Month: November 2011

This is a fairly obvious flap to open on the Advent Calendar of our “Thanksfulness:” I am the queen of doodlers. This is probably apparent by the way that I write; little snatches of lists and smileys and groceries and comments on every available scrap of paper. Tech Boy despairs of ever truly dragging me into tech; I still have paper address books… filled with defunct addresses and more doodles, calligraphic recordings of the alphabet in my every colored ink pen, ballet gowns and misshappen ballerinas (why? I hate ballet…), roses, libraries, couture, Sphinxes, jellyfish, Airedales. It is a strange space my scribbling mind inhabits. A place out of mind – and deep into my mind.

I just finished a novel wherein the girl drew everything around her in an effort to understand it. I think that’s me, too — lines of poetry, prayers, arguments, indictments, all rendered out in squiggles and swoops and lines. Does it truly give me any understanding of things? I’m not sure, really. But it does connect my hand to my brain and enable my thoughts to flow out of me, like a twisted pensieve in reverse. Difficult phone calls become somehow easier, jagged discussions flow more smoothly with a pen in my hand. Long sermons, grad school lectures…

I am not much of an artist, perhaps. But the scribbling, the drawing, the stamping, the coloring – it’s a freedom, too. The contents of my life, laid out in inky fingerprints on paper – a gift, perhaps only to myself. For this grace of clarity (or the attempt at said), I am grateful.

Lest you think my Thanksgiving Advent Calendar Countdown is about all things Deep and Meaningful, let me assure you that I am as childish and ridiculous as the next person (or, if you were feeling nice, you could say “childlike and whimsical,” but I’m pretty sure childish fits just fine). I LOVE Totoro. I think Hayao Miyazaki has adorable dimples, and I am a fan of pretty much all things Studio Ghibli (or Kabushiki-gaisha Sutajio Jiburi, as it’s also known).

I think the first Ghibli film I ever saw was an accident – we’d seen an ad for Spirited Away, but when we went to pick up the DVD – in Ye Olden Days when they rented them from Stores – it wasn’t it, and so we just picked up something else. One of the vids ended up being something about pandas for preschoolers, which we watched for a moment with bemusement (you can do this when you’re really tired and don’t want to get up to turn it off). “Okay, what else did you get?” I wanted to know. Tech Boy then put in Totoro, which, incidentally, is also for preschoolers, we were just stunned. It is gorgeous – the animation is atop backgrounds which look like well-executed oil paintings – and fey – the bunny looking things aren’t really bunnies… and really weird – the dust balls are alive (which in my house would explain so, so much) and — oddly beautiful. This still doesn’t really explain how two totally past-it non-preschoolers sat and watched the whole cartoon – and got sniffly at the end – but… you just had to be there. It was …fun. It took our imaginations, and drew them into their own little journey.

And then we watched Kiki’s Delivery Service. The beginning scenes depict Kiki lying in a field, listening to the radio… and that animated grass waving in the wind was just beautiful. Who else puts that much careful work into moving every single blade? Hayao Miyazaki – and now Goro, his son. Our all-time, rewatchable favorite Ghibli film is still Spirited Away; it’s full of spooky, weird, ridiculous and sublimely artistic things which we don’t quite get, but love to watch.

If you’ve read my blog frequently, you know I don’t always like movie adaptions of my favorite books – it’s more accurate to say that most times I violently dislike them, but since I didn’t read My Neighbhor, Totoro as a picture book, I came to it with no preconceived notions of plot or storyline. However, I will always remember how much Diana Wynne Jones loved that someone from another country and culture cared enough to interpret her work, so watching Ghibli’s version of Howl’s Moving Castle is something I can do with the idea that there are both cultural differences and other understandings of elements of plot at play, and know it was okay with her. I may even someday be able to watch Tales from Earthsea… fortunately, there are a lot of other Ghibli’s which embrace the strange and fey world of fable and myth and excellent anime, and I can’t wait for the next one.

