spring is like a perhaps deluge

dreaming in dialogue...writing woes in the wee hours

Happy for percolating...coffee and ideas!

For about an hour this morning, as I was trying to wrangle a little more sleep before the alarm went off and catapulted me into my somewhat waking life, my brain decided that I needed some writing lessons--specifically, writing dialogue.

I had a creative writing teacher once who said that all (interesting) dialogue is an argument--the interaction serves as a way for each of the characters to make his/her point.  Somehow, the characters need to be coming at the conversation from slightly different angles, and then they duke it out until they agree.  Or until the killer jumps out from the bushes.  Or the world ends.  Or they start kissing, I don't know.

In any case, in my dream, I had to write the scene I had been working on before I fell asleep last night, a scene that has been giving me a wee bit of trouble for some time (or...just possibly, one scene in a long string of scenes that have been tormenting me and filling me with paralyzing and agonizing waves of self-doubt about my worth as a writer and indeed as a human being...but anyway, that's not relevant), and instead of allowing me to wallow about in a restful sleep, my brain kept putting me through these dialogue exercises.

Okay, said my brain, or some cruel dream-time taskmaster, write the scene except Darin doesn't believe anything that Cass says.

And in my sleep, I did it.  I held it up, shiny and perfect.  "NOW can I sleep, please?"

Now write the scene except Darin doesn't believe anything Cass says, BUT he doesn't want her to know that he doesn't believe her.


I mean, sure, I can do that.  Dream-writing elissa writes in her dream.  Sleep now?


Now write the scene except Darin doesn't believe her, he doesn't want her to know, but she suspects that he doesn't believe her and not only does this make her angry but it reminds her of the way her brother spoke to her earlier that day and she realizes, with suprise, that he didn't believe her either.


Yikes.  Okay...dreambrain working working working...the alarm ticking on toward an abrupt and painfully noisy conclusion...YES! There! Perfect!  Dream-writing elissa feels a bit smug.  A bit...genius.


Now make her start to doubt herself, but hide that from him.

Simple!


Now make her hide that from herself.

Arghhhhh!  The alarm sounds.  Groggy elissa swims up out of the murky waters of dialogue exercises, disappointed that she didn't actually write all those perfect conversations in real life...maybe it's enough that she did it in her dreams.

 

I dropped a stitch! the terror of the ginormous revision...

I want to write about revision.  No, wait.  Maybe I just want to hide from revision?  Yeah, same thing.

So anyway, I've spent the past year revising--I'm pretty sure, when you break it all down, (*breaks it down*), I have spent more time this past year revising than sleeping.  And a lot of the time, even when I'm sleeping, the better part of my brain (AKA the part not otherwise engaged in drooling over pretty pictures and unlikely scenarios (not like, literally drooling, of course, ew! *flips pillow*)) keeps right on revising.

I struggle sometimes with blogging about writing.  I enjoy reading and commenting on other writers' blogs, but I don't really feel like I can write about "the craft" with any kind of authority.  What do I even know about writing except how much I don't know?  Still, I keep thinking about the revision process, and I keep coming to one big conclusion.  Ready?  Okay.  Revision is...hard.

Yeah.

Brilliant.  So as a writing teacher, I spend a lot of time trying to teach people how to make their writing better.  We do things like peer critiques, where readers ask each other questions about things they want to know more about, or identify language they really think "works"...that kind of thing.  And we do the kind of revision that is more about refining language--identify your lazy words and get more specific.  Read it out loud and find the sentence breaks.  Check your outline and make sure your paragraphs are organized with transitions and a strong thesis...that kind of thing.

Nobody can ever really teach you how to REVISE, you know?  Like, even when a reader (critique partner, agent, editor, your mom--whatever) tells you what's wrong with your novel--that the voice is awesome but everything that happens in it is slightly wrong, or that the whole thing really needs to begin 20,000 words in, or that the stakes aren't high enough or that your central focus seems to want to shift over about three inches to one side and maybe happen in a different state--even then, they can't tell you what to DO about it.

So far I've revised all of those problems and then some, and I still can't sit here on this blog and tell you what to do when you take apart a key scene about three-quarters of the way through and realize that it's like you've just gone to dig out a dropped stitch and suddenly there are all these loops and strings and holes and you're scared to move and your needles are shaking and more loops are sliding off of them every second and you've spent an entire year on getting this far so the thought of ripping it all out and starting over is paralyzing, and...

