And I know it.

Me and My Panic Attack: What Fresh Hell is This?

This afternoon, I think I had a mild panic attack.

I don’t know for sure if it was a panic attack because I’ve never had one before and I sure didn’t think I’d be getting one any time soon. My breath became short, my heart pounded, my hands shook and I started to stutter. I was able to quickly dispel it, but I was shaken, and disgusted with myself.  Stuttering, A.J., really? What is that?  The last time I stuttered, I was in high school.

So what was I doing that caused such fear? Making a phone call. That’s it. That’s all. I was calling someone for work.

I never have liked making calls. In college I always hoped that someone else would call for the pizza, but I never had any huge problems with dialing the phone. Like just about everyone in the first world, I have made millions of phone calls for work and never had a panic attack. In fact, I spent a decade making hundreds of phone calls a week, sometimes dozens a day, when I worked as a reporter. I knew, when I was making those calls, that a lot of those people didn’t want to talk to me. In fact, some of them were downright hostile, but my attitude at the time was much more “game on” than “freak out.”

Today, the shadow of the phone calls I had to make – a task that should take less than three minutes – hung over me from the moment I woke up. I actually slept in a little to avoid them. I dreaded them. I did everything else on my to-do list first. I sent emails. I did research. I paced the floor. I went on Facebook. I emptied the dishwasher. Finally I decided to just do it. I wrote out all the things I had to talk about in each call, something I’ve never done before and picked up the phone.

The first went off without a hitch. The second triggered the attack, if that’s what it was. I forgot my name. I forgot my phone number. I forgot my business. Then I was angry with myself, which made it all much, much worse. It took me a half an hour to make myself confront the fear and make the third call.

Now the callbacks are giving me trouble. Though I know I can now go about the rest of my day knowing the calls are over with, and though any callers could leave me a message, I feel compelled to linger over the phone, doing nothing,  just in case someone calls me back.

I have no idea why the phone calls would cause me such anxiety. They weren’t particularly difficult calls.  But all of a sudden it feels like I have a sudden phone phobia, and it’s hard not to judge myself here. Phonephobia sounds like a disorder for weirdos. And since when do people suddenly sprout phobias? Since when do I sprout phobias?

One of my resolutions for 2012 has been to work on my anxiety, which has been growing, inexplicably, over the last few years. In the days since I made my resolution, I’ve been doing some research on ways of handling anxiety, reading books about it, practicing yoga daily to control my breathing, looking for my triggers, all that good self-help stuff that one is supposed to do. Then today happened.

I don’t normally share my struggle with anxiety, which quite frankly embarrasses me, because – as someone once asked me –  what have I to be anxious about?  But I’m beginning to think that keeping quiet about anxiety might be contributing to the problem, so I thought, what the hell, I’ll jump into the conversation. At least I can get it out there. Maybe it will be one less thing to worry about.

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Writerly goals and personal battles for the new year.

On New Year’s Eve, I posted about a minor resolution dilemma. I was torn between posting a list of New Year’s resolutions and checking in monthly on this blog to report progress or using 2012 to work on some major inner conflicts.

Since I’m the sort of person who likes to have her cake and eat it too, I’ve decided to do a little of both. My resolutions are mostly writing-related. I’ll check in on the first of each month with my progress on these.

My conflict resolutions are personal, but I plan to treat them as if they were a project for grad school. I’m going to do more than search my soul for the answers to my questions, because I need a little more assistance than my soul is capable of providing. So I will pair navel-gazing with research and examine as many sides of each issue as I can. By year’s end, I plan to have written a long essay about at least one of the conflicts I worked on, and I will try to publish it. (I’m going to try to submit the essay to a magazine or journal, but if all else fails, I will publish it here.)

The ground rules are set. Here are my resolutions and conflicts: Read more

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New Years resolutions or New Years conflict resolutions?

For a while now, I’ve been feeling that it’s time to embrace New Year’s resolutions. I’ve also been thinking that this blog might be a good place to do this.

