Fortune Cookie

Accept no other definition of your life, accept only your own.

Maybe not the best grammar in the world, but I can't argue with the sentiment.

Today, I took a small boy out to lunch and a movie. Most of the afternoon, he had one expression on his face; I WILL not screw this up. I WILL not screw this up. There were no tantrums. There was no arguing. Accidents were met with equanimity. Yes and no were both acceptable answers.

At the beginning of the experience, we sat in the car with the engine running, discussing where we would eat lunch. "Have you been eating at McDonald's lately?" he asked. "Have you been eating at Burger King lately?" There was no screaming, no demands for either place, merely polite inquiry. He knows I have dietary issues, but he doesn't know what they are exactly. I said, "Are you at all interested in trying my favorite Chinese restaurant?" He said, "Yes," and so off we went.

It's an understatement to say he was impressed by the restaurant. He looked all around, at the etched glass windows of the balconies, at the white tablecloths, at the meticulously set tables, at the row of eight Chinese servers. He said, "At fancy restaurants, they give each person a glass of water." There were cool slices of lemon at the bottom of each glass. He said, "There are flowers at every table." He drank tea from his little cup, putting one entire packet of sugar in for each cup. "Is this Chinese sugar?" Yes, it was Chinese sugar. There was no English on the packets. His Shirley Temple came with an orange slice wrapped around a cherry on a cocktail spear. He said, "You could make a tiny crossbow and shoot this little arrow."

When it came time to order, without my prompting, he chose one safe thing (chicken fingers) and one risky thing (wonton soup). He wanted me try everything he ordered, even offering me the slice of orange from his drink. He ate bits of pork from the soup, drank all the broth, nibbled the shreds of pea pod and examined the wontons (they were politely declined). He took a sip of broth from my bowl, and offered me a sip of broth from his. The duck sauce, he said, tasted like apple sauce, and the chicken was VERY hot. He burned his fingers over and over again, but didn't complain when I suggested maybe he blow on things to cool them before handling. He blew, and he waited until things were edible.

Everything was clearly wonderful to him. I told him my daughter had grown up going to restaurants like that with me, rather than McDonald's and Burger King. He said yes, he'd be interested in going to another restaurant sometime. He'd gone to an Indian restaurant recently, and now this great Chinese restaurant. He asked me if people from China who live in America go to Chinese restaurants. I said maybe. Maybe some of them like Mexican food, or Burger King. Who could say? He said China must be full of toy stores, because all of his toys were made in China. I suggested perhaps there were a lot of toy factories, and he said, politely, "And also a lot of toy stores. Are there a lot of toy stores in Korea?" He's seven. It was a lovely lunch.

Just when he thought it was time to go, the restaurant got even better. They brought fortune cookies. We read our fortunes to one another. His said a short vacation was in his future. I suggested we were sort of on vacation today. He didn't disagree. He ate pineapple with a toothpick and sampled the sucking candy, which he insisted was grape and tasted bad, because he didn't understand what flavor "licorice" was. He said it tasted bad, but he needed to be persuaded to leave the candies on the table, rather than abandon them in my car. My fortune said the thing about accepting only your own definition of your life. I knew I'd write this blog post, then.

We went to see Kung Fu Panda 2. The premise revolves around a panda named Po, whose mission it is to defeat an evil peacock overlord who was responsible for the destruction of the panda village in order to escape his fate (to be defeated by someone "black and white"). Po's kung fu master explains that in order to succeed, Po must go to the next step in his kung fu training and find inner peace. The visual metaphor for this inner peace was the ability to float a droplet of water along his body while doing a complicated-looking kung fu form. About mid-movie, the panda starts really struggling to find inner peace, having experienced some kung fu failures, and concerned he's going to blow it and not defeat the bad guy. At one point, he's ranting and raving on the deck of a small boat, "Inner peace! Inner peace! Inner peace!" he yells, and smashes his head into the mast repeatedly. I know how this guy feels, totally. Yeah, man. Inner peace, dammit. INNER PEACE! RIGHT FREAKING NOW! Later, he does the thing with the droplet of water after remembering and accepting the destruction of his home village. Even later, he does the droplet-of-water thing with a few dozen cannonballs and defeats the evil peacock overlord.

I guess it's time for me to fess up and admit that kid's movies make me cry sometimes. I can be a big sentimental schmoop, which is weird, because the other stuff I watch is all this heavy existential stuff. You'd think I'd be immune to sentimentality, but I'm not. I teared up when the orphaned panda went home to his foster father (who is a goose who runs a noodle shop and wears a hat that looks like a bowl of noodles accented with chopsticks), hugged him, and I said, "I love you dad." The big panda hugging this miserly goose, who lays its beak on his big squashy shoulder with an expression of parental bliss. Yeah, those are the good days, when your kid says she loves you, that she's glad you raised her the way you did. Yeah, that really happens sometimes.

All this, and I'm still struggling to let go. I can't force life to be the way it was today. There isn't anything I can do to keep it going this way, to prevent it from raining cannonballs that I don't gracefully catch and do the droplet-of-water thing. There are times when cannonballs are uncatchable. When you can't convince people of anything, and shouldn't, for your own good and theirs. There are bitter days too, when you and someone who loves you don't see the world the same way. There are days when you can stand up and defend your faith and connect in compassion with someone else, and days when all the standing up in the world won't inspire compassion in anyone's heart, even your own. There are days when you will weep bitter tears, and the more you choke them back, the more they will just choke you. Sometimes, you just need to sit and let them run, and resist trying to stop them, and resist anyone who tells you that you shouldn't be crying. Yes, you must. The tears must come sometimes. Weird, right? Yes, there is joy in the world, and sometimes we must allow there to be sorrow.

We need to listen to others for what wisdom they might offer, but also not take their words to heart, if those words are not compassionate. Knowing the difference can sometimes be tricky, and generosity of spirit can be difficult when the scars get in the way. We need to laugh and cry. We need to stand up for ourselves and also be courteous, if we can; if not, standing up is enough. We need to request respectful treatment, but neither demand it nor expect it. We need to accept ourselves as we are, and also strive to grow. If someone else is hurting, it is in our best interest to be compassionate, but also allow them to suffer. Weird, isn't it? To be loving, you need to allow someone to suffer. You can try to help, but you can't prevent the suffering. You might as well try to stop a tsunami, and then get mad at yourself for failing, and get mad at nature for sending it. Sometimes, we just don't make any sense, and that's okay too. Some days we'll rail for inner peace, and some days we'll forget to rail and it will find us on its own. But stop looking, and you won't necessarily find it either. You need to look for it without looking. Don't ask me how. I don't know how. I am only an egg.

