more bad poetry

Yeah, I had an hour ride on the train and nothing better to do with myself. It was annoy the husband or write bad poetry about our day in the city (i.e. annoy you). Poetry won. And I have pictures. I love the wooden escalators at Macy's. One of my favorite things. Had to show you all.

Day after Christmas In the City

Twas the day after Christmas and all

through the city

The Harkens were wandering through weather gray and drizzly.

The merchandise of Macy's was stocked with care

To the delight of shoppers that crowded through there.

The people

were crammed in both Macy's and Saks;

Some there to shop and some to take back.

We walked through the rain to see the Rockefeller tree,

Then got sick of the crowd and hid out in lingerie.

We looked at the clothing we could not afford

And watched passersby until we got bored.

Then after all our adventures were done,

We bought ourselves cupcakes and went home to our cat.

The Guy At Holiday Parties

I saved two women in the course of one week recently. It had nothing to do with my EMT training. No one was choking or in cardiac arrest. I'm not ready to deal with that yet. I'm talking about rescue from that guy at the Holiday Party. He's somewhere between middle aged and beyond and he stalks and corners women 15 to 30 years younger than he is and starts talking. Talking isn't the right word for it. It's monologuing of the most patronizing sort.

It's the guy who if he finds out your a photographer will launch into a 15 minute soliloquy about his third cousin who was a sculptor before he went bankrupt and became an investment banker as if you are going to glean brilliant career points and find this all endlessly interesting. He's a wise and experienced dude, this guy at the party. No matter what your story he has some experience that tangentially tops you. It doesn't matter if you grew up above the Arctic circle and he's spent his whole life in Southern California, he once spent three days somewhere back in the 70s and so he knows cold and will tell you all about it.

These guys never talk to other men. You extract yourself, turn around, and find he has now attached himself to some other poor woman under 40 (they don't talk to women closer to their own age, either) going on animatedly about his brother's friend who was an important director in a community theater in Toronto while she's attempting to look like she's interested. It's a bit like a kid trying to pay attention in class, with the same full body jerks as she snaps back into awareness. Occasionally she utters an "uh-huh" or "oh!" and keeps her mouth open trying to find a place break in and politely excuse herself. But the leech man knows not to breathe often or he might lose his prey so there are few breaks and they aren't long.

So at one shindig I made a tactical error. I got him off of my friend but then he attached himself to me. She and I ping ponged him back and forth a few times until I finally told him that it was lovely to meet him, but I was here to talk to my friend. The 2nd party I was smarter. I broke in and said I urgently needed to talk to her, which meant he had to go away. It was a brilliant moment except I didn't really have anything to say to her. She looked at me expectantly and I just stammered out something lame about having nothing important but she looked like she needed saved. Then we both laughed.

So my question is: what are these guys thinking? I don't think their flirting. It doesn't feel sexual. It's more like they are hoping our brains will drop out and we'll start fawning over them, hanging on every pearl of wisdom that comes out of their mouths. I think they want groupies and life had not provided. But how do they not notice that they bore every person they talk to? I mean, I'll grant you, I'm pretty socially unaware, but even I get some inkling of something about the tenth or eleventh time the person I'm talking to looks desperately at her friends and mouths, 'Help!'

So here's hoping you all have a lovely holiday with people you enjoy being around.

Homicidal Lesbian Terrorist and yes, I still suck

Ahem--Well, it was a shorter hiatus than usual anyway. Last week I spent obsessively cleaning my living space. And yesterday I spent all day--most of the day--reading The Complete Hothead Paisan: Homicidal Lesbian Terrorist. I highly recommend this for all reader. Especially young women as an antidote to the usual media messages. But what makes it so awesome is that the point isn't the revenge and violence, though there is plenty of it. The point is learning how to face a hostile world with unconditional love. And a few rapists getting their spines ripped out through their orifices.

The problem is I haven't done holiday cards, bought presents, showered, practiced for choir, or written anything good on here because I was cleaning and reading and you know, I still haven't done any of those things. Yeah, this is why my readership is so wide and diversely nonexistent. So I'll have something good up later in the week. Promise.

Just don't hold your breath. But do get Hothead Paisan to tide you over. It's worth it.

on second thought...

