Blocking

The weather has been chilly and clear lately and I have been so needy of outdoor time that I've been walking a lot more than usual. Tanya, though still working on the whole trotting-alongside-her-master-faithfully bit, is a great walking companion. But she stops to sniff a lot. She pauses at bushes, fences, rocks, trees, lumpy patches of earth, cats, cat shit, cat hair, and the empty Wendy's containers that the local population never minds leaving on the sidewalks. This morning, we were doing the walk thing and she found a dead squirrel in some patchy bushes. I wasn't watching closely and the situation didn't register until I looked down just in time to see her bury her nose into its bloody fur.

I pulled her away and stooped down to look at it. It's weird to see a squirrel dead. They're such hyperactive animals, so reminiscent of that one kid in first grade who got hopped up on the Kool-aid, that it's otherworldly to see one down for the count, totally still, not even breathing.
Sometimes I get annoyed with Tanya stopping to smell every rock, tree, and Wendy's wrapper. And then, other times, I'm pretty glad that she gets me to slow down, stoop down, and fully appreciate the walk.

Things You Don't Know Just By Getting Older, Part III

Like any musical worth its jazz hands, "Once More, With Feeling" episode ends with a kiss, but before that, a confrontation. It's the structure of a good spooky story -- you acknowledge, you confront, you dispel, and then, the kisses abound. When Buffy confronts the musical demon, though, she almost doesn't make it out alive. She's been holding on to a major secret, one that she's told no one except the vampire who inspired Billy Idol's famous bleached coiffe. Her friends are beyond clueless and she thinks that she can hold on to this secret without any repercussions. And then, there's the singing and the dancing and the almost-combusting, and finally, her friends know what's really going on. Of course, that doesn't end it. It's just the beginning of the secrets that follow her throughout the season.

As I've been comparing notes, I see now that I'm getting older, too, and that secrets are much easier to keep now than they were when I was in high school and college. There's not the thrill of allowing certain people access to my own self-knowledge or a glimpse into my mirror, darkly. I think secret telling-and-keeping is a way of making friends, keeping friends, and figuring out who you can trust and not trust. It's like Survivor, just in hallways and dorm rooms. But secrets can become a way of life, something you don't even realize you're doing until it's three months later and you start to see a pattern of singing a certain soundtrack in your car every Thursday night after work.

I didn't see, for the longest time, that listening to O.M.W.F. had more to do with my state of mind than my love of a TV series. And even once I did realize that I was turning it on every weekend, and not just singing, but really feeling the idea of "going through the motions/walking through the part/nothing seems to penetrate my heart," I kept it a secret. I didn't tell anyone. I didn't know how to explain it. And in a way, I didn't want to. There was something delicious about having a secret and keeping it all to myself.

I worked at a summer camp in the mountains one summer in college. It was one of the most difficult jobs I've ever had and emotionally strenuous, too. I didn't feel like I fit in well with many of my fellow staffers and I started to suffer from not being understood nor able to talk well. I lived the weeks, especially the first two months, just trying to get to Saturday morning, when I could take off for the weekend and hang with my pals. It was one of the most lonely times in my whole life and even at the end, when I made a few friends, I never felt part of that environment. And what made it worse was that the work didn't suit me well, either.

But something valuable came out of that experience. In the late summer, I sat down with my boss, who was giving us evaluations. I'd never been evaluated, as an employee before, so this was all very nerve-wracking and twitchy for me. She started out by saying that I was dependable, respectable, that the campers loved me, and none of my fellow employees had conflict with me. "You're pretty much perfect," she said, "except that you're not very good at multi-tasking." I thought about it and I must have had a what-the-hell look on my face, because she proceeded to explain that though I was good at a number of different tasks, I was not very good at doing them all at the same time.