At the end of the afternoon, I said, "Thank you for coming to lunch and a movie with me." The young boy said, "Thank you for taking me to lunch and a movie." I asked if he would like to do it again sometime, and he said he would. I would like that too. I watched him take his unfinished root beer into the house, pleased that he hadn't demanded back the extra super giant box of Nerds that he hadn't finished in the movie theatre (thank goodness for that, anyway; it was a big box). It was a peaceful walk up the driveway in the shade, listening to his pleased chatter about nothing in particular.

You can't force your life to work out the way you want, if only you follow all the rules. The world doesn't owe you a thing.

Days like today are good fortune out of nowhere, and everywhere.

My Own Thing

I'm taking the day to "do my own thing."

It's been so long since I've done this, without sitting down with the calendar and taking opinion polls, that it's a challenge figuring out what "my own thing" is these days. Maybe that seems weird; I certainly seem to have a lot of interests. I catalog them on this blog, after all. I travel. I have a really good and stable job. I have a family, including a daughter whose last day of high school was Friday. I have a dog. I have a new house, and strangely, a new apartment inside this new house. I'm interested in my garden, in food, in photography, in writing. Writing, as you already know, is how I express myself about my life. It's my preferred mode of communication, writing. I write better than I talk, most of the time. Doing my own thing, in many cases, results in sitting down and writing about it, even if no one will ever read some of the things I write.

Today, "my own thing" included sleeping in late, and having tea with breakfast. It included tidying up my bedroom, and helping assemble some tables for the patio. It included going to Target for beach toys, and to Home Depot for deck chairs. I bought some charcoal, too, and I'm pondering what I will buy for tomorrow's big meal, be it lunch or dinner, whichever seems most appropriate for using the grill. Blissfully, it's just me and the dog sitting upstairs now. I have the windows open, and the almost-70-degree spring air is circulating through my bedroom while I write this post. It's getting a little hot up here, and so I will get help later with the installation of my window A/C unit. I may hang another picture, and maybe my curtain tie-backs, so I can put the drill and the tool boxes away in the basement. I have some laundry that needs putting away. I have some dry cleaning that needs to go to the cleaner's. I'd like to drive to Trader Joe's, which, luckily, is situated near a nursery (the kind that sells plants).

Once upon a time, I used to adore weekends. I'd get the house tidy, and then I'd go on an adventure with or without company. It felt good to get in the car and go nowhere in particular. Drive up the coast to Gloucester. Go to a bookstore. Go to a home good's store and pick up a few things to make the house more comfortable. I used to be turned outward and upward like a sunflower, before I allowed fears and anxieties (and not even primarily my own) weigh me in and keep me housebound and at once under and overstimulated. Going anywhere was too much work, in the planning and the execution. Too many anxieties flying around, everyone's feelings and needs to be considered, weighed, and the Venn Diagram of acceptable actions scried and obeyed at all times. How exhausting! I had to ask myself honestly: how good am I, really, to anyone, if all I am is a collection of other people's concerns? I may actually give others satisfaction, but how much satisfaction, ultimately, do I help create? Not as much as if I just let go, and did my own thing, which sometimes includes doing something for someone else, and sometimes not. Sometimes not. Sometimes it means sitting with my dog and reading a book, even if doing so deprives someone else of my time, my company, my energy, my leadership, or whatever.

I could get used to doing my own thing. I could get used to allowing life to unfold as it should, however that might be. No more emotional algebra. No more trying to make everyone in this house happy. No more trying to make everything "fair" and "peaceful." Life's not fair, and peace is within you. I am at peace with the idea that I could lie down and take a nap right this very minute. I could jump up and do chores. I could just pet and talk to my dog, and tell him he has bad breath. I'm listening to the birds singing right now, and I know I'm a little manic. I'm manic with the pleasure of my own freedom. It's Saturday, and I can do whatever I want with it. And then there's Sunday. And because there's a holiday, I have Monday off too. I could put on my pajamas and watch 24 episodes of Buffy the Vampire Slayer if I wanted to. There's nothing stopping me. There's no reason my time needs to belong to other people in one-hour increments. There's no reason I can't own that time. I do own that time. How weird is it that I forgot?

I'm going to lower my standards of success for this blog, and for "writing" in general. I may end up not blogging every day, and that's okay. I will probably write something every day, but if I don't, that's okay too. I am a writer whether I write every day or not, and the expectation that I'm not if I don't just makes me unhappy and doesn't actually lead to more writing. Just more self-hatred and judgement. What a splendid thing, opportunity. What a splendid power, to be able to love what I have. To resist the power of external frustrations and resentments to prevent me sitting and thinking, listening to music, planting flowers, dreaming big dreams, drawing out plans to nourish my spirit. If you're wondering, and you probably aren't, but maybe you'll indulge me and be pleased along with me, I've nearly paid off my credit card. My car is next, and then my student loan. Then I'll be out of debt, and my options will change. Won't that be lovely?

What will I do then? I have a plan to make a career change, and we'll see how it goes. It's not time for the change yet, but it's time to work the plan, and so I do, every day. This, too, is part of the plan, this letting go of outcomes. Maybe the plan will really happen, the way I hope it will. And maybe it will work out somewhat differently, and that will be okay too. Provided I do what I can, it'll be all right, because doing all I can do, is all I can do, There's peace in that limit. Such unimaginable peace.

I've been thinking of the future, pushing myself; I'll be happy when. When everything's right. When everything's peaceful.

To heck with that.

I'm happy today.

You Are A Child of the Universe

This is about understanding and accepting the limits of your control over your own life. This is about choosing how to react when things aren't going as ideally planned. One of my companions found this book online and I have read about half of it so far, and I think this thing needs a warning label. Even if you're careful, this can be a devastating book. It says you are accountable for your own happiness in this life. Period. No one else. Just you.

I'm not sure when I became a "fixer," a person who works really hard to get embroiled in relationships that need "fixing." I can't really remember ever having one where I didn't feel that I needed to fix it. This book is telling me that I can't fix those relationships. The only one I can fix is the one I have with myself. It all sounds very shallow and new-agey, like the "love versus fear" guy in Donnie Darko. Like you turn into a bright-eyed fundamentalist with an obsession for Sparkle Motion if you buy into the spiel. Maybe you'll think, "the human experience just isn't that easily quantified." "Too much self control makes you aggressive." "Where's the joy in life if you work all the time?" "I can only improve one thing at a time." Maybe you'll think those things, and we'll disagree. "You are accountable for your own happiness" is as deep as the ocean, and those other statements feel reductive, dismissive, and self-limiting. "You are accountable for your own happiness," to me, is challenging, frightening, and beautiful.