I know. New Years resolutions are boring. I can practically feel all of you unsubscribing.

But I have a model for this plan and an entertaining one: for as long as I have been following his exploits, author Matthew Dicks (a fellow Trinity grad) has posted his New Years resolutions on his blog at the beginning of each year. He then checks in monthly, reporting his progress on each goal, even if there has been no progress. This strikes me as a good way of laying out my goals and of holding my own feet to the fire.

When I mentioned this plan to my husband yesterday, he offered another idea: Instead of making New Year’s resolutions, use 2012 to work on some of my conflicts. Not external conflicts (although I have some fun ideas for resolving my conflict with the guy who keeps visiting our neighbors and parking in my spot) but the internal ones that seem to cause daily havoc. My husband knows all about these conflicts, since he has to listen to me talk them out for hours on end, so perhaps his suggestion is a little on the self-serving side.

I’m intrigued by the conflict resolution idea, but I see a couple of problems with it. For one thing, it’s a tall order. Let me give you an example. Here’s a resolution I was thinking of making: Go back to church at least once a month. Here’s the underlying conflict that needs to be resolved: I made a promise to the Catholic church, but my beliefs have wandered far, far away from church doctrine and I’m not sure I can keep my promise without being a hypocrite.

You can see the difference between the two. Going back to church once a month is easy and measurable and doesn’t lay the troubles of my soul bare for all the Internet to see. On the other hand, working on the conflict will probably create lasting change. And then there’s another problem. If I’m just making resolutions, I can make a long list of goals, but if I’m going to devote time to my inner conflicts, I can only choose one or two and then I have to figure out how to measure them, because if I am actually going to do this, I need to hold myself accountable in some way. Right now, long essays – which I will try to publish – seem the best way of doing this.

I don’t know. I haven’t decided yet. There is a lot of merit to a list of achievable New Year’s resolutions. There’s value in goals like Get an agent by July or Get thee to a dentist. I will have to come to a decision in the next 24 hours. 2012 ought to be a productive year, even if it the Mayans are right and it is the very last year.

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My name is O’Connell.

The holiday cards are a-rollin’ in, and there is no better reminder of the confusion surrounding my name than the various addressees on the envelopes.

So far, this season, I’ve been Ann O’Connell, Mrs. My-Husband’s-Name, Ann O’Connell-Husband, Mrs. Ann Husband. If our vet sends us a card, I will be Ann O’Connell, but my husband will become Mr. O’Connell, because my relationship with the vet’s office predates my relationship with my husband.

The envelopes at Christmas are a jumble of familiar names sewn together in Frankenstein-esque ways, and makes me think that maybe I should have done a better job of notifying my family and friends about the state of my legal name.

This is how I wrote my full name before I got married: Miss Ann J. O’Connell

This is how I write my full name now: Ms. Ann J. O’Connell

Not a big change, but it’s caused some confusion, not least because at the time of the wedding, I had planned to hyphenate my name, and become Ann O’Connell-Husband. I filled out all the paperwork. I was ready to submit it. Then several things happened.

– The idea of no longer being a full O’Connell bothered me. I got married at 31, so I’d been an O’Connell for a long time.

– I’ve never liked the idea of the changeable female surname. It all seems – like wedding veils and white dresses –  like a throwback to the days when women were property, handed over from a father to a husband for the price of livestock and a hope chest.

– When questioned, my husband told me that he did not care whether I kept my last name or took his own.

– Some of my friends got divorced and a couple of them went through the name dilemma all over again; do they change their names back? Do they keep their married names? What about their kids?

– After witnessing all that, I started really thinking about my name. What name will feel right to me, no matter what happens? Do I want the hassle of being one name at work and another name at home? Is that too much of a Batman/Bruce Wayne dual existence for me? What name do I want on the foot of my hospital bed when I’m 98 and in the rest home?

