Happy Spooky Day

Some neighbors are just destined to be topics of conversations. This is one that never holds back on the decorations, especially during spooky day. She also has a license plate rim that says, "I pull the wings off fairies." I'm not sure exactly what that means, but I think it has something to do with the fact that her yard, at present, is filled with caged fairies, subjected to pirate-demon tortures.

She's also somewhat of a shadowy, never-seen, decorates-at-night kind of woman. It's probably because of the wing-pulling.





But there's still nothing scarier than a bad haircut and junior high. I worked the lethal combination of both and if I were braver and had time to download one of my afro-with-bows-in-it photos from that time, I would show you exactly why that is. Perhaps if I was drunk or dared, I might show you my I-want-to-be-Amish hairnet/middle part phase in eighth grade. As I told my fellow pumpkin-carvers at Christina's on Saturday night, there's nothing scarier to a twelve year-old that this story:

I was in a girl scout troup of four in seventh grade and one time, in the car, one of my fellow girls was looking at each of us closely and made the following statement: "Gretchen, I want your hair -- Annie, I want your hair -- Sarah, I do NOT want your hair."

When Stinky Cheese Just Don't Work

Russ and I just discovered that an alley cat decided to have kittens underneath our house. The cat is gray, with a white mask, and has lived in the alley for a few years. Every time it goes away for a while and I think that natural selection - the other feral cats in the alley - has finally occured, she shows up again, slinking around the corners of the houses, ducking out of grasses in the backyard. Tanya is never happier than when there's a feral alley cat to chase down the alley. If she could talk, I think it would be her main topic of conversation.

But the fly in the ointment is that they're under the house, access to which consists of a small cat/Chihuahua/rodenty opening under the house. It is smaller than a bread box, no joking. So Russ and I have been thinking of clever ways to get those kittens out from underneath the house, before they join Mama Cat in the grand tradition of shitting in our yard, getting impregnated and making new generations of kitties, and (of course), streaking down the alley in total fear as a 10-pound dog lives her dream.

Russ had suggested an elaborate scheme of drawing out the kitties with smelly food, and then, coming at them from different directions, and nabbing them with a burlap sack. It was very Charlie's-Angels-meets-Reno-911. And it almost worked, but I, the Reno part of the equation, let the kitten scoot past me and back under the house. It was those eyes -- Kitty looked at me with those little blue eyes, terrified, and I got paralyzed. We were both frozen for just a second and then, she unfroze. I just watched her disappear.

So now's there the problem of drawing them out again and it seems as if they've gotten wise to the whole stinky-food-lure because neither Mama Kitty nor her kits have ventured out again. A few times in the last week, I've been sitting still for a while - and that tends to happen with the paper volcano of grading that is my job - and heard their wavery mews from under the house. But there's no way to reach them unless they come out on their own.

Photoshop, Program of Wonder!

Night

Yesterday, I started and finished Elie Wiesel's Night. I managed to make it to 28 without ever having been required to read it, which somehow feels like the result of the world's least read-y high school English education. No kidding. We spent over a month designing a new planet my junior year of high school - what does this have to do with literature? - and another month or so writing a group novel. Of course, my role, being known as the "writer" of our class, became to write and edit the whole damn thing. Luckily, I had a friend named Jed, who took compassion on my sorry task and helped me out in the whole writing-compiling thing. I wish I had a copy of this novel -- I think it involved a ski accident and possibly, a jewel heist. Jed, if you're out there reading this and still have our novel on your computer, send me a copy stat.

I have always wanted to say stat.

The point is, I don't remember reading much of anything except the Count of Monte Cristo, which was so good I raced through it in a few days and spent the next month doodling in my notebook, occasionally writing notes. I didn't say I was a good student in high school -- but had we read more books like Night, I might've sat up a little straighter.

I was finishing it yesterday morning, at Peet's, and the guy at the next table struck up a conversation about it, about how he'll never read it again, about how heavy it is, how it ripped him open. He had plagu-ed artisty hair, so I knew he was not just being dramatic, or maybe just a teeny bit dramatic, but just for emphasis.

"It's very haunting," I said. And I couldn't help it -- I started smiling. But just for emphasis.

A Chihuahua Will Change Your Life...In Bed

The other day, I woke up to find Tanya, la chihuahua, sleeping next to me, with her furry little sea-lion head on my pillow, her body under the covers, her front legs stretched out over the top of the duvet. She seems to be evolving.

In Praise of White After Labor Day

There were many times in my life when I thought I'd never get married. There were many factors contributing to this, including, but not limited to, my own parents and their marital buffet of dysfunctions, the boys in my high school class being more interested in basketballs and guitars than hanging out, and the fact that I read Virginia Woolf's "A Room of One's Own," and vowed to always have my own room. I just assumed that as long as I was single, I would have that room all to myself and no one would ever be the boss of me. I would be able to write and dream and be as silly as I was in my secret journal, which my friends and sister kept finding and reading. Very annoying for a slightly self-conscious high school cheerleader. So I began keeping a decoy journal and kept my real journal very, very secretly hidden in the back of my underwear drawer.