The human experience isn't at all easy to quantify or qualify. Witness billions and billions of books that celebrate the complexity of human life, the complexity of all life. You can see cognitive behavior therapy as shallow and useless, and maybe for you it is. Maybe it's just another damned book that's going to ruin your life. You can see the Bible as boring and hypocritical, too. You can be bored by Maslow, and feel threatened and overwhelmed by Jung. You can get lost in Tarot cards, astrology, Chinese fortune cookies. Everything is crap. Everything is gold. Everything, if you suffer from anxiety and/or depression, is scary as hell. Maybe you can think these things, but you get to decide what to do with that sense of being threatened. You get to decide what to do with that fear of loss and abandonment. You get decide what to do with that self that you refuse to look at for too long, because you don't like your choices with respect to that partially beautiful, partially ugly thing. Love it, or hate it? It's wrong to love that horrible self! How can you change it if you love it? Well, you certainly can't change it if you hate it. It just gets worse when you hate it. It's weird that way, how hating it only makes it worse.

You can pretend your happiness is somebody else's problem, but it's not. You can hand someone the keys to your life, and beg them to make it all better for you, but it won't make you happy, and it won't make your jailer happy either. Happiness comes from having a sense of purpose that comes from within you, that stuff you carry in you when external sources of pleasure, comfort, or joy fall by the wayside. Children grow up and move out. Jobs are "downsized"; people retire. Health fails. Accidents happen, taking your loved ones, your limbs, your vision, your mobility. The world was not made especially for you, and it owes you nothing. You may be a special snowflake, but all human beings are special snowflakes, and you aren't entitled to support, nurturing, love, respect, courtesy, or faithfulness. It's nice when you have those things, and it's nice to give those things to others. They are gifts given and received, and these gifts make the world better. But no one owes you these gifts, and you don't owe them in return. Obligation and entitlement destroy the spirit of a gift. Obligation and quid pro quo turns a gift into "protection" money, insurance against life's leg-breakers.

Find helpful books, glean goodness from them, or don't. You are accountable for your own happiness. If you do seek wisdom in books, and you get lost in conflicting advice, keep trying. If you don't seek wisdom in book and go it yourself, consider resilience, courage, acceptance. Does it really make you feel better to complain that water is wet, rocks are hard, children are loud, some Massachusetts drivers are rude, life is difficult, and change is scary? As Stevens writes in his book on being happy, consider the prisoner of war, who instead of lamenting his terrible fate, carefully saved bits of his meager portion of rice to offer his guards, considering them not the enemy keeping him locked in a cell, but guests in his "home". Consider how language and thoughts create your reality, and consider choosing to find and preserve your core happiness, regardless of the turmoil of those external things you cannot control.

Consider how you want to communicate your love and commitment and compassion. Consider nurturing yourself. Consider assertiveness rather than aggression. Consider that "defensive" isn't a dirty word. Understand that you are as you are, and you are perfect as you are, and you have a lot of changing and growing to do.

This is how I am speaking to myself today:

Everything will be okay, so long as you remember who and what you are. Here is Max Ernst's Desiderata:

Go placidly amid the noise and the haste,
and remember what peace there may be in silence.

As far as possible, without surrender,
be on good terms with all persons.
Speak your truth quietly and clearly;
and listen to others,
even to the dull and the ignorant;
they too have their story.
Avoid loud and aggressive persons;
they are vexatious to the spirit.

If you compare yourself with others,
you may become vain or bitter,
for always there will be greater and lesser persons than yourself.
Enjoy your achievements as well as your plans.
Keep interested in your own career, however humble;
it is a real possession in the changing fortunes of time.

Exercise caution in your business affairs,
for the world is full of trickery.
But let this not blind you to what virtue there is;
many persons strive for high ideals,
and everywhere life is full of heroism.
Be yourself. Especially do not feign affection.
Neither be cynical about love,
for in the face of all aridity and disenchantment,
it is as perennial as the grass.

Take kindly the counsel of the years,
gracefully surrendering the things of youth.
Nurture strength of spirit to shield you in sudden misfortune.
But do not distress yourself with dark imaginings.
Many fears are born of fatigue and loneliness.

Beyond a wholesome discipline,
be gentle with yourself.
You are a child of the universe
no less than the trees and the stars;
you have a right to be here.
And whether or not it is clear to you,
no doubt the universe is unfolding as it should.

Therefore be at peace with God,
whatever you conceive Him to be.
And whatever your labors and aspirations,
in the noisy confusion of life,
keep peace in your soul.

With all its sham, drudgery, and broken dreams,
it is still a beautiful world.
Be cheerful. Strive to be happy.

Sketchbook

Yesterday's train ride home was interesting. I'm still obsessing about the lost blog posts, and I'm getting tired of that! but on the way home from work, I opened my old paper journal to pour out my boring woes, when all of a sudden, I got the flash of a new story. I kept wondering - if I decide to cut down on blogging, if this really was sort of like Hemingway's suitcase, some kind of accidental call to arms to produce new work, then what should I do with all the ideas in those lost blog posts? What should I do with all the pictures I took with my android phone, hoping to turn those into more posts? That's when my pen started moving almost of its own accord, to make a cocktail napkin (ok, a journal-page) sketch of a story.

I'd just finished Aspects of the Novel by E.M. Forster, intrigued by a snippet from that book used in this blog post by Dora Goss. Several sections of the book struck me, the comparison of story versus plot, and (of course) the discussion on patterns and rhythm, which I like to call story architecture (not to try and one-up Forster, yegads). Having finished reading Forster's explanations of how these elements work in a piece of writing, something shifted in my brain, and I got the ping. I've known I was an architectural writer for a long time. To me, stories have structure and shape and movement within that adds a layer of meaning that wouldn't otherwise be there. I can tell a linear story, but in doing so, I lose some of my layering. I can tell parallel stories, and that creates the possibility of additional meaning in the echo between the parallels. I can tell a chain story, that loops back to beginning, to create resonance. I can tell a parallel story with one track going backward and one track going forward to create yet a different effect that adds to the meaning without me needing to point things out. This structure is to create a sense of irony! This structure is to create a sense of inevitable death! And so on.

