Blog Month, A Retrospective

In the past thirty days I've blogged at least once every twenty-four hours, and boy are my mind, heart, and fingertips tired. Now it's time to reflect on why I've done this, what--if anything--I've learned, and where as a writer I go from here.

Brock and I have frequently discussed why I'm blogging and not working on the book. I feel as if the blogging is working on the book, though I'm not sure if it's the one I've already written or an entirely new one altogether. Lala was a topic of some, maybe a fifth, of my entries. Many entries dealt with the frustrations of growing up and not being ready for it, not feeling adequate enough to accomplish the difficult (even the easy!) things life requires of grownups. In all of them I wade through guilt, misery, bugginess. In all of them I try to figure out who I am while also trying to find meanings in what is outside of me. In all of them I'm trying, sometimes futilely, to love.

A manuscript entitled Lying in Translation sits in the bottom draw of my big wooden desk, just feet away from where my feet are propped up on my chair at this very moment. I've held the book, the first draft of my life with Lala that took a much-too cursory glance at something so complicated, several times since I finished typing it four and a half years ago. I've had to hold it--we've moved a few times since then. Always it felt radioactive and too close, and my mind would flash the "Too Soon!" sign earnest people get if you make a celebrity-death joke too quickly after the passing. If ever I open the drawer while searching for paper clips or highlighters, again with the Too Soon! At this point I can't imagine touching it, flipping the pages. But I'm aware that reading my own work is essential to moving forward on this project that means so much that, if I didn't have it on my radar, I'd have nothing.

One of the reasons the book scares me so is very clear: I don't know how it ends, but I have the stinging sense it should be with a death. This is awful because my two greatest fears in life are Lala dying and King dying. (I love so many people so intensely, foremost my husband and mother, but for some reason Lala and King top the death-fear list.) Two fears, two inevitabilities. Daily I'm weeping for reality.

Back when Lala lived with us for a couple of months after Katrina, Brock cheered for my literary blessing: this is how you end your book! We were lucky enough to have all Lala, all the time: Lala sneaking food to King, Lala reminding me how much I loved to have my chepita kissed when I was a girl and asking me if I got addicted to it as a grown woman (wink wink), Lala popping Valiums if the nightly news was too intense, Lala batting her eyes at Brock, her Meester Cleenton.

But it didn't seem right to me. I still hadn't dealt with how scared of and drawn to her I was. Four years later I haven't quite done that yet. Maybe I never will.

Still, I have written 50,000 more words. And hopefully that counts for something.

One thing I know is from here my writing goes private. I must return to the blue and white of Word and work on what I have, discard what's not worth working on. From here I go back to the solitary writing world, one I've been rather unproductive in since I got the writing degree proclaiming me a master in it, and hope that as a result of this experiment I can stick to the schedule I've developed with my promise of my one blog per day.

Perhaps that's one of the reasons I chose the blog format to begin with. It was a promise I was making not only to myself, but those readers I loved. I couldn't screw that up because it would mean public failure. This format, though, was also dangerous. I became horribly sad and insecure when I went unread for days, when my boxes went unchecked, and would think to myself, "If the people who love me most in the world don't want to read me, then no one else will! Why am I writing! Or living!"

Etc., etc. Sad, sad.

This is the kind of gratitude I showed to my readers who, by the grace of Whomever, have decided they love and respect me and my writing. Any comment at all, any glimmer of encouragement, means so much, is so helpful. And I should bestow on each reader gallons of gratitude for seeing my writing, for understanding, for letting me be myself. Because when they write to me, I feel great. At least for a little while.

Thing is, I'm Lala's granddaughter. I always want the more-more-more. The chocolate milk with the cereal. Another plastic toy from TG&Y (which, incidentally, she taught me to steal if I really wanted). The indulgence of being swept away at night into the French Quarter and being kissed and assured repeatedly how perfect I am.

Readers, I love you, but I need to be adored, like, constantly. More than human capacity dictates. I'm holding all of you to the impossible Lala standard.

I'm still finding ways to both blame and thank her for everything. I could've gone to therapy, but while I don't know where I'm going, I like where the book (or thoughts about the book) is taking me.

These thoughts recall one of maybe five statements I remember Rodger Kamenetz telling me as I finished up my MFA degree: "The world doesn't care if you're a writer. If you never write again, the world won't blink." Some may see these as unnecessarily harsh or obvious, but no one can doubt it's veracity. Much as I'd like to hope my favorite online journal Brevity has just lost my email address, which is why its editor isn't requesting my submissions, the truth is I have to sell myself and my work to Brevity. To an editor and agent and hopefully to many, many others. And the prospect is exhausting. Imagine what the actual work will be like.

So where I go from here is I open up a book I began, in some form or another, six years ago, at 23 years of age, when I wrote an entry for a nonfiction workshop about my grandmother telling me it's good in life, sometimes, to literally take it up the ass. It was the anecdote to end all anecdotes. Classmates chuckled at the Wit. Rodger said I had a real Character. This anecdote would begin the thesis I submitted for cursory approval in April 2005.

Now I don't even know if Lala actually ever said that, or if I just had this idea in my mind of how sexually perverse she could be (sprinkled with the times she behaves as if she's never done the deed in her life: four immaculate conceptions, she had).

My other fear: that half my book's stories are largely bullshit, me as a writer just mounting the bardic steed across the page, saying something because it sounds good, but not really meaning it.

It took growing older to learn how to mean it. In many ways I sorta believe I was a better writer in grad school, under the force of so many watchful eyes, than I am now. But if I didn't mean half of what I said, the book isn't worth a damn. In the last few years, through the struggles of near-poverty and love of a good man, and because of the hard work I accomplished to take care of him and myself, I've learned to mean what I do and write, even when I feel craptastic, even when I'm wrong. Shit, I might be pissing in the wind like a damned fool, but I mean every minute of it.

At least, I think so.

Brock, who also takes care of me, told me recently how we should come to terms with our writing despite the small amount of success we've had so far: "Do your best to make the work as good as it can possibly be, and hope the world needs your work when you're ready to show it."

More than twenty years after I wrote in a diary entry that I wanted to become "A Teacher, or An Artist, or A Writer," I think I'm ready, finally, to take on the third of these. Though I need to do it alone, I know I'm never alone, because for all my maudlin insecurities about readers not wanting to read me, I know the truth: you love me, you really do. I'll continue working, among other reasons, for you.

Fragments

The first time, in my house on Foliage, I kept my t-shirt on and when I didn't the second time you said my breasts were smaller in person. Both times and dozens more after that I was pretty sure my grandfather was watching all this from heaven, stoic and staid, and I couldn't tell from his expression if he disapproved. He gazed at me from heaven in the same blank way he did when he was alive. I wondered whether or not Lala slapped him so many times not just because of the infidelities, but to check his pulse. You might not know it, but so many of our times together you were hardly there.

