. Great idea. Hey, here's another one; why not take these kids and ship them off to a state run fat camp (oops. my fingers almost slipped and typed "concentration camp'; wonder what that was about) and lock them up until they're eighteen, or until they've achieved a BMI of 25. Oh, and as for parents who apparently don't know enough about nutrition to feed a kid properly, don't bother educating them or anything. Just tie their tubes and make further procreation a death penalty offense. Yeah, that would solve the childhood obesity epidemic pretty quick.

What this doctor is forgetting, as all doctors seem to forget when they're commenting in public, is that there are human beings in this equation. One of them, by the way, is a kid. And I hate to dispell this notion that kids always do exactly what their parents say, but, uh, they don't. By the time a kid is eight or nine, he or she has both A. a functioning brain and B. the capability to use said brain to make decisions separate and apart from Mom and Dad. Yeah, I know how scary that is, but unfortunately it's the truth. So before we heap all the blame for childhood obesity on Mom and Dad (mostly Mom, since it's always the woman's fault in situations like this), let's consider that kid, for a minute, shall we?

Oh, heck. Let's just consider ME.

I was the obese eight or nine year old, though honestly, if you look at pictures of me from that time frame, I wasn't really all that fat. I did hit puberty at about a million miles an hour at nine or so, going from a kid's body to a fully grown adult woman's body in about six months. What happens during puberty? Well, you grow. And you gain weight. And it's possible it would have all settled out in the right places and I'd have been fine. Not likely, but possible. Instead, the pediatrician freaked out because I gained thirty pounds in two months, my mom freaked out because my first bra was a B-cup (no training bras here, kids) and the years of being forced onto one diet plan after another began.

I distinctly recall being about nine, reading Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm, when my mom came into my room and asked me if I wanted to go on Weight Watchers or Nutri-System. I don't think too many nine-year-olds have a very firm grasp of either one, but at least she asked? I was on Weight Watchers five times in five years and gained twenty-eight pounds. The real binge eating started during this time. I was eating steadily, doggedly, anything I could get. I'd sneak into the kitchen and eat raw cake mix out of the box. I'd steal coins out of my dad's change stash to buy candy from vending machines (nice and anonymous.) I stole food from other people's lunch bags. I even fished things out of the trash. The more my mother cracked down, forced me into exercise programs, and chirped at me about what foods were and weren't on my program, the more I ate.

And I did it on purpose. Why? Because I was furious, in the way only a pissed-off little kid can be. I knew when my rights were being violated. I knew if I kept on eating, it would make my mother mad, so I did it. Church picnics were awesome because there was no way she could watch me every minute. I'd head straight for the buffet table and watch her roll her eyes in despair.

Yes, being fat screwed up my life. Yes, I was the butt of every joke in elementary and junior high school. Yes, that sucked. But it didn't matter. I was too angry. And was I, uh, extremely sick? Let me think YES. But I didn't know that yet. I'd know it later, when I got around to joining OA. Much later.

By the time I hit high school, the binge eating had slowed down, but the damage was basically done at that point. I graduated weighing over 200 pounds. I won't tell you where I'm at now, but I will tell you that since joining OA I've lost 50 pounds, very gradually over 3 years. (Yay!) And I don't doubt that OA saved my life, because if I hadn't stopped when I did, I'd have gone over some precipice and I really don't even like to think about that, thank you.

But what I'm trying to say here is, why put all of the blame on Mom and Dad? My mom and dad did everything right. They were both thin. They modeled good behavior. They exercised a lot (especially my dad) and they encouraged (nay, forced) us to join them. My mom was on a health kick before there really was such a thing; we didn't have much sugar in the house, and a cake or pie was a rare treat (though the ingredients were always around; have you ever eaten a stick of pie crust? I have).

Kids are not mere mouthpieces for everything mom and dad do. They can and do think for themselves. And act on what they think. And that's why this Harvard doc is so off-base. He's gone hell bent for leather after the disorder and completely forgotten about the person--the real little human being--who has it. Sure, put the kid in foster care. Make him even more angry and messed up than he already is. Great idea, Doc. Call me when you get another one.

Mini-Post: Requiem for a Lizard

2011-07-12T06:04:00.001-07:00

One of my cats got ahold of a small lizard last night. Don't ask me what a lizard was doing in the house. I'm sure it regrets its rash behavior. After Joan determined that whatever the cat was playing with wasn't a six-legged creepy crawly that would make me scream like a little girl, I went in and got the lizard away from the cat. I picked it up with a napkin and tried to determine how bad it was hurt.

Answer: Bad. The poor thing was bitten almost in half. Yes, I know this is just part of the food chain and all that, but I don't have to like it. Quickly I rushed outside with the lizard, put it down on the porch and stomped on its head.

After which I, uh, was sick.

Don't get me wrong. I think I did the right thing. There wasn't any helping the poor little guy and he must have been in terrible pain. He's not anymore. But it's been ages since I killed anything. When I have to deal with a spider, I usually catch it and take it outside. I'll wave off mosquitoes, but I won't slap them unless they're biting me. I'm going to have to call an exterminator here, because we've got a hornet's nest someplace near the house, but I'm putting it off. I'm trying to figure out how I can call an exterminator who will somehow get rid of the hornets without killing them. (Right.) Any Buddhist exterminators out there? Hello?

I know people kill things all the time. Bugs, mice, rats, other pests that interrupt our households. Heck, even raccoons. I know it, but I don't like it. Killing things, I mean. I won't tell other people what to do, but I don't want to have to do it. Ever. And it occurred to me that maybe the best requiem for this little lizard is that I did react so strongly to having to kill it. What kind of person would I be if I killed something, shrugged, and went on about my business? And what kind of statement would that be, to this lizard? That would be saying that its tiny life didn't matter. All lives matter, however small.

The Drake Equation for Navigating Editorial Asteroid Fields

2011-07-09T20:43:00.000-07:00

k swum in July: 9.75 (24.2 to go!)

I don't often mope around the house and eat frozen yogurt, which I'm not supposed to eat, anymore. That's the problem with OA. After a few meetings, you completely lose the illusion that eating something will make it all better. You know it won't, so it's no fun eating whatever you would ordinarily eat when you mope around the house. Doesn't stop me from doing it, just stops it from being fun. You might say OA has ruined food for me, the same way that AA ruined booze for me. Forget about me ever joining SA. But anyway: Moping about the house. If I'm doing that, and it's not a direct result of my aunt and uncle selling their house in North Dakota (still waiting for somebody to offer me that $1.8 million), then it must be that The Odds have crept up on me again.

Now, I know I'm not supposed to pay any attention to The Odds. The Odds, as Boss Jason would say, do not exist. (As C3P0: "Sir, the possibility of successfully navigating an asteroid field is approximately 3720 to 1!" As Han Solo: "Never tell me the odds!") But The Odds of successfully getting a book published around here have to be a lot higher than the odds of successfully navigating an asteroid field. The Odds of just getting an agent are worse than the odds of surviving a night unprotected on the ice fields of Hoth (725 to 1; actually, Artoo, I don't think we needed to know that).

Now, I used to have an agent, so technically speaking, my odds should be somewhat better. I am, after all, agentable. So maybe only like 625 to one or something. But then, okay, let's say I make it past that first unimaginable hurdle and actually hook up with an agent. Now I'm like just one of hundreds of agented writers who have manuscripts they are trying to sell. There's only a certain number of publishers, and they only put out a certain number of books a year. So all the agents are taking all these manuscripts from all their writers and presenting them to all these editors who are going to look at, say, these hundreds of manuscripts and winnow down the pile to the, let's say, twelve manuscripts they're going to accept for publication in the year, say, 2013. And, let's say, things go well and they make a few bucks and their stockholders don't vote them out of existence between now and then, and they actually go to press with my book and it actually hits store shelves the year it's supposed to. Are you starting to get the idea?

There's this cosmic equation, called the Drake Equation, about the odds of the human race ever encountering an intelligent alien species, which has to do with how many planets there are and how many are within a certain amount of light years of travel and how many of those are e-class planets within a certain distance from their stars and not too cold and not too warm and not too violently tossed about and how many of those start communicating with radio waves and similar signals, and how many of said radio signals come into our quadrant of the galaxy and cross our wave of orbit, and anyway, after you plug in all these numbers, the answer is one. One. One lousy communicating intelligent alien civilization. I hope they are friendly.

Similarly, you could craft a cosmic equation for the odds of me ever getting a book published. You'd have to start with me writing a book that's good enough for people to actually pay money for, which I'm not sure I have, and I'm not sure I have because I'm in this mopey and eating-frozen-yogurt frame of mind, but just for the sake of argument, let's say I have. And said book would have to be represented by a fine query letter that really pops, which, again, I'm not sure I have, but let's just say I have, again for the sake of the argument. And then you'd have to calculate the number of literary agents who rep my type of fiction, and assume that the query letter would land in at least one of their laps (or on their laptops) on a day when they were in a good mood. And then you'd have to assume that, of the ones that were in a good mood, at least one of them would request my manuscript, like it, and decide to rep me. After which, you'd need to calculate the number of publishers in (just to keep this from getting totally out of hand) New York, the number of those that published suspense thrillers, the number of those that were accepting new submissions, the number of those that were willing to have lunch with this theoretical agent, the number of those that would then take a look at this theoretical manuscript, and...

And at that point my brain kind of bogs down. I mean, I can only calculate about fifteen equations at a time in my head before I get confused. But I think the answer is, uh, one. Or maybe one and a half. Or the odds of successfully navigating an asteroid field.

No wonder I say never tell me the odds. Clearly I need more frozen yogurt.

Talk Thursday: The Aminal Life

2011-07-07T06:02:00.000-07:00

Total k swum in July: 8.15 (25.8 to go!)

Well, kids, my last feral cat is gone. Her name was Frost (is Frost?) and she was a calico. She lived in the shed next to the house and showed up twice a day for feeds, and while she wouldn't come anywhere near me, she'd sometimes act like she was going to get close enough to sniff my hand. Anyway, I haven't seen her since the beginning of June, and because she was so regular, I have to think she's probably really gone this time. Gone to where? Don't know. Fatal case of truck or stray dog or coyote, I expect, or maybe an illness that she couldn't fight off. Another time she disappeared for about a week and came back dragging a back foot. It seemed to get better by itself (which was a good thing, since good luck catching her, taking her to a vet, and then catching her again to get the cast removed). But I think I'd have heard from her by now if I was going to hear from her.

So my backyard menagerie, which once numbered twelve (count them, twelve) feral cats, is down to zero. Unless you count the orange guy, who lives a few houses away and comes by for

extra meals and some loving-on. There's also a couple of grey cats that happen by every now and again, but I'm completely without any squirrel patrols, and the big ugly scary bugs that more or less never came into the house are, uh, coming into the house. (And the internal cats are completely useless, by the way; they come over and stare at the bugs with great interest, but don't do a darn thing to kill them. Cats not being Buddhists, they could kill with impunity; me, I have to yell, "JOAN!!" and try to ignore the fact that Joan stomps on them, rather than catch them and take them outside.) Yesterday I bought twenty pounds of cat food and couldn't figure out why I was doing it. Then, this morning, when I found the bin of food on its side halfway across the deck with the lid partially unscrewed, I remembered: The raccoons.

Y'all might remember last summer's bout with the cute furry and dangerous little masked

denizens of the aminal kingdom. They're attracted by the cat food, of course, and since I wouldn't stop feeding the external cats just to get rid of the raccoons, they had a nice source of food all summer long. I hadn't seen any in quite a while, though the last encounter was particularly cute; this one hid behind the food bin, stuck a paw out and scooped food out of the food bowl, pulling it behind the food bin to chow down. As if he was invisible back there.

Anyway, I thought they'd moved on to greener pastures. Perhaps it's the absence of Frost, but The Raccoons Are Back, People. And they're polluting the waterer by washing cat food. So I took the seemingly necessary step of putting out a small dish of water next to the food bowl. Maybe they'd wash in that, and leave the waterer alone. As it is, I've become the local watering hole for half the block and I'm filling the waterer every two or three days. When Joan saw this, she said, "Jen, I get that you don't want to chase away the raccoons, but is it really necessary to put out a finger bowl? I mean, what's next? Cloth napkins and a sherbet appetizer?"

My dad called me last night. He and Mom are visiting relatives in North Dakota, and my aunt and uncle had been hearing strange chirruping noises from the basement at night. My uncle finally went down there with a flashlight and a baseball bat and found not a prowler with a speech impediment but four baby raccoons. He and my dad caught them one by one and relocated them outside, under the porch. When my dad tried to walk away from the last one, it crawled out and followed him. Yep, Dad had become Mom. Luckily, the Real Mom showed up and put a stop to this nonsense in a hurry. So you might say this ridiculous fondness for pesky wildlife runs in the family.

(By the way, my aunt and uncle are selling the house in which I spent the only really happy part of my formative years. I'd kill to keep it in the family. Can anybody lend me $1.8 million and a speedboat until my first runaway bestseller? Anybody? Hello?)

Talk Thursday: Rejuvenation

2011-06-30T16:20:00.000-07:00

You gotta be kidding me. I just did Resurrection a couple weeks ago and ran perilously short of words. Now you're telling me I gotta put down the baba ganouj and the world's greatest pita bread and come up with even more words for a shockingly similar concept when I feel like I've just been dragged naked through flaming walls of rabid rattlesnakes? I mean, every day is interesting at the Old Law Firm, but today was particularly interesting and I hope tomorrow isn't this interesting or I might not survive. We're talking crisis upon crisis, from a new petition possibly being lost in the mail (and that would be bad, okay? That would really be bad), to me being utterly unable to make the conference call function on my phone work (have you ever hung up on your boss? Three times? In a row?), and we closed the day with me finding out that tomorrow, I'm going to have to tell Boss Dave something he's not going to like about an upcoming deadline that's up and coming one hell of a lot faster than he thought. How I'm supposed to pull Rejuvenation out of my hat at a time like this, I have no blessed idea.

But then, that's kind of the point of Talk Thursday. The topic-o-meter spits out A Concept, and your mission, should you choose to accept (and you must, or you wouldn't be here) is to take it, run with it and somehow Make It Work. There's gotta be something to write about underneath all that I-can't-do-it anxiety. After all, at the end of the day it's just you and your laptop. You work together and see what you can create.