For the gift of magically good anime, and the grace of imagination, I am really and truly thankful.

(This picture has nothing to do with anything except that the sky is gorgeous.)

I so admire people who can talk. I tend to be a fairly articulate person when calm, and when becoming annoyed, I find that my vocabulary stretches, and my words become multi-syllabic. When I am truly infuriated, however, I just… cry.

Ticks me right off, that one does. I mean, here I have all of these brilliant words at my disposal, but the emotional undertow just sucks them all away, leaving me a snot-smeared, red-eyed, breath-heaving mess. Grrrr. I suppose, if one wanted to delve into the psychology of the whole thing, the pointless sniveling comes about because in the back of my mind, I keep thinking that It’s Not Nice To Get Mad, but bother that. I appreciate a keen-edged rant, a well-worded diatribe. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not talking spewing invective at innocents, or random acts of unkindness here. I’m talking justified expressions of real anger. I don’t think there’s anything wrong with being angry. You don’t have to hurt anyone to express yourself.

Thus, I am doubly grateful to those people who are, when made angry, logical, precise, concise, and most of all, non-raving and coherent. Writers are especially good at this – Neil Gaiman, who can put together the most pointed and direct little responses even on Twitter, Maureen Johnson, who makes witty and warm – but shoot-from-the-hip serious arguments an art form on her blog, and others. Today, I give you the example of Daniel Handler, who had a nasty interaction with a rather wealthy man at a swim club who didn’t want to share a lane with him — and didn’t feel he should have to, since he’d given the club a lot of money. Rather than grabbing his neck and holding him underwater – weeping – as I might have been tempted to do, Lemony Snickett wrote this intelligent treatise instead:

by Daniel Handler

Thirteen Observations made by Lemony Snicket while watching Occupy Wall Street from a Discreet Distance

1. If you work hard, and become successful, it does not necessarily mean you are successful because you worked hard, just as if you are tall with long hair it doesn’t mean you would be a midget if you were bald.

2. “Fortune” is a word for having a lot of money and for having a lot of luck, but that does not mean the word has two definitions.

3. Money is like a child—rarely unaccompanied. When it disappears, look to those who were supposed to be keeping an eye on it while you were at the grocery store. You might also look for someone who has a lot of extra children sitting around, with long, suspicious explanations for how they got there.

4. People who say money doesn’t matter are like people who say cake doesn’t matter—it’s probably because they’ve already had a few slices.

5. There may not be a reason to share your cake. It is, after all, yours. You probably baked it yourself, in an oven of your own construction with ingredients you harvested yourself. It may be possible to keep your entire cake while explaining to any nearby hungry people just how reasonable you are.

6. Nobody wants to fall into a safety net, because it means the structure in which they’ve been living is in a state of collapse and they have no choice but to tumble downwards. However, it beats the alternative.

7. Someone feeling wronged is like someone feeling thirsty. Don’t tell them they aren’t. Sit with them and have a drink.

8. Don’t ask yourself if something is fair. Ask someone else—a stranger in the street, for example.

9. People gathering in the streets feeling wronged tend to be loud, as it is difficult to make oneself heard on the other side of an impressive edifice.

10. It is not always the job of people shouting outside impressive buildings to solve problems. It is often the job of the people inside, who have paper, pens, desks, and an impressive view.

11. Historically, a story about people inside impressive buildings ignoring or even taunting people standing outside shouting at them turns out to be a story with an unhappy ending.

12. If you have a large crowd shouting outside your building, there might not be room for a safety net if you’re the one tumbling down when it collapses.

13. 99 percent is a very large percentage. For instance, easily 99 percent of people want a roof over their heads, food on their tables, and the occasional slice of cake for dessert. Surely an arrangement can be made with that niggling 1 percent who disagree.

More quotes on anger, from people who didn’t sit around and cry:

For the grace of a hard boundary, a red light, a firmly worded, “Heck, no;” I am thankful. I am grateful for righteous indignation, delivered in the ringing clarion tones of the truly articulate, a call to stop, think, and turn.

