Wednesday, October 12, 2005
Ever notice how Nyquil gelcaps are the same color as those little mermaids that bartenders sometimes attach to the rim of your glass? And when the medicine hits you, it’s kinda like being plowed under by a wave ~ a big old comfortable tingly sort of wave.
I’ve spent the past several days swimming in oceans of Nyquil. Once in a while, not always ~ actually, almost never ~ but once in a while, it can be pleasant to be sick.
It happens when there are plenty of Puffs Plus, a neverending supply of Nyquil, your good clean pillow and warm blanket, and a little stack of books you’ve had on your to-read pile for a while. The kids are healthy, but fearful enough of catching whatever you have that they suddenly discover the phrase, "Never mind. I’ll get it myself." And if you have a craving ~ say your heart’s desire is a potato of the sea from Staggering Ox ~ all you have to do is voice that craving and it magically appears before you (following, of course, the 5-min. round trip drive time).
A person could get used to that kind of sickness.
If only the person’s to-read pile did not include The Mermaid Chair by Sue Monk Kidd.
I had heard so many good things about The Secret Life of Bees from people whose opinions I respect tremendously. So why didn’t I pick The Secret Life of Bees instead? Well, quite simply because it wasn’t one of my options when I signed up for yet another book-of-the-month club (with free tote!). Anyway, given the raves about SMK’s brilliance, I figured I was safe with TMC.
Nope.
It’s been a while since I actually screamed, "NO!" at a book. I think I may have actually spanked the text at one point, but that may have been part of a Nyquil-induced dream.
The thing is, I almost *never* dislike books. I can get into almost anything. I really can. I’m gullible ~ I’ll believe anything I read without asking questions. And I’ll always be able to find something to enjoy in almost every story.
But this book just made me angry. It made me cringe. The main character was pathetic, the dialogue was clunky, and by page 10, I was tired of hearing the phrase, "I thought about. . ." Ugh. And so many things were simply glossed over, in a la-di-dah, la-di-dah way.
But I kept reading.
Because you know how they say that the character traits that bother you the most in other people are the ones that you probably suffer from yourself? Like if your mother-in-law’s passive aggressive nature makes you want to peel your fingernails off, then you might want to gaze a little deeper into the mirror, senorita, because you’ve probably got a little passive-aggressive going on yourself?
Well, I admit it: I’m guilty of doing almost everything in my own fiction that drove me crazy about TMC. I’ve written clunky dialogue, I’ve had pathetic, unappealing characters, I"ve glossed over, and Lord knows I’ve typed that dreaded "I thought about" phrase more times than I care to remember.
So thank you, Ms. Kidd (Ms. Monk Kidd?) for that little awakening.
And thank you, Mr. Irving, for writing A Prayer for Owen Meany, which I’m just diving into and am loving on a whole new level of love.
And thank you, Jesus, for the Nyquil.
I’ve spent the past several days swimming in oceans of Nyquil. Once in a while, not always ~ actually, almost never ~ but once in a while, it can be pleasant to be sick.
It happens when there are plenty of Puffs Plus, a neverending supply of Nyquil, your good clean pillow and warm blanket, and a little stack of books you’ve had on your to-read pile for a while. The kids are healthy, but fearful enough of catching whatever you have that they suddenly discover the phrase, "Never mind. I’ll get it myself." And if you have a craving ~ say your heart’s desire is a potato of the sea from Staggering Ox ~ all you have to do is voice that craving and it magically appears before you (following, of course, the 5-min. round trip drive time).
A person could get used to that kind of sickness.
If only the person’s to-read pile did not include The Mermaid Chair by Sue Monk Kidd.
I had heard so many good things about The Secret Life of Bees from people whose opinions I respect tremendously. So why didn’t I pick The Secret Life of Bees instead? Well, quite simply because it wasn’t one of my options when I signed up for yet another book-of-the-month club (with free tote!). Anyway, given the raves about SMK’s brilliance, I figured I was safe with TMC.
Nope.
It’s been a while since I actually screamed, "NO!" at a book. I think I may have actually spanked the text at one point, but that may have been part of a Nyquil-induced dream.
The thing is, I almost *never* dislike books. I can get into almost anything. I really can. I’m gullible ~ I’ll believe anything I read without asking questions. And I’ll always be able to find something to enjoy in almost every story.