If I sit down and merely follow "where a story goes" I end up with a story, that is, a series of events. Some writers can magically create plot that somehow works with the story as it unfolds, but I don't seem to do this. I start with character, and then go to plot (why something would happen), because I get to the "what" part, which is what actions the people take. Sometimes, my stories are almost all plots, and the story is a loose frame. The characters don't actually do much. A story blurb is all but useless. "A woman kicks around in her house, fretting. A muse moves in next door. She watches the muse through the window, then takes off her clothes." Not much of a story here. I could make this into a story, where she and the muse ride off into the sunset, happily after after, but that's not what I'm getting at. I want to know the "why," and the "why" is plot.

My napkin sketch for the new story doesn't look like much, but it very much is a sketch in the sense that it's a word-structure. This POV comes first, this second, and this third. Here are the overlaps and parallels. Here is the merge that holds the plot. Here are my people and my setting. Here are my bones. Now the bones need meat. In my perspective, the hard work on this story has been done already, and now all I need is to color between the lines. The times when I've started coloring first, I have been lost. I don't like meandering around lost, any more than a wanderer likes an itinerary.

Today, I am happy with my sketchbook.

Broken-hearted or Just Hiding?

I have to admit that I'm broken hearted.

I've been alternating between sitting on my hands, waiting for the return of my four lost blog posts, and fanatically browsing the Blogger help forums, looking for an answer to my query. When will the posts and all of that work be returned to me? How can I trust this service enough to post again? What sort of double back-up do I need to do now, in order to restore my lost confidence and get back to blogging?

And yet. How much of this stall is because I lost five or six thousand words, and how much is because I'm teetering on the edge of knowing and not knowing what I want to do next? I have piles of photos I took while on Martha's Vineyard, and I have a lot to write about. Yet, something inside says I "should" be writing fiction. I've been putting my fingers in my ears and anxiously doing a lot of reading instead of writing anything at all. I suppose I'm hoping the answer will come to me while I wait for the posts to be restored, but some part of me understands that my tiny little blog is beneath the notice of the Powers that Be, and I'm unlikely to see that work again. Part of me suspects that it's an OCD thing. My flow was interrupted, and now there's a pause in my compulsion. Something broke the rope that was pulling me along, and pulling the content out of me.

I keep promising that if Blogger restores my lost content, that my compulsion will be healed, and I will be able to go on, producing content as I was before. And yet, I do need to face the fact that before Blogger went toes-up, I was getting behind in my posting. It had gotten to the point where I needed to write two posts a day for an entire week before I'd catch up. Now, I have the perfect excuse not to do it. Oh, all the grief, all the angst, and I can blame it all on the loss of data. I't not my fault. I can lay around and read books, and not produce anything, and none of it is my fault. Oh, what a terrible thing, freedom. What a terrible thing, excuses.

This written by someone who is considering, yet again, throwing the paper journals into the shredder to reboot her life again. To rid herself of the baggage of the years, and make a commitment to reinvention. Too many painful decisions have been made about priorities. Too many future plans have been revised to make way for the writing life. It is not acceptable that this person should use as an excuse not to write the failure of a tool. There is paper. There is pen. There is your laptop. That work is gone. This is NOT Hemingway's lost suitcase of stories. And even if it were, the lost suitcase had nothing to do with his death, and everything to do with him buckling down to write more, better stories.

Over the weekend I unwisely overexerted myself, but I pruned the forsythia and yanked out a swath of some tall plant to make way for a barrel garden. With help, I put up the drapes I bought several months ago. I went to church on Sunday and attended the annual meeting, then went grocery shopping, and cooked a meal. After the meal, I cut and glued a paper model for one of the boys. She was called "Bridezilla," a zombie in a wedding dress. Sunday night, I was in a very bad way physically, but very good in my heart. I felt whole, and compassionate, and well. This morning, I read a book I purchased after reading a quote from it on another blog, and realized I have about nine going at once, now. I'm reading to learn again, and it feels good.

I don't know what I'm going to do now. I don't know if I want to try and rewrite those lost posts, or just allow them to vanish unnoticed. To allow them to vanish seems a terrible loss, as they were about food, and the garden, and my writing, and those things are important to me. Also important is moving forward, regaining lost or abandoned momentum. I have new things to write about every day.

Whether broken-hearted, hiding, or both, I think I'm ready to get back to it, but I haven't yet figured out how. I suppose I find the appropriate cable and get the new pictures off my camera into my computer. I write about food, and the garden, and my writing in a new context, not worrying that I'll repeat myself. If those old posts ever resurface, then they do. There will be a thematic echo of lines appropriated, but it will be like having drafts of an essay filed in a drawer. I don't ever get rid of my drafts. If I write something, I keep it. Perhaps that's wrong too, and I ought to make a big pile and burn it all, and start again.

I don't know.

The only thing that seems undoubtedly correct is "start again."

Blogger Disaster

There has been a minor Blogger disaster that's preventing me from writing new posts. All posts that I wrote on or after 11 May have been lost. For me, that means four posts, written in two days. I've filled in the appropriate support form, and am waiting for those posts to be restored from backup, but I'm given to understand that the scope of this problem is rather large. I'm not in the habit of backing up my posts privately, relying on the Google servers to take care of things for me (clearly an error on my part).

I'm trying to decide if I want to try and rewrite the lost posts (I very much liked the themes chosen for those posts) or just move on while the Google people try to find them for me. Feeling a little bit like I'm standing in the deli line with a pink arrow of paper in my hands that says I'm number 1,000,679,042, I'm starting to wonder if I really want sliced turkey that badly. Maybe, instead, I should take this as a sign, and write fiction every day until my blog has been restores. Otherwise, even if it's irrational, I'm going to worry that the work already posted will just start leaching away, until my blog vanishes altogether.

My faith is a fragile thing. I won't want to take another step, writer another substantive, creative blog post, until the road looks safe again.

How to Read and Why

Yes, I love to read. I so much love to read that I also love to read about how much other people love to read. This isn't at all a new thing. When writers write about writing, they invariably write about reading. All of my favorite writers are also voracious readers, and I find reading their thoughts on this or that book to be the closest thing to having a conversation with them, which in most cases will never happen (especially if they're dead). Back in 2009, I wrote this blog post about the Nick Hornby book, The Polysyllabic Spree. There are several other volumes of the Nick Hornby book reviews from The Believer, and at some point, I'll read them, but recently, Harold Bloom's book How to Read and Why jumped out at me and landed in my Amazon shopping cart.