* * * * *

Abuelo did change his expression once. My cousins Jessica and Christine and I were dancing around the living room and one of them climbed up his torso recumbent on the Lazyboy, doing her best to flirt. Suddenly his legs were up in the air, the back of the chair down on the floor, a giant fallen L. The little girls scuttled out of the room, and Lala and I laughed so hard we couldn't breathe. Minutes passed before we lifted the chair to right him. When we did, his face was redder than I'd ever seen, and there was more white to his eyes than I could've imagined, and all he said to us was, "How kind of you."

* * * * *

Abuelo, again on the Lazyboy, legs fire-poker straight with wooly slippers on his feet. I asked for the zillionth time, "Can I?" And he predictably acquieses, even though Lala thinks it's an unhealthy obsession (as any obsession not relating to her must be), and I take off the slippers to begin the peeling. His foot bottoms are white as cake icing, all scab and crusty deadness. If a section of old skin won't peel off, I know to move onto the next one; Lala slaps if I make him bleed. I build a pile of his foot bottom skin and promise to pick up every single piece or otherwise eat them--again, Lala's deal. The scraps of peel look like larger white eraser shavings, and I wonder if I'm working to make Abuelo disappear.

* * * * *

My recurring childhood dream from about the age of eight: I'm Jennifer-Gray thin and wearing her exact pink dress in the final act of Dirty Dancing. My body is still that of an eight-year-old's but I'm not eight intellectually, which is good because of what happens next. I buy a ticket to a train and don't even know where I'm going--just away. On the train is every boy I've ever loved, from Carrie Almond to Patrick What's-His-Fuck to Willie Milligan. No one speaks a word but we all know what to do. I step into my private coach room, and one by one they come in and we make out insanely. No pair of lips can satiate me. As soon as the current-he and I finish with our few wild minutes--before we're even done--I'm on to the next one. When each of them leave I ask them kindly to close the door.

* * * * *

We're making the obligatory Halloween rounds on Phosphor Ave. I'm getting too old for this shit, or so I think, until I approach a porch and the big stuffed mummy sitting askew in a rocking chair leaps up and I scream to shake the rafters. My mom and stepsister are laughing, and I forget to even get some candy I'm so rattled, I forget even that I'm supposed to mutter "asshole" under my breath. As we're walking away from the house some smaller kids approach, and loudly warn them, "Be careful! The mummy's real!" They look up at me gratefully and I feel like a goddamned hero. Then mom grabs my arm and says, "Shhhh! Why do you have to ruin things for people?" We walk the rest of the way in silence. I'm convinced that no one will love or understand me, ever.

* * * * *

A drawing I make for mom years earlier on 30th St.: an elephant with the word Brooke underneath it, and a beautiful princess next to it named Dezi. She hasn't yet discovered the persistent I-hate-my-mother diary entries. I keep leaving the thing out hoping she'll read it, but if she has, she's made no mention. So I show her the damned drawing. She asks what the meaning of this is, why I'm trying to hurt her feelings. And it's the first of a zillion times I'll ask myself why art doesn't always work, why I even bother trying so hard to be me.

* * * * *

Dad and I are leaving Waldenbooks and I've got three new Babysitter's Club books. I swing my bag not so blithely as I'd like because it's come to my attention I'm running out of book room in the drawers Woody built to slide under my bed, but I don't tell Dad that, because I already know Woody's a fucking shithead scuzbucket, and I'm not in the mood to be reminded. Dad and I slow down at the approach of a tall woman with red hair. Her words sound like bird chirps, polite and annoying. Probably they'd prefer having this conversation without me here. But what are they even saying anyway? I get the sense that each of them are talking to an invisible person alongside the other. Her name is Donna, I learn near the end, and we smell her ripe fruit scent in the parking lot, in the carride home. I never see her again.

* * * * *

I am holding an inchoate life in brown pants. You are beautiful, Christian, and I can't talk to you. This makes me sad, because there are already so many things I want to tell you. For instance, you don't have to be your father or even love him, and if you decide not to, since I'm good at knowing guilt I'll show you how to avoid it. Really, you should only love the deserving, though if you're like your mother, you'll roll your eyes at that because you know I'll love you even when you decide to love stupid fuckers. Know that you've been so wondrous in this life that I've been happy to drink your pee (which I just did, a few minutes ago). What depths do these little toes hold? What are the possibilities inside this head, which for now even my tiny hand dwarfs? Even a baby should know these questions are futile: you will simply become, and I will try to be there to see it. For the next few moments my chest will rise and fall alongside yours. Each time I'm holding you, I'm ready.

Discovering Precious

On Thanksgiving night Brock and I began a tradition--which makes this the first annual--of going to see a movie after spending daylight hours stuffing ourselves with turkey and dressing. We were fifteen minutes early to see Precious: Based on the Novel Push by Sapphire, but I suppose that was equitable to be thirty minutes late on Thanksgiving because the movie was already sold out. Fuck, even Old Dogs was sold out, not that I would've considered seeing it. I may have been sweet potato-fat, but I still had my dignity.

We bought tickets to the 10:30 movie instead and returned home to clean for the two-hour interim. So we did and I was grateful for our being forced to see the later show so that we could leave the house looking perfect and cranberry-cleaner smelling (another thing I love about Thanksgiving, besides getting fat: its insistence that you change out of dark perspectives). I stuffed the requisite tissues and can of Diet Coke in my purse since I'd heard this was the kind of movie you have to prepare for.

And it was, oh my god, it was. It's been years since I've seen a movie with this kind of intensity, and even as I say that phrase--it's been years since--I feel I'm hitting a false note because honestly I've never witnessed anything comparable to this. Monster's Ball, In the Bedroom, you both are so weak. While watching this film, at the point you hope-hope-hope something awful doesn't happen to your sad protagonist, Precious, it happens, but much-much worse than you expected it to. I won't give away details, because presumably you will see it and we can talk about it. My point in writing this is instead to reveal to you the odd behaviors occurring around us as we watched the movie, and try to discover why it went down this way.

I won't mince words: we were the only two white people (as white as I can consider myself) in the movie theater. We were the first to arrive because we wanted our perfect upper-deck seats, and the auditorium filled up quickly. Something else I won't mince words about, even though it's perverted and I'm not proud of it: it's thrilling for me to be a dwarfed minority in public places. For a few moments I feel like, hey brothers and sisters, I'm one of you--I care about the same things you care about, watch the movies you want to watch, empathize with the very feelings you own. In other words, I love all of you.

Before you react, just know I realize how very Harper Lee, how very dumb-admiring-from-afar-white-woman this is of me. My heart might be something to admire if it were for my oft-piddling brain.