So there I was, all cozy in "A Room of One's Own," only I was sort of lonely. I didn't know that I'd be lonely, but I was. There were friends and later, in college, roommates and some random flings, and there was all the books and essays and academic work my little old brain would ever want, as well as cool art and cheap wine, but none of that really made up for the fact that I would always go back to my own room, and though my own, it was just me.

In my times of lonely living, I came back to stories. All my family, no matter what our other faults, are excellent storytellers. I always loved being part of a crew that would linger until 1:00 in the morning, sitting around with high school yearbooks, letting the stories roll about classmates, some of whom I still knew. My imagination roamed as I heard about the jock who died in the water at Starved Rock and the cute black girl named Lamb who my dad secretly dated in junior high. She had one of those plastic pink bow barrettes stuck in her huge afro -- I have yet to use her as a character in my own writing, but somewhere, sooner or later, I'm sure she'll emerge, pink barrette and all.

One story that stuck with me later in my own room came from my Aunt Sue. She was always content in her singleness, and as I got older, I understood why. She'd been engaged to married when suddenly, her fiancee stopped talking to her for the last three months leading up to their wedding. Bad. But even worse, in a sense, was that as a twenty-something, she found herself going to a lot of weddings and sitting around tables at the receptions, making bets with her fellow receptionees about how long the marriages would last. There was usually much green put down on the year-or-less category. So many of her friends, she told me, were just getting married because they were afraid of being alone, not because they loved and even particularly liked the other person. I would vow, fervently in my idealist teenage way, that no matter what, I would never get married just to have another body in my room.

And she smiled, maybe a little idealistically herself: "I'd rather be single forever than realize that I married the wrong person for the wrong reasons."

You know, I thought she might be single forever. I thought I might, too, at one point. But here it is, 2006, and as of two weeks ago, she's engaged to be married for the first time to a really wonderful man. She's getting married in February and moving into a new house after she sells her home.This is radical upheaval, the kind that only love inspires, and here, after fifty years, she's found it. She's currently throwing her life into mix-up-mix-down of future homesharing, trying to figure out what this new way of living is going to look like, because, let's be honest, these transitions rarely happen like they do in good writing. Smoothly, connectedly, without total randomness. As much as I admire good writing, I admire the willingness to mix it up-down even more. Especially years after you're supposed to be done doing that kind of stuff.

So, this is in praise of all the things that are supposed to be over at certain points of your life: high school, loneliness, conversations about "the way it is," secret journals to throw off your friends (or maybe blogs), artistic careers, starting over, new houses, engagements, and walking down the aisle for the first time as a mature woman in a fancy white dress in the middle of winter. These things are never off the table, something I remember in a room of my own, in a chair of my own, in a home shared with someone who respects my room and chair. Virginia would be delighted, I think.

Two Things Happened This Week

One was that Russ and I celebrated our fifth wedding anniversary. I think that means we're officially at the point where things get celebrated on fivesies instead of onesies. Playing jacks, marriage -- it's all part of the same circle. And I'm referencing my friend Chad and metafictional circles, not Simba and the circle of life circles.

We went to the Aquarium of the Pacific and took a behind-the-scenes tour. This means we saw all the secret labs where horseshoe crabs are (as we speak) being bred with humans to produce new superhumans with amazing pinching capabilities. We got to feed sharks nori and explore the world of aquarium-style water filtration. I realized the novel I'm writing, which includes a character who works in an aqurium, needs to be totally rewritten and imagined. I'm talking Eternal Sunshine revision, which includes memory erasure and lots of deletion. But far from being an anguishing thought, it's completely exciting. I like learning enough about a subject to get more ideas about how to tie characters to events and places; for instance, I learned yesterday that although the A.P. has about 1,000 employees, only about 200 of them are full-time and paid. So now I have to figure out how to translate my newly acquired smarts about this into the novel and account for how, if my character is one of 200 paid employees, she managed to finagle such a cushy gig. She must be a cut-throat and probably, a bit devious. Dark.

The other thing that happened this week is that we had an infestation of ants. Ants covered our kitchen walls, marching around like the Israelites around the walls of Jericho. Before everything fell to the ground, we crushed so many of them that our house still hasn't gotten rid of the stink of ant death. We had to vaccuum ant carcuses off our walls and floors and doorjambs, mop them up, sweep them up, pinch them off the utensils and pots and pans.

As I was driving to Vons for the third time in one night -- once to find a DVD-R for Russ, once to get ant spray, and then, to get Russ butterfly bandages after he split his head open on the corner of a cabinet while killing ants -- I thought about why we haven't domesticated anteaters yet.