How does it relate, you may ask. Well. My multi-tasking problems extend to my emotional life, too. Changes in life make it easy to keep secrets. I'm working my first "adult" job and that change rocked me hard, unexpectedly hard. It made me feel unsure of and often, disappointed in, myself, and that is what I've been focused on for the last few months. And it became a secret, all those feelings. Once you have secrets, it's easy to focus on them instead of clawing your way out, the honest way. If you're mono-task, like me, it gets even worse because you focus so hard on the feelings surrounding the secret and not on changing your life. I really think it's why I've been so no-show with my creative writing lately; it's not that I couldn't carve out the time to do it, it's that I couldn't focus on anything except my own special Sarah stew. I've been fixating on what makes me feel the whole going-through-the-motions feeling.

Unlike my teenage self, I'm not getting any kind of pleasure from all this secret-releasing. It's difficult. I'm embarassed that I've been so un-self-aware, so unable to voice this to anyone. But it is a way of transformation, a way of re-circling my square stake back into the kind of device that can penetrate. And I think even more change has to be the way to go in this case. Confrontation, in a sense.

In this vein, I went out and found myself a few writing buddies. One in particular is helping me get excited about writing again by letting me co-compose a writing manifesto with her and meet-up every week with our writings. It makes me un-mono myself once in a while and besides, it's a load of fun. Also, as odd as it might sound to say, I've volunteered for the session of my church, the twelve elected members that make decisions and keep the congregation from burning the mother down. My thought here is if I find a way to get ouside myself more often, a way to exorcise the whole me-centric stewing on a more regular basis, it will help get me back to sustaining a creative trickle at least.

So the musical here doesn't end with a kiss, just some messy realizations and a few good intentions. We'll see what the next act brings.

Let's Mix

I've been listening to the wickedly cool mix that Kristan sent me last week, falling in love with new artists and songs, and feeling the kind of lucky you only feel when a friend connects you to a great thought or feeling via song.

So I want to spread the lucky. I'm mixing today, and if you want a copy, leave me a comment or write me an email. It won't be fancy, but it will be musical.

Things You Don't Know Just By Getting Older, Part II

As many of you know, I spent a large chunk of my summer watching Buffy the Vampire Slayer (the TV series, not the movie-vehicle for Luke Perry). Originally, according to Joss Whedon, wunderwriter and creator, the show was imagined to end after the fifth season. Everything in the series was pointing toward that ending and when it happened, when I watched those last few minutes of the fifth season, my heart dropped and I even shed tears, but my heart and brain and need for closure was more than adequately fulfilled. It was a beautiful ending, full of both mythological and deeply emotional importance. It was the only way to end Buffy's story.

But, as many of you also know, Buffy was picked up by UPN for two more seasons and so, Buffy 5 = not the end. When I came to the end of season 5, I wondered where they could go, what they could possibly do. And so it was that I slipped in the Season Six DVD with a a bit of nonchalance. I had gotten word - from a good authority - that season six wasn't exactly bad; it just wasn't seasons 1-5, part of that stellar (and originally conceived) story arc.

There were some good episodes; some episodes that clearly set the tone for the season, one of diving into darkness, uncertainty, and numbness. And then, there was "Once More, With Feeling."

I could detail all the ways that "Once More, With Feeling" is amazing and beautiful and funny and bitingly aware, but I'll skip all that and just tell you that O.M.W.F. is a musical episode of Buffy, where a demon named Sweet takes over the town and as a result, everyone starts singing, dancing, and unfortunately, combusting. The singing is due to the fact that all the characters have a mega-warehouse of secrets and bottled-up emotions that they've been carrying around for the first six episodes of the sixth season (or in some cases, much longer), and the combustion, a by-product of all that emotion. And even better? Sarah Michelle Gellar can really belt it out, as can most of the cast, which is a relief when you're watching an almost hour of singing and dancing.

As soon as I saw it, I knew I had to own the soundtrack immediately, if not sooner (thank you iTunes, for the gift of instant gratification). And I've been listening to it a lot the last few months, while washing dishes, while typing out lesson plans, and often in the car on my way to and from that one university at which I'm teaching that's more than a few miles down the freeway.