– After a lot of thought, the name-changing paperwork seemed like too much work for something I didn’t really want, and for something that my husband didn’t care about. I shredded the forms and went on being Ann O’Connell.

Now don’t get me wrong; I’m not expecting members of the oldest generation in our family to understand why I didn’t take my husband’s name. And it’s easier for members of my husband’s family who don’t know me very well to simply write “Mr. & Mrs. My-Husband’s-Name.” But after a while, it’s come to be grating to see how many people – including the ones who know better – assign my husband’s name to me. I once got a birthday card addressed to Mrs. My-Husband’s-Name from someone. I glanced at it, thought it was was actually addressed to my husband, and gave it to him. He opened it, saw what it was, and handed the card back to me. I had this strange flashback to being a small child, seeing that there was mail for me, but dutifully handing it to an adult first.

Getting cards addressed to Mrs. My-Husband’s-Name is  a little odd to me, because we were married in 2009, and women have been not changing their names for a very long time. Some forward-thinking women in the ’50s and ’60s kept their names. Many feminists in the ’70s kept their names. It’s not new. It’s not even new in my family. One of my aunts who married in the ’80s didn’t change her name and I don’t remember any fallout from that.

But there has been some resistance. I’ve been told that  if we have children, I will probably change my name so that we can all be one united family. It’s also been insinuated that I’ve been disrespectful to my husband because I did not take his name.

I’d like to suggest that neither is true. I don’t think any person should feel as if he or she has to sacrifice his or her name in order to be a member of a cohesive, healthy and loving family. And I am no less of a wife than I would be if I went by Mrs.-My-Husband’s-Name.

And also, this is not to criticize the women who choose to take their husband’s names. Every person has the right to choose the name that seems best for them. For me, the right choice was to keep O’Connell.

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Why I’m done doing things conventionally.

This is a story about a couch.

Actually, this is a story about a search for a couch, and what it taught me about doing business the conventional way.

This weekend, my husband and I had to find a replacement for Horace, the couch that currently sits in our living room. Horace, unlike most couches, has a name. He’s been named because although he’s beige, he has acquired a lot of character in 30 years. Too much. So much, in fact, that my brother cannot sit on him without wheezing. Horace, bless his beige, cat-scratched heart, has got to go.

We started looking for a new couch on Friday. We had a small budget set aside for it. Neither one of us is new to furniture shopping. Both of us, when we were living singly, got a lot of stuff from the Goodwill and Salvation Army. I once furnished an entire apartment for $40, thanks to hand-me-downs, Freecycle, Craigslist and tag sales.

I will admit that we did hit some Goodwills and vintage stores, mostly out of habit. But we didn’t want a secondhand item this time. We wanted a nice couch. A new couch. A couch that no butts – canine, feline or human — had previously rested upon. Our very own brand new comfy couch, scotch-guarded, covered in a color that we had selected, and possibly delivered by burly men who would carry it over our threshold. Why? Because we are homeowners, tax-payers and grown-ups, and that’s how grown-ups buy furniture.

We started by going on down to the discount furniture showroom. The couches were in our budget, but the selection was limited and the sofas seemed cheap. Then we went to a furniture store where the furniture didn’t seem cheap. For good reason; it was twice what we could afford. We skedaddled  before anyone could ask if we were being helped. Then we went home and did a quick Google search. As it turned out, a major department store had a furniture section. Who knew? We headed to the mall and quickly found out why we’d never heard of this particular furniture department: it’s a dimly-lit grotto in the back of the store’s basement, behind the section where they’re keeping the Christmas trees for the next month. It’s staffed by a very strange man, who probably doesn’t see other humans very often, and followed us around as if he was planning to feed on our souls. And the furniture is cheap-looking, which probably why the lights are so dim back there. We departed from that cave in a hurry and we didn’t stop, or look back, until we reached the latte shop in the food court. Lastly, we decided to hit our state’s other discount furniture store, which hooray, had sofas in our price range and also seemed to have items that we liked. We decided on a couch almost instantly, but thought we’d wait a few hours, measure our house to see if we could get it through the door, and then call in our order. We were elated. CouchQuest 2011 was over.