So here's what I've come up with. Tomorrow is the first of July. This date is significant for several reasons. Firstly, Saturday is the second of July, and the second of July is halfway through the year. Secondly, the first of July heralds the approach of the three-day weekend, the Monday of which there will be fireworks (unless the burn ban extends into Dallas County, and it could, and that would kind of suck, but be understandable all the same). But thirdly and most importantly, the first of July heralds the beginning of Swim for Distance Month - the swimming marathon that is not for the faint of heart, nor the flat of chest.

See, for the last about four years I've been getting up at oh-dark-thirty most weekdays and driving myself to the Tom Landry Fitness Center to swim back and forth for an hour with the Dallas Aquatic Masters. Swimming is both fun, and awesome exercise, so I don't mind doing it (though it's occurred to me that if I ever really sat there and thought about it, I'd never do it; I'd think about the ridiculously early hour, the appearing in a bathing suit in front of all those superfit former Olympians and doctors and triathletes, and of course what it's costing me, so I work very hard on never thinking about those things). I think in some small way it keeps me alive. So I'm already swimming pretty hard.

But then, in July, we kick it up a notch. The goal is to swim at least every other day for the entire month, and you can pick a distance. The first year I did this I managed twenty-five miles, which is completely insane. Last year I don't think I cracked nineteen miles. So this year I went for a modest twenty-one. Secretly, I'd love to get to twenty-five again (and with the 2000-meter swim coming up at the end of the month, I may have a shot, but one thing at a time).

The only thing about July that I don't like is, it shakes up my morning routine. We scatterbrained folks thrive on routine, and I've got a good one; get up, meditate, feed assorted cats, make coffee, write for a while, make lunch, etc. I'll have to turn all that on its head and just get up, meditate very fast (can one meditate fast? I know one can mediate fast), roll into my clothes, grab my premade breakfast and coffee and hit the road, Jack. In short, instead of being at the pool at seven a.m., I'll need to be there at six. Which means getting up at about five. Which means my laptop and I are going to wash up at a Starbuck's someplace before work, guzzling coffee and getting our sorrows out of our systems before we haul ourselves back to the paper chase.

If it doesn't kill me, I'll be rejuvenated, all right. Last July I think I lost ten pounds.

Still, if memory serves, washing up at a Starbuck's every morning isn't so bad. It could get pricey, though. And I'll have to stay away from the scones. But there are certainly worse fates. We'll see you in the water.

Body Images

2011-06-26T08:58:00.000-07:00

Today there's a workshop on "Loving Your Body Through the Summer." Don't ask me how I get roped into these things, but I've been invited - nay, commanded - to "share my experience, strength and hope in the area of body image." As I have not one clue how to approach this, I thought I'd hash out a blog post first. Sometimes I do my best thinking on paper - or, in the digital age, white screens that look kind of like paper, with text and little pictures of fish on them. (Hello, fishy.)

What's going to be interesting about this little speech is, I haven't the foggiest idea what I look like. Every now and again I catch a glimpse of myself in the mirror and either A. don't recognize myself or B. jump in surprise, as in, "Who is that woman wearing my clothes and why is she staring at me?" I don't know why this is so - I recognize myself easily in pictures that were taken, say, ten or fifteen years ago--but the present me is a complete mystery.

I suppose all of us have some idea of what we look like, and we carry that picture around in our heads and either confirm that picture's accuracy or lament that we're no longer seventeen and a half whenever confronted with the physical reality. The thing is, though, I did this when I was seventeen and a half, too. I stared at my senior picture for the old high school yearbook and wondered who in hell it was; it was recognizable as me only because the girl in the picture was

wearing my favorite Eiffel Tower earrings. Now, of course, she looks like me. But this picture of me from Facebook, taken on my birthday--you're kidding. That's me? But she looks so ... so ...

What?

I'm in trouble, here, aren't I? It's hard to share experience, strength and hope about that which you have not one clue. But it gets worse. I also don't know if I'm male or female. Well, okay, I know I have female parts, and I really have no desire whatever to be a guy; imagine having 99% of your decisions being made by--never mind. But I don't always feel like a female. Maternal instinct? I ain't got it. Makeup? Lipstick? Yeah, I do that, because it's expected of me and because I'm a good mimic, but it so doesn't come naturally. But then, neither does mowing the lawn or working with power tools (Joan can tell you how many times I've almost lopped off fingers.) I seem to have grown up without ever learning that secret language of females that everybody else knows but me. Something about wearing high heels and skirts, the mysteries of pantyhose, the places you're not supposed to walk alone at night. Sometimes I feel just like a dude about stuff like that. Not that I'd know what a female (or a dude) feels like because (all together now) I don't know if I'm male or female. I once took one of those quizzes on the Internet that tries to guess if you're a guy or a girl, based on how you answer the questions. It put me firmly in the dude camp. I didn't tell it I was really a girl for fear of hurting its feelings. (Aha! you say. You're worried about its feelings! You're really a girl! And I can't argue with you. I can, however, point out that gay men worry about feelings, too.)

I also don't know if I'm fat or skinny. Well, obviously I'm fat, but I don't know how fat; am I huge or just, you know, fat? I don't always know what spaces I'll fit in, or what clothes, or--whatever. I'm like a cat with no whiskers that way. I'm always mildly surprised when I get into an airplane seat without an extension belt; after needing one for years, it still kind of rattles me that I don't anymore. Numbers on a scale are completely meaningless, as are numbers of sizes of clothes. Can I scooch behind this chair at a restaurant? Can I actually fit into that bathing suit, or do I need the next size up? If I sit here, will I take up too much room?

One thing, though: My body will do basically everything a skinny person's will do, and more. I swim ridiculous lengths on pretty much a daily basis (see fishy, above). I can walk long distances, carry heavy things, run when necessary (though not far), and carry on with the basic stuff of life, thank you. That I'm sometimes in my own way just makes it more interesting. I'm also ridiculously healthy, with normal blood pressure and sugars and a heart rate that's actually a tad lower than average. I blame the swimming. So what if we're not on a first-name basis; we seem to work together pretty well, my physical self and I.

So that's it. My experience, strength and hope. It's going to make for a short speech, isn't it? Well, that's okay. I'm a short person.

Talk Thursday: Devastation

2011-06-23T16:18:00.000-07:00

I got an e-mail this afternoon that a friend of a friend has died. I didn't know him well--point of fact, I don't even know his last name--but he was part of my little circle of friends, and I've missed seeing him since he moved to Terrell or Tyler or Timpanogus or wherever he took off to about a year ago. Somewhere in East Texas, anyway. He had AIDS and hepatitis, both, and nothing was ever simple when it came to his health. I'd heard he was in the hospital a couple of weeks ago, and I didn't think things sounded terribly good then -- something about quite a bit of innards needing removal and possible liver failure? So I'd been at least mildly concerned. He went home about a week ago, but then yesterday or a couple of days ago he became lethargic and confused, so his family took him back to the ER. He died in his sleep sometime this morning. I think he was about 45 years old.

And I? Well, I didn't take it very well.

As in baseball, there's no crying in law firms. Well, maybe in family law firms, but noplace else. Everything happens much too quickly and at far too great a volume to get interrupted by personal drama or a lachrymose state of affairs. There are briefs to write. Motions to move. Medical records to order, re-order, read, organize, certify and produce to the other side. Discovery to discover. Crises to un-crisis. There just isn't time, people. Which was why I hid in my cube and didn't bother telling anybody what had just happened and why I was moping around and why my makeup was all streaky.

Which means, of course, that I didn't give my colleagues a fair chance.

How do you know, for example, that your colleagues don't have time for you if you don't let them know that you need them? (Repeat that a few times, it does make sense, I promise.) How do you know that the manager wouldn't let you step out for a while, or even (Scalia forbid!) go home early, if you don't ask? How do you know that the whole litigation machine can't possibly grind to a halt for a few minutes if you've never given it reason to do so?

Let somebody else give it reason to do so, says I. I'll be the one hiding in my cube.

I am such a fucking coward.

Back about 10 years ago, when Stuart killed himself, I got a similar email letting me know the news. I already knew the news because I had a weird psychic thing the night before. Different law firm, different colleagues, same lachrymose state of affairs. Same reaction, too. Spent the whole morning crying in my cube and hoping nobody noticed. (It's possible nobody noticed; I had not yet done the things I needed to do to be dubbed certifiably insane by that particular group of colleagues, but that's another story and shall be told another time.) This was my role model, my life, my Christ, my great shining hope of the human race drinking himself to death and, just in case a .27 blood alcohol level didn't do the job (it would have), hanging himself from a pipe in a cheap hotel room. Why wasn't I already on a plane, on the way to the funeral? Oh, because I was broke. Right. What in hell was I doing at work? Earning a living. Oh, right. No crying in law firms. Chin up, lassie, there's the girl. Woof.

Anyway. A friend of a friend has died, and I am not handling it very well. I didn't handle it very well when Stuart died, and I didn't handle it well when Roberta died either. Or Uncle Al or Uncle John or any of my four grandparents. I imagine I won't handle it well when anyone else dies, for that matter. It's my brain and death is just one of the things it doesn't handle well. There's no crying in law firms, but there can certainly be crying in the front seats of cars, and I'm heading there now. Adios, muchachos.

Talk Thursday (the following Monday): I Love To Bitch About...

2011-06-18T19:09:00.000-07:00

...actually, I don't. Love to bitch, I mean. I love to rant, but that's different. I love to listen to everyone else bitch. Mainly because half the time they don't know they're doing it, and it's interesting to watch them do it while certain they aren't doing it. And once in a while a bitch turns into a rant, which is a wonderful thing to behold. Well, it is if I'm the beholder, anyway. I'm easily amused and all that.

Real quick, the difference between bitching and ranting: To bitch means to complain, which is to say, addressing one's complaints about something to someone who can do nothing about them with the expectation that somehow one's problems will get solved anyway. An example would be complaining about the size of an airline seat to the flight attendant, who does not purchase nor build airliners and has absolutely no say whatsoever about the size of the seats which are chosen to be placed in a particular airliner. (I see this happen every time I fly.) To rant, on the other hand, means to take issue with something and address one's complaint not just to those who have no control over it, but to the entire human race at large, usually in a very loud voice (or a blog post), and sometimes preceded with "I don't want to go off on a rant here, but..." before doing precisely that. When done as stand-up comedy (or a blog post), it's oftentimes hilarious, touching and enlightening (and Dennis Miller is the unacknowledged master of the art; I bow to you, sir.) When done on an airliner, it's often grounds for arrest. You have been warned.

I've been known to go off on a rant in this space pretty frequently. The subject is usually gay marriage and the thing that tends to set me off is my inability (in Texas, anyway) to quitclaim my house back to myself and Joan as a married couple. That's it. That's all I wanna do. Yet every time I think we can do it, bam! Another court rules some other way, and we're back where we started, which is to say, Dallas, circa 2004, signing a mortgage deed as two single women. Yes, it's nice to wake up in the morning and realize that I'm still legally married (for now) because the yes-on-8 crowd hasn't yet managed to undo the court ruling that left all 18,000 of us who managed to get married between May and November 2008 in California legally hitched. That's very nice, but it don't work here, or rather, we don't know how far we can push it here, and into property law is one place it probably won't go. Never mind that the way the deed is written, she gets the place if anything happens to me. That does not matter. I want to be a married couple in deed. (Indeed.) And it drives me crazy that I'm not. Thank you very much. This has been a sample rant, a live performance.

(By the way, Joan is going back to school, and she filled out the Big Student Financial Aid Paperwork Thingy this week. When she got to the "Are you married or single?" box, a little explanatory note popped up, stating that since it's a Federal program, according to the Defense of Marriage Act, she was single and could check the Single box, which meant my income didn't count toward whatever financial aid they end up giving her. So for the sake of the Feds, she can depend on no help from me whatsoever, even in the form of half the mortgage. Now, isn't that special. Play the system for all it's worth, says I.)

Rants are grand things. They're like public theater, street performance art. They make great reading, provoke thought, often provoke outrage, and at the very least, they entertain. More power to them. When it comes to bitching, though, I really wish people wouldn't. If anything they seem like a way for the bitcher to feel superior to the bitchee for a few minutes, often at the expense of the bitchee's feelings (and patience, especially if, as is usually the case, the bitchee can do nothing to help the situation.) Great. Congratulations, your anger has made you king. At least for five minutes. Then you'll realize how stupid you sounded, or maybe you won't. Maybe you'll settle into that airline seat with a note of smug self-assurance, confident that you told her how the seats ought to be on your planet. Never mind that they're still too small on this one.

I mean, what is the point of complaining, anyway? If you're not addressing a person who can actually do something to help you, you might as well not bother. And if you are addressing a person who can help you, please do him or her the favor of stating exactly what the problem is, how it happened, how it's inconveniencing you, and how you'd like it resolved. If the person you're addressing makes it plain that he or she can't help you, you'd do better to take it up a notch to his or her supervisor, or the supervisor's supervisor, or my personal favorite, the Director of Marketing. Often all you need in a situation like this, especially if you're dealing with a large organization, is one person who gives a damn. You're a lot more likely to find that person if you keep your cool, remain polite, and keep your requests reasonable. Bitter personal experience? Ah yes, my friends, I did disaster relief during Hurricane Katrina. And worked for Bank of America during the Security Pacific merger. Hard to say which was more harrowing.

And if you don't find that person? Well then, my friend, turn it into a rant. You've earned it, and the rest of us could use the entertainment. Play on!

Who, Dat?

2011-06-13T04:07:00.000-07:00

I live with a Doctor Who fanatic. We're talking serious fandom here. She peruses the chat boards, buys the T-shirts, has two (count them, 2) Tardis coffee mugs. She even quit playing D&D, which I happen to know she loves, to be home for each and every new episode of the current half-season, which ended, uh, Saturday, I think, on a big ol' cliffhanger. Before BBC America was broadcasting the episodes at the same time as the regular BBC was showing them in the UK, she'd get on BitTorrent and download those suckers (and delete them after watching; she's a law-abiding citizen). And, I believe we have every season since they started remaking the show with Christopher Eccleson stashed around here somewhere on DVD. Not an episode can be broadcast into this house without a Big Discussion on What All This Means (since the episodes are terribly convoluted, refer back to each other and stuff that happened in previous seasons, and often lay groundwork for stuff that will happen in future eps, which is mightily confusing if you're me.) In short, she takes this show extremely seriously.