WINTER CLOTHES

by Karla Kushkin

Under my hood I have a hat
And under that
My hair is flat.
     Under my coat
My sweater’s blue,
My sweater’s red.
I’m wearing two.
     My muffler muffles to my chin
And round my neck
And then tucks in.
     My gloves were knitted
By my aunts.
I’ve mittens too
And pants
And pants
And boots
And shoes
With socks inside.
     The boots are rubber, red and wide.
And when I walk
I must not fall
Because I can’t get up at all.

This morning, I walked by a mirror, and started to laugh, thinking of this poem.

It is about 39°F/4°C, and in my house, I am wearing: a long-sleeved mock turtleneck, a long-sleeved t-shirt. A short-sleeved t-shirt. A v-necked thermal. And a cardigan… and a pair of leggings underneath my heavy cotton pants …or, trousers, as they’re known here. And a blue corduroy hat.

Oh, yeah. All I’m lacking is mittens and wellies, which may seem a bit overdone for indoors.

This is not a good look. No, seriously. I wish you could see.

Today, I am really grateful for my sense of the absurd.

For some reason, in our family, most of us have it in spades. It’s how I knew my Mom was really sick – she couldn’t talk to me on the phone – and belly laugh – without getting really out of breath.

Though people rarely see it, Tech Boy is as daft as all of us – and was somewhat of an anomaly in his own family. My family is nutty, and spends time mimicking friends and strangers, laughing at the dumb things people do, and laughing at ourselves in various circumstances. There is no situation in which we simply sit down and weep in despair. We despair, for sure, but we tend to laugh while weeping. (I have been known to laugh at funerals – because while death isn’t amusing, there is sometimes a joyousness in its arrival. And maybe you don’t understand that – but it’s all right. You don’t have to, until you’ve seen someone you love suffer from a disease, and you rejoice when they are released. Life is a gift. So is death. That’s a HUGE topic, which I don’t mean to treat lightly, either, but think about it..). There seems to be nothing in this world which is safe from the theater of the absurd, from life itself.

It is for this grace of spirit – and for my ridiculous and homely, but warm, outfit, and the ability to laugh at it – that I am today so very grateful.

I am not a patient person. You have to be patient to be a good wildlife photographer. I took about two hundred pictures of birds the other day, one hundred and ninety of them of a bird’s backside, and the other ten of an unfocused bunch of leaves, blowing in the wind. I have ONE pretty good photograph.

One. And it’s not even perfect.

These guys are at present tweetling around the tree in front of my office window. I identify bluetits, robins, and some sort of finch. Or wren? The ravens and magpies stalk by, looking mildly affronted. Everyone is zipping about, eating, arguing, defending territory, playing coy. I love birds; they give my eyes something to follow while I’m thinking. As much as I love watching them, though, I kind of wince as they fly so close to the windows. I just know we’re going to have an accident one of these days. But, until then, the birds continue to live dangerously, kamikaze bounding from branch to branch, diving head-first into the freedom of flight.

from Rilke’s Book of Hours

(as translated by Anita Barrows and Joanna Macy)
Shared today for A., who has bravely taken wing
♦ ♦ ♦ ♦
How surely gravity’s law,
strong as an ocean current,
takes hold of the smallest thing
and pulls it toward the heart of the world.

Each thing—
each stone, blossom, child—
is held in place.
Only we, in our arrogance,
push out beyond what we each belong to
for some empty freedom.

If we surrendered
to earth’s intelligence
we could rise up rooted, like trees.

Instead we entangle ourselves
in knots of our own making
and struggle, lonely and confused.

So like children, we begin again
to learn from the things,
because they are in God’s heart;
they have never left him.

This is what the things can teach us:
to fall,
patiently to trust our heaviness.
Even a bird has to do that
before he can fly.

