5 Things That Happened This Week

I am having a hard time getting to this blog regularly to update it, though it's nagging at me in the back of my mind. My idea for now is to keep the posts simple, so this will be about 5 things of note that happened this week. Okay? No pressure!

1. I got my hair cut all the way off on Wednesday by the amazing Leslie at DiCarlo's hair salon on Sansom and 12th Street. I liked her a lot too; and we quickly discovered that we had some geographical things in common. Both lived in Chicago, then moved to Florida, and ended up in Philadelphia. She chopped off about six inches of dead hair (I knew I was in trouble when I started obsessively biting off split ends during Commencement like a crazy person). She straightened it after the cut, but promised me it would be cute too if I didn't straighten it, and she's right--I noticed today that the ends are flipping up in such a way that makes me feel like Daisy Buchanan.

2. Dan made a kitty perch for Ernesto on Sunday and the cat has taken to it like a cat to a kitty perch.  I thought he might have some trouble leaping up onto it, but no. He just climbs over the oven (good boy!) to get to it. Emma  Carol is both too fat and too clumsy to jump on it, so this little hammock in the air is his refuge from her occasional outbursts of violence brought on by her drippy eye. Here he is now:

3. I finished two books this week, Him, Her, Him Again, and the End of Him by Patricia Marx and Saturday by Ian McEwan. The first book was funny, but I kept waiting for it to be about more than this woman's obsession with a pretentious philosopher and it never was and then (spoiler, I guess, though the title does reveal this) he is killed at the end when a bookshelf falls on him. Saturday was a more satisfying read though I confess that I skimmed in places because McEwan, well, he's one of them detail-oriented writers. Still, I did pick up Solar by him and also started reading Meg Worlitzer's The Interestings.  Is it shallow to complain that a book is sometimes just too heavy? I want to read carry it around in my purse, but damn. It makes me slump to one side. And, no, I don't want a Kindle.

4. I got "A's" in both of my Penn grad classes this week, and have also reached the class-taking portion of the degree. I'm still like fourteen years old about grades. Was biting at my cuticles when I got the emails about my final grades. It's not like anyone in the professional world ever says, Hey, can I see your report card? Still, I did a little dance.

5. Axl is visiting work today and his owner, Emilie, also made me oatmeal chocolate chip cookies fro my birthday. Update: This is me an Axl. I am forcing him to sit in my lap. You can't see it, but Emilie had him wear his special occasion bow tie. She's the  best. I am lucky to have so many thoughtful friends, human and otherwise.

Some Vine Videos

Of good and bad and indifferent quality. I'm still figuring out the process...

First, Emma Carol. Click on the little audio button in the top left if you want sound.

This is called "The Many Faces of Emma Carol," but there is really only one. The one with the constantly weepy eye.



Then, we made a Vine at a local pizza restaurant showing bunnies multiplying. It's called, "What Bunnies Do."
And finally, here's six yoga postures, done on the fly.

Dove Stands for Inner Turmoil

In case you haven't heard, there's this new Dove campaign that capitalizes on women's insecurities  about how they look while simultaneously pretending  to be trying to show women how beautiful they really are. The ad says, essentially, that most women don't see themselves as beautiful, aw, how sad, how awful that you should not believe your beautiful, because being beautiful is one of the most important attributes of a woman, Feeling beautiful (i.e. feeling desired by men) equals confidence. When really, why shouldn't feeling powerful equal being confident as it seems to be equated for men? Why should woman's confidence be based on the exterior and a man's worth on how important he is?

Do straight men think about they appear to women all the time? Do they wonder what kind of face they have--what the shape it is? Does GQ magazine give them ways to classify their bodies as pear, hourglass, apple or tube or rectangle shaped? I don't think they do, but men do come in different shapes and sizes--they're still not told to pick a dress shirt that helps make their shoulders look broader, and their waists thinner. They don't make Arrow shirts with shoulder pads in them or neck ties shaped to compensate for a perceived double chin.

And so of course I love this parody of the ad if it were geared toward men.