...well, I'm not sure how else to put it.  It's terrifying.  But you can't sit there all day holding perfectly still with your needles in the air. So...you start tugging at strings.  You pull a few loops.  Sometimes it works to cover the wall up above your desk with post-it notes, and sometimes it helps to make color-coded notes on dot matrix paper and spread it all over the floor, and sometimes it helps to cry and sometimes it helps to paint a deck with music stuffed in your ears and sometimes it helps to take a walk and sometimes it helps to take a bath and sometimes you have to write what's supposed to happen next ALL IN CAPS with things like "OMG THEY ARE FREAKED OUT" and "WHAT WE THOUGHT YOU WERE JUST A LITTLE MESSED UP BUT YOU ARE REALLY MESSED UP" and even "AND THEN HER PARENTS’ HEADS EXPLODE!" (All of these are either my own actual methods of revision or my own actual excerpts from my current document--I left out the somewhat controversial methods of snarling at my family and going on crazed cleaning rampages...)

Anyway, no matter how you cope with it, revising is freakin' HARD.  And what works for one person may not work for another.  What works for me today may not work tomorrow (assuming I eventually post this and get back to work), but the process of making serious, deep changes to a manuscript time and time again (I'm a slow learner) is daunting and difficult.

But.  Here's the good part.  As difficult as it is, and as many times as I feel like a big failure when I have to go back YET AGAIN and rework something I thought was as good as I could ever do in a million years, and as much as I despair with my huge pile of post-its and my fourteen open documents...every single time, something crazy happens.

The book gets better.

And that feels almost good enough to remember it all the way through until the next revision.  Almost.

*opens fifteenth document*

*sighs*

(for the record, because I'm afraid this post might be too short and might not contain enough parentheses, I can only knit in a straight line, like a never-ending scarf, and my options for dropped stitches are three: tear it all out and begin from the beginning (after I get someone to cast on for me because I always seem to forget how), live with a hole in the middle of my scarf, or bring it over to my mom's house and make her fix it...but so far, I have not yet made my mom do my revisions.)

Contract!

Took a short break from my editing (by the way:  AAAAAACKKKKK!!!) to sign my contract!  Hooray!

*peeks out of cave*

This lovely image of Lily, the black bear star of the den cam at the North American Bear Center last fall is the perfect image to represent me tucked up in my editing cave--bleary-eyed, confused, hungry, and rather annoyed with anyone who dares to desire my attention.  (I'm sorry, family!)

So last night I sent another draft back to Melanie, my lovely editor at Marshall Cavendish, and I'm hoping that as she reads it she will find things that she thinks are improvements.

I'm now in the middle of the third week of school, and I'm working on my sixth graders, trying to get them all shaped up into middle school students.  They're a lively, spirited bunch, and my "homebase" group makes me laugh constantly, even when their exuberance gets a little frustrating.

So, reeling a little from a Friday afternoon session of craziness and everyone-talks-at-once and everyone-blurts-every-thought-without-filtering, I decided to put together a little list of talking points for Monday morning.  I called it How to Be a Human and a Sixth Grader Instead of a Little Monster in a Sixth Grader Uniform.  I don't really think my sixth graders are little monsters, but...we all have our moments, right?  rawwwrrrr.

I organized my points into "R" words.  Sort of.  They listened, and I think they thought I was moderately funny.  In any case, I feel like maybe we may have a future that doesn't involve growling at each other.  I'm pretty sure it still will involve lots and lots of shouting and jumping around, but they're getting used to my quirks, I hope.

1. REALLY. We are here to help you, not torture you. Give us a chance to do our jobs as teachers.
2. REMINDERS and REDIRECTIONS don't mean you're in trouble. RELAX and just do what we're asking you to do.
3. RESPOND with a simple, "OK". We're not interested in what you didn't do or why you were doing it or who did it first.
4. RESPONSIBILITY: take some. for your actions and your words.
5. RESPECT: we all have to earn it.
6. RETALIATE, and you will get caught. No, we won't see the person who struck first. That person's actions alerted our spidey-senses that something was off-kilter, and now we see YOU.

Then we spent our afternoon playing a team-building game that involved possibly excessive amounts of volume but also excessive amounts of smiling and cooperation, so that was cool.

/boring teacher post*


_____
* it's okay, though.  I was thisclose to boring you all to tears with a Teaser Tuesday, so you can thank me in the comments.  :)

do you ever?