But this book just made me angry. It made me cringe. The main character was pathetic, the dialogue was clunky, and by page 10, I was tired of hearing the phrase, "I thought about. . ." Ugh. And so many things were simply glossed over, in a la-di-dah, la-di-dah way.
But I kept reading.
Because you know how they say that the character traits that bother you the most in other people are the ones that you probably suffer from yourself? Like if your mother-in-law’s passive aggressive nature makes you want to peel your fingernails off, then you might want to gaze a little deeper into the mirror, senorita, because you’ve probably got a little passive-aggressive going on yourself?
Well, I admit it: I’m guilty of doing almost everything in my own fiction that drove me crazy about TMC. I’ve written clunky dialogue, I’ve had pathetic, unappealing characters, I"ve glossed over, and Lord knows I’ve typed that dreaded "I thought about" phrase more times than I care to remember.
So thank you, Ms. Kidd (Ms. Monk Kidd?) for that little awakening.
And thank you, Mr. Irving, for writing A Prayer for Owen Meany, which I’m just diving into and am loving on a whole new level of love.
And thank you, Jesus, for the Nyquil.
Monday, June 27, 2005
Cross-posted on my livejournal, b/c I'm bored & felt like fiddling around over here. . .
Divining the future
This has been the longest B and I have been separated from the boys (they're in Yellowstone, with the in-laws), other than my trip to Rochester, MN a few years back, which was different because we were the ones leaving. And it makes a difference, a huge difference, whether you’re the one leaving or the one who is left.
We’ve had, in this small space of time, a glimpse of what retired life couldmightmaybe be like for us. What I predict:
I will not spend much time cooking, I don’t think. We’ve enjoyed tiny simple delicacies for dinner. Tuscan tomato-basil soup and brie with warm bread last night.
We might very well become alcoholics ~ Saturday was Harvey Wallbanger night and Sunday was (because I was curious and they looked so good on Sex and the City and I had to try it) Cosmopolitan night. We will not have the cosmos again.
We will still laugh and find each other nerdily, endearingly funny.
He will still rush me through the grocery store, asking every five seconds if we’re almost done, almost done, while I linger in the candy aisle, the bakery section, the produce department.
We will still talk, still hold hands in parking lots.
The Honky Car and the Evil Car-Lady
And this weekend was the weekend we needed to look at getting a new (used) car. Our lease is expiring and we did not, not, not want to lease again. Not now, not ever.
At the first place we visited, the saleslady kept nudging us toward this god-awful Buick, pimp-ugly, cheesy, behemoth-mobile. She sneered at us both when I told her that I wasn’t all that fond of the fake glossy woodgrain interior. It was a what-do-they-know sneer, a clearly-I’m-a-better-person sneer. B asked about a couple of Accords they had on the lot and she (almost reluctantly, it seemed) drove along with us. We liked what we saw and said we’d talk it over and so she gave us her card and we left.
Back at home, I looked at the card, recognized the woman’s name, and googled it to make sure. The evil car lady who tried to sell us the UG-mobile was none other than the woman at the head of the organization listed as Number 8 on the Democratic Underground’s Top Ten Conservative Idiots of 2003. The woman who said, of Queer Eye for the Straight Guy, “that's not a reality show about gay people. A really good reality show for gay people would be five gay men dying of AIDS.”
Uh-huh. She’s the same woman who was responsible for my morning skin-crawl session when she went on a letter-to-the-editor rampage a couple years ago.
Needless to say, we did NOT return to that car lot.
We went elsewhere, test-drove elsewhere, and in the end we bought what we are now calling The Honky Car. I don’t much care about cars, as long as it can get me from Point A to Point B without problems. But this car we bought is lovely. Glossy black. An Accord. Comfy and smooth and quiet.
It only has one teensy problem, which we discovered when B ran into Safeway to purchase orange juice (for above-mentioned H. Wallbangers) and I waited in the car. When I saw B coming back out of the store, I flipped the switch to unlock the doors and it was at that point that our lovely new car began to emit the most horrendous, most ear-scrambling, blaring HONK that you can imagine. It was painful and brutal and we could not, for the life of us, figure out how to shut it off.