Me? I just watch the thing.

I mean, I like the show. It's cool. Guy flies through space and time in a magical box that has certain Issues once in a while but on the whole can do just about anything. Guy lands on planets that are often severely messed up in one way or another and goes about fixing them, or at least solving their single most monumental problem (alien invasion, parasites, ground-devouring critters, artificial flesh taking over as doppelgangers, that sort of thing.) Guy meets presidents, prime ministers, Popes. Guy gets into and out of lots of trouble. What's not to like?

Here's the thing. I feel outclassed. It's practically a church service at our place, complete with low lights, sacred recliners and cell phones with which to Twitter through episodes. I'm relegated to the couch (the TV version of the crying room for little kids, maybe?) where I'm afraid to breathe, practically. Because Joan is so obviously into this show and not on planet Earth that my saying the wrong thing might just, I dunno, break the spell or something. And then what? Well, then I've ruined it for everybody, like the guy who hid razor blades in Halloween candy.

There's a kind of weird dread that comes over me when I know a new episode is imminent. It's

hard to be in the same room with that much Serious Fandom. I get very intimidated. No matter how much I like the show, I can never in a million years hope to equal that kind of rah-rah kick-alien-butt sort of passion. I sometimes wish there were such a thing as a Doctor Who bar, kind of like a sports bar if you get my meaning, where us casual fans could drop in, watch the show and, I dunno, eat barbecued hot wings. (Scantily clad waitresses are totally optional.) Somewhere where the atmosphere would be less intense. Because, ya know, it's been on the air for 43 seasons and burned through 10 different actors and killed I don't know how many Daleks, but look, folks, it's only a TV show.

Oops. There, I said it. I have to go hide now.

Talk Thursday: On the Road

2011-06-09T16:15:00.001-07:00

Longest road trip: In 2004, Joan and I piled 2 cats, a box containing a crock pot and various kitchen supplies, some suitcases, a bunch of other miscellaneous stuff, and ourselves (did I mention 2 cats?) into a 1998 Corolla and drove from San Diego to Dallas. It took us four days, including an overnight at my parents' place in Phoenix, and was not what you'd call fun. The cats were relatively well-behaved most of the way, though they seemed to want to sleep on the floor a lot (read, under the accelerator pedal), and for some reason Caesar wanted to stand on his back feet, rest his front paws on the windows and howl at every eighteen-wheeler that went by. But really, they were pretty well-behaved until we got to Abilene. I'm not sure what happened in Abilene but they both just freaked right the hell out. We had to stuff them back into their cat carriers. Caesar promptly flipped his off the seat and began rolling around on the car floor; I had to pull over, put him back on the seat and strap him down with a seat belt. I then drove 90 mph all the way to Dallas, somehow managing to avoid state troopers entirely. Thank God once we got them into the house, they calmed down. We lay on the floor on an air mattress most of the afternoon, panting for breath and wondering how long it would take our furniture and stuff to show up. (Answer: Four more days.)

Latest road trip: Last weekend, we drove to Glen Rose, Texas to take a tour of a wildlife rescue facility called Fossil Rim Wildlife Park. In this zoo, you're the one in the cage; they stick you into

a vehicle (an old school bus, in our case) and all the animals come out to see you. They gave us kibble to feed to the critters, prompting this giraffe to not only go after Joan for more kibble, but to try to steal her hat. And yes, it was hotter

'n' lots of things that are too darned hot, and we needed to have taken along much more water, and it was dusty and uncomfortable and so on, but still, a giraffe tried to steal Joan's hat. How cool is that?

Most surprising road trip: On another of those let's-get-the-hell-out-of-Dallas whimsies, we drove to yet another animal sanctuary, this one near Conroe (which is almost to Houston, in case you don't speak Texas geography.) This was to visit a wolf sanctuary, and we followed quite a few twisty turny roads to get there on the way down. On the way back, we came out of Conroe onto the I-45 and just turned north to get back to Dallas. Passing near Huntsville, we got the surprise of our lives: There, on the freeway, in front of God and everybody, was a giant statue of Sam Houston. I mean this thing was huge, monumentally tacky, and stuck out there in the middle of Nowhere, Texas, for No Apparent Reason. I mean, I guess you're supposed to pull over and take pictures of it or something? I dunno. But I was really surprised. Well, maybe appalled comes a little closer.

Scariest road trip: When I was a kid, we lived in Utah and my entire family -- well, two uncles and many cousins -- would fly in from North Dakota to go skiing at Snowbird every year for a week. It was awesome because we got to miss school, and because we got to see the sun; in Salt Lake City, the fog rolls in about mid-November and stays there until April, so if you want to see the sun, you have to go skiing. No kidding. Anyway, my parents had this old Ford Econoline van, which we'd cram with something like 15 people, plus all the ski equipment and luggage, and we'd drive this thing up this narrow, twisty, snowy, icy road to Snowbird, that frequently got wiped out by avalanches, hoping to God we wouldn't careen off a cliff and die horrible deaths. My dad would pile all the luggage in the back of the van and position random kids against the pile, including on top, so that all the weight would be in the back. Then he'd get us all to sing at the top of our lungs -- usually old camp fire songs, but once in a while something religious--so that we'd forget how frick'n scared we were. And there we'd go, this band of terrified, singing Icelanders, up the road to Snowbird. And somehow, every year, we made it in one piece. The gods have a soft spot for fools. And the nineteenth round of "Green Grow the Rushes."

Weirdest road trip: I rode in the back of a Brat truck from downtown El Salvador to uptown Chalchuapa, if Chalchuapa can be said to have an uptown. Chalchuapa is a town in the El Salvador Highlands (yes, there are highlands) where they've just in the last 20 years or so discovered the ruins of a Mayan city. They're slowly excavating some temples out of the jungle, and the tourists are starting to come to check them out, though because the location is so remote it's slow going. Still, I rode in this Brat in both sunlight and rain (it rains a lot in El Salvador), up these twisty turny mountain roads to Chalchuapa, and got to see this Mayan temple up close and personal. A nine-year-old kid walked me through it, and he was pretty knowledgeable, telling me all about the ball game that the condemned used to play for the entertainment of the locals before their still-beating hearts were ripped out of their bodies. (He then demanded a tip. I paid him and bought him a Coke.) We had dinner at a place called the Manhattan Bar and Grill, where the local specialty was pollo asado with shark fin soup. I kid you not. And on the loudspeakers in this fine establishment of the local haute cuisine played a fine rendition of Willie Nelson's "On the Road Again."

Next road trip: Well, it won't be a road trip because I'll be flying, but I'm going back to Utah to see the folks. And if we go to Snowbird, which we might very well do, the road will be dry and safe without a trace of ice. Which sort of negates the whole purpose, but it's still awfully pretty up there.

Talk Thursday: Fan

2011-06-02T16:08:00.000-07:00

Sometimes I wonder about the Talk Thursday Topic-O-Meter. Sometimes it seems to function at less than its optimal speed, and sometimes it spits out some just plain weird configurations that lead me to wonder if it's, you know, running with all its parts engaged. Or maybe it has a Plan, a Secret Plan of which I, a lowly mortal, can know nothing because to fully comprehend it would blow away my tiny mind and I'd be reduced to a gelatinous lump of protoplasm working at, I dunno, a law firm somewhere.

In any case, the topic of the week is Fan. And how do you like them apples?

I am a Fan of a great many things, though I tend not to Fan things on Facebook because it's a great way to get tiny viruses and junk mail. I can't speak for everyone, though, and one of the everyones I can't speak for is Joan. We share a Facebook page, and she likes to Fan things, so I end up Fanning them whether I want to Fan them or not. The last time I checked, I'd Fanned the Band of Gold, Afrah (my favorite restaurant), North Texas Mensa and something called the Tardis Tavern. I have only the vaguest idea what half of those things are. The other half are complete mysteries. Luckily there is no requirement that you must know what something is in order to be a Fan; as far as I can tell, you don't even have to be breathing. You just have to have someone click on the "Become a Fan" box for you and you're in, kid. That's right; my mother-in-law, many years deceased, could easily become a Fan of the Village People. (What's that I hear? Somebody turning over in her urn roundabouts Fort Rosecrantz? Sorry, Mrs. C. I was just making an illustrative example.)

I'm also a Fan of fans. Don't know what I'd do without them in Texas in the summer. Absolutely indispensable for questionably air-conditioned meditation halls at Buddhist retreats in the middle of summer. Trust me, I've got this down to a science; om mani padme flip, om mani padme flip. I have a fan mounted to the ceiling of my bedroom, and since the switch is broken, I unscrew the lightbulbs at night so I can still have the fan without the lights. One might point out, and one might be right, that I could just get the silly thing repaired. Yes, I could, but that particular repair is at the end of a long list. Currently at the top of the list: Getting the tree that's grown up around the power lines cut the heck down. It's starting to look dangerous out there. Second on the list: Getting another Fan mounted on Joan's ceiling. She needs one more than I do, and that's saying something.

Okay, I've covered Fans and I've covered fans. Can I stop pretending I know what to do with this topic now? Oh good. Let's get back to my favorite subject: Writing. Firstly, let me announce that the New Book has a title: Taken By Storm. Look that up on Amazon and you'll find at least 21 unique items, which was where I stopped counting. Five of them were drippy romance novels and one of them was a heavy metal album, but that's okay; can't copyright a title [Lutz v. DeLaurentiis (1989) 211 Cal. App. 3d 1317]. Secondly, it made Joan cry. Oh, wait; Secondly, Joan actually read it. Thirdly, it made her cry. And finally, buoyed by a familiar dose of wild optimism, ladies and germs, I'm pleased and mildly terrified to announce I sent out the first query letter this morning. Yes, I'm still querying the other one--but now I've doubled my odds. (As Han Solo: "Never tell me the odds.")

This leaves me in an odd position; without a work-in-progress for the first time in, uh, ages. I was working on like four of them before Storm took over, but for some reason I don't want to go back to any of the other three. I want to do something else. Haven't a clue what, just--something else. Maybe something about fans. Hey, how about a fake biography of a fan maker who travels to San Sebastian to meet Thor and Loki and prevent the end of the world? Nah, that'd never work. But it does pull the whole blog post full circle. Fan that!

Talk Thursday: If It Weren't Illegal...

2011-05-26T16:25:00.000-07:00

It bothers me no end that I'm such a law-abiding citizen. You'd think somebody like me would be a rabble-rousing hellraiser with a rap sheet as long as my arm, full of busts for civil disobedience, sneaking into animal shelters at night and freeing all the poisonous snakes, petty theft charges for like stealing the Mayor's keys, and being a public nuisance for, I dunno, lying down on the sidewalk in front of one of those government offices where you have to approach a row of windows in a proper but unknown order to get anything at all accomplished. But I don't. I'm distressingly well-behaved. Not only have I never been arrested (except that one time in Sweden, and I don't think that counts), I've never even been threatened with arrest, except for a couple of student protesty things in college, and by the time the police were telling us we had five minutes to clear the area, I'd assume the point had been made, we'd caused quite enough trouble, and I'd get up and go home. I mean, seriously, by then the press was there, dozens of cop cars were scattered about the area, lots of well-dressed people were standing around with their arms folded and looking distressed, and one or two officials who made more money in an hour than I did in a year had actually raised their voices. And that was about as much attention as the cross on top of Danforth Chapel actually needed, First Amendment or no First Amendment.

Okay, once I got pulled over for doing an illegal lane change and got a stern talking-to. But I didn't even get a written warning. And all of this well-behavedness brought me to where I am today, or rather, where I was yesterday: Standing at the counter at the Department of Vehicular Manslaughter, staring at the renewal form for my driver's license and trying to decide which box to check. There's a whole list of questions on that form that they want you to check "Yes" or "No" to. Any time you answer "Yes" to one of those questions, you're just bound to get into all sorts of trouble. Have you been diagnosed with insulin-dependent diabetes? (At least it doesn't just say "diabetes" anymore; the wise sheriffs of the DMV have figured out that there's more than one kind, and that a certain type is more dangerous, as far as driving goes.) Are you addicted to drugs or alcohol? Do you have a movement disorder that makes it difficult for you to turn your head or shoulders? And I was doing fine, checking "No" to box after box, until I got to, "Have you been diagnosed with or are you under a doctor's care for a psychiatric condition?"

I froze. Holy crap. It's illegal to be crazy and drive in Texas. Which is, if you'll pardon the expression, insane. I mean, I've driven in Texas and I've driven in L.A., and given the choice, I'd take the worst day in L.A. in a second, I mean in a heartbeat, over the best day in DFW. Don't get me wrong--people are much nicer here; they wave when they cut you off--but still, that's--that's just--words fail me. Heck, lots of things failed me, including my remarkable capacity to make decisions. I stood there with my pen poised over "Yes" or "No" for quite a long time, while the speaker in the background continued to drone on about "Now serving No. 678 at Window No. 999." Why in the world do they want to know if I have a psychiatric condition? Lots of people have psychiatric conditions. Three people in my house take Prozac, and one of them is a cat, for God's sake. Is this anybody's business? I mean, besides mine and my doctor's and everybody who reads this blog and my 120-odd followers on Twitter? (Hi, y'all!) And if it's illegal to be crazy and drive in Texas, then how in hell do they explain the 635 eastbound at rush hour?

Now, for some people this would be no problem. They'd simply check "No," renew their driver's licenses and go on with their lives. But I am not most people and I did have a problem. I am not in the habit of lying, period, but especially to government officials. That is a great way to get into all kinds of trouble. What did Martha Stewart go to jail for? Not insider trading but lying to the SEC. What is John Edwards in trouble for? Not diddling another woman and getting her pregnant, but lying about it to federal investigators. Never lie to the Feds, folks. It's just not worth the prison time. And while I'm sure that lying to the Texas high sheriffs isn't nearly as dire, the prisons in Texas aren't nearly as nice, either. Plus, it's just really not an option if you're me. I don't lie because I'm such a good person; no, I don't lie because I suck at it. I turn about eighteen shades of red, I start to sweat even if it's cold and my voice jumps an octave without my half-trying. I look really guilty. Remind me never to have an affair.