Do you ever look around you and realize that you haven't stopped to take a breath in like two weeks?

This is my deck, which I finally finished painting on Labor Day--also the day I started my second pass of my KtMS manuscript so I can see if the edits I finished two weeks ago actually make sense. 

Today began the second week of school, and I realized around 3:00 that I hadn't stopped to use the restroom all day.  And, since at that time I was besieged by sixth graders (who all wanted to escape Language Arts class to use the restroom, by the way), the realization was once again pushed aside until 4:15, when my own son got off the bus and made his way to my classroom, freeing me to finally leave.

Except by then I was in the middle of previewing an online training module, which I have to present to the staff meeting tomorrow morning at 7:30.  And since I'll be in the meeting tomorrow morning before class starts, and since my sixth grade homeroom needs way more attention and assistance in the morning than my eighth grade homeroom did last year, I decided I'd better get my chalkboards set up for tomorrow as well.  I had two documents open on my computer, and I was pecking away at a lesson plan outline for my boss and a compilation of book blog addresses for my teen book blogging elective, at the same time as I was fixing a snack for Jabber and scheduling a complicated classroom swap with two colleagues. 

Still had not peed.

At last, I realized that I was way too busy to keep poor Jabber at school with me until I was done, so I called D. and asked him to come pick the boy up...annoying to D. as he was in the middle of making an experimental dinner recipe (which turned out to be delicious, when I consumed it out of the microwave an hour or so later!), but I was busy planning and photocopying and distributing files full of links into shared folders while I filed IEP notices, answered emails to parents, and double-checked two of my sixth graders' schedule changes.

I did finally make a trip to the bathroom--at home--and during this activity I was visited by a small child who needed help with putting on his socks.  Also several arguments/wrestling matches broke out at this time, which I broke up.  I heated up my coffee and my dinner while loading the dishwasher and then listened to Jabber read while eating and making out a check for his school photos.

Fixed bedtime snacks.  Signed reading minutes.  Cleaned up snacks.  Wrangled kids a bit.  Cleaned kitchen.  Went to gym and worked out (while reading the book I am going to start teaching on Thursday, which I've only taught once before, years ago), showered, made lunches, and sat down to revisit those edits.

Except, oh crud, I still haven't blogged.

*Breathes*

And now it's bedtime.

a tangential slalom course of a post

I go through these jags where I listen almost exclusively to Minnesota Public Radio when I'm driving my car, and I'm in one right now. If you were to see me driving somewhere, you'd probably be able to tell. I might be chuckling. I might be nodding thoughtfully. Most likely, though, my car will be parked and inexplicably idling at my destination--the children straining at their seatbelts while I shush them.

So yesterday I hopped into the car (I keep calling it that, but it's really a mini-van, sighhhh) to pick up the boys from a morning at daycare while I was writing, and this Harvard psychologist, Dan Gilbert, was speaking about happiness, or more specifically, why people mess up so much when trying to predict what will make them happy. A long time ago, I remembered watching this video of a shorter talk he did at some other...ideas thingy...because I remembered the interesting experiments he did with a photography course.

Short story is that he had college students take a bunch of meaningful pictures and create two beautiful prints, and then they had to choose one to keep and one to leave with the instructor. Half the students were told that they could change their minds in four days and switch pictures, and the other half were told that they had to choose and it was a final decision. In the end, the people who had an opportunity to change their minds were less happy with the pictures than the people without that chance. Like, a lot less happy.

Then he asked a new group of students which group they would rather be in, and over sixty percent of them chose to be in the group with the choice. They chose the class that would eventually make them unhappy with their photo.

This was interesting.

I started thinking about shopping, about the difference between the way I shop and the way D. shops. First, I make decisions and then I don't look back. Let's say I'm looking for a new pair of shoes to wear to work. I'll go to the shoe store, find my size, look around at all the options, try on a few pairs if I don't already have a tantrumming toddler, pick one, buy it, and I'm done. Those other shoes that I didn't buy? They aren't in my head anymore, unless I've made mental plans to come back for them after I've earned another pair of shoes or something.

David does pretty much the opposite. He will scour shoe stores for several weeks, repeatedly going in and trying on different pairs. He will research the finalists thoroughly on the internet. He'll read reviews of the shoes. He'll go back and try them on again. He'll pit the stores against each other to get a better price (seriously, he does this all the time, not necessarily with shoes, but I wouldn't put it past him). Finally, he'll make his selection, but much of the time it's a close decision, and he may waver a couple of times as he works through all the pros and cons of each.