The husband and I both play World of Warcraft. (Somehow it feels as though there should be the obligatory, "yes, I'm a geek" comment here.) And we're coming across a small problem. We are perhaps the slowest levelers on the planet and as we get nearer to 80 we've gotten even slower. Non-existent. Actually we aren't even playing those characters anymore. And I think it stems from one major reason: We don't like people much.

That's not entirely true. We have social lives and can manage meeting people and all that. We like going out with friends and all that good stuff. (BTW, thanks for having us over the other night, Thistlewitch!) But in school I was always one of the kids that hated group work. Chemistry was the worst for continual group work, but I especially hated when we all had to do a paper or project together.

So raiding is supposed to be the real fun of the game, but all I listen to people do is complain about it. Getting groups, getting gear, groups not working out, bad players, good players, and so on and so forth. Do I really want to get into that?

On the other hand, I really enjoy the leveling aspect. Most people consider it boring, but boring things tend to interest me quite a lot. I like studying grammar. History books enthrall me. So it's not the first time this has occurred. I may never reach level 80.

Hi Twitter People

If you are reading this you probably just clicked the link from my Twitter account. So, Welcome. Put your feet up on the sofa, no one cares. You can pet the cat and she'll let you know when she's done by biting. This is my blog that I share with another writer.

Why "fry a hen"? It's from the book Caddie Woodlawn and is essentially "try again". Which kind of has to be your motto if you are attempting to get into any art form as a career. We write entertaining and edifying posts--or a lot of crap, depending on the day--about pretty much everything and the various chronicles and travails of trying to get somewhere as writers of fiction.

So stick around and earn your right to say, "Oh I was reading them way back before they even had book deals." It'll feel good. Promise.

clearly I have too much time on my hands

I don't know why, but I thought it would be fun to do this post in verse. Possibly because I'm reading Dorothy Parker again and there is some sort of poetry theme going on with my friend on Twitter. I can read good poetry, but I can't write it. But if you want to comment on this, please do it in verse.

Thoughts on a Boring Life

With sincere apologies to Dorothy Parker and the reader (I'm so sorry)

I want to be Dorothy Parker

And have her amazing wit,

But she had thoughts of suicide

In almost every poem she writ.

I cannot be Dorothy Parker.

My words don't sparkle or amaze.

My love affair has not gone sour,

And I don't live in an alcoholic haze.

If only I'd chosen my husband more poorly,

Or perhaps drank more to excess;

If only my parents had not lived and loved me,

I'd be much more of a success.

4 days and running

I'm managed to keep this up for 4 days. It's a record. I don't think I've managed to change my shirt everyday for 4 days running. (I know. Gross.)

I feel like a massive moron right now. I was taking care of my neighbor's cat for the last ten days and the cat is fine. It survived. I didn't kill it. But I forgot to get his mail.

I don't remember anything discussed about getting his mail, but I've done this a number of times for him, so it's not like he needs to tell me each time. Somewhere around day 7 I realized I was probably supposed to get it and went to check. There was nothing in the mailbox so I thought maybe he'd gotten it held. When he got back yesterday I attempted to casually ask him, "So did you have your mail held?" Of course he didn't. I feel really bad. But I took good care of the cat, so that counts for something, right?

In other exciting news, I now own this. What is that? you ask. It's the card that says I'm a

Healthcare Provider who took the CPR course. Meaning, it assumes I will pass my EMT course and not be a sticky layperson like the rest of you slubs. It really doesn't get me anything, unless I get hired to do this instead of volunteering. Then they just want to see it, so it still doesn't get me anything. One more card in my

wallet.

I desperately need to take cans to the recycling place. That just looks pathetic, doesn't it? If I let it go any longer it will probably become sentient and try to take over the world. Cyberdyne and Skynet were framed. On the other hand, my neighbor (a different one. Not the one with the cat and no mail) has threatened to break in one day and start making pop can art out of it all. I'm curious and lazy enough, I might just wait for that happen. It would make a great conversation piece in my apartment.

Sacrifices to the Squirrel Goddess

So I'm going to let you in on a secret. I didn't want to tell you before because I wanted to preserve some fiction that I am sane, but you've probably seen through that by now. So here it is. I'm a goddess. To squirrels.

No. Really. I am.

I am the Goddess of Death and every once in awhile a squirrel will sacrifice itself to me.