And so, after standing there for about fifteen minutes and listening to the annoying lady on the speaker getting closer and closer to my number, I finally checked "Yes" and sat down. Then, today at work, I did a little research on the Internet. What I've done is evidently called "self-reporting." The nice man behind the counter who took my little questionnaire will send it to something called the Medical Advisory Board, which will then send me a bunch of forms to fill out. I'll fill out the forms, probably have my doctor sign something, send them back, and the Medical Advisory Board will make some recommendation or other. If I don't like it, I can ask for a hearing with judges and lawyers and stuff. And if I don't like the outcome of the hearing, I can make like Dr. House and crash my car into the local Department of Vehicular Manslaughter as my final statement before they take my driver's license away.

That is, if it weren't illegal.

Mini-Post: Rapture Report II

2011-05-21T17:02:00.000-07:00

Well, whaddya know! There's Blogger kiosks in Heaven!

(j/k) - Okay, it's past 5 California time and everyone still seems to be around. Even my lawn guy, who is a saint. So, no Rapture today, kids. We'll add this to the list of doomsdays I and the planet have inexplicably survived. (White Nights, the Emmanuel David prophecies, Helter Skelter, 1989, Hale-Bopp, 23 in 1998, 45 in 1999, Y2K, Halley's Comet and 65 more between 2001 and 2010--somebody add that up, it's getting to be quite a list).

Disappointed that so much time and money and energy and brain synapses got burned up on this nonsense. Think of the number of hungry kids we could have fed, low-income housing units we could have built, problems we could have solved. To say nothing of people who would have made good Christians, that saw this sort of thing as What It's All About and walked away. You know, kind of like I did. Okay, in my case it was an overpriced organ, not an overpriced Rapture, and I'll tell you about it sometime, and I'm happy with being a Buddhist, but still, it was kind of sad. The Road Not Taken always carries with it a certain element of sadness.

Anyway, I guess I'll be showing up at work on Monday after all. Have a good rest of the weekend, everybody.

Mini-Post: Rapture Report

2011-05-21T04:26:00.001-07:00

Just wanted to report that as of 6:26 a.m. on Rapture Saturday, I'm still here. No definitive conclusions can yet be taken from such a small data set, but it tentatively appears that a Buddhist refuge ceremony trumps an infant baptism and a Lutheran Confirmation. Still, I'll keep you posted. You never know...

Talk Thursday: Settling on the Courthouse Steps

2011-05-19T16:17:00.000-07:00

Well, I don't have a topic yet, so that one'll do as well as anything else. This afternoon, just slightly after I got all the trial binders put together but before I went to Kinko's to pick up the nifty graphical maps, our case abruptly settled. This is kind of like winning the bronze medal before you actually get to ski down the giant slalom course (and I'm using a skiing metaphor because, frankly, the giant slalom course scares the crap out of me; I mean seriously, hurtling down a hill at seventy-plus miles an hour, strapped to a couple of boards, with only a silver unitard between you and certain destruction? No helmet even? Ye gods...). So everything came to a screeching halt in a way that can best be described in this haiku by that famous legal poet, uh, me:

Litigation train

Jumps the tracks before the trial

Sudden settlement.

If you've ever been about to fly to, say, El Salvador for the vacation of a lifetime, and you've got all your bags and your surfboard and your copy of "Let's Go! El Salvador" and your Dramamine and your private pass to the Zona Rosa annual art festival and your bottle of celebratory champagne to drink in first class, only when you get to the airport you find out you can't fly to El Salvador because a war has broken out and not only has the State Department ruled the place off limits to Americans but the pilot is refusing to even fly there, it might knock you off your stride the same way settling on the courthouse steps knocks me off of mine. It felt exactly like somebody had reached up and unplugged me from my wall outlet. Instantly I went from full speed ahead to no speed whatsoever. I sat down in the middle of my cube and took a look around at the stacks of stuff for the trial, the neatly arranged binders (also for the trial), the list of phone calls I had to make for the trial, the number of to-dos I still had to do for the trial, and wondered if there was any continuing purpose to my existence whatsoever. It takes talent to turn a settlement--and a pretty good one, I might add--into an existential crisis, but hey, I got talent in spades. Trust me, it would take 900 trained monkeys hundreds of years to pound out this blog in the form of random typewriter keys. I type, therefore I am.

Honestly, I'm not sure if I should be relieved or disappointed. Relieved because that's a whole bunch more work I don't have to do, but--heh heh--you should see all the work I've not been doing because I was doing all this trial stuff. Disappointed, because we didn't get our big cathartic good guys v. bad guys showdown in the halls of justice, with a jury of our peers riding point. But then, I probably wouldn't have been there for most of it, and heard about it mainly in war stories after the fact. Plus, there's one thing about settlement that's hard to argue with; it may only be a bronze medal, but at least you get one. If you go to trial, you may get the gold--or you may get nothing. And nothing is a heck of a thing to be stuck with after all that work.

In the olden days, the proper way to handle the post-settling-on-the-courthouse-steps blues was to go out to the nearest watering hole and drink until one felt better. Tragically, that is no longer an option for yours truly (if indeed it ever was), and snarfing down pita bread and hummus at Afrah, while it's excellent hummus and probably the best pita bread west of Baghdad, is a poor substitute. There are times when I find being sober quite annoying, and this is one. But I am going to eat every scrap of both of these pieces of pita bread, just for spite, and take home all the leftover garlic sauce. So there.

Rerun: The Five Phases of Trial Prep

2011-05-18T18:27:00.000-07:00

In case I haven't mentioned it, I have a trial on Monday. Maybe. If we get that far (they overbook courtrooms like they overbook airplanes, figuring some people just won't show up, and the rest won't mind being bumped because they know they'll get a $200 voucher toward their next filing fee. Okay, I'm kidding about the filing fee.) We're not #1 in line for that day, so it might not happen. But then again, it might. So there's much scrambling around in my office right now, and the best way I can possibly describe it is the way I described it back in '09. So if you'll indulge me, here's a recycled column from this very blog - The Five Phases of Trial Prep, by yours truly. It's a different kind of case, but the rest of it rings pretty true.

Originally published in this space on January 31, 2009.

One of my Big Cases is going to trial. This hardly ever happens. I don't have the stats at my fingertips here, but only some tiny percentage of lawsuits ever go to trial - I think it's less than 1%. The rest settle or are dropped. I've been a paralegal for about 10 years now and I've been involved in probably about 20 trials. And, yes, one of them did go all the way to the state Supreme Court, but my part was well over by then.

Now, mind you, lots of lawsuits settle the day before trial, or even the day of or a few days in. Far as I'm concerned, you get to that point, you might as well go for the gold with the jury because, honestly, all the work's been done. The rest is posturing. I don't have to do that - that's my boss's job. Anyway, for the uninitiated, here are the five phases of trial prep. Abandon hope, all ye who enter here.

Phase I: Euphoria. Oh wow! One of your cases is going to trial! This hardly ever happens! (see above) There's so much work to do. Exhibits to list. Depositions to highlight. Witnesses to call. The adrenaline high kicks in and you're running on caffeine and sugar. Get as much done as you can; this phase won't last.

Phase II: Panic. Holy cow, there's so much work to do. It's impossible to get it all done. What's worse, all the people in the other cases you're working on seem not to know you're going to trial and they keep wanting things done, like, I dunno, returning calls and setting mediation dates and stuff. Add to that, people keep interrupting you every five minutes and pretty soon you want to hang a polite sign that says something like "F*ck Off" on your office door.

Phase III: Rage and despair. Your case stinks. You're going to lose. Your witnesses are all changing their minds about what they saw and at least three can't remember anything they said in their depositions. We should have settled months ago. The insurance adjuster won't return your boss's phone calls. He's throwing tantrums in your office door because the Chinese place sent kung pao squid instead of kung pao scallops. The other lawyers are Nazi drunkards, the judge is 16 years old and fresh out of law school and everything's starting to look like a bad episode of Boston Legal. Oh, and your client is now saying he's not sure the wheel flange was installed by Bob's Pretty Good Technicians, it might have been a guy from Bob's Topless Emporium down the road. Time to throw your boss, all the trial boxes, and yourself out the nearest window. Double points if you land on him or her and survive the fall.

Phase IV: Numb. You no longer know nor care what the case is about. Your boss has a seven word vocabulary and all of them are words you can't say in front of a jury. Oh, that's right, there's going to be a jury. God, you feel sorry for them. Two weeks of testimony on wheel flanges. Somebody please explain why we don't just duel to the death over these little disputes anymore. Wouldn't that be easier? Your boss makes you call the adjuster to explain that, really, there's not that much difference between a $6 million settlement and a $9 million settlement. It's only money, right? And hey, the trial costs alone will run - hello? Hello? Oh great. We'll have to go through with it, then.

Phase V: Euphoria. You've hauled the 58 trial boxes to the hotel room you'll be living in for the next month, set up the temporary shelving, hung the take-out menus in alphabetical order around the room and packed extra Gas-X in the tackle box you'll be taking to trial. You've sent your boss back to change three times and he/she finally looks almost presentable. You've got three extra sets of the opening statement notes on index cards and your laptop ran the presentation software more or less okay, with only minor glitches, roundabouts two a.m. this morning. Somehow it'll all hold together. You take a deep breath, swallow the rest of your double-shot sugar-free cinnamon dolce latte in a single gulp, toss the cup over your shoulder into the trash can and it's time to follow your boss into the courtroom. Four weeks from now this will all be a distant memory. The gavel bangs and it's showtime...

Well, at least I hope that's what Stage V will be like. I'm mired in Stage III right now. Two weeks to go. I'll keep you posted.

Mini-Post: A Humble Question...

2011-05-17T04:48:00.001-07:00

This has been on my mind a lot lately, ever since You-Know-Who was shot and killed on the night I became an Official Buddhist (which I'll always remember with weirdness). There's been this running debate on the CNN chat boards, which I really ought not to read, about whether or not "enhanced interrogation techniques" at Guantanamo led to this. And whether or not we should continue to use said techniques in our endless pursuit of justice, national security and cheap oil. Which is not a fair question, but then I'm not a fair person.

Still, what I really want to know is this. Putting aside for a moment what "waterboarding" does to the person "waterboarded", what does it do to the person or persons doing the "waterboarding"? If you're, say, a 19-year-old kid in a uniform, and your boss tells you, "Please nearly drown this guy, and that's an order," what does that do to the inside of your head? Besides making you a person who is willing to do that sort of thing--and just because someone tells you to, which, in my opinion, is a hell of a bad reason to do a bad thing--how does that leave you, when you have to deal with other human beings for, say, the rest of your life? Are you able to separate out that part of your life from the rest of it, or do you wake up from nightmares for the next seventy years? What if one of your future kids drowns or has a near-drowning incident? (They happen; I almost drowned when I was about five and again when I was about eight, and I've talked to plenty of people--a lot of them swimmers, oddly enough--who say there-but-for-the-grace-of-God-go-I when it comes to near-drownings.) How does that mess with your head?

I guess that is more than one humble question. Well, I'll throw another one on the pile. Run this one by John McCain, maybe: What does it say about our country, that we're willing to create these moral dilemmas for ourselves, and put our people in the situation to become the kind of people who would do those kinds of things? No, I'm not gonna clarify that; hash out the semantics yourselves. Later.

Talk Thursday (on Friday): Excess

2011-05-13T10:20:00.000-07:00

I admit it; I have too much stuff. I could say we have too much stuff, but that’s an open invitation to an argument. One person’s too much stuff is just barely enough and maybe we should get a little more. Fifteen years I’ve been living with Joan and if I wanna make it to sixteen I had better shut the heck up. Besides, I do have too much stuff. I have scads of books and t-shirts and things and I’m not even sure what-all in the scary room that used to be a garage and is now kind of the laundry room/craft room/ cat box room/ place where we dump stuff we don’t know what to do with. There are still boxes in that vicinity that we never opened when we moved in, uh, 2004. The only reason I haven’t opened them (besides the fact that they’re scary) is that all the stuff I’m looking for might not be in there, and then I might have to acknowledge that it’s Lost Forever and then I might have to go get more stuff.

Seriously, I feel guilty about the quantity of stuff I seem to have accumulated in my pushing-42 years on the planet. I have some weird stuff. A set of bagpipes, for one thing – a bit dried out, but probably still serviceable. A guitar. A bicycle pump. A nifty space heater that I’m now afraid to use because it might fall over, catch on fire and kill everybody. But by far the largest quantity of excess stuff is paper. I have more paper than any normal person. I have an embarrassment of paper. And I haven’t the foggiest idea what to do about it.

Way back in the mists of prehistory, ie, in high school, this whole writing thing started to get out of hand. I started to get this idea that I might want to quit fooling around and actually, you know, do something, like, I dunno, slap some words together and see what happens. A friend of mine decided to join me—God alone knows why—and we alternated chapters, if you could call them chapters, until we came to the end of one of the sorriest tales ever penned by anyone, ever. Don’t even ask me what was about. It’s embarrassing enough that it exists. It was about 140 pages and it didn’t conclude so much as it mercifully crashed into a wall. I thought it was brilliant, naturally. I still have it. It’s hermetically sealed in an envelope and I’ll probably leave instructions to cremate it with my remains, but I can’t bring myself to just put the thing out of its misery.

My next foray into the great literary scene was 224,000 words long. I shit you not. It was a sweeping epic of monumental proportions. This one had a plot, sort of, and there was a war going on, sort of, and the protagonists (oo, I used a big word) all got laid and there were exciting plot twists and, well, it actually wasn’t bad, except for being totally incomprehensible. This sucker took up four (count them, four) three-ring binders, took an entire weekend to print out on a dot matrix printer (remember those?) and ended happily, I think. One of the boxes down in the scary room is completely full of this manuscript, which I will probably never open again. And I haven’t brought myself to throw away that one, either.