The next thing is that I don't do returns. So let's just say I don't like shoes when I get home. They actually pinch a little. Wow, I didn't realize they made that weird little sighing sound every time I take a step. That will be awkward while I'm creeping around my classroom. I totally didn't notice that they made my feet look so boxy. Boxy doesn't really look good on my feet. I shrug and tuck them in my closet. Give them away to someone. Possibly I have slightly pinching, boxy, sighing feet for a while until I have a chance and the funds to try again. But it doesn't really occur to me to bring them back. I don't know why...I just feel like it's a lot of trouble. I made the choice, no big deal. I don't usually feel unhappy about the shoes. Shoes are great, but I'm not going to go crazy over a pair of shoes.

D. comes home from shopping and doesn't take the tags off of things until he's certain. Really certain. And then maybe he'll sleep on it. I guess I can't speak to his happiness with those final purchases, but from my point of view, it seems like if he realizes that there's a flaw in his purchase, he's more likely to wonder about that other option...maybe I should have bought that other one...I saw that one review about this on their website, but everyone else said it was fine...it seems a little like agonizing, to me.

Agonizing =/= Happiness.

So Gilbert talked about how choice--freedom--makes people less happy. Because you can wonder about whether you made the right choice? Because you also have the freedom of regretting the choices?

Oh, dear. This is not what this post was supposed to be about. Warning! Tangent! Where did it start? *traces back*

AHA!

Second paragraph. A likely place for a tangent to crop up.

What I meant to write about was the tiny snippet of the Aspen talk aired on MPR that was about CHILDREN. And how they make us less happy. I believe his three reasons that we still think of our children as sources of joy were Armani socks, Heroin, and Baseball. Maybe I'll blather on about that tomorrow. Or maybe there will be another tangent. What was I talking about?

A moment ago.

Me: Hey guys, how about, before we pull out all the Little People shit, I mean stuff, how about if we pick up some more of this other shit, I mean stuff.

Jabber: Okay. (sits in same position, playing with other shit. I mean stuff.)

Me: Like this wooden knife. Where's the little pink basket of food that this goes with?

Jabber: I don't know. (sits there, playing. hasn't looked up from toy.)

Me: Well, is it in the fort? Is it in your ear? Is it up in your room? Someone had it out, and I'm just wondering where the rest of it is, so I can put it away.

Jabber: I DON'T KNOW where it is.

Me: I know. I don't either. Will you help me look for it, please?

Jabber: I can't look for it. I don't know where it is. (has not looked up yet from the toy.)

Me: Well, I don't know where it is, either. That's why it's called looking. Searching. Seeking. The basket of fake food is hiding. It is awaiting discovery. Make a treasure map. I don't care. But will you please help me look for it?

Jabber: But I wanted to take out the Little People! (collapses in a sullen heap of fake crying)

Lameness

GAH. Only reason I'm posting this? Because my kiddo erupted like Mt. Vesuvius last night (five times) and forced me to concoct a sub plan at 11:30 p.m. in between dashes up the stairs to try to catch some of the mess in a plastic mixing bowl lined with a dish towel and then the alternating dashes down to the basement to shuffle our bedding, towels, and several sets of clothing from washer to dryer and then back upstairs to the bed, ready to take the next round. Then back downstairs with the new load of ick. Rinse and repeat. Until 2 AM.

So when I started this blog, my goal was to get writing again. I had finished my first novel, spent a couple months querying it to agents (with no positive responses, frustrating because the rejections aren't even based on someone reading the novel!) and then got sucked into the bog of motherhood and teacherdom and, well, real life. So mired was I that I didn't write a single thing other than stuff for work. Maybe an email or two, I'll admit. Oh, and okay, fine, maybe a post or a thousand on a certain natural family living forum. But writing on a regular basis--something that has been a part of me since I was in elementary school--had virtually disappeared from my life since having children.

This blog was my resolve to keep a journal, something I had tried eight thousand times since Jabber was born, with very sporadic results. I decided to write once a week about my kids and their shenanigans, my thoughts on being a parent in this crazy world, my process of becoming a writer/remaining a writer/succeeding as a writer, random bits of creative writing that I hoped might trickle out of me, and maintain some kind of regularity to the whole thing. All last spring and summer I had the most terrific routine, too. I had a gym membership, and I would go work out after the boys went to bed (David included, since he works suuuuuuper early in the morning and goes to bed, ideally, right around the time that Jabber and Monkey do), and while I jogged around the track or slogged along on the elliptical machine, I would think of things to write about. Then I came home and made them happen.