It seems that Rilke is saying that we each have our place, and that when we get beyond our place, we get confused and messed up. At the same time, he advocates learning how to fail, and how to fail.

This poem always brings to mind another by Jack Gilbert, Failing and Flying, in which he talks about Icarus. Icarus is the antithesis of what Rilke was saying. Here’s a dude who tried to fly – when the average dude can’t. Surely he was out of place, out of time; flying into the face of what is supposed to be. There he flew; thus he fell. Or is that it?

So many times, when failure looms, people say, “well, she should have known better anyway.” Human nature is very odd. Extravagant gestures, while we seem to applaud them from unknown celebrities, are almost always frowned upon from “ordinary” people. (Who are you, to be be brilliant, gorgeous, talented, fabulous?) When a massive gamble fails to pay off, we are almost always eager to indulge in schadenfreude, to participate in grasping and throwing down to a hard landing someone’s fine dream. When a crash occurs where the breath is shocked out of the body, and the skin burns on impact, we are part of the Greek chorus caroling, “It was too good to be true, it was too perfect to last; I told you so.”

(That’s a human sickness; birds tend not to gloat when one of their tribe hits the window in some aerial escapade gone wrong. So, why do we? Is it because we actually all tend to want to “push out beyond what we each belong to
for some empty freedom”? A rhetorical question, think amongst yourselves.)

And yet: all failure is not failure. Jack Gilbert points out that Icarus was aloft — he flew. Flying wasn’t failure. Falling wasn’t failing, for him, but merely, the end of that success.

Success does not always last forever.

I am grateful for both: the strange appearances of success, and the temporary nature of failure. I am thankful for the continued human impetus to try, to step out of the perception of where we are supposed to be, and where gravity has held us, to embrace the lesson of trusting to the heaviness of falling – and failing – over and over again, until we wing aloft, and our victory is sweet, even if only for awhile.

More poetry at Laura’s new and improved Writing the World for Kids today.

Two hundred failures are worth one pretty good shot.

Thank you (and big hearts – mwah! – ♥), to everyone who asked; my Mama is fine-ish. She sort of sounds like she swallowed a frog, but she is surrounded — and I mean surrounded – by family and friends. Her entire book club moved their meeting to her hospital room; that was six women, plus another couple dropped by during, plus our pastor, plus members of her school board. There were six people in her room when I phoned her at lunch. The nurses are Not Amused. As a matter of fact, the last thing my father said to me as he hung up was, “Oh, gotta go. The nurse said…” Click.

Nurse, shmurse. My father is not much for phone calls.

If it seems like I’m stalking Ursula Vernon, I am not (much). It’s just that she keeps saying such great things. I am truly grateful for people who can clearly articulate their respect and affection for traditional publishing. I owe Editor E, Knopf Books/Random House and the whole copy editing team a great debt, and I think they’re brilliant, professional, and amazing. I am all for people self-publishing, but as I am shy, couldn’t sell even wrapping paper for school when my street cred depended on it, and am basically lazy, I can see myself doing it… pretty much never. Self-publishing is A LOT OF WORK. Unless I suddenly start to gain new and exciting personality traits at this late date, I just don’t see it as an option. Traditional publishing is a monolith, and is probably here to stay, and as happy as I am for those who can do it on their own terms, I’m really pleased with what I’ve got, too.

And on the topic of being lazy, I am grateful today for … the complicated things. Well, things which have been complicated for me, anyway. Like long division. And ab crunches.

I am not a natural mathematician, or a natural athlete. I remember being mortified that author Sara Lewis Holmes does a “drop and give me twenty” type of thing with her class visits for OPERATION YES, and girlfriend can drop and give you all twenty. In various ways. Doing jody calls all the while. She loves doing push-ups.

Sara has the sweetest drawl, and is the kindest person, and is a fellow poetry princesses and sister-logophile, yet in spite of all of this, I spent a lot of time being cranky-envious of her push-ups. I hesitate to tell you how long it took me to figure out that I could just, I dunno, try doing my own challenging physical things.

