Nightmare

Let me set the scene for you.

Image from "Earth vs The Flying Saucers"

It’s the end of days. The sky is orange. Silver saucers zip across the horizon, making pew-pew noises as they fire lasers at buildings. The landscape is catching fire and curling in on itself, like that paper city in Adele’s Rolling in the Deep video. The latest rumors are that the aliens piloting those gleaming crafts are Tribbles. Fear runs rampant among the survivors. There is looting in the streets. People are finding religion, losing it and finding it again. The end is near, but it seems to be taking its sweet time getting here.

I’m huddled in a room with some friends and my entire family, waiting to get blown up. I spent the last few days running, like a dog who is afraid of a thunderstorm. I fled to New York City, then had to flee New York City. I returned back to my hometown to sit with my family and wait.

The phone rings. I pick it up. It’s the Governor.

“Oh thank god, Governor,” I say, and my family’s ears perk up. They look at me with something like hope although the pew-pew noises are getting nearer. “Thank god. We need your help.”

“Ms. O’Connell? Are you all right?” The Governor’s voice is crisp.

I attempt some alien-invasion humor. “Oh you know, just waiting to get blown up by aliens.”

“Riiight. Listen, A.J., I’m going to need you to stop screwing around and tell me whether or not your paper is going to be able to cover this event down at the water treatment plant in New Jersey tomorrow.”

“New Jersey?” I had thought that New Jersey was already destroyed. “But, sir – ”

“I’ve only called two or three other reporters about this.”

“Right. But -”

“I don’t have time for this, A.J.. It’s up to you. It’s not my problem if your newspaper doesn’t get the story.”

That stops me dead. I look up. The pew-pew noises have stopped. My relatives are no longer huddled together in terror, but are looking at me with mocking smiles.

I’ve never felt so stupid.

I sigh, and pick up a nearby pen. “Okay Governor. Give me the information. I will see you in New Jersey tomorrow.”

* * *

This is what happens when I take a day off in the middle of the week to do all my errands and get no writing  done. My subconscious has laid the smack down.

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In which the author is confused by Linkedin

Early this morning, I got my latest invitation to join Linkedin.

I get a lot of these, because I’m not on Linkedin. The very first request came a few years ago, when I was working at a newspaper and an old source sent me monthly requests to join Linkedin. I got one every month for at least a year before either he stopped trying to invite me or I left my job and lost access to that email account. I can’t remember which happened first. Anyhow, since then, I’ve received Linkedin requests from all sorts of people: former co-workers, current co-workers, students, family members, people I’ve met once, people I haven’t seen in years and friends of my family.

It seems like everyone’s on LinkedIn, and since I’m a sucker for groupthink, I’m beginning to wonder: Do I need to be on Linkedin? And if so, why?

I have checked out the site. It looks like a non-scandalous, grown-up version of Facebook, where people use phrases like “communication skills” and “can-do attitude” in lieu of “OMG” or “LOL.”

And although I realize the site is used to network professionals, I can’t figure out if it is useful or not.

It’s not as if I don’t love social media. Those who suffer my Facebook status updates and my Twitter feed can attest to the fact that I love The Network. It’s ridiculous. I’ve been waiting for it all my life:  I write words and people react to (or fail to react to) those words almost instantly. It’s instant gratification. Sometimes it’s instant mortification. And it’s done wonders for my writing — Facebook has honed my comedic skills by teaching me that 80 percent of everything I say is not funny.

Same thing with Twitter, which has allowed me to gradually connect with other writers, and which has also taught me how to craft very, very short sentences while including hashtags and replies.  And these two sites are really just the latest in a series of social media innovations that I’ve loved and abused. Before Facebook, I was on Myspace. Before that, Livejournal. Before that, I was on Friendster. And before that, there were various messaging and file-sharing groups that I can barely remember. ICQ and Hotwire (I think it was called HotWire. It could have been HotLine. Livewire? I don’t know. The software I’m talking about is from 1995. It’s been lost in the mists of time.) Also, AIM and unsupervised chat rooms, and even the old Apple chat software Broadcast.

All of them were useful in their own way, just as Facebook and Twitter are useful to me now, as I build a reader base and follow what’s going on with my friends and in the world. But LinkedIn? How is that useful? Isn’t it just a way to get my resumé online?

And so, because I have no answers of my own, I end this blog with an obnoxious crowd-sourcing series of questions. Are you on Linkedin? Is it useful? How? Have you obtained a job or gained contacts by being on Linkedin? Please, corporate types. Help a sister out.