Tangible evidence of why my thrilled mentality was problematic: the audience members behaved very badly throughout the entire movie. I'm not saying they fulfilled any racial stereotype, no, it was worse than that. On the whole, this audience hated the movie. It might be said here that the entire cast of Precious is black, and that the characters' circumstances are beyond bleak, and that the way these elements are evoked on the screen are hyper-realistic. Literally you can see every pimple and scar and twitch of a character's face. The camera is unrelenting. Much like a horrible car accident, you know you must look away for fear of what's inside, but you can't. And when you look, you cry at the inexplicable. In short, Brock borrowed half of my Kleenex. My husband is not a crier.

But around us people were bored. They were texting. They were laughing at those horrifying scenes that tensed up my calve muscles, tensed up my teeth. Moments when the movie gave us a brief respite from the sadness and one of the characters said or did something hilarious, the audience remained stoic, texted some more. Every one of the audience's visceral responses was the exact opposite of mine.

* * * * *

Let me give a brief respite from this audience analysis and take you a year or two into the past. I was (and still am) in love with Barack Obama and was dedicated to electing him our next president. So along with making phone calls, door knocking, and spreading the word as effectively as family and Facebook will allow, I was becoming someone else I'm not very proud of now: a vigilante.

The perpetrators I was to uncover and out to the world were the racists. I saw them everywhere I went. White man in a fishing cap = racist. Old white woman with perfectly manicured French-tip fingernails smoking a cigarette outside of Buddy's gas station = racist. Mini-van with a Sarah Palin bumper sticker = mini-van full of racists, even the kid in the carseat (okay okay--future racist). It was a sense I got from certain people. Of course I didn't believe all whites were racist, but if I felt something askew about them, if they squinted at the sun in a certain way, Racist was the invisible sign I'd frame above their heads. If what I was doing weren't so damaging and ignorant, I would've seen myself as a hapless Inspector Clouseau. Instead I was the one-woman member of the John Birch Society, only in reverse.

Months and years later this reminds me of the story my landlord Clay told me about when he was held up at gunpoint by two black men in his home. The lesson he learned, he said, was to be more vigilant around black people. Of course not all of them are bad, he reminded my increasingly horrified visage, but after the robbery he'd picked up a sixth sense about these things, and in public he was able to root out the bad ones from the good.

Meanwhile I thought the Palin rallies had similarly taught me where rotten could be found in white. But I justified this to myself: I was on the right side of history, and these dipshit troglodyte bottom-feeders prayed to God that the nigger would go to hell. They truly deserved my contempt.

Please don't equate these admissions with the idea that I blindly supported Barack Obama because of my reverse-John-Birch-Society mentality. I haven't been sitting around these past five years after poor milquetoast Kerry was defeated and looking for a splendid black man to support. He just showed up, happened to be black and was a terrific writer and brilliant mind, the latter two being the reasons why I ultimately supported him (and which admittedly have little to nothing to do with politics or someone's ability to run the government, but I didn't--and still don't--care much of a lick about that).

* * * * *

So the audience members I blindly loved in my blind comraderie did not love me nor Precious. When the movie was over I slapped myself silently a couple of times to restore color to my cheeks (how 19th century of me), dried my eyes and walked with Brock to the men's bathroom, where I waited outside. A group of ladies walked passed me and lamented, "Shit, we shoulda seen New Moon. We coulda seen Old Dogs."

I wanted to stop them and ask what they were looking for in their movies, what kind of entertainment they thought a bunch of white teenage vampires who--gasp!--cannot fuck could provide them. Yes, this is snobby of me--there, I said it: to hell with New Moon--but I'd just seen a transformative, real, existential kind of movie, and these women seemed put out by it.

Secretly I wanted to say, Do you know what's good for you? Do you need me to tell you what can be learned from this film?

John Birch Society all right, but not so much in reverse at this point.

All the way home I cried intermittently for the movie and for the audience reaction. Brock suggested this particular audience reaction (he's a very careful, deliberative liberal white man) might have rejected the movie for its sheer realism. "It's Thanksgiving, after all," he said. "Most people probably don't want to experience this kind of pain today."

Then I asked him about Tyler Perry, why his films are so popular among the black community. I described to Brock the Perry film I just saw a few weeks ago, Why Did I Get Married?, in which four couples go on a mountain retreat to reevaluate their lives together. What was stunningly lame about this movie was how each couple and each individual fit into some black stereotype I believe was created mostly by white people (or media, or history--essentially, white people): there was the always-drunk woman, the fat god-fearing woman, the rampant infidelity among three of the couples, the welfare-check collector, the gold digger, the guy with VD. The characters were black but they weren't real. Even if black people of these types do exist, these particular characters struck only one note in the entire range of human emotions and behaviors. They encapsulated one or two ways of being only, and that just isn't right, Mr. Perry. Though he's clearly doing something right; his movies are some of the highest grossing of any auteur filming today.

"They watch him because he's easy, because he doesn't make them think," suggested Brock.

Then again, what the fuck do I know? Where are my real, fleshed-out human black friends for whom to base my Tyler Perry character comparisons? Why aren't they coming over to my mini post-Thanksgiving party today?

My black friends are out there, I'm sure, living meaningful, purposeful lives, reading Richard Wright novels and working diligently to support minority voting rights and absolutely falling in love with the movie Precious: Based on the Novel Push by Sapphire. I just haven't met them yet.

Leche con Chocolate

Virgin milk in a tall glass that shudders at the cold it holds, a child's chin on the edge of the kitchen countertop, admiring the pour. Then the long, elegant stream of dark, how obscured by the thick whiteness until, like magic, a full-bodied spoon is dunked in the glass and after a couple of pirouettes, the thick darkness unveiled. Mi leche con chocolate. Even the glass tears up at how pretty all this is.

A calculation: my childhood veins carried about 30% blood, 70% chocolate milk. It is impossible to remember a morning without it. What impresses me most about the memories is how grateful the small me is for each and every glass. More mornings than it is possible for my head to hold were spent with my chin on that countertop waiting for the dark magic. When I think of how many meals in adulthood have become obligatory, the chewing and swallowing like a drone punching in and out of work, I myself feel dark and lonely, and I mourn the death of eating ecstasy.

It can still be found in desserts that friends are munificent enough to make: chocolate-cashew tortes, honey pies, doughy cake balls dipped in white chocolate. Luckily for me I indulge in these only at parties, which is not often, as a runner cannot go far with a bellyful of cake balls, delicious as they are. But when I do allow myself these desserts, my ever-loving lord: again the sensation that shuddering must accompany eating, that maybe here inside the stickiness can be found some purpose in our lives, an unveiling of a larger scheme.

Willy Wonka's ideology within a hymnal? God inside of chocolate? Though my people (and by my people, I mean Lala) are adept at hyperbole, I'm not sure about all that. Really I'm saying that as an adult, I'm most conscious of what I eat when it's sugary, because it's so damned good and I know exactly how damned bad it is for me. During the moments I'm eating it, though, I say goodbye to all that and am transported, madeleine-style, back to the smaller body with its chin on the kitchen countertop. Sometimes it feels good not to feel oneself.