Incidentally, I started the sixth season right around the time that I began working, right around the time that my life began to be a parade of lesson plans, essays to grade, and handouts to photocopy. My life went from being that of a grad student and writer, someone thinking about her own writing all the time, to being that of a worker, someone thinking about how to teach a bunch of freshman how to think and write. My own writing, as you probably know by now, has not been on my thinker much lately. And I know that's a problem, a Kevin-Britney size nightmare. Unlike Kevin and Britney, though, my writing is not something I can divorce, no matter how much I neglect it. It doesn't go away. It's my second, inner skin. The more I don't think about my writing, the more that skin gets squirmy -- and just like in O.M.W.F., secrets can't stay secrets forever. Sooner or later, a (metaphorical) musical demon is going to show up on the scene and all that secrety stuff comes out. Which is what happened in my last week.

The sixth season of Buffy is unique, too, in that the characters become their own worst enemies, their own worst nightmare versions of themselves. They're are all far away from high school at this point, but with no parental figures to help ease the blows of reality. They're older, but not exactly wise yet. Even though they were in college for seasons 4 and 5, it's season six when their lives begin to crumble from within, not because of some "big bad" trying to start an apocolypse. This crumbling is all about bad choices, miserable communication skills, and most of all, the failure to take responsibility. (Again without spoiling too much,) Buffy is slaying demons by night and flipping burgers by day; she's making out with one particular vamp just to feel anything, even if it's revulsion and pain. It's poignant, then, that the opening of O.M.W.F. is Buffy's song called "Going Through The Motions," as she's slaying in the graveyard. Even the demons notice (musically, of course) that there's something lacking in her staking.

On Thursday nights, when I drive home, I like to sing "Going Through The Motions," because that's exactly how I've felt lately as an all-worker-non-writer. I think that's how most people feel when their lives get away from them. Although I love and value my students, most of the time, without my writing, it all just feels like sub-par staking.

Things You Don't Know Just By Getting Older, Part I

Once upon a time, I was a writer. A novelist, I should say, since I have a strange resistance to writing anything short. Or perhaps it's not so much a resistance as it is that I'm long-winded and like the big picture better than nitpicky details. Or perhaps I can't help myself -- when I start getting attached to a character, say a forty-year old female character who suprises me by turning out to have a bit of fetish for not-even-out-of-college boys, I want nothing more than to keep exploring how those desires are ultimately going to lead somewhere a little shady.

Sometimes I forget how great being a writer is. It's easy to think it's not great and that's possibly because there are so many books out there - some great - proclaiming that it's not great. That's it's hard and full of "KFKD" moments, as Anne Lamott says. Sure. But it's also not a Britney-Kevin situation, where just looking at them in awful cutoff jean shorts or bad hairdos makes one want to lay face down in a red tide. There's a lot of reminders out there that it's hard, and so, it becomes hard to see that cheery, slightly cultish ray of sunshine poking through the process.

I had a conversation with an old professor a few nights ago, a guy who is now my colleague. I see him in the hallways and we always toss out last names, sometimes arm punches, but we haven't had lots of leisurely time to chat. But I caught him on the lamb from advice-seeking juniors and took the opportunity to ask him about anthologies. Now although all evidence points to the contrary, this doesn't make me the world's lamest person. I'm teaching three sections of literature next semester, haven't done it, and hate anthologies. But, because it's an intro class and because I can't think about putting together my own packet right now without the whole red tide scenario, I decided I would go with the monolith and be done with it. Sadly, few anthologies have my favorite short stories, such as Russell Banks' "Sarah Cole," but at least I found one that still offers Melville's "Bartelby the Scrivner." Point being, I was all ready for an anthology bashing session, but my collegue/professor wasn't having any of it. He did not want to hear my anthology-junkie-backlash. He wanted to hear about my stories, my own writing, and what I was doing with it.