At the end of summer, my gym membership ran out. There was no money for a renewal, sadly, since we are all tightening our belts (haha, yeah, try loosening the drawstring on my sweatpants now!) and stuff since apparently the economoy is awful and times are tough. (This, so far, is not any different from my life before the economic crisis, but whatever. I have lost exactly zero dollars on the stock market. :P Still, it is nice that David and I are still both employed...knock on wood.) Oh, dear, I digress.

Since school started, I've been terrible about this blog, even though I'm doing a nice job at writing itself. The kids...what could I write about them? I feel like I barely see them, to be honest.

The holidays themselves are always sort of an invitation for my soul to freak out. We start with "Deer Camp," the three weekends in November that we all go to the in-laws' so David can hunt. We have a great time, although I think my children have just about worn out their welcome after two weekends. They are certainly energetic, to say the least. That's three weekends in a row that I don't get laundry done, groceries shopped, toys picked up, whatever needs to be done. Then we have Thanksgiving, a family get-together the weekend after that, and wow! That brings us to the boys' birthdays. Wow, it's so nice to have their birthdays only one day away from each other. And just two weeks from Christmas!

*Elissa dies of overwhelmedness*

I've done my complaining about all of this...to anyone who will listen, honestly. But I haven't really come to terms with exactly how lame of a person I really feel at the moment. My mom, trying to reassure me over the telephone, said something like, "Well, you know, you need to let things slide. Who cares if the house doesn't get dusted today."

Uh, Mom? I don't think it's been dusted since 2005. That's the least of my worries.

There are so many things I should be getting done at any given time; I get lost in all the little details. I should be doing a craft project with my children to make little gifts so that they can give something nice to everyone in the family. Instead, I can't even manage to find time to give Jabber a haircut and search through the winter gear in the basement to find Monkey some boots before there's actually snow on the ground. I should be baking cookies with them, writing out greeting cards, shopping for Santa, and I dunno...buying a turkey for Thanksgiving, since I am pretty sure we somehow agreed to having the in-laws over here for Turkey Day? I can't even manage to get the checkbook balanced or buy toothpaste for the baby or change all my clocks over from daylight savings time.

So I'm lame. And my blog is lame. And my house is messy. And my bedroom smells like sick baby. And I haven't said even a little hello to any of my friends in over a month. (Hello, friends! I really do love you, honest!) And...I complain too much. I promise, the next entry will be either witty or endearing or, at the very least, mildly interesting. :)

Transitions

Moving from one thing to the next can be a bit tricky. Some of the hardest parts of writing--a novel, an essay, even a blog post--are the bits where you try to make one idea lead into the next, flow in smoothly with a minimum of fuss. My students learn transition words from a list, but you can't really just memorize a list of words and let them do all the work to move your writing from piece to piece.

Like a choppy paragraph break, we started school again today, and everything about the transition was crazy. I had to peel the boys off of their sheets this morning and stuff their floppy limbs into clothing while brushing my teeth hurriedly and making a grocery list for this morning's potluck, which I had forgotten. I stayed up well into the wee hours like usual last night, and by the middle of my leadership meeting this afternoon, I was all but comatose in my steamy classroom. It was a good thing the chairs are so uncomfortable.

After the children finally succumbed to sleep in their beds again this evening, David collapsed in his chair in the living room, looking like a refugee of war. His eyes darted and twitched; his hands shook.

"What's the matter?" I asked, from my slump on the couch. I sucked back a couple of aspirins with a whiskey shot.

"I...can...do...this...." His voice was thin and sounded a little deranged.

I thought about giving him a hug, but that would involve moving. So I just sent him telepathic thoughts of love instead. Upstairs, the alarm clocks ticked on, inexorably moving us toward tomorrow.

"Tomorrow," I whispered, "will be much easier."

"Tomorrow," he groaned, "we have to go grocery shopping."

Transitions are tough.

Teacher of the Year, Foiled Again!

Jabberwock is full of questions. Some of them are annoying, some of them are completely bizarre, and a good deal of them are about trying to figure out the way things work in this world. I try to answer him.