I think on this because I couldn't remember the last time I drank a glass of milk, but then I woke up this morning to find a miniscule white pool at the bottom of the glass on my nightstand. My first thought was, Who left this empty glass of milk here? It took a few long opening minutes of consciousness to recognize it was indeed my glass, and I'd drunk the milk. Still I'm trying to remember the taste but can't--I slept through the every sumptuous gulp.

Two things sadden me regarding food: that it's a nearly ubiquitous issue for women, and that what I do remember of food during my childhood, that gorgeous pre-issue period, doesn't extend much further than those mornings of chocolate milk. When we met, Brock had the idea that every meal Lala cooked for me was exotic because, well, we're brown. Don't your people make great food? Aren't overseas, possibly black market spices involved? Is there some form of incantation?

What follows is the sad reality of everything I remember eating before I was responsible for putting food together for myself:*

• leche con chocolate
• taquitos
• arroz con huevo frito
• cereal--either Lucky Charms or Cocoa Puffs or Cheerios
• arroz con pollo
• papas fritas
• platanos con carne asada

Now that I look on the list, it seems that without meaning to I've produced one of those Highlights Magazine's "what's-the-odd-thing-in-this-picture" scenes. One thing I can guarantee with nearly 100% assurance is that if I was eating at home, and I was younger than ten, these were one of seven meals I'd be eating.

Last night at our solitary Thanksgiving dinner, Brock ate two plates to my half-plate, which is as it should be--he's a big strong man, and I'm trying every day to become a better runner. Again and again he dipped into the broccoli and cheese casserole, the brussel sprouts and mushrooms, the upside-down turkey, the cranberry, the mounds of mashed potatoes with their caves of gravy. At one point he reminisced that when he was a boy, all he ever wanted was to be able to eat more than he could, but he was so skinny it was impossible. Now as a man, he has to force himself to stop eating, and often fails. Then he asked if I was going to finish the errant crescent roll and sweet potatoes on my plate. I pushed them over.

Here I realized something else I miss about eating while young: Lala's complete devotion to every bite I ever took. It often drives my mom crazy because Lala still does this, stares at us while we eat, and says, Que gusto que me da, viendote comer. Mom gets no joy at those big eyes of Lala's obsessed with each moment of mastication. But my secret is, I kinda love it. Lala sort of makes you feel proud for being able to eat heartily, which has always been a discounted skill of mine. She reads your look, knows your love for what's slow in becoming part of you, and she compounds that joy you may feel guilty for. Her look says, you know what? Fuck that guilt. Look at you, you are eating and happy and so good at what you're doing, which is understanding what it is to enjoy yourself fully. That is a skill, and you, mijita, are a master.

It is weird, though, when she waits until I've got a mouthful of food to tell me how beautiful my body is. That ruins things a little bit, transporting me to my next five-mile run. How in the world, I think, am I ever going to work this off?

Running: a thing almost entirely absent from my childhood. There was no place in the world I needed to get to quickly. Everything I could think to need and want always sat before me. Now I'm always running, still unsure of exactly where I'm going.

Glossary*: I've recognized that some of these terms might have to be interpreted, and I thought it might be useful to have the food of my youth defined fully for myself and others. This should also serve as a reminder of what not to eat, although eating it can be so good.

leche con chocolate--chocolate milk, best concocted using 2%, only acceptable in tall adult glass
taquitos--more like taquotes (that's a big taco, to you and me), these large flour tortillas are fried lightly in butter then filled with about half a block of mozzarella cheese, the two sides of the tortilla then folded over like arms in a hug, and then gorged upon
arroz con huevo frito--a generous bed of rice with two fried eggs on the top, lots of butter, salt, and pepper to top it off
arroz con pollo--same bed of rice, but spicy chicken on top, probably the most healthy among these meals
papas fritas--friend potatoes, or french fries, which require no explanation
platanos con carne asada--plantains (those hard green bananas on steriods that one can never find at Winn Dixie) chopped into medallions and fried in butter alongside a healthy cut of steak with spicy spices

I almost forgot: Que gusto que me da, viendote comer. What pleasure it brings me watching you eat. Watching others eat makes her happiest these days, and all the days I remember of her. If Lala could crawl inside our mouths or hearts and curl up there for awhile, she would. What we are is what her dreams are made of.

My Subject is Everything

A few weeks ago, in the midst of a wine-tingling night, I came up with a fabulous plan I had to share with Brock right away, like Right Now: a book project. We'd compile a list of subjects/topics/ideas (starting with my thousand) and one by one I'd tackle them through prose, and Brock would write a poem on the exact same subjects. The word Brilliant kept flashing across the blackboard of my mind in neon pink, and in cursive. By the time I related the idea to Brock I was ready to throw all our collective thoughts into a hat, but when I looked over to him he was shaking his head and said, in a not unsweet manner, "No, that's not how it works. Curb your enthusiasm."

Brock had supped on a little wine, too.

It reminded me of a similar conversation we had years ago, only in this instance it was a series of my bright ideas that were shut down in a similarly not unsweet manner. See, Brock would tell me a story about something interesting that happened at the grocery store or gas station, some lack of communication between himself and the outside world (one of his finest tropes) and I would respond, "Brilliant. You have to write a poem about it." Sometimes Brock would agree and actually write it, other times he wouldn't, but eventually we discussed whether or not anything on this good earth has the possibility to be a subject for our writing.

I was on Team Yes, Brock on Team No.

Brock's position reflects the refrain we've heard from writing teachers all our lives: "Just because it happened to you, doesn't make it good, or real, or worthy." And this is admittedly hard to disagree with in a fiction workshop when a writer's defense of his story is simply, "It has to be realistic, because this really happened!" It's like Dan White's Twinkie defense in the 70s--it doesn't make right what you've done, and really it's positively laughable. In short: yes, your story happened but it still sucks.

On the other hand Brock's position is ironic because his wonderful mentor and newly minted poetry star, Mark Halliday, has made a career of writing about the minutia of his own daily life. One of my favorite poems of his is called "Muck Clump," in which he discusses how insignificant he often feels alongside his wife and daughter Devin, and how one morning he gets up to fix Devin her breakfast of shredded wheat, and as his wife glides through the kitchen she tells him he hasn't poured enough cereal for Devin, a growing girl. And then for two more pages of poem he imagines grandly, Walter Mitty-style, how wrong his wife is and how right he is, and how the profuse amount of cereal she's poured for Devin will congeal and turn into a nasty muck clump, because no one can eat as much shredded wheat as his wife has poured for his daughter. After he imagines making an extravagant show of tossing the massive muck clump down the drain he awakens to find Devin placing her empty bowl in the sink and kissing him, then skipping off to school. Classic Mark Halliday: breakfast scene, family, insecurities, hopeful-delusions of grandeur. And while part of this is the persona Halliday creates specifically for his art, he is also writing about the small events in his life worth recreating.