Middle School Journal

When I was in Florida visiting my parents last month, my mom asked me to go through some of my things from long ago; take what I wanted to keep and get rid of what was garbage. I found some things that I still can't part with--a note my friend Jen wrote on an airline sickness bag, my baptismal candle, this tiny green ceramic frog that used to mean so much to me, and then some of my old writing, such as this palm-sized notepad from 6th grade that I kept. Mostly, I wrote stories based on characters I liked from books or TV shows such as Little Women and Remington Steele. My characters were almost always adults. The women were beautiful, and the men were handsome and sometimes dastardly and they were all very very rich

I must run soon to work, but I leave you with an excerpt. This is a fan letter I wrote but never sent to Warren Beatty, probably after seeing Reds with my parents.

Dear Mr. Beaty (sic),

I got your address from my friend who knows this editor man.

My third period class put on a play that I wrote. It only lasted about twenty minutes, but it was pretty good.

The play was called Cinderfella. It was sort of a satirish thing, but Fred (the guy who was Cinderfella) did a good job. My friend Diana played the evil stempomther and I was one of the evil stepsisters, Arminta.

The thing was that I got to act, write, direct, and produce it. That was kind of neat. It makes you feel important.

I watced the awards the other night. Well, actually only some because at around eleven, I had to go to bed, so I didn't see the award you recieved, but heard about it later on the radio. You must get a great feeling of accomplishment.

Sincerely...Aimee

And then I wrote a note like "Be sure to remember that I'll never send this."

I was a fledgling feminist even then, casting against type to have Cinderella be a guy rescued by a princess, though you'll note that I didn't change the gender of the mom or stepsister.

There are pages and pages of this stuff, and most of is fiction, with lots of adverbs and lots of adjectives, as well as practice drawings I did of Garfield the cat, who was popular at the time.

No Thanks

I don't think I'll be moving out to LA. I think all of the things that they say about LA in movies is true. Everyone is full of it, everyone is trying to get noticed, egos are on the line every second of the day, every time you walk down the street. I'm thinking about this because I have a friend at work whose aunt used to date a recognizable musician, someone from a band you've heard of and they have that one song whose chorus you sort of know. Anyway, he was once normal looking--he has a movie star cleft chin and blue eyes, but recent photos of him show that he's been through the plastic surgery machine. He has that mask-like face and perfectly straight, gleaming white row of teeth. And I can just imagine all the b.s. he hears all the time around him--"no, you look great, you look great. That new album is going to go gold!"

And I imagine that tons of people go out to LA thinking because they had the lead in their high school play in Clearwater, Florida, and they know that they've just got to meet the right people, and they'll get discovered. So, the guy filling the gas in your car is a model, the waitress with the violet eyes and delicate faux rhinestone nose piercing is definitely an actress. The kid scanning your cereal boxes at the grocery store has an audition after his shift that's going to save his life and land him a role as the mean older brother on a Disney show. And of all those people, maybe one percent will ever be in any way successful, and another 2% might make it onto a reality TV show like the dumbest one on last night Real Love--I thought for a while that it was a joke. How do these shows get made? I promise that I watched only five minutes, but it's this weird combination of The Bachelor and a game show, where the contestants appear on stage in these glass pods and are judged and have to make the case that they are on the show for the right reasons. All women, of course. Have we progressed at all when we still have these same tropes where dozens of women are presented in evening gowns and high heels and pancake make-up to dudes who must decide which ones he thinks are the hottest? No.

Anyway, this all reminds me of one of my famous stand up bits by David Cross.

"Beware the Undertoad..."

Do you recognize the post title? Yes, that's right. It's from The World According to Garp. I haven't read it in a while but I think it's what the little boy thought everyone was saying when they really meant, Beware the undertow. Mishearing them, he had visions of this giant toad sitting at the bottom of the sea, looking up for little boy legs to gobble down.

Dreamed last night that I was rooming with four undergraduate girls who were super young and cute and partying and I came home to find that they drank all of my Kahlua and filled it back up with water. They wanted to go out again and I said I would go with them, but I wasn't dressed appropriately--wore my raggedy looking sneakers next to their cute yellow and orange delicately strapped sandals. A guy friend of mine who was going with me had an embarrassingly large spaghetti sauce stain on the front of his white pleated shirt (the shirt was just as attention getting as the stain). Then later, I was trying to get from the Jersey shore back to Philadelphia, but had to swim across an ocean of choppy gray water with shark fins breaking the surface. I made it to the other side though, remember feeling physically relieved in the dream when my feet touched the sand and I could stand up and hurry toward shore.