By the third one, I was in college, and I’d actually learned something, scary as that may sound. The third one was a haunted house tale that I rather liked. There was only problem; it dropped dead on me at about page 200. I mean seriously, it just died. I could not add even one more sentence. If a story is going to die on you, it ought to be polite and drop dead around page ten or so. I keep kicking around the notion of going back and seeing if I can fix it, because, well, I hate to give up. I probably won’t, though. And twenty years later, it’s still in a box someplace. (I hate to tell you this, but this blog post does not end happily.)

You get the idea. I am swimming in abandoned manuscripts. I’m not even sure how many I have, but somewhere between five and ten, anyway. I sometimes give Joan a hard time because she holds on to old zines and underground publications, but I really ought to just get over myself because I’m just as bad. The good news is, I managed not to start querying agents and publishers on any of these suckers. I at least knew I was producing material that was Not Suitable For Publication. (Yeah, and Danielle Steel is Shakespeare. But I quibble.)

Still, ya gotta start somewhere. It’s not like there’s an instruction book or anything. I’d like to think I haven’t written ten bad books. I would like to think I have succeeded fabulously at finding ten ways that do not work. Meantime I’ll, uh, hold on to my illustrative examples. Yeah. That’s it. That’s the ticket. Until somebody buys me a great big shredder, that is.

The Dalai Lama Speaks at SMU

2011-05-09T17:18:00.000-07:00

Today I left work early and went to see the Dalai Lama speak at Southern Methodist University. Yeah, the frickin' Dalai frickin' Lama. Head of state, spiritual leader, Mr. Buddhism to the world. For the average Buddhist, this is sort of like a Catholic getting to see the Pope. And somehow I got tickets to this thing. I'm still not sure how that happened.

I have good news; for a spiritual leader, he has a great sense of humor. He came out wearing an SMU Mustangs cap. It sort of matched his robes, kind of. And he says pretty much exactly what's on his mind, no matter who's listening. In this case, George and Laura Bush were listening, along with a cadre of very large individuals wearing dark suits and an assortment of high-powered weaponry. And at one point he said, directly to George, "I didn't agree with you when you went to Iraq. But you got around to democracy eventually." (Yes, I was in the same room with both George and Laura Bush and the Dalai Lama at the same time. I'm lucky my head did not explode.)

His accent was not easy to understand. Interestingly, it came and went. I think he might have had some sections of a speech prepared, and when he got to those, he spoke almost without accent; then, when he was speaking spontaneously, the accent returned. The whole event was captured on streaming video and can be viewed here. (I had a little trouble with the streaming video and had to refresh it twice before it kicked on, so have patience, like a Buddha.) But he did leave us with these gems:

"Democracy is not an American possession. It is universal."

"Wherever you receive affection, you feel at home."

"Love, compassion, forgiveness, tolerance - these are the aspects of a calm mind."

"The purpose of education is to reduce the gap between appearance and reality."

"Don't think of compassion as a religious matter. Be a warm-hearted person. Everyone needs that, irrespective of belief."

Definitely worthy of missing work. And a nice follow-up to becoming an Official Buddhist (TM).

Talk Thursday: I Remember When ...

2011-05-05T16:16:00.000-07:00

Now there's a topic to make you feel old. Fortunately I was feeling old already as I was contemplating my birthday, which I always start doing when Joan starts contemplating her birthday. We're a month and a day and ten years apart, she and I, and she's due. Due for what? Well, no major medical procedures, let's hope. But definitely due for a birthday dinner at Red Hot & Blue, the local barbecue pit, which I love because it has food other than barbecue. Yes, I'm the only Texan who doesn't like barbecue. So sue me.

Anyway, I remember a scad of things that people born after, say, 1980 don't remember. This is kind of fun sometimes, because to all intents and purposes I grew up in a different world than they did. For example, I remember when the Russians were the bad guys. I posed this to a 19-year-old co-worker, and she said, "The Russians were the bad guys? Are you kidding me? They're pathetic! They sink their own submarines!" And so I tried to explain about the domino theory and Korea and Vietnam and the Berlin Wall, and detente and glasnost and why Nixon went to China. And she blinked at me, this winsome creature so young and full of life, and said, sympathetically, "I'll bet you thought Cate Blanchett was really scary in Indiana Jones 4, too, huh?"

Like I said, different world. I remember when we sang "Up, Awake! Ye Defenders of Zion" right after the "Star-Spangled Banner" before starting the school day. (I went to school in Utah, in the early 1970s, and apparently several Supreme Court decisions before Madalyn Murray O'Hair--or at least before word of her hit the local school board.) I remember when gas was 78 cents a gallon during the Iran oil embargo, but it didn't matter because you couldn't find a gas station that had any. Not that I expected to live long enough to learn how to drive because the Russians (remember them?) were going to push the button and start the nuclear war that would destroy life on Earth. I remember "On the Beach" and "The Day After" and wondering why anyone would want to survive a nuclear war in the first place. (Yes, I was a fatalistic little kid. It was kind of hard not to be.)

I remember when Jimmy Carter was President and for a few shining years there, everything looked hopeful. We were going to have electric cars and we'd stop relying on oil from the Middle East. We'd all pass the Presidential Physical Fitness Test and devote our lives to community service and everything would be just grand. Then Reagan got elected and AIDS swept the planet (coincidence? Probably) and the Space Shuttle, that great symbol of American know-how, blew up because it got too cold out. And inevitably the jokes started: "What does NASA stand for?" "Need Another Seven Astronauts." Oh yes, the witty repartee never stopped.

On the other hand, I remember when there were no play dates and nobody had ever heard of day care. Kids ran around the neighborhood on bikes after school and hung around in each other's yards, and nobody panicked and called the local police department's gang control unit. I remember when there were no cell phones and no Internet, and you had to ask your parents' permission to use the phone because telephone calls were expensive. If you wanted to know something about something, you had to go look it up at the library because there was no such thing as "googling." I remember when you'd be walking to school, and somebody's mother would be driving by and she'd stop to pick you up and give you a ride the rest of the way, and it never occurred to you for one second that this might be an abduction about to happen. There was no "stranger danger" because there weren't any strangers. Everybody knew everybody, except that sinister old dude who lived across the street, and everybody still knew he was the sinister old dude across the street, so you still knew him even if you didn't know him. And after he died it turned out he was a millionaire several times over who'd left all his money to the library or the hospital or something. People were just weird like that.

I remember when the school day ended at three and the parents came home by five. I remember when we spent weekends at Snowbird because ski lift passes only cost $15 each (scary to think of now, isn't it?) I remember when you could get on an airplane and not only avoid being groped by the TSA (because there was no TSA), but you didn't even have to walk through a metal detector. There was no such thing as "skyjacking", the Twin Towers were still standing and Osama Bin Laden was just another reactionary fighting some pointless war in Afghanistan against the Russians, who used to be the bad guys. Oh, and we were financing him then, too. Your enemy's enemy is your friend.

And on that note, it looks like I've come full circle. So I'll just say this. I remember when I didn't have a blog, and I just blathered this stuff to myself in the shower. Heaven forfend we ever return to those days. Cheers, all.

Mini-Post: The Weird Dichotomy of Sunday

2011-05-03T06:43:00.000-07:00

Hello all. The whole Osama Bin Laden thing sort of stole my thunder, but on Sunday I became an Official Buddhist by accepting the Five Precepts and going through a ridiculously long ceremony (Buddhist ceremonies are often long). Yeah, it's not like I was exactly an un-Buddhist beforehand, but now I feel kind of--official. Oddly enough, the one thing that sticks out in my mind is that I can't join the office lottery pool anymore. One of the things I promised not to do was gamble. Not that I was exactly a card shark or anything, but that's out now. Which is probably for the best. I have a superstitious streak that's a mile wide and buried ten miles deep that just probably shouldn't ever be waked up, if it can be avoided.

So I went through this ceremony, and they gave me this pretty white scarf and a little jewel and cut off a little bit of my hair, and there was a lot of chanting, and we sat and meditated for what felt like a lot longer than half an hour, and I came home feeling all serene and, well, official. And less than two hours later, the Twitterverse lit up with all this stuff about how the President was going to address the nation. At 10:30 on a Sunday. I mean, I had to go wake Joan up. We always watch the President when he addresses the nation. And in the twenty or so minutes between finding out that the President was going to address the nation and finding out why the President was going to address the nation, my brain went rabid. Nuclear attack? Terrorist bombing? Did we just declare war on somebody? This had to be bad, right?

Well, no. It wasn't bad. It was Osama bin Laden. And I've managed to keep my big mouf shut up until now, but today I'm gonna say it. Yes, I'm glad my country and my fellow human beings no longer face a threat from that particular individual. And yes, I'm also glad that that particular individual's organization is, perhaps fatally, crippled and less able to hurt people. And I understand that a lot of people who lost loved ones and family members during 9/11 are very emotional right now. But still: The video footage of people celebrating his death, chanting, singing and waving flags all around the world, made me sick.

The death of any human being, even an enemy, is not, in my humble opinion, cause for celebration. Relief, yes; celebration, no. I've got backup here: God doesn't think so either. "As I live, says the lord GOD, I have no pleasure in the death of the wicked, but that the wicked turn from their ways and live." Ezekiel 33:11. And "Do not rejoice when your enemy falls and do not let your heart be glad when he stumbles; or the Lord will see and be displeased." Proverbs 24: 17-18. (The Buddhist quotes the Bible. In the Bible Belt. How apropos.) I'm just sayin'. Yes, there are plenty of Bible quotes that say the exact opposite. But it's my blog and that's my opinion. Your mileage may vary.

In closing, I'm gonna leave you this, from the Dhammapada: "Your worst enemy cannot harm you as much as your own mind, unguarded." It's been a long ten years. It was also a long twenty minutes.

Talk Thursday: ...And Little Did I Know...

2011-04-28T16:12:00.000-07:00

I wasn't gonna write this blog post. I was feeling pretty magnanimous about the whole thing, and I was just gonna let it slide under some rug somewhere. I mean, it ended happily. Even if it was one of the great debacles of all time, a customer service FAIL deserving of a place on failblog.org, I didn't see how blogging about it was gonna help anything. Besides, I just finished writing a book, for Yarg's sake. I'm in a nice mellow mood about that. Yeah, I still have to edit the thing, and it could be months before it's ready to be submitted anyplace, and who knows, I might have to tear it up and start over, but still, writing a book is a Big Deal. Finishing writing a book is an even bigger deal. Trust me, I know lots of people who have started writing books and never finished them. I've got my share of Unfinished WIPs myself.

But then today's topic comes out of the topic-o-meter. "...and little did I know..." I mean, that's just perfect. It's the story of my whole week. If I'd known, lots of things would have happened differently. So here goes. My apologies in advance if you happen to work for the particular business establishment I'm going to talk about but try very hard not to name. Let's just say they run the tightest ship in the shipping business and they've been used as a prop in a major motion picture.

It all started out so innocently. Client Mr. Burns settles his case. Client Mr. Burns is owed a check. Because the check is somewhat large, it's decided not to send it to him in the mail but via this particular shipping company. So on Thursday last, I prepare an envelope according to the tightest-ship-in-the-shipping-business rules and put it in the box o' packages down in the basement. On Friday, I check the Web site, and it says the package was delivered. No reason to doubt the Web site, and besides, Mr. Burns would have called if the package hadn't shown up. So I'm not at all concerned.

On Tuesday, though, my boss asks me to please check on Mr. Burns. No particular reason, he just has a bad feeling. So I call Mr. Burns and he tells me no, he didn't get a package. This is, uh, surprising, to say the least. I mean, says right there on the Web site that said package was DELIVERED on FRIDAY, APRIL 22 at 9:43 AM. So I try to print out the CONFIRMATION OF DELIVERY promised by the Web site, and when it won't print I navigate the phone tree of the shipping company until I reach a human being.

The particular human being I reach is not all that reassuring. She reassures me that the package must have been delivered, but like the Web site, she can't prove it. I ask her about the CONFIRMATION OF DELIVERY and she tells me she can't get it to print either. Finally she figures out that the reason there's no CONFIRMATION OF DELIVERY is because the delivery driver didn't get a signature. Uh, why not, I ask. There was a cute li'l box on the shipping form that you could check if a "signature not required", but I didn't check it. That should have clued somebody in that a signature was required, no?

No. Turns out the rules had changed...and little did I know...domestic deliveries were all treated as "signature not required." Had been for the past four or five years, this person told me.

To which I said, "You have GOT to be kidding me."

She wasn't.

So we had no proof of delivery, no signature, and no package. How, exactly, did they handle it when something went awry, as, uh, was clearly the case here? Well, I could call the recipient back and make absolutely sure he didn't get it, she said. Or I could talk to a manager. I elected to do both. When I called Mr. Burns again, he stated that he knew the shipping company had been by because they'd left a sticky note on his door stating, "Sorry we missed you! We'll be back!" When I called the representative again and asked why in the world they'd leave both a "Sorry we missed you!" sticky note AND the package, she said, "Well, ma'am, I'll admit that doesn't make a whole lot of sense."

She'll admit that doesn't make a whole lot of sense. Oh, that made me feel better.

At this point I had to tell my boss what was going on. There was, after all, a rather large check gone AWOL. At some point, somebody needed to decide whether or not to call the bank. So I hauled myself down the hall and popped into his office and, uh, told him what was going on.

He said, "You have GOT to be f_____ kidding me."

I avered that, regardless of my wishes to the contrary, I was f_____ kidding him not.

Back to the phone. After some wrangling I was able to raise the manager of the Garland facility. She also admitted that the situation didn't make a whole lot of sense, but thought that perhaps the best thing to do would be for her to get ahold of the delivery driver and find out if he had left the package behind a plant or under a mat or somewhere else that wasn't screamingly obvious. I agreed that this was a good idea. She asked if this was an emergency or if it could wait until the following day. I told her the dollar amount of the check. She decided it was an emergency. But, then it didn't matter anyway because it turned out the delivery driver was a substitute and she didn't have his home phone number, so she would have to wait until the following morning. She promised to call me before nine a.m.