Nothing helped. Sticking the keys in the ignition did nothing. Pressing every button in sight did nothing. It just HONKED and HONKED and HONKED, until everyone in the Safeway parking lot was staring and glaring at us. Some yelled at us. We had to drive away, down the street, ashamed and humiliated, past a police car, with the damned thing still honking. It finally, blissfully stopped when we turned down our street.
And we were grateful for the quiet, so completely grateful, until we opened the doors and the HONK commenced yet again. We slammed the car shut and ran inside the house. Truly, we couldn’t have run any faster had the car suddenly revved up and gone Christine on us. The noise lasted for three minutes, which felt like three hours, and I’m sure more than ever that our neighbors hate us.
Divining the future
This has been the longest B and I have been separated from the boys (they're in Yellowstone, with the in-laws), other than my trip to Rochester, MN a few years back, which was different because we were the ones leaving. And it makes a difference, a huge difference, whether you’re the one leaving or the one who is left.
We’ve had, in this small space of time, a glimpse of what retired life couldmightmaybe be like for us. What I predict:
I will not spend much time cooking, I don’t think. We’ve enjoyed tiny simple delicacies for dinner. Tuscan tomato-basil soup and brie with warm bread last night.
We might very well become alcoholics ~ Saturday was Harvey Wallbanger night and Sunday was (because I was curious and they looked so good on Sex and the City and I had to try it) Cosmopolitan night. We will not have the cosmos again.
We will still laugh and find each other nerdily, endearingly funny.
He will still rush me through the grocery store, asking every five seconds if we’re almost done, almost done, while I linger in the candy aisle, the bakery section, the produce department.
We will still talk, still hold hands in parking lots.
The Honky Car and the Evil Car-Lady
And this weekend was the weekend we needed to look at getting a new (used) car. Our lease is expiring and we did not, not, not want to lease again. Not now, not ever.
At the first place we visited, the saleslady kept nudging us toward this god-awful Buick, pimp-ugly, cheesy, behemoth-mobile. She sneered at us both when I told her that I wasn’t all that fond of the fake glossy woodgrain interior. It was a what-do-they-know sneer, a clearly-I’m-a-better-person sneer. B asked about a couple of Accords they had on the lot and she (almost reluctantly, it seemed) drove along with us. We liked what we saw and said we’d talk it over and so she gave us her card and we left.
Back at home, I looked at the card, recognized the woman’s name, and googled it to make sure. The evil car lady who tried to sell us the UG-mobile was none other than the woman at the head of the organization listed as Number 8 on the Democratic Underground’s Top Ten Conservative Idiots of 2003. The woman who said, of Queer Eye for the Straight Guy, “that's not a reality show about gay people. A really good reality show for gay people would be five gay men dying of AIDS.”
Uh-huh. She’s the same woman who was responsible for my morning skin-crawl session when she went on a letter-to-the-editor rampage a couple years ago.
Needless to say, we did NOT return to that car lot.
We went elsewhere, test-drove elsewhere, and in the end we bought what we are now calling The Honky Car. I don’t much care about cars, as long as it can get me from Point A to Point B without problems. But this car we bought is lovely. Glossy black. An Accord. Comfy and smooth and quiet.
It only has one teensy problem, which we discovered when B ran into Safeway to purchase orange juice (for above-mentioned H. Wallbangers) and I waited in the car. When I saw B coming back out of the store, I flipped the switch to unlock the doors and it was at that point that our lovely new car began to emit the most horrendous, most ear-scrambling, blaring HONK that you can imagine. It was painful and brutal and we could not, for the life of us, figure out how to shut it off.
Nothing helped. Sticking the keys in the ignition did nothing. Pressing every button in sight did nothing. It just HONKED and HONKED and HONKED, until everyone in the Safeway parking lot was staring and glaring at us. Some yelled at us. We had to drive away, down the street, ashamed and humiliated, past a police car, with the damned thing still honking. It finally, blissfully stopped when we turned down our street.
And we were grateful for the quiet, so completely grateful, until we opened the doors and the HONK commenced yet again. We slammed the car shut and ran inside the house. Truly, we couldn’t have run any faster had the car suddenly revved up and gone Christine on us. The noise lasted for three minutes, which felt like three hours, and I’m sure more than ever that our neighbors hate us.
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