The last couple of weeks, we have been going for short hikes at a river near our home, and the questions have tended toward the scientific. In just the last week, we have had pretty in-depth conversations about evaporation/condensation (and the three states of matter), erosion, and then yesterday it was all about animal classification. Now I have always enjoyed biology--from the microscopic level right up to the cat dissection we did in advanced bio in high school. But this was the subject that stumped me, that made me say, "Gosh, Jabber, I just don't know. I guess we'll have to look that up."

OK, so from an educational standpoint, I know it's actually better for us to explore resources and learn the answers together, rather than a sort of Biology 101 lecture from the voice of Mom. Still, it irks me that I couldn't pull the answer out of my brain.

So we're sitting in the sandbox, and he asks me, "Mom, humans are mammals, right? So what makes us mammals?"

Yes! Easy question! I rattle off a bunch of characteristics of mammals, excited beyond all normal parameters that just yesterday we had been talking about animals being warm or cold-blooded. We chat for a while about animals giving birth to live young and then move on to discuss how mammals all feed their babies "nummies." Monkey joins the discussion at this point, lifting two sandy hands from his mud pie to caress my breasts.

"Nummie-nummie-nummie-num," he says solemnly. My shirt will never be the same.

"So, Jabber, can you think of any animals besides humans that would fit those characteristics? What other mammals are there?" I must be getting ready for school after all, hopping into Bloom's Taxonomy Mode while hanging out in the sandbox with a four-year-old.

He thinks for a minute. "A polar bear!" he shouts. "And a deer!"

We all applaud. It is quite exciting, let me tell you. I feel like science teacher of the year. And then.

"Are worms mammals?"

No. No, they are not. I am sure of that. He doesn't ask the next question: well, then, what ARE they? But I do. Come on, Science Teacher of the Freaking Year, what is a worm? My brain starts throwing words around, like Kingdom Phylum Class Order, or...damn, was it Order Class? Yeah, yeah. I dredge up an idea about five different groups of animals, but my brain can't fit worms into any of them.

Even though I don't have any idea how to fit a worm into my classification system, I start talking, trusting my Intro to Bio knowledge to show up when it really counts. "There are other groups of animals, too, besides Mammals," I say. "Like reptiles." Yeah, I am absolutely sure that's one of the groups. Is it a Kingdom? A Phylum? A Class, no Order?

"Dinosaurs were reptiles," says Jabber, full of wisdom.

"Yes, they were, but there are other animals that are reptiles, too, like turtles and snakes." Oh, I can feel that Best Teacher Tiara settling back onto my head now.

"Snakes?" asks Jabber.

"Nakes?" asks Monkey.

"Well, that's kind of like a worm," says Jabberwock. "So is a worm a reptile?"

Damn! "What is with you and worms?" No, I don't think I actually said that. "Well, there's Birds," I continue. I'm sure of birds. Mammals, Reptiles, Birds, and..."And amphibians, like frogs, that live on both water and land." Yep, I know that's one. I search through my brain for the fifth category. I know there's five; that number is clear in my memory, although I still can't remember what level of the taxonomy I am babbling about. I mean, one category can't include insects, worms, fish, and oh! there's a category that's like things with shells...crustaceans! Shit, this is too many categories. Suddenly, in my head, two Latin words compete: Annelida and Arthropoda. Annelids? Worms are Annelids! But...what about fish? What about the five categories?

"What is a worm?" He is pretty insistent at this point.

"Wom?" asks Monkey.

I sigh. "I don't know." I am defeated, vanquished by the natural sciences.

Come on, kid, ask me about poetry, plot structure, a vocabulary word?

Who are you, again?

Sometimes I think I live under a rock. Celebrities--be they actors, politicians, news anchors, musicians--somehow they all blur together in my mind and become pretty much indistinguishable to me. News about famous people always kind of confuses me. "Wait, wait, don't tell me, now was he the one who played Batman, or was he the one who played Superman?" David and I went to see The Dark Knight on Friday, and it was almost ridiculous how many times I had to whisper to him, "So...who's Batman again?" I mean, no, I totally can remember that Batman is the guy in the big black suit, and I even know he's the slick millionaire Bruce Wayne, but what the hell was the actor's name?

"Christian Bale," whispers David, for the third time. And then, as though this will help me, "He's the one who got in trouble for beating up on his mother and someone else."

This added detail does not ring any bells. (I have since researched this alleged incident, and I am honestly less interested in it now than I was then, if that's possible.)