The first was during a golf game. I was walking along with friends, stepped down and the ground felt all soft and wiggly and squeaked. I jumped, dropped my clubs, and made a squeaking (or possibly screaming) noise myself. I looked down and there was a ground squirrel lying on its back, with the light of death in its black eyes. It clawed frantically at the air while blood gushed from its otherwise adorable little mouth. We watched as it clawed against its fate until it finally bit it.

Yeah. My game was a little off for the rest of the afternoon. (Okay, my golf game has never actually been on, but anyway.)

I think the squirrels realized this event rather traumatized their goddess because they never killed themselves in that way again. About a month later another tried. I was walking through a park and it must have mistimed because all of a sudden I felt fur on my foot and this little ground squirrel goes sailing into the air and lands about 5 feet away. It popped back up and went running off, squeaking "Chee chee chee chee chee chee chee chee chee." After that I refused to walk in grass for about a year.

Since then I've had them run into my car, dart in front of my bicycle tire, and drop dead from a tree. You thought I was kidding about this whole business, didn't you? I'm not. Elephants go to a graveyard, skunks go to the road, and squirrels come to me.

So it happened again the other day. I was driving down the road when this squirrel came running full tilt out of the ditch and into the road. I couldn't swerve. I didn't have time to. I barely saw it before I heard the wet thunk of it hitting the car.

I checked the rear view mirror, hoping to see it alive and well and dashing back for the ditch. (Stupid hope, but I'm not always that bright anyway.) I was expecting to see the furry splat in the road. Instead I saw nothing. Just the dead leaves blowing in my wake.

Crap, I thought. It's stuck to my car.

I got to where I was going and sure enough, there's its broken, little body, hanging from under my car.

Right. Okay then.

I don't know what to do and I'm late for my class, so I decide to ignore it and maybe it will go away. I come back a few hours later and its still there, but now it's stiff and the blood is drying. Rigor mortised squirrel. Ick.

Not having any better ideas, I decide to get back in the car and go home and hope that the little beastie will dislodge itself en route so I don't have to...you know, deal with it myself. And I'm wondering if the car wash down the road from me will charge extra to dislodge the squirrel.

I purposely hit every pothole and bump I could find along the way to try to jog it loose. I couldn't see it in any of my mirrors (I tried) so I just had to hope it was gone. Anyway, I got home and there was no dead rodent on my car anymore. Thanks to whichever of my fellow deities managed that one.

But what I really want to tell my squirrel worshipers is this: STOP THAT! I'm a benevolent deity. I don't want sacrifices. Gifts will suffice. Gold, silver, rubies, any of that will be just fine. For that matter, I'd be happy with adventurine and amethysts. I'm easy. I don't need to be the volcano you throw the virgins to anymore. It makes me sad.

Thanks.

Rejection Count is 2

So I found out last night that House of Spies got it's another rejection. That puts the count up to 2. I'm going to go indulge in cheap chocolate and weep now.

No, actually I'm not. It's not personal and I know it. It's cool.

They'll all regret it later when I'm huge, I tell you. HUGE!!

Yeah, I know. Keep dreaming, girl.

the bloodletting

So I mentioned in an earlier post that I was helping a friend clean up her novel for submission and I thought you'd all (the two of you who stumbled on here) like to see what it looks like when a writer really works on the language in a manuscript. This wasn't just grammar and punctuation fixes. This was testing out every word, sentence, paragraph to make sure she has the words absolutely right. The flow, the sound, the imagery, and all that. We've been having a great time and it's been so fun to work with someone who really wants to learn and work at the craftsmanship end of it.

(Umm...Now that I've typed that sentence, I wonder if I should possibly revise my idea of fun. It might be a little warped.)

So anyway, these are after pictures on her manuscript. Those 2 pages took us 4 hours. But they are the beginning of her book, so they have to be perfect. If I did some digging, I can find the penultimate draft of House of Spies and it looks just as bad.

You know how athletes will brag about their bruises and cuts from a game? Writers brag about words slashed and manuscripts trashed in the same way. Just look at those marks and bruises. It went down hard, but we made the play, baby. We made the play. (Wow, does that sound as dorky in your head as it does in mine?)

I'm so proud of her. Her novel is going to rock!

so what do people write in these blogs anyway?

What I've been doing since deciding that I must blog regularly is obsessively reading other peoples' blogs and trying to come up with amazing and interesting things to talk about. Fabulous, witty things that will get trillions of readers (difficult on a planet with only 6 billion people, lots of whom can't read English and might not own a computer). Because that's the way it works, right?