And I love that.

As you might be able to tell by now, I heavily depend on persistent thoughts, observations, and wishes for my subjects. More and more I'm realizing my subject is not just Lala, or my family, or my youth--my subject is everything. And even Brock would agree that if one constructs this everything artfully, there's nothing wrong with that.

My concern comes in when considering the ethics and value of certain writing scenarios. I toil, I worry, over this:

• Am I exploiting those I love in my writing? Am I depending on their strengths and weaknesses and daily actions, whatever they may be, in order for my work to work?
• If there is a line to be drawn on which subjects are off limits, where is that line? Is it what makes me uncomfortable, or what makes my subjects uncomfortable? And if I keep my toes just on the edge of that line, doesn't that make me a bit of a coward? Isn't my responsibility to the truth of the matter and not anyone's comfort levels, no matter how much I may adore these anyones? (I can tell you now the answer to the last two questions must be a resounding yes, or I might as well close down the computer now. I just realized the answer as I was typing.)
  
• If a writer must (should, whatever) establish her ethos before garnering an audience, and the foundation of my writing is all ethos, all the time (look at me: voice! voice! voice!), how will I draw anyone new into the fold? How will I convince those who don't love me to love me? Which leads to the most difficult question of all,
  
• Am I too I in my writing?
  

An admission: part of my aversion to beginning sentences with I is that I've convinced myself that if the sentence is constructed in a way that buries the I, my reader won't think me so self-involved. This is really bad, because I'm clearly trying to trick my reader, whom I love, in a not-so-subtle way, and any readers I have are certainly a lot smarter than I'm giving them credit for.

There goes that ethos again. Sheesh, I never give up.

Last semester I taught a creative nonfiction workshop in which rested the foundation that my students' subjects could (should, whatever) be everything. Many of them loathed this idea. Teri, my 60ish-year-old student who tediously reminded us of her age every other minute and thought it an interesting topic of conversation (holy shit, am I another version of Teri?!?), stated simply she could not write about herself. Fine idea, I thought, enrolling in a creative nonfiction course. Students were asked to write three pages a week--torturous, right?--and each Thursday she'd turn in barely half a page because, "That's all I could come up with." When I told them Proust wrote for fifty pages about a madeleine memory, or for three hundred tracing the history of one infidelity, and by the way, did so in some of the most stunning writing ever printed on the page, they thought I was full of shit.

Maybe pointing to Proust was too much. Most of them were about twenty, after all. So instead I gave them Bernard Cooper's two-page essay entitled "The Fine Art of Sighing." It reads much like a prose poem, really, but I wanted to show students that any obsession, observation, momentary fact of your life can be a subject as long as you've thought about it, really cared about it, make real meaning out of it. Cooper thought about sighing, about the world's daily sighs, and more specifically the sighs he heard constantly growing up, what they said about his parents and their wants and fears and how they helped to mold his own. In these tiny two pages he tried to learn the world through deliberation of sighing. There goes that neon pink Brilliant sign again, only for real this time. Let me give you a line from that essay that kills me every time:

"Where my mother sighed from ineffable sadness, my father sighed at simple things: the coldness of a drink, the softness of a pillow, or an itch that my mother, following the frantic map of his words, finally found on his back and scratched."

Delineating the people you love through their signs? And to do so in such clear, poetic language? This reading clearly had to win them over.

But the students' reactions were more varied than I expected. They conceded to the pretty phrases and perfect sentence structures, but weren't so thrilled about the subject. Teri, especially, made her views clear: "So what? It's about sighing. People do it every day. So what?" She sighed conspicuously as punctuation. I acquiesced under the weight of her obnoxiousness and moved onto the next one, not pointing out that people die and love every day too, and that these still make fine subjects for writing. I didn't remind her that one needn't scale Everest to get some exercise.

That's the thing I never got to tell my students that semester, a belief I have about writing that can't be taught and therefore that I may as well leave out of the classroom for fear of giving the Teris of the world the heart attack they're always sure is coming, and the belief is this: if you're going to write nonfiction, you've got to be at least a little cool.

By being cool I don't mean high school cool, or James Dean cool. In my entire life I could never be close to this kind of cool, and that's for the better, I think. The kind of cool I mean is closer to the definition of openmindedness: being cool is being open to whatever is before you (yes, even if that's Newt or Sarah or Teri), being genuinely fascinated by the sundry people who make up the world, seeing them and everything else on this good earth in neat, new, interesting ways.

Thing is, as we all know, you can't teach cool. So if I were to express this belief in class, my best approach might be to walk in on the first day and say, "Some of you are absolutely fucked when it comes to writing, and some of you aren't. Throughout the semester we'll discover whether or not you're fucked, but I can give you an early hint right now: if you are offended/appalled by my saying this, then you're very likely fucked. If you are confused or worried or curious as to what the hell I mean, you're very likely not."

This approach might save the Brookes and Teris of the world a lot of trouble, but would also cost me my job. So I'll continue directing my frozen smiles to the Teris and read their offensively boring work with a glass of wine to tingle my toes, since no other part of me could possibly be moved.

So for today my subject was, among other things, whether or not cool can be taught, and whether or not I should take any of this on as a subject. Through the writing you can see the answer I've come up with. And if you're still here with me you obviously agree. Kudos, you. And to ethos, for now, I'm thankful.

Metaphor

My youth is a lot like a hangnail, in that I'm busy composing a life throughout the day, with dog tasks and running tasks and grocery tasks and wife tasks, and I look down and there it is, swelling slightly the more I notice it. Hello there, nice pink hangnail, I'll say, you don't have a place on my body, you are for children who don't yet moisturize. Adults presumably transcend these things. So I'll ignore if for awhile and snag it on my clothes or bang it on a door, and there, there it grows.

Then comes hangnail concentration: I will usurp you with my will, hangnail. Well, not really my will, that's only romantic flourish, my very own mounting of the bardic steed. No, I'll just rip you off with my other two-bit claw nails--you are so tiny it will be easy to extricate you. A shame, really, how weak you can't help but be.

But with each tiny white tear it grows and bleeds a bit and now a mound of flesh, this hand is not my hand. Puffy nail, as if I could stuff you. Loaded ring finger, how crowned you are, as if you could be loved.

Later the pinkish torn flesh will turn dark in anger--this is not how you take care of a hangnail, says the hangnail. You were the one who said moisturizer, you were the one who claimed adult.