Obviously, there is a point when a person is so famous that they penetrate my cluelessness. I can pick the presidential candidates out of a line-up, for instance. Most of them, anyway. And although I may not have any clue who the anchor was who interviewed them, there are some celebs I can figure out. Oprah, for instance. I almost never mix her up with anyone else.

So I just always thought I didn't care about famous people. I kind of felt a little smug about it, even. As in, I am above the plebian crowd. Then I was talking to one of my co-workers, and she mentioned that she has difficulty with facial recognition. She was talking about it almost like a social disability. As she talked, I realized she was talking about me.

So pretty much, until I form some kind of emotional attachment to someone, I cannot recognize their face. And somehow, it mostly impacts me with men. They all look alike to me. This explained a lot about why, whenever we watch action-adventure type movies, especially if the people all dress alike, I'm always confused. "Was that the guy who shot all those people in the beginning?" I'll ask David, and he gives me this look like, "WTF? Where have you been?"

The dressing alike piece could also be why I can't for the life of me tell news anchors apart. They're just like a cookie cutter to me, a suit with a balding white head that tells me shit I'm supposed to know. Until I get some kind of emotion from them, or meet them in person, I have no clue who they are or what they look like. This frustrates David to no end, since he works in news. I mean, I can't even identify the reporters of our local news, the station he works for, the people he talks about in our daily lives. Just last night I went downstairs to tell him something I had seen on the news, and he asked me, "Was it so-and-so?" and I had to dig through my brain. "Uhmmmm, she was blond I think?"

So since realizing I have a social disability instead of just a huge-ass case of elitism, I've tried harder to differentiate among the beautiful people. After all, I figure if I can learn like a hundred names and faces of kids in my classes (who do dress pretty much identically, thanks to our uniform code), I can probably manage to recognize my state's governor or Maggie Gyllenhaal (even though I had to look it up twice to spell her last name right). Other people who have disabilities find ways to cope. Mine is that I have to find an emotional connection to these people. One way I can do it is to actually see their movies. For instance, I feel relatively certain I can now identify Christian Bale, provided that he is wearing a black bat suit. Oh, and as long as nobody ELSE tries to fool me by wearing the suit. Gyllenhaal is easier, for one because she's a woman, and for two, because I remember seeing photos of her nursing an older infant in public, and once you've seen a woman's breasts, it should follow that it's easier to remember her name. Although, not necessarily her face.

So I'm working on it. And in the meantime, let's just hope I am not ever the sole witness to a crime. "Uhhhh, I think he was wearing a suit? And...he might have been a white guy? Maybe?"

My First Meme

OK, lame, I know. My brain is blank tonight, or at least it's not full of anything coherent and resembling a story or essay. It's kind of like an old coffee can in the basement with a bunch of random bolts and hinges and extra pieces for things you've assembled but maybe not all that well.

Anyway, I've seen this book list meme a few places and just kept it on the back burner for later. My biggest issue with these kinds of lists or quizzes is that I have to add commentary to them all the time. It's not enough to simply put the title in italics or whatever; I've gotta blather on. It's my specialty. So we'll see how I do here.

OK, I stole this particular version from Grace.

Supposedly, the average adult has read 6 out of the 100 books of all time as chosen by the National Endowment for the Arts. Bloggers, having nothing better to do, have turned this into a game.

Basically, you take the NEA list and

1. Bold all the books you've read.
2. Italicize those you intend to read (or have started to read but didn't finish?).
3. Underline those you have read more than once. (I'm just going to turn them purple because it's easier.)