I suck at phys ed stuff (You should have [not] seen me in school). But, I can do some push-ups now. Which is more than I could do before. And I can do a ton of crunches. I’m a bit proud of that.

And as for long division – boy, third grade was tough because of numbers. I wept silently. I sweated. I got yelled at by my Dad. I got glasses – that, at least, helped. But I had fallen behind in math, and I never, ever caught up. Even into college – when I was taking those last required remedial courses – I thought that math was one of those Big Mysteries that Someone Like Me would never get. And then, when I was dragging my little sister through her math homework, which she hated, I started doing her problems with her. It was …relaxing. I started doing it more often, comparing answers, letting my sister see where she’d gone wrong — and suddenly I had this weird idea of doing long division as a kind of meditation… Yeah. Can’t explain that one, but it worked out for both of us. Sometimes just knowing that you survived what someone else is suffering through can give you a moment of Zen about… well, a lot of things.

Ab crunches. Long division. Things which once tripped me up, but which now remind me that I can do anything at all, if I simply chip away at it. Little victories. I remain grateful for those.

My writing group has taken my NaNoFiMo idea and set out rules and built forms and they’re all excited about it. Which means I have to finish my mystery by December 31. Roughly five pages a day, and eighty thousand words…

Oh, dear.

November

No sun – no moon!

No morn – no noon –

No dawn – no dusk – no proper time of day.

No warmth, no cheerfulness, no healthful ease,

No comfortable feel in any member –

No shade, no shine, no butterflies, no bees,

No fruits, no flowers, no leaves, no birds! –

November!

~ Thomas Hood

Methinks Thomas Hood had a tiny bit of an attitude problem. Just a little one. Okay, so he was joking, but yeah, I get that many people HATE this time of year; once the pretties of autumn fade out, with all of the foliage turning, we’re left with the stabbing fingers of twigs poking into the bleak sky, and darkness. The time changes next week for the US, this past weekend for the UK, and then it’s Winter In Earnest.

But November is also the countdown to the day of grace, in which we stop whining for five seconds and go, “Okay, yeah, we’re not dead. We have a decent place to live, in this country. (Most of the time.) Things are not that bad.” This, coming directly after Día de los Muertos, or The Day of the Dead, is probably a healthy thought process.

In the spirit of John Scalzi’s wonderful post(s) counting down the days ’til Thanksgiving with an Advent calendar, I’m going to write, live, and breathe gratitude this month.

Today’s thought: Got a text this morning that my mother is in the hospital. No gratitude for this, obviously; I am … a bit beyond frantic that I am five thousand miles away. However, my older sisters seem to have things well in hand, texting me updates, and I am told that All Is Well, and it’s only overnight, and now that doctors know what is wrong (apparently a pulmonary embolism, exacerbated by a flight), they can easily Fix It. I am grateful that my mother has four other children who can hover around her and annoy her until she shoos them all away and gets up out in self-defense.

As always, I am grateful: it could have been worse.

And, on this second day of November, I will hold that thought close to me.

Writer-illustrator Ursula Vernon has declared this National Novel Finishing Month. Congratulations to those of you doing NaNoWriMo; I am deep within NaNoFiMo, and I mean it. Even with doing reading for the Cybils, I have a lot of unconstructed time in the evenings (as Tech Boy finishes the corrections on his dissertation and resubmits it in ONE MORE TIME) and I could really finish my mystery.

I LOVE my mystery.

I don’t often talk about work in progress, because it never stays the same from one day to the next, but I will give you some hints which won’t change: an obsession with The 69 Eyes, stalking Moths, extra relatives, a “house divided,” elderly neighbors, and annoying eldest sisters.

I hope this novel (working title “Favorite Son”) turns out to be as much fun to read as it is to write! (And I hope that fun lasts through the denouement. Writing mysteries is HARD. You have to almost keep the ending a secret from yourself!)

Okay. Back to work.