How to read? Seriously? Why would I buy such a book? Snort. Obviously, I know how to READ. Duh. Okay, now that I'm done being snotty, I'll tell you what Bloom means. We're not talking about the skill of reading, of being able to pick up a book and make sense of the sentences. Let's call that Layer 1. I pick up something not too challenging, that is mostly story, and I read it. I used to love books that were mostly story; now, not so much. I've picked through my book collection rather aggressively and pruned most of these books out. I'm looking for more than story these days. I'm looking for more than what happens in a book. I'm looking for more than a shallow why, too. I'm looking for a particular kind of why, a why that speak to me. It's usually something like because the meaning of life is simultaneously simple, and unknowable. I LOVE that kind of thing. Layer 2 (and this is NOT Bloom's argument, but I'll get to that in a minute) is something a bit deeper. Maybe picking up a book that can be read multiple ways. I suppose you might say that any book can be read multiple ways, but I don't find value in spending a lot of time trying to make a beach book say something it doesn't really mean to say. I can reach and stretch and make something up (English majors do this all the time) but let's say a romance novel is primarily written to inspire a certain affect in the reader, and that's pretty much it. Layer 2 reading supposes that there's a plot delivered along with the story, that has a compelling why that's more complex and meaningful than a single emotional affect, like sentimentality. Let's say further that Layer 3 is about reading a book against its influences, reading a book in multiple contexts and grokking all the way down to its spine its many rich layers of meaning, and discerning its immortality.

Harold Bloom is a Layer 3 reader. Or maybe a Layer 10 reader, and I don't know how to describe Layers 4 through 10 any better than I can lay out the numerological secrets of Jewish mysticism. I'm halfway through How to Read and Why and he's going on about the great Russians, and I already know that I'll likely never be able to understand his analyses. I may never read Joyce either. For me, somehow, this isn't the point. The point for me is to see the depth of someone's interest. The passion on the page. In a way, it's like watching Yo Yo Ma playing the cello. I'm certain that I don't really understand what I'm hearing, but I do get the sense that it's something wonderful, that I'm hearing something very special. I'm listening to someone who lives on the same planet that I do, but who sees it very, very differently. I'm reading How to Read and Why, not to learn how to read, or why. I already know how to read, and I already know why. I already know that my why is different from the why of most people I know (I know this because it's terribly difficult for me to talk books with people). I don't need someone to tell me why I read. But I'm interested to know how Bloom reads and why, as much as I'm interested to know how Nick Hornby reads, or how Stephen King reads, or Hemingway, or Chuck Palahniuk, or Jonathan Franzen, or Jeffrey Eugenides, or Alex Garland. If Alex Garland wrote a book about what he likes to read and why, I'd buy it immediately.

As with everything, it boils down to one thing: I have a fascination for passion. I'm passionate about my interests, and when someone else has a passion, their passion is interesting to me. I like to read people, and I like to read people's passions. With no passions, I bounce off of the surface of people; I find it difficult to have a conversation. It's like holding my nose and jumping into a body of water, expecting to sink, and finding that I'm standing in a puddle with wet shoes. Let it be any passion whatsoever. Any interest, of any sort. Only let it take the speaker away from themselves, away from their self-awareness. Let them become a conduit for what they love, if it be for antique street signs, the history of candle-making, art make from dryer lint. I am drawn irresistibly to selfless interests, for people who absorb and reflect the parts of the world they love the most. I like people best when they've gone a little 'round the bend over something, who bypass chitchat to show you the teacups their grandmother gave them, that have all the tiny cracks because they were loved, and used. I love the stories my father tells about being in the Navy, or picking crops as a kid in Oregon. I love the story about him and my uncle coming out of a corn field all yellow from head to toe with pollen, about how hops grow, about his love of food and friends. A passion for the life itself is also good, when it's such a positive passion, rather than obsessive, neurotic, or self-referential. Just love, wide open love.

Harold Bloom's book isn't for everybody. I'm not passionate about everything either. For example, I love crawling around on old military vehicles, airplanes, tanks, stuff like that, but a military museum will put me to sleep faster than a Valium. To love an airplane, I need to be in the airplane, seeing what the pilot saw, not stuck on the depersonalized outside. I want to see the dials and the levers and the knobs. I want to imagine what it was like to sit in there, and think about death over the Pacific Ocean. Morbid, sure. So what? If you'd be bored reading about someone else's take on Crime and Punishment, for heaven's sake, pick another book. For whatever reason, I'm soaking this up, and I'm happy about that. I hate reading because I have to. Just hate it. I took an English class at the local college, and we read Wuthering Heights, Jane Eyre, Villette, and big stack of other books like that, and I really hated it. Years after the class, I picked up all of the books again, and I read them, and loved them. I was free to love them. I was free of the need to analyze them, and say something different and important about them. I was free to wander within them, and had the time to read to Layer 3 if I wanted to, or just enjoy their stories, if that's all I wanted. Free to do what I want, I go to Layer 3 naturally. Under duress, I become paralyzed by under-stimulation.

I'm in real trouble. This book makes reference to a lot of books I haven't read yet. It took me most of two months to read Vanity Fair at the beginning of this year, and I was cranky, because I couldn't figure out why I'd bothered to. And yet, I'm terribly glad I did. I may return to Dickens and give him another try. I may read Proust. I may decide to spend my time, and read the Russians after all (I want to know WHY Pat Conroy says Anna Karenina, Anna Karenina, Anna Karenina.

I'm in trouble, but I'm happy.

Have No Mean Hours, Second Try

From Wikiquote:

Have no mean hours, but be grateful for every hour, and accept what it brings. The reality will make any sincere record respectable. No day will have been wholly misspent, if one sincere, thoughtful page has been written. Let the daily tide leave some deposit on these pages, as it leaves sand and shells on the shore. So much increase of terra firma. This may be a calendar of the ebbs and flows of the soul; and on these sheets as a beach, the waves may cast up pearls and seaweed.

Henry David Thoreau
July 6, 1840

This blog was started back in 2003 with the same wretched self-consciousness with which I resumed writing as an adult. What do I write here? I can't write anything but serious news, reviews of my stories, announcements that make me look like a Real Writer. It was all quite intimidating. I didn't want to clog the world with more useless, quickly written, poorly proofread prose about what I had for breakfast (did you catch the irony? Oh, the irony. I rarely write about breakfast anyway.) It got easier later, especially when I lost most of my inhibitions, but some days, I wish I could still write like I did when I was a child.

My father bought me a typewriter when I was ten, and I started writing stories on it immediately, unselfconsciously. First, I taught myself how to touch type using a drill book, and then I started writing stories. I didn't care whether they were sincere, thoughtful pages. I was happy to see the letters form on the good white paper. It was the pure pleasure of seeing something appear there, of composing sentences, paragraphs, pages. It didn't matter, the skill of the writing, but still I used correction tape, correction fluid, erasable bond, sometimes, to get a clean copy of my pages of dubious value. This is how I wrote as a child, freely, madly, deeply. When I returned to writing as an adult, it was not like returning to bicycle riding. It was a different thing altogether. Like Eve, I had somehow learned shame, and I poured this shame into my paper journal. This post is not about that. So I will talk about that another time.