No solid or liquid left for me to punish out, the hangnail, flat and dark, almost resembles an eye. A single dilated pupil looking back into my own. It doesn't need to say I told you so, or that violence isn't the way to go. Instead the pain blinks through it and I just stare back from inside my human, proper body. Winning through sheer magnitude is no victory at all. Hangnail remains, unvanquished, and if I were to grope for wine or Tolstoy, the hangnail knows it'd be useless--I'd still feel it and know its presence and nothing else.

Yes, my youth is a little like a hangnail.

Letter to Myself, Age 12

Today you are wearing horizontal stripes and you hate yourself. There is so much skin on your skin. There is too much thickness about your face and thoughts. Today, in this room, someone has decided to frame your face forever in this sea of library faces, and you probably hate that person too. She is probably your friend, and she is undoubtedly beautiful.

Last summer you squirted Sun-In all over your head not to become blond so much, you know that's impossible, but maybe just not to be so dark. No one knows how to express how unlike them you are, so they call you smart. They think that is a safe word to name you. They say, your mother must be paying you a million bucks for the marks you earn. You've learned, after a couple of embarrassing homerooms in sixth grade, to fake sick on report card day for fear that Chad will, again, snatch your grades out of your hand and run around the room hailing you a genius of our day, but not in a nice way. You agree with their idea that you must study very hard, and bury the truth of school and studying being every bit as obligatory for you as it is for them. If you must deign to be smart, at least be agreeable. Anything to keep them from staring at you, and from you wanting to die. Right. Now.

A couple of years ago your younger stepsister moved back to Texas, her father having left your mother quite literally for dead. Divorced Again. Or maybe, Divorce, Part 2. This is all like a movie, a romantic comedy, because everything tragic that happens won't be tragic as long as you can make witty jokes and laugh about it. So, Brooke, make a funny joke. Learn to say fuckety-fuck just as much, no, more than the boys. They will be scared of you and you will love it. So instead of thinking about your mom, half dead and alone in a hospital bed, her husband tucked away in a bar, in his solitude and near-widowerhood, poor little soldier, how pure he is in his weakness, other women might say, in place of these things, think of Ricky Sears. How his finger got chopped in half last summer in his father's garage, and how ironic that is since he was always giving everyone the bird. Still too tragic? Think again of the Sun-In, the orange scarecrow it turned you into, how mad it made your mother, your so-alive mother who it's become increasingly difficult to look at. To come close to her means touching death, so it's best to keep distance for awhile. Remember instead how just a few months ago you ate cookie dough with Heidi and laid out on her roof to tan, and how you pretended to agree with her that the dough could probably bake a cookie inside our stomachs since it was so hot out and we were so close to the sun, even though you knew that was bullshit, but what you knew even more than that was you don't disagree with friends who are prettier and dumber than you are, because the mathematical equation of them equals better. You can't beat pretty. Still, ugly is funny. Dumb is really funny.

Something that still makes your mom laugh: at six you shared your first Christmas with a sibling, your stepsister Dezi, who like Athena springing from Zeus's head, was simply here in front of you one day, fully formed and blue-eyed and perfect. Camcorders had only recently been born, just like Dezi, so that Christmas will live forever, as will you in your horizontal stripes, Brooke. In the video you cannot be consoled. Outwardly there is no reason for you, at six, with a world of potheads and winos who view your presence as nothing but great fun, to be mad about. But there's that scowl--do you remember it? Mom calls it one of your fits, but we remember the truth: though empirical evidence existed to prove there were many children in the world living concurrently with you, they were never in your purview, so you were safe. It was like not having to travel to the moon to know it was there; at nighttime you just craned your neck up. But suddenly this moon of a child clung to your belt loop. She was shiny and everyone wanted to pick her up and see her, the discovery. And you felt like one of the fossils you were beginning to collect, dusty and old. Part of your scowl, then, was your idea that you were at once a mother, and at the same time having to compete for the affections of your real mother, who had a socialist's idea of love: it's all equal. Thus the scowl. You were beginning to learn, thankfully, what by now you know so well--what it means not to have what you so desperately want.

Don't forget also that you were born, Brooke, do not forget the miracle of that event. Your mother once thought, in the tense days before you were ever spoken of but still existed, no bigger than a fingernail, that your dad wouldn't want you. That he would take you for a mistake, that he might treat you like the fingernail you sort of were, and just chew you off, so to speak. Wait awhile for another one of you to grow, once a better time rolled along. But no, your dad wanted and wanted you so much in those early fingernail weeks, so much so that in two years he couldn't really take you anymore. Always love, though, from dad with cigarettes and the Memory game and Little Golden Books, and from mom with friends and cigarettes and stiff curly hair and always beautiful. Even now the smell of AquaNet is enough proof that your mom kissed and hugged you and was alive with you.

Somewhere along this way you've stopped understanding what it means for a human--for you--to love yourself. And though you test your fingernails to their pink, meaty limits, you as a human are all claw--no one gets close. Friends think they do, and you allow them to believe it, because this is what it means to be normal. It's one of those unspoken rules you sense that you must allow someone in this life to love you. But you and all your friends are masters of deception, already at twelve, and it's fun to write and say BFF and not mean an initial of it. As soon as a boy neither of you truly care about, but think maybe you should, enters into the frame, the F (forever) will turn to N (never). And all will be as before: pink, meaty nailbeds, the thickness about your face and thoughts.

What I'm saying is you don't need to smile at this camera, or any other, if you don't feel like it. Maybe lunch today sucked, maybe algebra was a drag. Certainly your life is a series of flash cards you've got neither the time nor inclination to study for. You don't need to curl your eyelashes, even though mom taught you how, and you don't need to talk so much, though that's something girls do. Maybe you're about to open your mouth to say something profound about the twelve years of pain--and yes, ecstacy (though neither us will be able to recall that for awhile)--of being Brooke on this planet of so many more meaningful things you want to cry for so frequently, so selfishly thinking of your own being and name. It's possible you're going to tell the picture-taker how lonely you are, how you're scared your mother really will die so you want to stay far far away from her, how every face you look upon seems glacial, even hers, the beautiful picture-taker's. Or that maybe it's your face, you, that you feel so far away from. More likely you're going to say the obvious: don't take the picture! Don't remember me! But eighteen years later here you are, in horizontal stripes and maybe not so sad as I'm thinking of you.

But really, I know you are. And I'm just saying, it's okay. I've heard these things come out in the wash.

Jon and Kate Plus the Evils of Capitalism, Or, We Can't Go Back

Tonight the highly anticipated series finale of Jon and Kate Plus 8 will air on TLC, leaving viewers to ask, where will we go to now to witness such a fantastic unraveling of a marriage? Those who believe this drama is far beneath them, that believe it's much more important to watch news for the current state of the economy for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, I'd implore to take a look at the show for answers to these pressing difficulties.