When we got home, I looked up the couch and on a whim, decided to look at the customer reviews, because I loved the couch and I wanted to see how many other people loved it too. I wanted to join the cult of love for my new couch. I wanted to hear all about its snuggly pillows on cold winter nights, and about how I could take naps on it on autumn afternoons.

I clicked. The first reviewer described her couch pillows falling apart within the first year. Maybe her couch was a fluke. I clicked again. The second reviewer said that her couch only looked new for the first month. Click. The third reviewer loved his couch so much he gave it five whole stars. But his review sounded exactly like ad copy. “It’s so easy to clean,” he crowed. Really? In the store, we read a bit of fine print about chenille being dry-clean only.  Click. The fourth reviewer was angry. “In six months it looked like I had a 10 year-old couch.” Click. “Mine arrived damaged.”

I yelled down to my husband not to call the store. He didn’t want to hear it. He was in love with the couch too, but after reading two pages of bad reviews, he agreed with me. There was no way we were blowing our couch fund on a lemon. And there was no way we were going to give business to that store. I had checked online review sites for the business itself. I found scathing comments written by the spouses of  employees who were forced to come in during dangerous storms, comments from customers who felt cheated and comments from people who felt all the furniture was cheap. We felt bad that the salesman, who seemed like a nice guy, was not getting a commission from us but we simply could not do it.

We were bummed. My husband, looking downtrodden, made dinner. That was when my rage kicked in. I went into the other room, slammed my butt down on Horace and opened my laptop.

What the hell had I been doing? Why did I feel the need to buy furniture – probably not even made ethically and definitely not made in this country –  from stores that abuse their employees and cheat their customers? Why? Because this is what people do? That is no reason to do anything. That’s how unethical behavior gets to be the norm. I typed in a search on Craigslist. It was Sunday night. All the tag salers were cutting their losses. Someone in our town was getting rid of a 100-year-old velvet couch, for free. It’s in our living room right now. We’re using the couch fund to reupholster it, and we’re hoping to use a small local business for that.

And if the cost of re-upholstery is too high? We’ll do it ourselves. Not because that’s what we’re supposed to do, but because it makes the most sense for us.

This couch may also need a name. She has sufficient character.

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The Grocery War

I hate the grocery store.

In our house, Stop & Shop is referred to as The Evil Empire, and couponing is considered a noble form of guerilla warfare which predates the extreme couponing reality TV shows of last year. We’re taking money out of the pockets of the Empire, right under the nose of the yellow-shirted storm troopers who patrol its aisles.

If we manage to use the circular, manufacturers’ coupons and stack those with one of the Evil Empire’s own coupons, it’s a well-planned attack and we’re giddy with our victory. If we do all that while getting the reusable bag discount and obtaining gas points, that is a direct hit on the Death Star and we dance as we wheel the spoils to our car.

We could stop going, I know that, we could choose a new way to get our food, but we use that store for a variety of reasons, so I’ve decided to deal with my hatred and wage my little coupon war. It makes me feel better about all the money we’ve spent there over the past several years. There’s one thing my war doesn’t make me feel better about: Being at the store.

Nothing raises my ire more than being in Stop & Shop, pushing a cart, while people careen up and down aisles without looking where they’re going, children scream, slow-moving old people cause pet aisle traffic jams and three ladies all park their carts right in front of the mayonnaise I want and gossip for half an hour. I get especially murderous in Produce, where the management has, as a cruel joke, put three digital scales out for all the customers to fight over. As if we weren’t already hip-checking one another to get at the produce itself. There’s always some poor ancient husband staking out one of those scales while his wife roves Produce, collecting cabbage and squeezing grapefruits, and the poor guy has to guard the scale from the rest of us until she comes back to weigh it all at once. The whole experience makes my inner monkey screech and bare her fangs, and sometimes I hide in the health food section and gaze upon the gluten-free cookies to calm myself.