In A Footprint, Frozen in Time, I describe my feelings about my paper journal, always a love-hate thing. But as my life goes on, I find myself being very much grateful for every hour. Even if I'm counting down to some major life event, it's different now than, say, when I was in the Army, and counting every day with painful scrutiny (just need to get through until lunch...just need to get through until morning...just need to get through until leave). And yet, I know what I write in my paper journal. I write things there that no sane, optimistic, well adjusted person would want to read. I whine. I bitch. I moan. I cry. I rail against judgement, unfairness, boredom, frustration. I vent my anger, my deep, deep anger. Sometimes, the pile of journals seems malevolent, hissing, begging for disposal.

No day misspent, if one sincere, thoughtful page has been written. What's sincere? What's thoughtful? What counts? To me, journaling is usually sincere, but rarely thoughtful. It's a dumping ground, a purge. I can't contain these thoughts and feelings any longer, and I must eject them somewhere. They're toxic. Another moment left untouched in my mind, and they will poison me through and through. Thus my love-hate relationship with those paper journals. My occasionally witty vomitorium. There should be no horror at the thought of my throwing this writing in the shred bin. They deserve no mercy. If Blogger snuck into my house, snatched my journals, and burned them, I'd write them a thank you note, sprayed with perfume.

And now this blog. Written all in a burst, each post, with little to no research, few to no pauses. Pictures. Quotes. Book reviews. What value these? No much, really, and yet seemingly enough. For a while, I was writing every day, multiple posts per day, if I happened to skip a day and need to make up. Strangely, where I was once completely blocked from writing anything, where long ago, I was ashamed to call myself a writer in polite company, this blog is somehow different. The things I write here are similar in spirit to that which I write in the paper journal, but fit for company. Cleaned up, nose wiped, shoes tied. Clean, but still fragile, still frightening sometimes. All of these words, all of these opinions spilled out before you, half-formed.

I've been tempted to hit the "delete" button once or twice. I am currently no one. Very few would notice if this, of millions of blogs out there, were to vanish. But this is the place I catalog my ills, my yearnings, my aspirations, my plans. I tell you about my travels, the many meals (tonight's dinner is an antipasto salad from the Gulu Gulu Cafe in Salem), with hot capicola, genoa salami, prosciutto, provolone, roasted red peppers, peperoncini), and endless stories about my beloved garden. And writing. Writing about writing. The ebb and flow of my soul, these things, as little and modest as these things are. How can a meal eaten out of doors on a warm spring evening be part of my soul? It just is. I can't explain it. By itself, it's just a meal, but as a sincere, quasi-thoughtful page, it is a pearl.

It's a pearl because having come from California, I'll never take warm weather for granted again. When people in New England step out of doors and see the sun, it's occasion for a festival. Sidewalk cafe tables are filled. Polished toenails appear, flip-flop sandals, sunglasses, strollers, bicycles. Even the ubiquitious, psychotic distance runners look happier. They bound like excited greyhounds in the spring sun. That is their daily tide, maybe, that mile count. Writing about them is part of my flotsam and jetsam, my seaweed and pearls.

A beer glass beaded with sweat, a single slice of lemon, a cobalt blue bottle of Saratoga sparkling water, a wrought iron table and chairs, the constant rising gabble of people lounging, planning bike rides to the beach. I have felt poorly about my sad paper journals, but not these pages, here. Here, though these pages lack poetry, lack research, lack blood, sweat, or tears, these pages are okay with me. They can stay, for now.

The ebb and flow of my soul.

Ear Plugs

Still not dead. Just terribly busy, and tired.

My advice: pay attention to the calendar when scheduling time off from work, and allow life to get frayed sometimes, rather than trying to kill yourself keeping all the balls in the air, all the time.

It has taken me some effort to get caught up after returning to work after my trip to Chicago, and now I'm doing my best to tie some loose ends together again at work before I head out on yet another trip, which is a 4-day jaunt to one of my favorite places in the world: Martha's Vineyard. As you may recall, I spend some time in California in February with my daughter, for her 18th birthday, and perhaps I've not yet reported, but it's important to note, that I'll be taking her to London and Leeds in August, to attend the Leeds Music Festival for her graduation present. A banner year for travel, and I'm a bit exhausted by it.

I love travel; I think I've made that clear. I love seeing the world. And yet, I'm still an introvert, and I'm still hypervigilant and anxious. This means, sometimes I go out to see the world in a somewhat odd way. By Sunday evening, I hadn't really had a rest since I left for Chicago on the 27th of April. That's a 12-day work week for me, and 8 of them felt like Wednesday, where the energy from the weekend has been spent, but Friday seems a long time away. By Sunday evening, I was at the peak of my exhaustion, desperate to crawl into my bed and hide, but there was a birthday to attend. This was an occasion for me to look weird in public in order to get on with my life; this was an occasion for me to wear earplugs at a restaurant.

I wore earplugs for a lot of my time in Chicago, and because I'm observant, I saw the whispers making their way around the group of chaperones. That weird woman with the earplugs; she also has a pill for everything in her backpack (which is weird; I never was a pill popper until recently). I don't think wearing earplugs out and about is any weirder than wearing ear buds, and millions of people do that. I suppose, though, it's weird to most people because the purpose of wearing ear buds (ostensibly to listen to music or podcasts or what have you) is "normal," where the purpose of wearing ear plugs out and about (ostensibly to shut out noise) is "abnormal." If that's the case, then the world is making a huge assumption about why people choose to listen to their iPods non-stop.

At least some portion of those folks are using their iPods with the same purpose as ear plugs - to block out the rest of the world. The only difference is that their ear plugs have build-in entertainment, and a "normal" justification for use. I'm not ignoring you, I'm listening to music. I'm not shutting you out, I'm listening to my podcasts, because this is the only time I have to do that. I'm not hiding from the world, I'm learning Polish. It's likely that the majority of people who walk around with their ear buds in really are trying to use their time efficiently, or make its passage more pleasant. I'm almost certain that there are more extroverts in the world than introverts, and more people who are comfortable with a constant barrage of input than those of us who aren't. There are always fewer people pressed against the back wall at a party than mixing in the middle, talking their heads off.