As it's well known and documented by Marshall McLuhan or some other media genius, what takes place on television often reflects what is happening in our culture. Some study whose name I wish I could remember said that television also affects in no small degree the book publishing industry. In the early to mid 90s when TV shows related to law (L.A. Law, Law and Order) regularly busted up the Neilsen ratings, the book business was also looking for lawyerly fiction. Oh hello, John Grisham and Brian Haig! And then in the late 90s and through today when reality TV took over basically every network--young twenties live together! washed-up celebrities dance together! pseudo-celebrities recover from meth addictions together!--so did the memoir/creative nonfiction books start selling like mad. Readers in America said, give us your fucked up childhoods, writers of America! Uh, okay, sure. I was born at just the right time for the endeavor I'm working within, and if I weren't so lazy I might have already profited from it.

The idea of profit is such a beautiful segue into Jon and Kate. Of course you already know them, but let me indulge in a synopsis of their television (and real?) lives. Kate is domineering and talks to her husband as if he's one of her children, though in her defense, he behaves a lot like one of them. In the introductory opening to every episode, one can witness a segment of the episode in which the family goes to the pig farm, and Jon is sitting on a hay bale watching his kids scamper madly until Kate leans over and screams (shrill voiced), Hello! Get up and do your job! and adds a few snaps of the fingers as punctuation. The series is, if nothing else, a series of abject lessons on what not to do in a marriage, and luckily no party is guiltless. Surely there is a way to persuade a husband to grow up (leave him?), and while I have no idea what that is, I'm certain that Kate's way isn't it.

What both parties are for sure guilty of is the exploitation of their children. It must be because all eight of those little twinkies are as cute as, well, twinkies, that the show is as incredibly popular as it's become. A miserable couple is only interesting if eight twinkling orbs of pretty are surrounding them--they have to make it work, they've got eight beautiful kids to love and support (okay, seven beauties: Mady is a fucking nightmare).

Kate's counterargument to this is that the show is for the children. The revenues from TLC and the book tours (Kate's a writer too, la di da) and speaking engagements have made the family tremendously wealthy. Now they've got money for college, money to be comfortable and live the lives they want to lead. Oh yes, they're comfortable. So much so that in the past five years they've lived in three different homes: first a four-bedroom house in a subdivision in central Pennsylvania, then a six-bedroom house, and now finally in a fourteen-bedroom, ten-bath home on many acres of land, room enough for all the kids to grow up and build their own homes on the property. Ah, said Goldilocks, that's just right.

Jon and Kate have every right to become wealthy off their talents, even if their talents of two include being vile and fertile. Oh, and organized. Kate's very organized. But does that make this right? What are we rewarding, and at what cost to ourselves?

One of the most resounding health care reform arguments coming from the right side of the aisle in Congress these past few months is that America was founded on the basis of an entrepreneurial spirit, on the notion that if one works hard enough one can be whatever he (and later, black people, and later, she) wants to become. This includes becoming the CEO of health insurance companies. These people have the godderned right to run their businesses as they see fit. Offering as little service as possible to the greatest number of people is part of that entrepreneurial spirit the right insists on defending, and pardon me if I don't want to plant a sloppy kiss on Tassin Barnard, the CEO of MetLife who refuses to pay for my anesthesia during a wisdom tooth extraction because, hey, I should've sucked it up and done without.

The problem is that as soon as one starts suggesting that certain capitalism practices need some reform, or at the very least regulation, the masses decry one as immoral and not fit for our soil. (Quick tangential anecdote: when grading my British literature tests I came across a student who assessed Thomas More in this way, "He's an evil, immoral socialist, and he wrote Utopia to try to spread his vile socialist notions to England." She forgot first that socialism did not exist in the 16th century, and that More actually died defending his right to practice the religion of his choice despite Henry VIII's denial of this right, thus, off with his head. I mentioned that More's defense of his human rights were very American of him, weren't they? and I was happy to mark her answer wrong and add up the points that led to her D+ on the test.)

It perpetually boggles the mind how in a country that so values free speech, one is loathe to actually practice it lest she be called unAmerican or French or some bullshit. My frustration also extends to sundry ex-Facebook buddies and variable dickheads on the street who walk around thinking, "I work hard all day, and these lazy_________ (insert racial epithet) just want to live off the government." I'm quoting sundry dickheads spread across my life verbatim. Why, I want to ask, are you so mad at the black guy on his stoop drinking a Olde English, but why aren't you mad at the dozens of CEOs, worth billions, who just got the biggest welfare checks in American history? Which citizen--forty drinker or CEO--is more greatly responsible for the crisis we find ourselves in today?

Let me be clear that I recognize many people live off the government, and are lazy, and it's deplorable. My sister, though she often works minimum wage jobs, is quite lazy as a person, and lives off the government, and will probably continue to do so in the foreseeable future. This is a result of poor choices, most prominently a silly boy as teeming as Niagra Falls. The point is many people are lazy: some of them are lawyers and teachers and pharmacists, and some are cashiers. And although they may be inherently lazy, cashiers have to work their asses off and still receive government assistance. If it weren't for Medicaid I don't know how my sister would deliver her children, which those on the right view as one of the most sacrosanct acts known to man. Yet health care is still not a top priority.

I'm digressing: Jon and Kate. They are currently fighting about, among many other things, the house. She wants to keep it, but really it's too big for only nine of them. And the major question for Jon and Kate and millions of Americans is: How can we go back? The thought of Kate downscaling to a smaller home now that they won't be receiving revenues from the show is just abominable. I'm not speaking for her; she's said this herself. It's about quality of life for the kids, she says. She may have a point there, but her constant obfuscation of what she has to gain, how her individual quality of life has improved, leads me to believe that the lady doth protest too much.

I began to ponder Jon and Kate and the potential evils of capitalism because I recently read another Mary Karr interview, this one on Huffington Post. In it she laments that her book wasn't on any of the major top ten best books of the year lists, and compares herself to Michael Herr, whose wondrous Dispatches didn't win Book of the Year, and how no one remembers who won that year, only that Herr didn't. But alas, says Mary, she'll leave it up to history and readers to decide whether or not this latest book is meritorious. If readers buy it, she says, she wins.

Karr cannot allow herself to retreat from celebrity-land. The focus isn't "let me tell you about the process of this book," but instead, "let me tell you how much I don't care about the awards I haven't won." She cannot not be Mary Karr at any moment in her life. She is the seller of books, the winner of prizes. Similarly, Jon and Kate cannot go back. They are tabloid mainstay, they are speakers to red America, they are Halloween costumes and they are the owners of one fucking enormous mansion they'll soon be unable to afford.

But how do they go back? They might be able to sell stuff, sure, but how much selling would be equitable to weakness? What new thing should we do? they must be asking themselves. A reunion, I'd hazard a guess, is already in the works. Because the answer to the question of how they go back is simple: they can't. They caught that entrepreneurial spirit, the zeitgeist that never dies, and like Mary Karr have proven to themselves that they are just a little bit more famous, just a little bit more important and talented than the rest of us. Retreating to the past humble you toiling over a book, toiling over kids alone, is impossible. Going back is death.