There is just one little problem: I have no amazing commentary on life and I'm not witty. I know how to tell a good story given sufficient revisions, but really that doesn't help a blog. My life is rather boring anyway. Take yesterday. A typical day in the life.

I got up, made husband lunch, and took him to the train station. I got ready for class, fed neighbor's cat, and went to said class. Then I met up with a friend to work on her novel. She has an agent interested in her book and we want to get it into tiptop shape. So we sit around discussing the merits of using a possessive pronoun or an article before a specific noun in a sentence. We get maybe two paragraphs done. I pick up husband from work. We run to the grocery store, go home, make tater tots and Boca "chicken" patties for dinner, watch Return of the Jedi, and play some World of Warcraft (big new stuff yesterday!). Yeah, I'm a nerd. After that he went to bed to read and I stayed up until all hours surfing the internet. Checked on neighbor's cat again. Went to bed.

And now I'm sitting here, sifting through my day and trying to come up with some nugget of brilliance to write this post on and all I can think of is that I really need to clean both my cat's and the neighbor cat's litter boxes today as they're pretty smelly. I am continuing the stereotype of the drivel written in blogs. Yikes.

Oh, but I did learn a new idiom yesterday. "A tuppenny curse." Used as in, "I couldn't give a tuppenny curse if he dates other girls." I love that. Much better than, "I couldn't give a fig..." since I don't buy figs to give anyway. Fig Newtons, on the other hand--actually I don't buy them much either. And as for the posteriors of rats, what exactly does one do to give that? Do you cut off the rat's butt? Is this like a lucky rabbit's foot? I'm not sure I want to know about what you do with rats and their hind ends, thank you.

But a tuppenny curse sounds like going down the street to that wise, old lady and laying down your two pennies to give that irritating co-worker a pimple or something. Knowing me and my interests, I'd be down at her place anyway, poking around, tripping over her cat and getting into her eye of newt and lavender. I'd be casting tuppenny curses on everyone. Don't cut in front of me at the bakery because I have plenty of pennies. So if I'm NOT giving a tuppenny curse, that is some serious not caring.

still just kids

One of the funny things about the class I'm in is how much we're still like kids. No matter how old you are, the moment you drop back into student mode, you regress. We whine about tests. We want to get out early. We argue over being given homework. We chat in class while the teacher is talking. All of that.

The thing is, most of us are past 30, we signed up for this course voluntarily, and we all want to do well as EMTs. We are adults with all the usual responsibilities, demands, and deadlines but stick us behind a desk and it is straight back to high school.

Okay, maybe not straight back. There are no cliques. No one is dating another classmate or has a crush or any of that. The chatter while the teacher is talking tends to be continuation of the subject rather than class gossip. So the regression isn't total, but we all still want to know if that's going to be on the test and can we leave early today?

That Pre-New Year's Resolution Thing

Which is to post more in general. That and to start exercising, which is the same resolution I make every year and fail at. Yeah, yeah, me and the rest of the country, right?

So I know what you're thinking. It isn't even New Year yet, so why start now. Well, why not? I know what I'm planning so why wait? Actually, I'm planning nothing. I'm way too spaced out to plan anything in advance.

Speaking of having nothing planned in advance, while I was sitting here I just came across the little metal card case that has the cards of a bunch of agents I met at a conference a few years ago. I opened it up and I had submitted to all of them and they all rejected me. Yeah. So...

But it's a lot easier to look at that now that I do have an agent. Yes, it happened. But I have a hard time telling anyone and I'm practically seizing up writing it here because I somehow imagine talking about it will make it all go away. Like some sort of fairy tale where the person is having a wonderful time and all of that and then says the wrong thing and poof! the whole party disappears leaving the person standing out in the cold and mud and wearing nothing. So that's the last I'll talk about that until there is more to be said, just in case. The short update is someone was crazy enough to like the novel, says he'll represent me and has even gone so far as to submit it to a whole bunch of places. It's been rejected once that I know of already, which is awesome. Too much success would go to my head and two people liking my writing in a one year span would definitely cause my ego to inflate to scary proportions.

Other than that, I started taking an EMT class and just recently learned CPR. So now I can crush people's ribs and claim I know what I'm doing. More on that later, I'm sure. In the meantime, I actually wrote something on the blogosphere so millions and millions of people can not read it. Really, blogs are such a weird phenomenon. But here it is. Go me.