When I reach a very sensitive state of mind, I have to start making careful choices about what I do with my attention. If I have rapidly changing visual input, such as when riding in a car or a bus, I can have the radio on if there's no one in the car with me, or if the people in the car don't want to talk. But I can't be in the car, watching the scenery, have the radio on, and be in the presence of conversation (and this gets worse, the more conversations are occurring simultaneously). I need to pick two things and stick with those. No, in my most sensitive state of mind, I can only pick one. That means if I'm in a car, I put in the ear plugs, because sitting in the car with my eyes closed is usually impractical. It's less weird to wear ear plugs than to wear a blindfold. I can just imagine the kind of feedback I'd get if I wore a blindfold on public transportation, say.

On Sunday, at the restaurant, I chose to wear the ear plugs in order to be in the restaurant at all. I could still see my own party (six people), but I was facing out a window, and there were very few people in the tables behind me, so no one but the wait staff passing by, infrequently, or unobtrusively. I could still hear the talk at my table, especially if it was directed at me or I could read their lips, but for the most part, the murmur of their many conversations was muted enough that it blurred into background noise if I didn't pay attention. The ear plugs take out the high-pitched stuff, so it's like being able to fall asleep on the couch with an info-mercial going. Yes, there's sound, there are words, but they are ignorable words, uninteresting words, and so I can allow them to be the same kind of sound as falling water. There's information there, but it doesn't require a lot of analysis.

Turning off, or turning down, the analysis engine sometimes keeps me mobile. Staying mobile is more important to me than impressing people with my normalcy. I suppose I could start wearing my ear buds instead of my ear plugs and just not connect them to anything, but then I'd be socially uncomfortable. Think about how it looks to see a woman wearing ear plugs when in the company of an animated family, and how it looks to see a woman wearing ear buds in the same situation. I don't care tremendously what people think of me, but I care enough to wear something nice and not trot around in my sweat pants, and I care enough to show them that maybe there's just something wrong with my ears, rather than "my family is so dull, I need to block them out with some Lady Gaga." (I don't listen to Gaga; that was meant to be funny. I listen to depressing, whiny, young-to-middle-aged males complaining about being lonely, for the most part.)

I have two boxes of ear plugs in my bathroom pantry. I wear them at night, too, to block out the ambient sound of the world so I can sleep. Otherwise, I'd be up all night listening to passing cars, passing people, animal sounds, the sound of the trees, and I'd be too interested in making up stories about those things to fall asleep. This is only inadvisable when I'm worried about not hearing my alarm in the morning. I have to figure out what to do about those nights. Right now, I just try to sleep without the ear plugs, and often do badly. I'm thinking I need to start using my phone as an alarm, and leave it under my pillow, to wake me up with its vibrations and blaring, obnoxious rock-music ringtone. Or I need an alarm clock that opens up at the top and whacks me with a little hammer.

Sometimes I wear ear plugs at work, to help me focus on editing documents.

Like right now.

Chicago - Day 5

Day 5 was 20 hours on a smelly bus.

This is going to be a post about my last experience before leaving Chicago on a bus at 11:00 p.m. Saturday night, to drive all night and arrive home at 8:00 p.m. Sunday. The bus ride home was non-eventful; I drugged myself to sleep, slept most of the day, with the idea of 1) getting rest; and 2) not consciously smelling the bus (imagine a classy combo of overstressed chemical toilet, teenager feet, and the garbage bins behind your favorite mall food court).

So, back to the close of Day 4.

As I mentioned in my last post, our final event was the award ceremony, which occurred after dinner and a show at Medieval Times. I skipped past the Medieval Times part, to maintain dramatic flow, but I want to go back to it, in part to discuss the experience, and in part to discuss why I'm still a little kid in my heart, and probably always will be, no matter that most of the time I have rather sophisticated, un-childlike tastes in just about everything. Everything, that is, but amusement parks and spectacle entertainment.

When at an amusement park, or engaged in spectacle entertainment, I become ten again.

You enter Medieval Times through an entryway badly decorated in the worst theme park kitsch of medieval life. Generic banners made of glitzy non-medieval fabrics. The staff all have really bad Irish accents, for some reason. They're using the classic medieval equipment of computers, headsets, and walkie-talkies. The costumes are made of more glitzy non-medieval fabrics, like rayon and polyester velour. It's bad. I mean, it's really bad. They shuffle you past the cash registers into the "ale hall," which is a big room that smells like beer, and the master of ceremonies does his best to heckle the crowd in his radio-announcer voice, and move them toward their seating. The Medieval Times I visited held around 1450 people. They seat groups by table, in sections delineated by color. I got the black and white section. At each place setting, there was an adjustable paper crown in your home colors. I put mine on, thus forcing the other parents to put theirs on in solidarity.

The tables were facing the arena, so you could eat and watch the spectacle straight on. It's a charming, "eat with your hands" setup, and so there are no utensils, and the dishware was comprised of a fake pewter plate and soup bowl with handle. Plastic mugs were provided in the shape of some imagined non-plastic drinking vessel, and the beverage offered without question was regular Coke. I had to beg for water, and as service was carefully regimented, I was politely told water would be brought in ten minutes. Exactly ten. My serving wench used the ubiquitous terrible Irish accent. (As a note, the master of ceremonies used the Prince Humperdinck English accent, to a note, but as a mix of Casey Casem and the guy who says "let's get ready to rumble!!!)

I must admit that I was underwhelmed, and a little grumpy because I was tired. The other parents looked as if they were lined up with barium milkshakes, ready to prep for a colonoscopy. Not even their black and white paper crowns made them look any jauntier. I honestly didn't think I was going to have fun, especially when the arena filled with smoke machine ejecta, and the roving spotlights started. Each player in the show was announced by Sir Casey Casem, and as an opener, we were subjected to the lamest frame-story narrative and acting in creation. Prince Whatsisname has been abducted by an enemy kingdom, oh noes! Short, somewhat lame mock battle, and he gets tied up and dragged away, leaving trails in the arena sand. One of the horses takes a dump, and I amuse myself by imagining a horse-poop Zamboni coming in at half-time to rake the sand of road apples. It turns out later that the road apples are policed by a guy (probably with a bachelor's degree in medieval history) with a metal bucket and a rake that resembles an over-sized cat-letter scoop. I hope he earns a living wage, but somehow I doubt it. The guy who drives the raking machine after the show, who does not deal with the poop, probably makes more, and is very likely union.