To keep my criminal record clean, I’ve decided to find an hour when our grocery store is not crowded, and shop then. It’s been a seven-year mission, and I still haven’t found a good time slot.

Here are my discoveries thus far:

From 9 to noon: parents with small children and over-flowing shopping carts/senior citizens who all know one another and want to catch up.

Noon to 2 p.m.: parents with small children/senior citizens/harried people on lunch break who are hungry and trying to shop for the week in 15 min.

2 p.m. to 4:30 p.m.: College kids, just getting off campus for groceries/parents with older children/high schoolers who’ve come in to chat with friends who work at the store.

4:30 to 7 p.m.: People who are getting out of work and have suddenly remembered that they have nothing to eat in their homes. They are hungry, frustrated with traffic and furious if they so much as see a coupon produced by a person ahead of them in the checkout lane.

7 p.m. to late: College kids, in various stages of disrepair.

Back when our store was 24 hours, I used to shop in the middle of the night, but there were a lot of drunks at those hours.

I still haven’t explored before 9 a.m. on weekdays or random times on weekends. I am convinced that someday I will find the sweet spot in the grocery store schedule and will find an hour when it’s just me in the store. It will be a major coup in my campaign against the Evil Empire.

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Blocked.

Recently I’ve begun to suspect that I’ve been rejected.

Someone may have blocked me on Facebook. And not just one someone, but maybe as many as five someones. Maybe even more. And it’s eating my lunch. But my real problem is not that five people may have blocked me on Facebook. I’m irritated because I’m bugged by being blocked on Facebook. You follow? No? I’ll draw a diagram. Here.

I mean, really.

Why would I care? Someone blocked me on Facebook. Big deal. This shouldn’t be a problem for me, because it isn’t a problem.

First of all, if out of 450 “friends,” five have blocked me, that’s a pretty decent rate of acceptance versus rejection. Second of all, and more importantly, I don’t interact with the suspected blockers in real life. I expect to see a couple of them at assorted reunions, probably in the very distant future. The others I may never see, ever, again.

Some of these blockages are even mutual. I can think of at least one alleged blocker whose posts I’ve had hidden for a year. It wasn’t personal; I just didn’t want to see the graphic updates about the contents of her child’s diapers. Evidently she was equally unimpressed by all my clever status updates and scintillating blog posts. And we aren’t actually friends in real life. We never were. If you look at it rationally, our Facebook break-up is a win-win. But in the self-centered, personal propaganda world of Facebook, where everyone is your “friend” and  people are unable to “dislike” your photos, updates or relationships, being blocked comes as somewhat of a shock.

Why should that be? Most of us deal with rejection in the real world all the time. We interview for, but don’t get jobs. We don’t get complimented when we think we deserve it. We say hello to people on the street and they don’t say hello back. People give us the finger in traffic. And although these daily rejections are awkward at best and painful at worst, we deal with them.

I’m 33. Like most people my age, I’ve watched friendships crumble, relationships fall apart, been passed over for promotions. As a writer, I’ve gotten good at being rejected by magazines and journals. When I worked as a journalist, I got used to people being furious at or dismissive of me. But on Facebook rejection brings me back to middle school.

“They don’t like you,”  says the little voice in my brain, the one I heard all the time when I was 12 years old. “They don’t like you and they don’t ‘like’ you.”

This voice is not my friend. It used to hear classmates laughing a few tables over in the cafeteria and convince me that those kids were laughing at me.

“I thought you were dead,” I say to the voice. “I thought I left your mangled corpse on the streets of Spain in 1999.”

“You’re talking to yourself,” says the voice. “No wonder people don’t like you. Or ‘like’ you.”

And the cycle begins anew.