 

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Writing recess

A couple weeks ago, I sat across from one of my professors at a coffee shop. We were discussing my novel. I had just finished the first draft of it and I was obsessing over several minor plot points because I’d shown it to a couple of writers’ groups and gotten conflicting reactions.

My professor sat patiently as I allowed my OCD* to ride roughshod over my common sense and my ability to remain calm. After about 20 minutes of listening to my nonsense, she cut me off.

“Don’t workshop it anymore. Now is the wrong time to workshop it.”

I blinked. I belong to three writers’ groups, two of which meet monthly. I’m headed off to my final residency for the Fairfield University MFA program. All of these groups require substantial writing samples from me on a regular basis.

I need to feed those beasts. And I have just the fodder for them: a 273-page, mostly unread and largely un-workshopped novel. I mean, come on. What else do I have to hand to my writers’ groups? A sheaf of angsty college poetry written in Spanglish, complete with coffee stains and cigarette burns? Darkwing Duck fan fiction from 1992? Because that’s what’s left in the bottom of my filing cabinet.

"I am the terror that flaps in the night. I am the fanfic that lurks in your past."

I communicated this to my professor, leaving out the bit about Darkwing Duck.

“Don’t bring anything. Or you know, bring something else you’re working on. But don’t workshop your novel now.”

My professor told me to fuggedaboutit , literally. She said that I needed to protect and incubate the work. She told me not to look at it, or think about it, for at least two weeks.

“I know that might be hard for you to do, but you have to try,” she said, and looked almost apologetic.

She needn’t have. It wasn’t hard. Not even a little bit. My inner procrastinator seized onto that piece of advice, and by the time I skipped out of that coffee shop, I had already pushed all thoughts, worries, or concerns about my book to the very back of my brain. I walked out of there carefree. I had permission to forget about my novel. Great! My professor had let me out for recess!

There is a problem with this. The problem is that my professor’s advice had two parts. The first was to forget, and the second went like this:

“In two weeks, sit down and read the whole thing. Try to do it in one day. Read it with a legal pad in hand, as if you were reading something written by somebody else. Then you will begin to see what changes need to be made.”

Oh dear. It’s been two weeks. And I am having a hard time resurrecting my interest, enthusiasm or desire to look at my first draft. I can’t even write other things. I just got back from a writers’ retreat, at which I wrote at least 1,500 words of another two projects. All of it was crap. All the sentences were Subject-Verb-Noun, the level of the most basic Dick and Jane reader. (Jane writes novels. Jane drinks wine. Booze doesn’t help.) I lost my mojo, and I don’t know where to look for it.

Actually, that’s a lie. I do know where to look for it.

Because as soon as my prof told me to forget about the novel, I (as I stated earlier) pushed all of my worries and fears about that novel to the very back of my brain. I opened a mental closet door, chucked in all my concerns about the novel, then shut the door quickly before anything else could come tumbling out of that closet and walked away quickly. Now I’m loathe to return.

Not only have I enjoyed a stress-free couple of weeks, but I don’t want to go rooting around back there to find my enthusiasm for my novel.

Here’s an example of some of the other items I’ve housed in that part of my brain:

• Things I learned in high school pre-algebra

• Memories of the ignoble things that I’ve done to other people

• Everything I know about the phrase “mill rate”

Good lord. I’ve put my novel behind the Gee-I-hope-I-never-have-to-think-about-this-again door. Why? I have some theories.

It could be plain old fear of failure. (Ahh! What if I work very hard and fail?)

It might be fear of success. (Ahh! What if I publish it? Then people will hold me responsible for what I wrote!)

It could be something I like to think of as Queen Midas Syndrome. (If I touched it, it’s already gold. No need to touch it further.)

It could be my short attention span. (I should work on my novel… Ooh! Something shiny!)

It could be laziness. (I’d rather play Scrabble on Facebook.)

It could be that it’s summer. (School’s out!)

It could be any of those things. Or it could be something else. But while I was typing the above list, I realized something. None of the bullet points are valid excuses for not printing out my novel (an exercise that takes my printer an hour to complete) and reading it some time this week. I mean really. I’m too arrogant to fear failure, I love smugness too much to fear success, I’ve never been diagnosed with ADD (*or OCD, for that matter), and although I’m lazy and it is summer, neither of those things has ever kept me from doing things that I hate. That leaves Queen Midas syndrome, but who cares? It doesn’t matter why I’m making excuses for myself. It matters whether or not I pay attention to the excuses.