Now, keep in mind it's Tuesday evening. We had a whole line of nasty thunderstorms roll through here Monday night. If this package has been out in the rain all that time, it's quite likely useless anyway. So the boss and the office manager jointly decide to cancel the check, only it's too late to call the bank so they send a fax.

You know where this is going, right? The sun comes up bright and early Wednesday morning, I go to work, nine a.m. comes and goes and absolutely nothing happens. So I get back on the phone roundabouts nine-twenty, and after another round of press one for English, press two for customer service, press three if you're still breathing, I find out that the person I talked to the previous evening is the night supervisor, and couldn't possibly have called me before nine in the morning because she doesn't come on duty until one in the afternoon. However, they could connect me to the day shift supervisor, only they can't do that either because the day shift supervisor is busy dealing with a big freight shipment that just came in, but she'll call me back as soon as she can.

And you probably know where this one is going too. Do I ever hear from the day shift supervisor? Do I ever hear from the night shift supervisor? Do I, in fact, ever hear from anyone ever again at the tightest ship in the shipping business? Uh, no. That'd be a negative, Roger. They did, however, send me a nice little package of new labels.

About ten o'clock that morning, Mr. Burns calls. The delivery driver just dropped off a package. He thinks there might be a check inside. Is it all right to open it?

Mad scramble ensues. Must now call bank to stop them from stopping payment on the check. Must now make sure Mr. Burns, who has a message on his answering machine that the check isn't valid, doesn't tear it up. Must also make sure the Web site still says the package was DELIVERED on FRIDAY, APRIL 22, 2011 at 9:43 A.M. It does. It's now Thursday, April 27, a day which bears no resemblance to Friday, April 22, except that I'm still dealing with the same ridiculous shouldn't-have-been-a-problem. I mean, come on, people. I have things to do. People to sue. Motions to write.

But, again, it ended happily. Somehow, Mr. Burns and his (valid) check ended up in the same room together. So I should not be upset at a shipping company which has never screwed up before in living memory.

Still, you have to admit: Web site confirmation falsehoods? Customer service fails -- twice? Slightly over thirty grand missing for seventy-two hours? That is one hell of a screwup.

Quick Announcement!!

2011-04-26T05:29:00.000-07:00

Hi all -- just wanted you to know that after 72,000 words and 248 pages, I typed the words THE END on my work-in-progress this morning. I still don't have a title, but I'll think of one. A celebration is in order. Drinks would be on me, if I still drank. Coffee on me doesn't have quite the same ring to it. But anyway, whoo hoo!!

Talk Thursday: Resurrection

2011-04-21T18:45:00.001-07:00

When this topic first floated across my email, a song popped into my head. One of those old hymns from Bible camp; “I am the Resurrection/And the life/Those who believe in me will never die.” Not the world’s greatest Bible camp song, though it involved a lot of clapping. This being Easter Week and all that (yes, we Buddhists keep track of the Christian holidays; it’s hard not to when you live in frick’n Texas), it’s wholly appropriate to be talking about this coming back from the dead thing—even if it calls to mind, as it does for me, those creepy-crawly guys that growl and hiss their way through The Walking Dead on AMC. (Seriously. Jesus. Zombies. There’s a connection. It gets creepy if you think about it for too long.)

For some reason, resurrection has become the subject of arguments. When I was in college, some Christian organization was showing a movie about a guy who set out to prove the Resurrection never happened. If Christ never came back from the dead, as the story goes, then obviously all of Christianity was a fraud, and the entire Church would cease to exist. (The tag line: “Can your faith survive?”) I’ll admit I never saw the film, but I thought the premise was a little flawed. I know this will come as a news flash to some of you, but disproving something has never done much of anything to change anybody’s mind about anything religious. Every now and then some guy (it’s almost always a guy) announces that the day of judgment will be, say, next Tuesday at four o’clock, and when it doesn’t happen, his flock doesn’t exactly get up and leave him. If anything, they believe in him even more, because he’s singlehandedly staved off the Apocalypse. (Okay, sometimes they commit mass suicide instead. But nobody’s perfect.)

Sometimes I take in one of those Shroud of Turin shows on NatGeo or the History Channel. The shroud, in case you did not know this, is a piece of cloth with a radiographic image of a guy who looks remarkably like Jesus. Supposedly the image was made as His body dissolved into light, which is pretty interesting because, uh, you can only see the image with a radiograph. So as He was dissolving into light He had to predict that many years in the future, somebody would invent radiography, and then they’d be able to see that he’d dissolved into light, which is kind of an obscure thing to be thinking about at the moment you’re going from the state of being human to the state of being divine, if you ask me. But hey, he’s Jesus, right? He can do whatever He wants, right? So, yeah, he could commune with his divine state and dissolve into light and think about radiography all at the same time. I mean, why not.

So do Buddhists believe in resurrection of the body and life everlasting? I dunno. Go ask a Buddhist. Just kidding. Seriously, though, let me channel my inner Brother ChiSing here and say that Buddhists believe it does not matter if there is resurrection of the body and life everlasting. What’s important is living mindfully and graciously in this life. After all, this life is the one we have. There’s no reason to speculate about a life we don’t have. Anyway, if this is the only life we have, we would want to live it as mindfully and graciously as possible. And, if there is resurrection of the body, we would want to live this life as mindfully and graciously as possible, so as to be resurrected in a blessed state and have a better chance to be of use to more people following the resurrection.

What, you were expecting something profound? We haven’t even settled the question of reincarnation yet. Ask ten different Buddhists how reincarnation works and you’ll get twenty answers and forty deep discussions. And that’s just if you ask them today. Ask them again tomorrow and you’ll get twenty entirely different answers. Ask them before they’ve had their coffee and—no, don’t do that. That could get ugly.

What do I think about the resurrection of the body? That’s easy. Gross and no thank you. Reincarnation I can handle; Nature is a very efficient recycler. Besides, I’m planning to be cremated and made into plant food. This Jesus guy better be pretty good if He’s going to try to reconstitute me from ashes, soil and a big ol’ live oak. I’m just sayin’.

Happy Easter, everybody!!

Book O'The Decade: The Coffee Shop Chronicles of New Orleans

2011-04-16T18:22:00.000-07:00

Y'all may not know this, but I'm rather partial to New Orleans, even though I've only been there like twice. The first time was for this big Mensa hoo ha, right before Hurricane Katrina (in fact Hurricane Cindy hit while we were there; only a Cat One, but saying "only" and "Cat One" in the same sentence when discussing hurricanes is like saying "only" and "Hurricane" when discussing alcoholic beverages). The second time was for the big Pen to Press Writers Retreat, where I got to hang out with the inimitable F. Paul Wilson, stayed with good friend Marcia and maybe possibly met my new agent (which is to say he hasn't rejected me, yet.) And of course there was that stint with the Small Business Administration, in which I talked to scads of people every day on the phone, and gave them directions to places I'd never been all over Orleans, Metarie and Plaquemines Parish to meet with loan adjusters, appraisers and other trustworthy government officials. So I kind of have a hankerin' for the place in a not-sure-I'd-wanna-live-there-but-it's-awesome-to-visit kind of way.

(And were they ever hiring paralegals after Katrina. Wow. Every old firm in Louisiana had like three or four positions open because people had been evacuated and just couldn't make their way back for whatever reason. After the SBA laid me off I was saying to Joan, "Seriously, we could do a lot worse," but apparently libraries weren't hiring at the same prodigious rate. So we stayed put. But it was a thought.)

Anyway, this and the blog and my extreme fondness for things made from the essence of ground beans made me a natural to review The Coffee Shop Chronicles of New Orleans, a novel in three parts by David Lummis. Click on that link and it'll take you to Amazon.com, where you can get a copy in both Kindle and paperback. You can also get it as a vastly cooler and more technologically efficient NookBook, about which I'm not the slightest bit biased. (Nooks rule! Kindles drool!) I just knocked off Part One, and I'm not sure when Part Two is coming out but you'll hear it here first.

Coffee Shop Chronicles is the saga of B. Sammy Singleton, the gay, agnostic, eight-years-sober son of a preacher man who came to New Orleans from New York looking to become a real writer. The first person he meets is Catfish, who runs a shop that sells architectural salvage and rehabilitates low-income housing. Catfish has recently been sprung from jail, accused of tomb desecration; when he promptly disappears, Sammy sets out to find him. Along the way, he learns that Catfish's family is old New Orleans, and their fortune was built on the backs of slaves. As Sammy learns more about what he begins to call the American Holocaust, he finds out more than he ever wanted to know about Catfish, and more to the point, how a person might hate his family name so much that he might consider irreversible alternatives to separate himself from his history.

Coffee Shop Chronicles is not without its flaws. It's too long, for one thing; at least seventy pages too long, and probably more than that. It shifts back and forth in time in a way that made me dizzy and didn't really tackle the meat of its subject until the very end. But when it got there, it really got there, and packed most of its emotion into the last forty pages in a way that can't be described as other than gut-wrenching. I'm very much looking forward to Part Two, and it wouldn't surprise me at all if this is one of those Hunger Games Trilogy type deals where Part Two's going to end on some massive cliffhanger that practically begs to have Part Three already purchased and in hand. So go check it out. (And if you have a Nook, as opposed to a proprietary Kindle, you really can check it out, from your local library. So there. Nyah.)

Two Blog Posts In One Day?!

2011-04-14T06:47:00.001-07:00

Well, yeah, because y'all need to go read this. One of the best articles I've read on bipolar disorder. Maybe someday this condition will stop being something that only crazy people and Charlie Sheen has and start being something the Buddhist next door and Catherine Zeta-Jones has--and that will be okay, because people know a little bit about it now and don't need to be afraid of it anymore. It's not contagious. Sincerely.

Talk Thursday: Time Has Come Today

2011-04-14T04:46:00.000-07:00

Well, it seems my hyperfertility is at an end. It always ends; that's the trouble with hyperfertility. It ends, and then I look back on the 70-odd pages I wrote when it was in full swing and ask myself what the f____ I thought I was doing. Obviously they're crap and need to be thrown out. (True? Probably not, but I'm mopey now so that's the first thought.) Whether or not they get thrown out, though, time has resumed its normal speed. Which is to say, time has come today. Or so the Talk Thursday topic-o-meter tells me.

The song, by the way, is by the Chambers Brothers, redone by the Ramones and the lyrics can be found here. I don't get it. I don't get lots of songs, so this doesn't particularly bother me, but I try to actually get Talk Thursday topics so I can write about them in a way that makes sense. I do get time travel, though. It has to do with space travel. It was good old Einstein who figured out that the passage of time depends entirely on where you are standing. Toss a ball on a moving train, for example, and it will take much less time to travel 100 feet than the same tossed ball on a stationary train platform. Toss the same ball on a rocket ship moving at near the speed of light, and the ball doesn't take any time at all to travel the hundred feet. In short, the ball travels back in time and arrives before it was tossed. Yep. I get that, no problem.

Where the whole time travel thing starts breaking down for me is in movies that use it for a plot device. This is where I need my sister, who always pinpoints the plot holes. Take, for example, the Christopher Reeve movie Time After Time. (Please.) Christopher Reeve's character receives a watch as a present from an old woman, which he then takes back in time and gives to the woman when she was young. My sister pointed out that the watch could never have in fact existed, because if she didn't get it before Christopher Reeve gave it to her when she was young, and he didn't get it before she gave it to him when she was old, then where, pray tell, did it actually come from? The watch is trapped in a Schroedinger's riddle of existence. One of these days the movie director will open the box and find out the watch was dead the whole time.

Perception of time also varies from person to person. One minute means very different things in, say, a football game versus waiting for the results of a home pregnancy test. Yesterday our server went down at work (nice servers shouldn't go down) and the afternoon was a lot longer than our afternoons normally get. In fact, by three o'clock I'm sure it was normally at least four-thirty on any other day. Once I'd done all my filing and boxed up the old files and cleaned off my desk and done some professional reading, what else was there, you know? Rearrange the file cabinet, I guess. By which time it was still only four. Time stood still. I needed Christopher Reeve's watch.

When I'm hyperfertile, time gallops forward at a ridiculous pace, and the only way to keep up is to run alongside as fast as possible. Everything's faster. I even type faster. Then it ends and everything slows back down to a normal pace, which is like a crawl in comparison. Kind of like going 90 mph on the freeway (which I'm sure none of you would ever, ever do) and then slowing back down to the speed limit. Yeah, you're still traveling at an insane pace, faster than any of our ancestors ever dreamed possible, but it feels so slow.

And so, slowly, I am wrapping my brain around my work-in-progress and figuring out that A. the last 70 pages may or may not be crap (is that cat alive or dead?), B. I have no idea how to end this thing, C. I probably need to do another draft and maybe more than one, and D. Caesar the Cat makes a great editor, but a human being might be needed as well. Which is not much comfort at seven in the morning. Time has come today. Time!

Talk Thursday: Wants; Needs; Must (Do)s

2011-04-07T16:06:00.000-07:00

Now there's an interesting topic for somebody who's basically been avoiding all of the above for the past several days--well, okay, at least a week. Oh, don't get me wrong--I'm still swimming, getting to work and getting the basic chores done around the house--but I'm not getting much of anything else accomplished. Seems that the mysterious affliction known as hyperfertility, which attacks only people named Jen and which I'd kind of despaired of ever having again now that I'm (ahem) Being Treated For My Condition, isn't completely gone after all. In fact I'm on quite the tear at the moment. I've cranked out something like 60 pages of the current work-in-progress in the last two weeks, and at the rate I'm galloping along I might actually have the book done by the end of the month. Which would be all kinds of awesome; I'd have two books to flog around instead of just one, and that would give me a cheap excuse to become a paying member on Querytracker. Not that I need an excuse, technically, but I think I may have mentioned I have fiscal anorexia? I don't spend money unless I have an excuse. And it has to be a cheap excuse because--yeah.