1 Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen
2 The Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkien [I remember I didn't like it the first time through. I almost didn't finish, but it was for English class, and I had to do a book project on it.]
3 Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte [I love this book!]
4 Harry Potter series - JK Rowling
5 To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee [I love this one, too...oh, Scout!]
6 The Bible [I've attempted this one numerous times. I've read much of the Old Testament, and I've read the Gospels.]
7 Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte [Yeah, I know. I haven't read it. I don't know why, either.]
8 Nineteen Eighty Four - George Orwell [I love Orwell. This book freaks me out every time, too!]
9 His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman
10 Great Expectations - Charles Dickens [and I didn't enjoy it! SHHHH!]
11 Little Women - Louisa M Alcott
12 Tess of the D'Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy
13 Catch 22 - Joseph Heller
14 Complete Works of Shakespeare [well, I've read a LOT of his works, but maybe not all...]
15 Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier [although I read the newer one...can't remember what it was called?]
16 The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien
17 Birdsong - Sebastian Faulks
18 Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger [I just reread this again last spring. I like Holden...]
19 The Time Traveller's Wife - Audrey Niffenegger
20 Middlemarch - George Eliot
21 Gone With The Wind - Margaret Mitchell
22 The Great Gatsby - F Scott Fitzgerald
23 Bleak House - Charles Dickens
24 War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy
25 The Hitch Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams
26 Brideshead Revisited - Evelyn Waugh
27 Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoyevsky
28 Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck [I think I was suffering from PTSD when I finished this. Bleak!]
29 Alice in Wonderland - Lewis Carroll
30 The Wind in the Willows - Kenneth Grahame
31 Anna Karenina - Leo
32 David Copperfield - Charles Dickens
33 Chronicles of Narnia - CS Lewis
34 Emma - Jane Austen
35 Persuasion - Jane Austen
36 The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe - CS Lewis [why is the complete Chronicles AND tLtWatW on the list?]
37 The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini
38 Captain Corelli's Mandolin - Louis De Bernieres
39 Memoirs of a Geisha - Arthur Golden
40 Winnie the Pooh - AA Milne
41 Animal Farm - George Orwell [I teach this every year, so...]
42 The Da Vinci Code - Dan Brown [OK, why is this book on the list? I mean, it was okay as far as that kind of action-y type books go, but on a list with Shakespeare and whatnot? Uhhhh...no.]
43 One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
45 The Woman in White - Wilkie Collins
46 Anne of Green Gables - LM Montgomery
47 Far From The Madding Crowd - Thomas Hardy
48 The Handmaid's Tale - Margaret Atwood
49 Lord of the Flies - William Golding [This book FREAKED me out the first time I read it!]
50 Atonement - Ian McEwan
52 Dune - Frank Herbert
53 Cold Comfort Farm - Stella Gibbons
54 Sense and Sensibility - Jane Austen
55 A Suitable Boy - Vikram Seth
56 The Shadow of the Wind - Carlos Ruiz Zafon
57 A Tale Of Two Cities - Charles Dickens
58 Brave New World - Aldous Huxley
59 The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time - Mark Haddon [This book didn't really wow me, either.]
60 Love In The Time Of Cholera - Gabriel Garcia Marquez [in Spanish!]
61 Of Mice and Men - John Steinbeck
62 Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov
63 The Secret History - Donna Tartt
64 The Lovely Bones - Alice Sebold [this is on my shelf right now.]
65 Count of Monte Cristo - Alexandre Dumas
66 On The Road - Jack Kerouac [I've read everything Kerouac wrote. I'm goofy like that.]
67 Jude the Obscure - Thomas Hardy
68 Bridget Jones's Diary - Helen Fielding
69 Midnight's Children - Salman Rushdie
70 Moby Dick - Herman Melville [I've read more than half?]
71 Oliver Twist - Charles Dickens
72 Dracula - Bram Stoker
73 The Secret Garden - Frances Hodgson Burnett
74 Notes From A Small Island - Bill Bryson
75 Ulysses - James Joyce [OK, I really, really wanted to finish it. I read Dubliners and Portrait of the Artist, and I just couldn't hold on...]
76 The Bell Jar - Sylvia Plath
77 Swallows and Amazons - Arthur Ransome
78 Germinal - Emile Zola
79 Vanity Fair - William Makepeace Thackeray
80 Possession - AS Byatt
81 A Christmas Carol - Charles Dickens
82 Cloud Atlas - David Mitchell
83 The Color Purple - Alice Walker
84 The Remains of the Day - Kazuo Ishiguro
85 Madame Bovary - Gustave Flaubert [started it, ran out of motivation]
86 A Fine Balance - Rohinton Mistry
87 Charlotte's Web - EB White
88 The Five People You Meet In Heaven - Mitch Albom [no, but I did read Tuesdays with Morrie and one other one by him...or I think I listened to them on tape. Yeah...it's all coming back to me now.]
89 Adventures of Sherlock Holmes - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
90 The Faraway Tree Collection - Enid Blyton
91 Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad
92 The Little Prince - Antoine De Saint-Exupery
93 The Wasp Factory - Iain Banks
94 Watership Down - Richard Adams
95 A Confederacy of Dunces - John Kennedy Toole
96 A Town Like Alice - Nevil Shute
97 The Three Musketeers - Alexandre Dumas
98 Hamlet - William Shakespeare
99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Roald Dahl
100 Les Miserables - Victor Hugo