Then they brought out the Andalusian stallions. And yes, they were stallions. I am an ex-horse owner, and still a horse enthusiast, so I know a stallion when I see one. There is thick, high arch in the neck that mares and geldings just don't have (those last are castrated male horses). These horses were impressive enough standing still. One was glossy black, and four others were white, each with a long, rippling mane and tail, and rippling, well-worked musculature. It was clearly a working bunch of horses, and I was impressed. And then they started to dance. Paraphrasing Mommy Fortuna from the movie The Last Unicorn: "I had to give you a fake horn the crowd can see so they can recognize that you are a real unicorn." All of the smoke and mirrors was to convince the crowd that what they were seeing was amazing, because your average audience member has never seen and does not understand dressage.

Piaffe: this is a soft, elegant trot in place. The regular trot on a regular horse is an uncomfortable, jolting affair, and it's definitely a turf burner. But a horse doing the piaffe looks like a ballerina delicately stepping in place.

Passage: this is a forward-motion trot variety, but the horse makes an elongated pause between paces, with a high elevation of step.

"Andalusian Walk": I can't remember what this is called in actual dressage terms, but this walk features a very high and forward-thrust front step. It's an aggressive move, as if the horse is trying to front-kick an enemy in the codpiece.

Gait-changes: I'm not going to list all of the different dressage gait changes here. To the untrained eye, elegant dressage can sometimes look like a horse trotting in an arena, but if you're sensitive to subtle changes, you will note the graceful shifts in gait and pace and rhythm as the horse does slow and elegant figure-eights around an arena. The rider telegraphs nothing, as all of the cues are given by shifts in weight and pressure using the legs and seat, and it's breathtaking if you know what you're seeing, but likely not all this interesting if you're there for the smoke and flashing lights.

The next moves are called the "airs above the ground," and these look like circus tricks, if you don't understand how many years of training go into these moves, which are really equestrian battle maneuvers. I'll only list the ones I saw at the show.

Levade: to the untrained eye, this looks as if the horse is rearing on its hind legs, the way you see in western movies. But the levade is a controlled elevation, at a perfect 30-degree angle, which requires a huge amount of hindquarter strength. The levade is lower than you usually see in a "rear", and executed to get the rider's sword arm up above an enemy.

Courbette: the horse balances on its hind legs before jumping or hopping forward. At Medieval Times, the horse actually sort of walked forward on its hind legs instead of hopping, while elevated much higher than in the levade. Less controlled than the levade, but still impressive.

Capriole: this is a move in which all four feet leave the ground. I've seen a show by the Lippizaner stallions, in which one animal performed this air and seemed as if he were weightless. From a soft canter, he leaped into the air as if jumping over an obstacle, but mid-air, kicked his rear feet out before landing. I'm afraid the horse in the Medieval Times show was not a feather-light specimen. It was much like seeing a draft horse hoisting itself into the air from a standstill, but it was the capriole in form. As intended when the move was taught to war horses, he'd have taken out the knees of the person behind him, had there been an enemy there.

When the horses came out, I oohed and ahhed, and clapped my hands like a little kid. I kept saying, "That's not easy, what he did just there." The parents around me were kind and didn't mock me, but there was very little light in their eyes for the horses and the dressage. Luckily there was one woman determined to have fun, and through the whole show, she waved a little souvenir ribbon on a stick with "Medieval Times" embossed on it. She was a much bigger fan of the handsome knights than the animal acts, though, so I was alone in my appreciation of the horses, and the subsequent act, which was a falconry display. The falcon was put off by the crowd for a little while. She flew up above the dais containing the thrones, and sat there staring at her handler for a while, but eventually, she did fly after the spinning lure and took some majestic flights around the stadium. When the falconer dropped the lure to the sand, she pounced on it with her wings spread, and nommed on the lure for a little bit before hopping back onto the falconer's wrist.

That was great. I was suddenly so happy to be there, no matter that the audience needed to see a fake horn in order to recognize a real unicorn. The rest of the show was either choreographed displays of martial skill, held loosely together by the silly frame story, or actual competitions between the six different knights. The black and white knight was my favorite, with his kind young face and long rippling wheat-colored hair. When he won at javelins or ring-jousting, he would gather his favors from the "princess," and distribute the favors to the crowd. If the favors were a handful of carnations, red or pink, he would kiss each one and give it to a girl in the crowd. I loved him because he focused mostly on the row of little girls front and center in his section, who ranged in age from five to ten, and all goggled over him sweetly, wearing their little veiled crowns and waving their little banners.

My favorite part of the martial displays was the actual jousting, though the knights did so with balsa lances that shattered mostly harmlessly into millions of pieces on contact. The venue actually lowered hockey nets around the arena to protect the crowd from flying bits of balsa. The horses were excited, and the knights were handsome and skilled at maneuvering the lances. It didn't matter that the weapons were blunted, and the armor was alloy, and their costumes were bright synthetics. From a distance, it all looked great. It looked great while they were riding their caparisoned horses, and great when they jumped to the ground and started bashing at each other with swords, polearms, axes, regular maces, chain maces, blows ringing off of metal shields, and the blunted edges of the weapons clearly treated to produce sparks. It was flashy, but it was tremendous fun.

The food? Oh yeah. The food was served in courses. A mediocre tomato soup drunk from the fake pewter bowl. A slice of reheated frozen Texas garlic toast. Then a very nice roasted chicken (1/2 a bird per person), a pork rib, an herb roasted potato half, and a flaky apple turnover for dessert. The roasted chicken was spicy, the rib was barbecue sauced, but the meal was surprisingly ok. It had its moments. I did end up getting my water (2 plastic mugs, to obviate the need to request refills). My neighbors were finicky about eating the meat with their hands, but I'm accustomed to disassembling roasted fowl with my fingers; however, I was as glad as anyone to get the plastic-wrapped hot moist towelette (which my "wench" said was handed out "whether or not we needed it, haha").

For some reason, I wasn't into the Museum of Science and Industry. I wasn't into the ComedySportz club as much as everyone else. But I loved the architecture cruise, and I just adored Medieval Times. I adored it the way I love Disneyland every time I go, no matter how old I am. I love Six Flags. I love historical reenactments. I love a parade. I love county fairs and craft expositions. I love historic house tours, and city tours, where you follow a guide, or ride in a trolley. I loved the Napa Valley Wine Train, but with the delight of a little kid (albeit one allowed to drink wine.) I like carnival midways, although I don't waste my money on anything but the racing game where you squirt water into a target to make your horse run a race, or the one where you try to shoot out a star with a pellet gun. I prefer cashmere, silk, good housewares, elegant cars and luxuries. But my taste in entertainment varies wildly, and I still cry if I see Tinkerbell flying over Sleeping Beauty's Castle.

I'm 38, and 28, and 18, and 8.

And I'm finally home from the trip.