There's a funny thing about being a writer, or at least, a person who actually tells others that he/she is a writer. It's a commodity at a party -- people always want a detailed summary of what your story or novel is "about." But, on a day to day basis, among my friends and family, I have very few people who ask me, "So, how's your writing going? Are you working on anything right now? Are you reading any time soon?" Perhaps it's just assumed that my writing is always going. Perhaps it feels invasive to ask any kind of artist what they're working on. Maybe it's the whole I-don't-exactly-know-how-to-put-this-into-words thing. But the people who ask me on any kind of regular basis how my writing is going are Russ, Eileen from church, and this collegue-professor of mine.

And the truth is, my writing has not been going. I have been using this blog and my reviews as my only form of writing, which is still some sort of practice, but not the kind of practice that this old professor of mine was hoping to hear about when we talked a few days ago. He wanted to hear what stories and chapters I was sending out, what nonfiction pieces I was submitting to journals and literary magazines. I think he wanted to believe that I was not just one of those MFA students who gets the degree and then, stops writing. But sadly, I haven't been much in the creative way at all for a while. It's painful to admit that because I never thought I would be one of those writers who didn't write. I never thought the "hard, no time, KFKD" part of it would ever eclipse the "cheery, cultish" part of it. And yet, here I am: No ray of sunshine, just the horrible jean shorts.

Whe'ever I Hear That Old Southie Swagger

Russ and I saw The Departed on Friday night, which was a hysterically funny and incredibly gruesome marriage of cinema, a perfect Scorscian Frankenstein of a film. All the hysterical laughter was due to Mark Wahlberg, a.k.a. Marky-Mark of the Funky Bunch, who stole the show every single time he opened his mouth. This happened in I Heart Huckabees, too. The guy's just pitch-perfect comedy, whether it's because he's jumping over a counter and yelling to Jason Schwartzman, "I'll cover you!" or encapsulating all the known curse words in a mere sentence with a deeply Southie accent.

Russ and I spent our entire walk home from the theater discussing how much we love Boston, even though neither one of us has ever been there. Russ said he thinks of it as a mythological land, where the linking verbs are repalced "motherfuckin'" and men make even the ugliest gold chain look, if not good, then at least right.

My own realization, walking home, is that Matt Damon is not attractive unless he's speaking in his dreamy little Southie accent. As soon as he opened his mouth - I think his first line was something like, "Those firefighters are homos" - I was instantly hooked. My love of his way with words had me oogling his booty, something I haven't done since Good Will Hunting with any real conviction. And for the record, let me say that I'm not someone who even cares about butts. Not even in high school, where it's like a part of the unspoken curriculum that you check out a few butts each day. I just rarely visually engage with the derriere. Not my thing.

So it got me thinking about the connection between accents and butts and I have come up with the Matt Damon hypothesis. Think about it -- Good Will Hunting? Accent - check. Checking out of the butt? Big check or as Buffy would say, "Wake up and smell the hottie." Didn't we all enjoy those long, numerical whiteboard scenes, with Matty face forward? But then, there was The Bourne Identity-Supremacy-Whatever the third one was/will be. Accent? Bland as American cheese. Butt checkage? None. There was no even curious attraction to the superman-type-fighting-world-governments. The Talented Mr. Ripley? He shows it all in the bathtub scene with Jude Law and I felt nothing. While I could go on, cataloguing Damon's movies and my own not-noticing, I'll take the road less long and present my hypothesis: Matt Damon imbibing Southie = attractive. From that wicked smile to that freckled, turned up nose to that cute little bum, I am deeply moved. I notice everything, like the subtle yet important difference between butt-in-khakis vs. butt-in-jeans. And yet, take away his accent and there's nothing there. His smile loses its edge and he's returned to my peripheral land of look-a-like butts.

Curse word verbs, gold chains, accents that make butts magically attractive -- Boston really is a mythological land.