Well then. Recess is over. I’m printing it, and I’m reading it, just as my professor suggested. But I will ignore her advice about submitting something else to my writers’ groups. They’re getting chunks of novel this month. After all, I am lazy.

 

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The closet purge

I’m cleaning out my closet this week. It’s long overdue.

I’ve been ignoring the warning signs: My shoe rack bent the nails holding it to the wall and came crashing down, I can’t shut one of my closet doors, and I can’t find my favorite black tank top anywhere. That last one really clinched it. If all the clothes that I don’t wear are obscuring the one item I want to wear all the time, it’s time to get rid of some stuff.

I set up my camera this weekend and got to work, photographing, measuring and putting stuff on eBay. By the time I’m done, I will hopefully have gotten rid of at least a third of my stuff. Maybe half.

My husband, who was out fishing when I finally snapped, came back home to find me under a mountain of clothes I never wear. He’s a little concerned about this purge. He knows I love clothing and worries that I’m tormenting myself by cleaning the closet. He’s afraid that what I’m engaged in is a sort of Sophie’s Choice for clotheshorses. The first time I cleaned out my closets, just before we were married,  he offered to bring garbage bags of clothing down to the basement and store them there.

“You might need them later,” he told me.

I knew I would not need a floor-length bedazzled cotton hippie-inspired skirt from the sales rack at Bob’s. Not later. Not ever. I didn’t need it to begin with.

I tried to reassure him, but he still looked concerned. I think part of the problem is that my husband doesn’t understand my relationship with clothing. I relate to clothing the way a cad relates to women. I’m happy when I buy it, I’m happy when I use it, and I’m happy when it walks out of my life and stops blowing up my cell phone 24-7.

And like a cad, I don’t really mind sharing. My feeling is this: I like my clothes. I think some other people probably like my clothes as well. So if I’m not wearing an item, and it’s languishing at the back of my closet when someone else could be rockin’ it on the street, what’s the point in my hanging onto it?

Still, to abandon the cad metaphor, there are some things I’ll never part with. My wedding dress. And that black tank top that I got at a consignment shop for a few bucks, but which fits so well and looks good with everything. Or the white hippie shirt I bought from a vendor at the student center in college. Or the silver brocade dress that I bought on the first day of our honeymoon because I felt that, as a married woman, I needed some “grown-up” clothes. Or the 30-year-old “Shazbot” tee shirt that my dad bought when Mork & Mindy was popular in the ’70s and which was passed from me to my brother until I finally stole it and ran off to college. (I think every member of my immediate family has had it in their wardrobe at some point. It’s got some holes now, and the fabric is more or less transparent but I still wear it under a sweatshirt when I walk the dog.) Or the mint-green sweater my mom got as a present when she was expecting. Or the green faux leather jacket that my great aunt Rita had in the ’40s, which my mom “borrowed” in the ’70s and I took over in the ’90s. I have a bunch of things like this; items that came from family members who borrowed from family members. I love that.

All of these sort of come together in a cohesive way for me. It’ s my life story, told in clothing. If my closet were a museum, this would be the permanent collection. The other things are just on loan.

But I don’t know; maybe the “permanent collection” isn’t so permanent. It may be that in a few years it will make sense for me to get rid of all of it  in order to make room for other things. If we have children I’m certainly not going to be able to monopolize every closet in the house. So I may get rid of almost everything, even the good stuff. And that will be okay.

But here’s what I’m hoping for: maybe if I’m lucky, I’ll be able to keep the good stuff and someday – when all I can wear are sweatsuits and the other practical clothes of old age, some granddaughter or niece or young cousin or neighbor will be able to come over and raid my carefully curated collection.

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Gluten is a cruel and scrumptious mistress.

At some point in the last several days, I ingested gluten.

Our collection of flours. We do a lot of baking.

I think I know when it happened, and I don’t regret eating that meal because it was delicious. Gluten (the sticky protein in wheat) is always delicious. Well, it’s always delicious to me. That’s because I haven’t eaten gluten on purpose in almost eight years. I was diagnosed with an allergy to gluten when I was 25.

I haven’t blogged about my gluten allergy because food allergies are boring. Whenever I talk about gluten, I can’t stand myself. It either sounds like:

a) I’m some crunchy anti-gluten zealot (“Allow me to educate you about the horrors of gluten, brothers and sisters! Join me in going against the grain!”)

or

b)  I’m feeling sorry for myself because I can’t order a pizza. Boo hoo. Someone, please, call the waaambulance.