So really, what’s the deal with Facebook and rejection? My only guess is that our Facebook profiles are such manicured, Photoshopped versions of who we are. We post the most attractive or amusing photos of ourselves as profile shots, or else we post pictures of the things we want to show off: our kids, our wedding photos, our pets, our flower gardens, our priceless collections of stamps or brass military buttons. Our statuses are little flags we wave for attention. Our interests are carefully edited. And when someone rejects all that, when they block you, that can seem like a rejection of your highest self.

Except it’s not. It’s a rejection of your own personal propaganda. And if that bothers you, you probably need to get over yourself. I know I do.

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Making time for work, or, This novella ain’t gonna revise itself.

, ,

Today, I’ve spent a lot of time dodging people, and trying to make the time to write and revise. It’s imperative that I make the time work today, because I have a half-revised novella on my hands, and I’m due to send it out next week. The prose ain’t gonna polish itself, amirite?

But for some reason today has not been a day of quiet, thoughtful work. It’s been an obstacle course. My phone is ringing. The dog is needy. My neighbor would like to talk to me, right now. Another neighbor has decided to start mowing his lawn with the loudest lawnmower ever invented. My husband, busy with his own job, needs me to run an errand. On that errand, I run into people who want to speak with me and ask me how my summer has been and what plans I have for fall. When I come back, my cat has decided to impress me by attempting to eat a Nintendo DS charger. Sweet lord.

I understand that none of these (except for the charger-eating cat) are unreasonable things. Running an errand while my husband is busy is no big deal, it’s good that my dog is affectionate, and most people actually like to make small talk. It’s polite. They’re being nice. I’m the unreasonable one.

None of the people I met this morning know that I’ve been revising in my head since I woke up. None of them know that while they are talking about their plans for the rest of August, I’m thinking Do I just cut out the first two pages? But then how can I make the opium den believable? And do I really have to lose the part about the chickens on the Fung-Wah bus? I mean, come on. Everyone likes chickens.

No. The people I met this morning just think I’m a rude, distracted-looking woman who hasn’t showered today, and was late for my errand thanks to two wrong turns and a near accident. It’s probable they think I have a decreased mental capacity, or that I’m insane and need to be confined.

Evidently I think I need to be confined as well. Right now I’m holed up in my office, hunched over my laptop. I’ve seen myself in the mirror. I look like a crazy person. Maybe we should pad the walls in here.

Why am I writing this instead of revising? Two reasons.

First, because I need to vent. I’m afraid that if I don’t vent, I’ll burst into tears and shriek Leave me alone, I’m thinking about chickens and whisper videos, dammit! at the next person who asks me how I’m doing today.

Second, because I think it’s important to write and think about making the time to work. So often, I put off the things I want or need to do because people are calling me, or because I forget that writing is my job, or because I enjoy writing so much that it can sometimes feel like play. But writing is work, and in this case, for me, it’s serious work because someone is waiting for it. This is a discussion writers need to have often, because I think many of us forget that writing isn’t just fiddling around with a pen and paper or a keyboard. It’s serious work, and requires a commitment.

And now that I’ve said all that, I’m hitting the “publish” button and logging out so that I can get to work.

Now.

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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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The reluctant grammarian.

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I hate wasting my time on grammar. As a student, I rolled my eyes whenever a teacher pointed out a grammatical error. Though I was an English nerd as a student, I was one of those lazy kids who became indignant when a science teacher had the temerity to point out and then — oh horror — take points off my grade for sloppy spelling and grammar. “But this is science, not English,” I would whine. “Grammar isn’t important in science.”

If I could reach back through time and slap myself, I would.

Because grammar is always important. There. I said it. Grammar is important, but despite the fact that I’ve made my living with my ability to put ideas into words, I didn’t really pay grammar much attention for years. I mostly just knew when things I wrote were wrong and when they were right. In fact avoided reading about the rules of grammar until two things happened: 1) I started teaching at the college level 2) I opened a Facebook account.

First let it be noted,  I hate grammar.