What is hyperfertility, you ask. Well, hyperfertility is where for whatever reason, I can't frick'n stop writing. It usually happens right around the time I'm most likely to get pregnant (and I doubt that's a coincidence), and it also happens to co-exist with mania. I'm not truly manic in that sense (yes, I'm still snarfing down my USRDA of pills), but a little bit hypomanic? Yeah, I'd cop to that. Still, I'm not staying up to all hours of the night and I'm not talking a mile a minute (though I do, for some reason, have the lyrics to ABBA's "Fernando" stuck in my head). My doc and I just tinkered around with one of my doses of something or other to fix an issue with something or other else, and that may have set this off; he says not to worry, give it a few weeks and everything will straighten out. To which I thought, "A couple of weeks! Great, that's enough time to finish the book!"

Wrong answer, right? Well, hey, it's the one I've got.

So on the wants list, I've got falling by the wayside beading, TV of pretty much any kind (though I managed to catch "House" on Monday), any serious pursuit of anything else, and any cooking of anything that takes more than ten minutes. I've been recruited as a betafish for The Sekrit Projekt (google that; I'm not even gonna try to explain) and I've only been over there once. On the needs list, I'm managing to keep up with the chores, but I haven't mowed the lawn yet this year, nor have I had the blades sharpened on the mower. I also haven't done anything about having the exterminator come by, the gas man check out the stove, or the washing machine guy come fix the balance issue. And as for the must dos--well, I'm getting to work every day and I'm working on work stuff while I'm there. But I always do that. Even when I'm fatally distracted, I'm pretty good at doing my job.

(Yes, I'm also bathing and doing the laundry. I have certain standards, ya know.)

The last time I was hyperfertile, which was almost a year ago, I just typed like mad and waited for it to pass. And it did. I have a feeling I'll be doing the same thing this time. The lawn, the stove, the washing machine and all that will still be around when it does. Which isn't to say some people won't be impatient with me, such as a certain person with whom I reside. Uh, sorry, sweetie. But I'm keeping up with the chores, right? Right?

Talk Thursday: Weird Stuff I Dream About

2011-03-31T16:06:00.001-07:00

This is my Talk Thursday topic, and as usual I came up with it at the very last minute and without a lot of thought. I was thinking about stuff one dreamt while one was asleep, but in retrospect I suppose it could be anything one dreamed about in any state of consciousness. Not that I have that many anymore; generally I'm either A. Awake, or B. Asleep. I suppose one could throw in C. Meditating, but except for the times I'm D. Asleep While Meditating, I don't often have dreams in that state. (Except the one where some cat is kneading my leg because she wants me to snap out of it and pay attention to her, and generally that's no dream, brothers and sisters. Man, does Chloe have sharp claws when she wants to.)

So anyway, weird stuff I dream about. Well, by far the weirdest thing about my dreams is that there's always some part of my brain that just...doesn't...quite...buy it. Yes, that's right; not only am I reality-based, I'm aggressive about it. Ever have that dream where you're in college (it's usually college; sometimes it's high school) and you're trying to find some class that you somehow haven't been able to get to the whole semester? Well, when I have that one, I'll be frantically going through my stuff looking for my stupid schedule so I can at least find out when this class is, or hunting for the bookstore with the totally useless campus map in hopes of locating a textbook in which I'm now a minimum of three weeks behind, or wandering around in a building that I know has this class in it someplace, and this part of my brain will suddenly go, "Holdonasec. I'm almost positive that I'm fortysomething years old, married, a homeowner and hold down a responsible job." Sometimes I'll argue with this part of my brain, because in this dream I don't remember the intervening twenty-odd years between college and now, but more often something else happens; I wake up. And I blink, look around the room, and say to myself something along the lines of "Well, I guess that was right," before I fall asleep again and go back to the campus map and the useless schedule and the building with the M.C. Escher hallways.

It's a mental state called lucid dreaming, and in some religious traditions it's considered a blessed state. Basically, it means that you know you're dreaming while you're dreaming. I usually don't get quite that far, but I do get lucid enough to know that there's Something Wrong With This Picture. And I sometimes experience the side effects, like sleep paralysis (waking up unable to move; that is not fun, but it goes away quickly if you start small, like wiggling your fingers, instead of trying to, say, sit up or kick off the blankets). According to Joan, I'm sometimes prone to waking up yelling my head off, which must be a real treat for her and the cats. I can always tell I've done this if I'm awake and there are no cats in bed with me. I always sleep with a minimum of two cats, one sprawled across my hip and the other one by my feet. Apparently I also sometimes kick in my sleep. Sometimes a silent night is not very silent around our place.

By far the oddest permutation of this lucid-dreaming thing is the sex dream. You know the one. No, don't tell me about it; I'm not gonna tell you about mine, either. Let's just say that mine never end well. Just when things start to get interesting with the man/woman/fantasy creature, I suddenly remember I'm married and start apologizing. "I'm so sorry. I just can't be doing this. I have to go home now." And I get up and leave, even if I'm an ant and the landscape is some distant planet. I'm terrible with directions in my own known universe, but somehow I'm going to figure out where home is and go there, where I'm going to explain myself to Joan and apologize profusely. What more often happens is I wake up. Minus cats. Damn, it just happened again.

When I was about 26 I had a dream I'll never forget. (There were no men/women/fantasy creatures in this dream, nor were there colleges.) There was really nothing going on in this dream, except that I'd made my way into a forest, and in the middle of this forest was this tree. It was bigger than those giant redwoods in northern California (the top of it was invisible from the ground, as a matter of fact) and it looked like some member of the willow family, with drooping branches and long leaves. Hanging between the leaves on just about every branch that I could see were long fingerlength spires of crystal. When the wind blew, they all rubbed together and made this indescribable music, and of course when the light hit them, they were shot through with rainbows and the whole tree seemed to glow. Absolutely nothing happened in this dream, except that I woke up crying and extremely happy.

Being Icelandic and all that, I've wondered ever since if that was Ygdrasil, the Tree of Life. And if it was, what I was doing there. I'm not big on the whole gods and goddesses thing, but I could have been convinced that day. Even more so if it had, you know, said something. Like, "Jen, go forth and become a great paralegal." Or even, you know, "Hi."

But it didn't. It just stood there, being magnificent. And, realistically, I'm not sure the Tree of Life should really be doing much of anything else.

Talk Thursday: Who, Me? Already?

2011-03-24T16:29:00.000-07:00

My friend Kevin asked me an interesting question the other day. He asked me why I wanted to be published, anyway. He wanted to be published, he said, so that other people would get a chance to read his stories. Why did I want to be published? And in the grand tradition of wordsmiths everywhere, I stared blankly at the screen (this exchange took place through e-mail) and could think of not word one to say.

For me it was a question rather like “Why do you want to continue breathing air?” It had never occurred to me that there was an alternative. I write stuff; therefore I want to get stuff published. Why wouldn’t I want to do that? I mean, what a strange question. But the more I thought about it, the less I could come up with any grand all-encompassing Reason. Fame? Ha! Fortune? Ha! A Jedi craves not these things. Which is good, because they’re frickin’ scarce. Median annual income for a writer the last time I checked? $20 grand. Which is not bloody much, and since that's the median, half are making more and half are making less. Dem ain't good odds. So eventually I agreed that, yeah, I wanted people to read my stuff, too. Which is basically true. But it’s not the grand, all-encompassing Reason. Which is good, because I’m not sure that I even have one.

Anyway, all of a sudden the prospect became kind of daunting. After all, neither of us know what lies beyond this, the Land of the Unpublished. So, although in general I don’t have a decent prognosticating bone in my body, I took my brain forward in time to that unknown when; when I’ve found an agent (or rather, another agent; I had one once), when the agent’s pronounced the manuscript salable, when the salability has been conclusively proven by the advent of a contract; when my lawyer (likely Boss Dave, if he’s up for it) has pronounced the contract signable; when I’ve signed it; when somebody’s written me a check, I’ve cashed it, it hasn’t bounced and I’ve paid the light bill with the money. Oh, and when I walk into a bookstore and see Mindbender sitting on a shelf someplace, hopefully not clear in the back underneath Dear Abby's Keepers: Columns To Live By but I'll take whatever I can get. So what’s that time like? What if it’s not like the movies? In short, what if it sucks?

“Working two jobs, for one thing,” Kevin points out. There’s always that. Both of us have been through multiple jaunts of unemployment and are doing pretty good to have one job apiece. And neither of us are quite crazy enough to quit our day jobs; not even Dan Brown-style runaway bestsellerdom would convince me to do that, and the last time I checked, I didn't even look like Dan Brown. Them publishing contracts don't exactly come with health insurance (though there’s a persistent, unsubstantiated rumor that Lloyd’s of London has insured Stephen King’s brain.) So, yeah. Working two jobs. One might point out we’re already doing that and just not getting paid, but that’s quibbling. Deadlines, phone calls, Big Discussions, meetings and more meetings. I had a dream once that Joan called me at work and told me I needed to call the production assistant right away because there was some kind of problem with Chapter Fourteen. "Okay, I'll call at lunchtime," I said, and Joan said, "No, you need to call right away, it's an emergency." Wondering what in hell kind of publishing emergency could possibly be more important than whatever legal emergency I was currently wrangling I agreed to call right away. Just then my alarm went off and I woke up, reaching across to my nightstand for the phone. What's it called when your night job starts interfering with your day job? Daylighting? And here I don't even have one yet.

Then there's all the other stuff. I mean, very few people make a living at this writing thing, and I sure don't expect to, but even if you don't, sooner or later you're going to have (gasp) fans. Or people who like your stuff, anyway. What happens if they start showing up on your doorstep at two a.m. because you said something in Chapter Fourteen (which is always a bitch) that reminded them of something their best friend's mother's aunt said in high school? What if they, you know, recognize you in public, when you're doing your level best to hide behind your laptop at Afrah and turn out your frick'n Thursday blog post? I mean how embarrassing. I get wigged out when people recognize me outside of OA meetings, and there's for Godsake rules about how to handle that. Here there be no rules, and what if they start bothering your wife? Believe me, the Stephen Kings and Dean Koontzes of the world have nothing on the utter scariness of a bothered wife. I will go to the ends of the earth to avoid bothering my wife.

Interesting questions, all. Are they problems I would like to have? I don't know. Are they problems I am going to have eventually? Yes, one way or another. My prognostication bone may not be decent, but about that I believe it absolutely. And I will probably find some way to deal, just like I do with every other weird situation I stumble into/get invited into/walk into/get thrown into. But the Big Question of why I want to get published, which I still have not answered to either Kevin's or my satisfaction, continues to hover over all this and ask me if, in fact, I'm even ready. If the right agent were to suddenly materialize at this very moment, and my reaction would be something like, "Who, me? Already?"

Jenz Ten Commandments of the Workplace

2011-03-18T07:15:00.001-07:00

Or: How Not To Get Fired Once You Finally Land A Job.

I found this in an old WordPervert file that got scooped up from my old laptop and deposited in my new laptop with lots of other sage advice to myself. I compiled this through years of bitter personal experience and good advice from friends who have been there. What's the point of sage advice if you don't dump it on your readers--er, if you don't share it, says I? Anyway, here it is:

1. Show up every day, on time, neatly dressed and ready to work. Because, honestly, if you can't manage this one, the other nine aren't going to help you.

2. Remember that it's not your law firm. (Or engineering firm or government office or whatever.) You were hired to do a job there, which involves following a certain set of rules. If you don't like the rules, don't complain about them; talk to someone who has the power to change them. But if it's obvious they're not going to be changed, get over it and move on.

3. Never assume you know everything. If you have even the slightest question about how something should be done, ASK. If you're working on a big project, it's a good idea to do a small portion of it, then show that portion to your boss and make sure you're on the right track before you spend a lot of time doing it the wrong way.

4. Avoid office gossip whenever possible. When you can't avoid it, try not to add to it, and remember there's probably a lot you haven't heard. Rather than throw in your two cents, listen and nod a lot. This will gain you a reputation for being wise, and a good listener, rather than a troublemaker.

5. Treat everybody with respect, from the head honcho to the janitor. If somebody else contributed to a project and you're getting all the credit, be sure to step in and acknowledge that person's contribution. Nobody ever climbs the corporate ladder without a lot of help from friends. If you can't make friends, you won't go very far.

6. Don't date anyone you work with while you work with them. Yes, this one gets ignored a lot anymore, but it's still good advice. Too much can go wrong, and when it does, people tend to take sides.

7. Mark Twain said it first: Sometimes it's better to keep your mouth shut and be thought an idiot, than to open it and remove all doubt. Or something like that. You don't need to have an opinion about everything.

8. If you have a drug, alcohol, or mental health problem, or think you might, get help BEFORE it becomes a workplace problem--because sooner or later it WILL become a workplace problem, and it's hard enough to accpt help without wondering if the entire typing pool knows a judge sent you to A.A.

9. When you're at work, work on work stuff. Work on your taxes, the crossword puzzle, your marriage, your checkbook or your six-pack abs on your own time. And stay off the Internet when you don't need it for work purposes. Most especially, DO NOT SEND PERSONAL EMAIL FROM A WORK ACCOUNT. EVER. AT ALL. NOT EVEN TO SAY HI.

10. Last, but not least, remember that all jobs have their good and bad points. Nobody likes everything about a job, but you need to find something to like about yours. If you can't find anything, it's time to move on--but before you do, look over these ten again and make sure it's the job, and not you, that has the problem.

Optional No. 11: Do not drink alcohol at company functions. Yes, this is another one that gets ignored a lot anymore, but I still think it's a good idea. If you do or say something stupid under the influence, people will remember A. that you did or said something stupid and B. that you were drunk, and neither of those things are likely to enhance your reputation in the office.

I think I adopted these from my dad's "10 Rules for Flying." I can't recall all ten of them now, but I think my favorite was, "If a crash is inevitable, hit the softest cheapest thing you can find as slowly as possible." Y'all have a nice safe weekend, now.

Talk Thursday: Take The Long Way Home

2011-03-17T16:50:00.001-07:00

It isn’t often I get to take a Talk Thursday topic completely literally. I could, I suppose, instead wax rhapsodic about the song by Supertramp, ponder the meaning of the lyrics “And then your wife seems to think you’re a part of the furniture,” wonder whatever happened to Roger Hodgson anyway and why, after two brilliant solo albums, he nosedived out of existence. But, no. This one I think I’ll take literally, and tell y’all about Jen’s Nightmare Flight from Stockholm to Phoenix by way of just about every point between. You know that Infinite Improbability Drive in The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, which works by passing through every point in the Universe simultaneously on the odds that you’ll eventually arrive at your destination in one piece? Yeah. It was kind of like that.