Anyways, since I have to think about my dietary restrictions constantly in real life, I like to write about other things here.

But since my reaction to this particular glutenous meal has slowed me down so much, and since Elizabeth Hilts posted that today, on her fabulous Inner Bitch Calendar is “I love my body — no matter what day,” I thought I’d post about mine.

Allergic to being an adult

I haven’t always been allergic to gluten. I ate bread with abandon as a child. Actually, the only allergy I had as a kid was to pollen. Around Mother’s Day, every year, I’d be miserable with allergies for about a week. I dreaded that week. I have memories of sitting in church for the Mother’s Day mass, all dressed up, with my eyes swollen and itching and my nose all runny. But that was really it. I don’t remember being allergic to anything else.

Then I grew up. All of a sudden I was allergic to a variety of things: Gluten, lactose, wasabi, certain store-bought fruits and vegetables. Even non-food allergies surfaced; I am allergic now to both cats and dogs (which doesn’t keep me from having one of each.)

Actually, I like to think my body is just allergic to being an adult.

I would like to quit

There are days, like today, when I would like to quit my allergies, particularly the gluten allergy, because that one has caused me to rearrange my life. Lactose I can take pills for. Wasabi is easily avoided. Fruits and vegetables can be grown or bought organically. But wheat? It’s in everything, and the older I get, the worse my reaction to it becomes. And I hate being The Woman With The Food Allergy. You know the one. You have to organize group dinners out around what she can and can’t eat. She interrogates the waiter about what’s in each menu item. She comes to dinner at your house but has already eaten a meal, just to be safe. She carries her weight in gluten-free products when she goes anywhere. She turns down slices of your 90-year-old Aunt Betty’s delicious homemade cake. I don’t like being that person at all. I especially hate turning down cake. And also, poor Aunt Betty has no idea what gluten is, and just thinks that I’m vainly concerned with my figure. Aunt Betty, let me assure you that I am not. I am crying on the inside because I can’t have three pieces of your delicious, mouthwateringly glutenous cake.

Ahem. See the self pity? Call the waambulance, folks.

Gluten Freedom

And yet, being gluten-free has been a good thing for me. Right before I was diagnosed, I ate a lot of fast food. I was having Dunkin’ Donuts bagels for breakfast, McDonald’s for lunch and pizza for dinner. I worked all the time, and all of these foods were available en route to and from my various assignments. When I was diagnosed, I suddenly had to plan my meals. I had to bring food with me. I had to cook at home. And although there was a longish getting-used-to-being-gluten-free period, during which I spent too much money at health food stores and cut things out of my diet that didn’t actually contain gluten, I ultimately created a diet that worked well for me. And I dropped a lot of weight, which was nice.

And then there was another thing – one of my friends at work had been diagnosed with similar allergies about a year before. (Actually, her allergies were worse.) So all of a sudden I had a support system. We shared information, recipes, lunches. We learned – often the hard way – which foods to avoid. Sometimes  we were both ill because of an unfortunate snacking experience. Still, I think those food-related disasters were easier for me to handle because I had a gluten/lactose-free buddy. We were friends before my diagnosis, but I think our mutual allergies cemented our friendship.

Now that I think of it,  the best things to come out of my allergy have been the connections I’ve made with other people. I’ve been amazed at the generosity of people who invite us to a party, and put a special gluten-free item on the menu just because I’m coming over. Sometimes they’ve never intentionally made something gluten-free before. They don’t have to do that – I can almost always find something to eat – but they make the effort, and I’m always touched by that.

My cousin, who is an extraordinary baker (she made my wedding cupcakes), is especially thoughtful. For example, I haven’t had Christmas cookies in forever. But this past Christmas, she made me four types of gluten-free cookies. I still have some in the freezer, and I break them out whenever I need a little snack. She makes me something whenever she bakes for a family gathering. She doesn’t have to do that, and I’m always floored when she does.

And then there are the legions of people who email me gluten-free recipes, or links to articles about gluten-free foods or gluten-free restaurants in our area. I get at least one email like this every couple of months, and I love it! It’s touching to know that people are thinking of me, and I’ve got quite the collection of gluten-free recipes.

So maybe being allergic to life isn’t that bad. I mean, I’m still not happy about being laid up for a few days after each forbidden foray into the delicious realm of gluten, but hey — avoiding gluten is a really good way to stay beach-trim, and I’ve got a lot of awesome friends.

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