I attribute the dream to a couple of things related to the classes I'm taking now--one is that half of my small group team is made up of undergraduate Penn students and next to them, I often feel old and oafish; uncool, clumsy.  Then also, I have to give a presentation in my other class tonight and I don't feel prepared. I'm sure it will be fine--that class is a generous group of women--all nearer my age, but I still don't love the idea of having to offer up a PowerPoint.

My anxiety dreams are not opaque--insecurities and fears are right there like the shark fins, visible, obvious.

 

Promise

As soon as my classes are over (at the end of April), I'll try to write posts more regularly. In the meantime, here's an essay I wrote for the latest issue of Philadelphia Stories.

I include a recent picture of the cats outside, enjoying the stirrings of spring, as compensation.

The Right Prompts

Recently, I attended the joyous funeral of my 94 year old grandmother, Lurye LaBrie, mother of ten kids all raised in the Midwest on a small farm in a tiny rural town populated by grain elevators, a town hall, and a juke-boxless tavern (not a bar, it was always called a "tavern"). I use the word joyous to describe the event because she had lived a long and prosperous life and the funeral was evidence of that--all ten children and their spouses were there, along with the twenty-nine grandchildren, and ten great grandchildren. Rather than being solemn occasion, it felt more like a celebration.

At the reception, I shared a piece of church-made sheet cake with my younger cousin, Allison, who was
complaining about her college creative writing class. "We keep getting these prompts, and then we have to write a story from them."

Thrilled at the sudden opportunity to talk about writing, I offered her some quick advice. "Well, I hope you never start a story with an alarm clock going off. "

She looked back at me blankly. "Why not?" I told her that you should begin the story with something going wrong; not just the start of an ordinary day. I borrowed one of my favorite lines from Janet Burroway, who wrote The Art of Fiction: "Only trouble is interesting."

"Mine started with her getting in the shower," she said.

"That's okay, as long as it didn't end with, It was all a dream."

"Oh, no," she said. "It ended with her realizing that she was really a dog locked in a kennel."

I swallowed the last sweet bite of cake. "What was your writing prompt?"

"The professor told us to write about a person discovering she has some kind of deformity. I made my character's deformity 'craziness.'"

My guess is that sixty to seventy percent of the class did the same. To me, this is primes example of a bad writing prompt, one that sets the students up for failure. While it does ask the student to use her imagination, it also takes away from another piece of solid writing advice: write what you know. Maybe some of the students wrote about their own real or perceived deformities--noses too big or too small, weight issues, maybe several had club foots. Still, is this something a character would discover one day? If you have a deformity, aren't you often aware of it or have you been avoiding public spaces and mirrors for decades, locked in a tower by an evil, jealous queen?

The prompt also sets the writer up for a few amateur mistakes; one being beginning the story with the aforementioned alarm clock moment; another being the O. Henry "ah-ha" reveal where the story is turned on its head; a third being the narrator telling the story from the locked ward on an asylum (or, in Allison's case, a kennel). If you are Robert Olen Butler, you can write a whole short story from the point of view of a parrot, and if you are Franz Kafka, make him a cockroach, but for most new fiction writers, it helps to first get familiar with the form before playing with it too much. Learn it first, and then unlearn it all you want.

A good writing prompt inspires you to think about an idea, situation, or character in new and unexpected ways. Some of the best first lines in short stories start with the juxtaposition between two incongruous ideas.  Take this one, from Bharati Mukherjee's "The Management of Grief" which place a stranger in what should be a familiar and private place: "A woman I don't know is boiling tea the Indian way in my kitchen, whispering and moving tactfully."

Putting unlike things together helps to create a necessary sense of tension--that idea that you're stepping immediately into a scene where something appears slightly "off," like a crooked picture on the wall. This discombobulated feeling from the very first line makes the reader want to keep reading to see if it gets straightened out.

My advice to you the next time you find yourself staring at a blank page is to find two disparate things and put them together--a happy funeral, a tragic wedding, a bloody birthday cake. Use this marriage of two unlike things to see if you can shape the idea into a good 750 word short piece.

As with any writing prompt, take only what's useful, interesting, or familiar to you. If you need to change the word "funeral" to "Miles Davis concert" or "happy" to "deep shame," then do it. You may also find that setting the story on a day something is happening will give even the most clichéd situation a sense of urgency, as in "His alarm clock went off the morning of his grandmother's funeral and he leaped from the bed with anticipation."