To begin with, I had a concussion. I would strongly advise against flying with a concussion, or drinking with a concussion, or sleeping with a concussion, or doing basically anything with a concussion besides seeking immediate medical treatment. I’d just been in my first and only barroom brawl, which came about because I was in Birmingham, England circa 1990 and somebody at the back of the bar had just yelled, “We won’t pay our poll taxes!” Utter mayhem ensued, and just for the record, yelling “Don’t hit me, I’m an American” did not help in the slightest. Somebody hit me. Couldn’t say who or with what, but I was out cold for a span of time between several nanoseconds and several hours before I came to on the floor with some brilliant bouncer type standing over me going, “How many fingers? Who’s Prime Minister?” I got the first one right but not the second (Margaret Thatcher having left office several years ago), but that was good enough for them and I got hauled back to my feet and turned loose.

After the concert (there was a concert; did I mention there was a concert?) I made my way back to the place where we were staying, which was a youth hostel of some kind, marginally clean and only a little bit scary. Here I attempted to clean up a little, put away the t-shirt from the concert, then went to sleep, which, again, is a bad idea when you have a concussion. It hadn’t yet occurred to me that I had a concussion, though, because when you have one you don’t think rationally. Besides, there were nearly two weeks left of this trip, and I wasn’t going home early just because I had a stupid headache. The last time I was in England I’d had a sinus infection and it hadn’t even slowed me down.

Ah, youth. Does anyone not remember their twenties fondly, if only because they thought they were invincible? Sure, I can stay up all night and still go to work the next day; no problem flying with a bad cold, who cares if my eardrums explode? They’ll knit in a few weeks. What broken leg? Get outta here. I can still walk, can’t I?

And so two more weeks went by, of which I remember just fragments. Scottish country dancing in Inverness; that was pretty cool. Meeting Alec Wiseman, one of the survivors of the Fifty First Division; yeah. Wow. Camping somewhere in the Highlands, outside of a town, listening to tapes (remember tapes?) on a Walkman. A Highland Games in Bathgate; something like 103 bagpipe bands all playing at once. Really good pizza in Glasgow. And somewhere in the middle of all this, getting the distinct idea that something wasn’t right, that I was not behaving normally, that I might want to do something radical and maybe go home.

So okay, back to London; slept on the train, didn’t shower for days. Got to the airport and asked if I could fly standby back to the States. The nice lady at the airline said she could do it, but she had to route me through Stockholm, because that was what my ticket originally said. I forget, at this late date, why I was supposed to go to Stockholm. There must have been a good reason. So I crawled onto the plane, flew to Stockholm, landed, tried to go through customs, and then all the trouble started.

It seemed I had a ticket that said I’d been to Stockholm and a passport that said I hadn’t. That had something to do with a canceled flight back at the beginning of the trip, and getting rerouted directly to London because of a leaking coffee pot or something like that. But that was a long time ago. Back before the concussion. Back when things made sense, when I still made sense, when things that had happened could still be adequately explained. I’d forgotten all about it since then. I had no more idea how I got to London than I did the workings of an internal combustion engine. When I wasn’t staring blankly at this customs agent, I was saying things that, apparently, made no sense in either Swedish or English. Apparently at some point I got angry (or more probably, frustrated) and raised my voice. The result was spectacular: I got arrested. Or as they say in airport security-land, detained. And I spent the night in a cell.

If you have to get detained by airport security, do it in Sweden. The jail is very nice. Tiny private rooms, almost like itty-bitty hotel rooms, with private showers and even TV. By the time I got to my tiny private room I no longer cared if the door opened or not. I fell into bed and slept for about a year, but not before asking the nice matron to get me something at the airport bookstore. She got me A Prayer for Owen Meany, which was the No. 1 bestseller that week (and a great book, just incidentally.) I read it on the plane, when I got on the plane. Which I’m getting to.

The next morning, after I’d had a shower and put myself into my cleanest set of clothes, they turned me loose. I guess they’d been busy checking me on a list of known terrorists or something, hadn’t found me, and decided I was safe enough to put on the next plane home. Well, sort of home. Home to Atlanta International, anyway, which wasn’t home. After that I was sort of on my own.

So I approached another ticket desk and asked how much closer I could get to Phoenix, which was where I lived at the time. That got me to Tulsa. Tulsa begat Memphis. Memphis begat Minneapolis. Minneapolis begat Denver, Denver begat Salt Lake City and I almost got stuck there, in the Beehive State. There was only one flight left (it was after ten) and it was completely full. I looked around this airport, at its orange and blue decorator panels and its pictures of naked people trying to fly, and decided if I got stuck in Salt Lake City for the night, I might possibly have to kill myself. But then a miracle occurred and I got the second to last standby seat on a flight to Las Vegas that landed at three in the morning. After which I got a flight to Phoenix that touched down just after five.

The sun was coming up when I caught a cab outside of Sky Harbor. I’d been on a plane for over 72 hours. I was so tired I couldn’t remember where I lived and just gave the cab driver my parents’ address. I knew where they hid their spare key. I gave the cabbie a 20 on an eight-dollar fare and didn’t wait for my change; just crawled into the house and fell asleep on the couch, where my dad found me a few hours later. None of this “What are you doing here?” none of this “How did you even get in?” He just hauled me down from the couch, steered me to a bedroom and left me there.

And some fourteen or so hours later, I woke up. And got the joy of explaining myself to two rather concerned and puzzled parents. I finally got back to my apartment the following day.

I never did get treated for the concussion.

I still have the t-shirt.

Mini-Post: Japanese Buddhist Response to Tragedy

2011-03-15T06:46:00.000-07:00

Hi all--this is just a quick referral to a fascinating article on CNN about the Japanese Buddhist response to the double tragedy of the earthquake and the tsunami. Buddhist traditions in Japan, in case you did not know this, tend to intertwine with the much older Shinto tradition, which has components of ancestor veneration and honoring the spirits of the recently deceased. Of particular interest is the role of young people in modern Japanese Buddhism, or rather, the lack thereof. Anyway, happy reading!

Talk Thursday: Winning

2011-03-10T04:55:00.000-08:00

We're a competitive species, homo sapiens. Probably because we needed to be, from the time we were hanging around in caves and telling stories around campfires (no, not last week at Carlsbad Caverns; I'm talking aeons ago.) He who ran the fastest and threw the spear the hardest (the alpha male) got the mammoth, fed the family and lived to die another day. He who didn't (the beta male) got the leftovers after the alpha male got himself killed. (Which might have included three or four bereaved widows. Hm, doesn't sound like such a bad deal.) But this competitive streak became ingrained in our DNA, and now to this day, we still talk about winners and losers as though spears and mammoths (and bereaved widows) are at stake.

For a book-length discussion of alpha and beta males, check out A Dirty Job by Christopher Moore. For a blog post on winners and losers that you can read in five minutes, soldier on. To be called a loser, especially in the corporate world or that miniature corporate world, the first-grade playground, is to be permanently branded as one of the worst things imaginable. Losers don't get the fame, the glory, the girl, or the kickball for the next round. Winners get all that stuff, plus they are usually also taller, better-looking and have nicer hair. Everybody wants to be on the winning side, ignoring the fact that there has to be a losing side or the winning side would have no meaning whatever. Aside: In high school marching band, the flag corps instructor was telling the ladies not to put their palms up on a diagonal sweep because in flag-corps language, that meant the country had just lost a war, and the U.S. has never lost a war. As quickly as I could I said, "Uh, Vietnam, Grenada, El Salvador, Nicaragua." She looked at me as though I were terminally stupid and said, "Those were just police actions."

Anyway: As a Buddhist I should not care one whit if I win or lose at anything, since it has no meaning in the greater context of reality and in fact serves as a distraction from the truer need to have compassion for all, but because it's encoded in my DNA, I do, of course. It rankles me when Joan kicks my butt at Scrabble (and she practically always does; if I win it's a fluke). I'm always relieved when we reach a good settlement for a client at work, because a good settlement is the same as winning and then we aren't faced with the all-or-nothing of a courtroom battle. Every year I get perversely interested in the Oscar campaigns, not because I can stomach sitting through the world's stupidest presentation show but because on some level I'll have picked a favorite that I want to win, and I'll be glad/unhappy if he/she wins/loses. (Hallie Stanfield was robbed. I'm just sayin'.)

And then we get to Charlie Sheen, who's not bipolar but "bi-winning", and the whole blog post breaks down and takes off in another direction.

Hang around a psychiatrist's office long enough and you'll start armchair-diagnosing everyone you see. I do it and I'm not proud of that fact. And okay, Charlie may be "bi-winning" and not bipolar but I wouldn't bet the farm on it. Check out a couple of my posts written under the influence of what I used to call hyperfertility and you'll get a sense of what's maybe going on in Charlie's head. (I didn't know what it was then. Nobody shoot me.) I'm not a professional with several letters after my name, and even if I were I'd hesitate to say for certain without talking to the guy at some length, but darned if a lot of the symptoms aren't right there. Even the substance abuse. No, especially the substance abuse--bipolar disorder and drugs/alcohol go hand in hand. It's called self-medicating. Bipolar also tends to run in families. (Me: Four alcoholic grandparents. Yep, four for four. What are the odds?)

Charlie, honey, you're breaking my heart. Don't sweat the whole winning/losing thing; you've made your point, abundantly, in the mass media. Now please go see somebody. Do it now, before you crash, and maybe you won't have to crash. You're so much more fun when you're stable. I'm so serious about this that I'll even follow you on Twitter to prove it.

Me and five million of my closest friends.

Show Tunes, Ultrasound and the First Amendment

2011-03-08T05:19:00.001-08:00

It's not often I comment on legislation without having first read the stuff. Yes, I actually read pending bills, and Court opinions for that matter, even though they can run to hundreds of pages and be full of legalese. Why? Because the devil is often in the details, and before I go off in a semipublic forum (or rather, to the two of you--you know who you are) I'd like to know enough about which I speak that I don't sound like an idiot, thankewverymuch. Besides, once you read the silly things, they often start making sense, and contrast with their headlines in such a way that you wonder what the journalists were thinking. My favorite example is "Appeals Court Denies Custody to Lesbian Mom," out of Virginia circa 1994 or so. The story made it sound like the court gave custody of the kid to his grandma solely because Mom liked another mom more than she liked Dad. Well, once I got ahold of the actual decision and read it, I wouldn't have given this woman custody of a cat. She had never held a full time job, she was on and off drugs, in and out of rehab and before she settled down with her "life partner" of less than six months, she'd had five boyfriends the previous year. The kid had lived with his grandma most of that time. Oh, yeah, and there was one sentence at the very end of the decision that said something like, "It is noted that Mom X is a lesbian; however, this is not a basis for deciding custody in the state of Virginia." That's it. That's all. I'd say the headline got it wrong, wouldn't you guys?

So that's what I mean when I say that the devil's in the details. And I haven't read this particular bill so I may be missing the devil. Or the details. So that's my disclaimer. I'm not a lawyer, either, nor do I play one at work. But here's the scoop about the law, as it's reported on a fairly moderate news site (CNN): Texas Lawmakers Approve Bills Requiring Ultrasound Before Abortion. And let the fur fly.

Obviously, the point of this law is to discourage women from having abortions. I don't think there's any other reason to pass it (and it looks like it did pass, though the final form has yet to be hammered out; the House wants a 24 hour waiting period after the ultrasound, the Senate only requires two hours, and for some reason the Senate thinks the woman can skip looking at the results if she's a rape or incest victim, though how they'll decide that is beyond me.) And we'll assume for the moment that nobody's going to sue and say this law poses an undue burden to women seeking an abortion (and that's a stupid assumption; I give it forty-eight hours, maybe less). If you wanted an abortion and somebody stuck a picture of your developing infant under your nose, how would you feel? Would you change your mind? Apparently that's the bet.

That's also the bet of the "sidewalk counselors" who stand outside doctor's offices and Planned Parenthood clinics and wave cheery signs with pictures of dead babies on them. Somehow they have this idea that the women showing up for appointments haven't made up their minds yet. That they'll just turn around and leave if they're shown the right bloody picture or if they're told the right thing. Well, folks, I used to be a volunteer that walked these ladies from their cars past the sign-waving crowd. I did it for two years, and never once did I see a woman turn around and leave. Never once. By the time they got to the clinic, the decision was made. So I can't imagine how the new ultrasound rule is going to change anything as far as that goes. No, I think this law is about making women feel bad. Sick, guilty, worse about their decision than they already feel. That's the point. That's the great state of Texas. That's the Republican Party (a supermajority in both houses of the Texas Legislature), the party of less governmental interference in personal lives. Mandating a medical procedure after they stated that no one should be forced to buy health insurance. Pardon me if I experience a bit of a disconnect here.

Of particular interest to me, though, is the provision that the women who undergo the ultrasound "listen to a description of the results" (apparently only one version requires them to actually look at the pictures, and I'm not sure which one--again, didn't read the bills, sorry about that). Which brings up an interesting question. How, exactly, do you require someone to listen to something? I mean, if you're reading the description, and the woman suddenly covers her ears and bursts into a medley of show tunes, what do you do then? What if she wears ear plugs? Are you legally required to clap your hand over her mouth and shout the description in her ear? Or will you need to build a special "listening to ultrasound results" restraining chair, complete with straps and eyeball-opening devices from A Clockwork Orange (and if you haven't seen it, why are you still sitting here? Go rent it on Netflix and get into a powerful self-argument about the nature of free will, already!). What if the woman Just Says No? No, I'm not looking at your pictures, I'm not listening to you, and I don't give a ripe goddamn what the Texas Legislature says? I mean, that's free speech, people. Hard to call it anything else.

In all seriousness, we need to think about this. In a country where we have free speech, do we or don't we also have the freedom not to listen? Because if we don't, all the First Amendment arguments in the world aren't worth a single bill out of the Texas Legislature. You heard it here first. (If you're still listening.)