One of the reasons that I’m all worked up about this is because I feel like I’ve been forced to brand myself a grammarian, when all I want is for people to stop pluralizing by sticking apostrophes to the end of random, innocent nouns.

I don’t want to be a grammarian because I’m not one. I don’t know every rule. I regularly make a fool of myself in Facebook statuses, email and on Twitter. Probably even on this blog. But I feel I have to say something when I see yea used as yeah, and people who fling a handful of commas at every sentence in hopes that one of those commas will end up in the correct place. Commas are not ninja stars, people.

One of the universe’s strangest phenomena.

Here’s something else I hate about paying attention to grammar. My complaining about other people’s errors makes me look like a moron when I make a mistake. And I will make a mistake. Because that is one of the universe’s strangest phenomena: People who point out the grammatical errors of others always make their own grammatical mistakes while they’re critiquing someone else. When I was working for the newspaper, and “helpful” readers would email me to correct a mistake I’d made in an article, there was almost always a spelling error in the email that pointed out my mistake. I’m no different. I will proof this post many times, but an error born of righteous indignation will appear in it. I just know it. (Point the error out in the comments! Think of it as a grammatical game of Where’s Waldo.)

The reluctant grammarian in the classroom.

In past years, several students have said some version of this to me: “It’s not important how I write it. My message is the important thing.”

Right.

Look, our Constitution is properly punctuated. Every holy book for every faith on the planet has been proofed. You can put money down that every advertisement blasted at you has been edited and spellchecked multiple times.

If your message is at least as important as any of the above, it probably deserves to be encrypted in proper grammar.

Here’s what I would like to say to those students, and to anyone who has a message so important that they think it might transcend the rules of basic grammar:

I too would prefer to concentrate on the content of a piece rather than the arrangement of the characters that make it up.  But because of your bad grammar I can’t concentrate on the meaning of your piece. Instead, I’m wasting time trying to decipher it. Your precious message might be important. It might be life-changing. But if you don’t take the time to write it down correctly — if your their turns into a there, or if your yeah loses its h, or if you slip into Facebook-speak and use 2 instead of to and ur instead of your — well, then your message might not be taken seriously.

And that brings me to my next point.

The reluctant grammarian on Facebook.

Sometimes it can be painful to read status updates on Facebook.

For the record, I do not think Facebook and Twitter are ruining the English language and making people illiterate. Facebook and Twitter are encouraging literacy because both sites rely on written language. You can’t be illiterate and be on Facebook, so there’s a sort of added social pressure to be able to express yourself in words. And social media has done something else for language: it has made people’s levels of literacy public.

Facebook isn’t killing the written word, it is changing language. All the little abbreviations that pop up on the Internet are headed for spoken conversation. OMG and WTF are being nicely assimilated into our slang as OK was a century ago.

I support all these things. I think social pressure to be literate is awesome. And I think we can only benefit from being exposed to each others’ literacy levels. I love me some vernacular, so I like the idea of acquiring new slang.

But Facebook might just be taking an axe to the rules of grammar. Why? Because capital letters are a hassle to type on a cell phone, maybe, or because if one’s friends aren’t big on spelling, maybe some people don’t feel like they need to be vigilant about their status updates. Or maybe people are just spelling things in their own way because they are beautiful, unique snowflakes and spelling is how they express that uniqueness. (I know one person whose trademark is a double letter on the end of at least one word in every status update, plus an elipses. Example: “my parakeet lovess sushii…” )

Or maybe because it’s just Facebook and therefore unimportant and therefore somehow undeserving of proper grammar, even though so many of us spend so much time online, reading each other’s status updates.

Even though we’re communicating with hundreds of people at a time.

Even though we’re often communicating about the things that are most important to us.

Even though grammar is the boat that allows us to navigate the great sea of written language.

It’s not “just Facebook,” or “just Twitter” or “just an email” or even “just a text.” It’s the way we communicate with each other in today’s society. And if we’re going to be able to understand one another, we’re all going to need to follow some rules.

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