Thing is, I'm guilty falling prey to the zeitgeist too. I cannot go back to my 600 square foot Bluebonnet Place apartment in Baton Rouge. I cannot go back to the mouse-infested shack in Thibodaux. I've put in my dues, dammit, gotten the degrees, slipped on the ring, and I deserve to live with my husband in a home it's becoming increasingly more difficult to afford. And I'm a liberal socialist.

In this beautiful, three bedroom house I'm lucky enough to temporarily call home, I'll watch the finale of Jon and Kate in just a few minutes. I'm grateful that I already know the ending to the TV show: a marriage dies. But then how many dreams are born: I have a talent too, echoes one viewer after another in living room after living room. They live like so many crickets outside my window who exist only through the insistence of their sounds. I can do anything, cuz this is America.

Blogging is Free

"This is America. Decide what job you want to do and become the person who does it." ~Bobbie Barrett, Mad Men

I'm a socialist if in no other way but my writing. For years I've extricated myself from the world of competitive submissions, which from my perspective exists only to prove a false sense of meritoriousness. In graduate school I was editor of New Delta Review (a job I got, by the way, because someone or other saw me as more likable than the other candidates), and I've been to AWP conferences and only now that I've got a distance from that world can I see how ridiculous it all it. AWP exists so that editors of journals, who are also always writers, can find an in into a journal. A few years ago at AWP in Chicago, I met a very cute poet named Dave Lucas who I thought chatted with me to exchange contact info, which we did, and I was all bugginess till I realized he was interested in my role as then-poetry editor of NDR. We published two of his poems because they were pretty good and he was cute, and a recent Google search shows that he's since been published in Poetry, Slate, Blackbird, Paris Review. It's safe to say we hate this capitalist bastard in all his horned-rimmed glasses cuteness, this CEO of 29-year-old writers.

Maybe socialist writer is the wrong term to describe my approach, maybe it's about communal writing. It matters to me to have a small group who loves what I do, and while I wish this group perhaps loved me a little less so that they might impart more critical judgments, I feel that if a connection happens then I'm bugginess all over again. I love when I hear famous writers lament in interviews how lonely the process is, how they pad around in bathrobes and feel very nothing about themselves. Thing is, writers literally need other people: to publish them, to read them, to love them. I already have some of that happening, thus I already feel somewhat successful. Why should it make me feel better to have the words Georgia Review laced beside my name?

Yes, it does matter to be thought grand by those who are in a place to make that judgment, but every teacher (and, I suspect, parent) knows that certain students (or, children) are favorites. What gets published involves so many factors which unfortunately bother me: different schools of aesthetics, literal schools the writer attended, the worry of inserting too much or too little personality into a fucking cover letter. Why can't I submit a nameless, address-free, cover letter-free essay and, maybe with a Post-it on the first page of my draft, write a note saying, "Do you like this? If so, call 504-606-4337, and I'll tell you who I am." Simplicity. No room for it in free enterprise, I suppose.

Of course this may sound like sour grapes coming from someone who positions herself above this world, but is transparently scared to join it, thus does not submit for publication: ever. Literally it's been four years since I've tried. Instead I'm happy to blog for free, for both my friends and myself. My hope is that each word I type is filed away somewhere. Somehow, I'll remember doing this, I'll remember what felt good about certain words and phrases and what felt odd about others. If nothing else this is just hand practice, my learning to hold my wrists just at the edge of the laptop, my hands folded starkly over the keys when I'm considering my next thought, my fingers flying by when I believe in, if only for a few moments, exactly what it is I'm typing.

This has been a Mad Men weekend for us; we're halfway through Season 2. The show is sultry in its foreignness. Everyone is beautiful and smokes and drinks from sun to moon, and in advertising the sale is god but everyone is unhappy, even when he wins. This is a world where capitalism reigns, so in many ways nothing's changed. If one is not getting ahead, then he is falling behind. One character in the show nearly quits Sterling Cooper because one of his co-workers (same age, educational background, etc.) was getting paid one hundred dollars more per week. Similarly I often want to give up writing altogether because a colleague who is two (two!) years younger than I am has at least twenty publications on his c.v. While I feel all this has only just begun, that I'm just beginning to brush away the insecurities that whisper I must not-not-not running this race at all, motherfucker is crossing the finish line. So I'm already behind in a life I haven't been born into. Whatever analogy I finally decided to go with here, you can see how royally fucked I feel.

My first impulse when justifying the quote Iused at the start of this blog is to tell you it shows how unlike Bobbie Barrett-type gal I am, how I'm not the type of person who just decides what I'm going to be and makes it happen. I don't want the reigns, don't want to hold them, don't want to see them. You take them. I can't even submit to journals! Often I'm scared to have even my husband, whom I trust, read my work!

But there are twinges of Bobbie in me. A long ago memory keeps recurring lately, and I don't know why but here it is: I'm in grammar school and in love with the Babysitter's Club books, but especially with it's Kristy character, the club's president. Over one hundred books were written in the series, and what interested me then was how the writer, Ann Martin, had to remind us of each character's traits and background at the beginning of each book (in case you were a newcomer). The word that recurred for Kristy was outgoing. If I'd been a few years old I would've thought her a bossy bitch, but no, Ann convinced me she was outgoing, which seemed a magical way for a girl to be. Want something? Say it, find it, get it done. These seemed impossible feats, but not for the outgoing. So one day I wrote up a quiz for my mom to take in which she had to rate my character traits. I created a 1-5 scale and included such traits as funny, smart, athletic, and of course, outgoing (and now, embarrassingly, I'm thinking of the white boxes under my blog, and feel like I'm in grammar school again, and want to die).

I don't remember the rating mom gave me on any of these traits, even the outgoing one, but I know the score on that particular one wasn't good. She gave me a 1 or 2. I remember feeling majorly affronted, and showing this on my face as I insisted upon more of an answer from both her eyes and the scale in my hands.

"But you're not really outgoing," she said. Then, to quell my horror, "Maybe kind of outgoing, a little bit."

Faced with the veracity of her words (I did not like speaking up, ever, and was scared of new--and some old--people), I decided that in order to be some more proper version of Brooke than I was, I would have to try outgoing. Work at it. Be assertive. And somewhere around that time, in the fifth grade, I ran for student body president. For that endeavor I shook hands and walked with my head up. It only took six posters and weeks of mom-anxiety, but I won the election. Partly this proved to me that I'd become outgoing, or at least was on my way, and though I didn't check this box off on myself I soon after began to work on the Beautiful box, and what torturous times were those subsequent eighteen years.

Perhaps I'm writing this because, at 29, I'm still deciding on the job I want to do. What seemed rather straightforward at ten years old (1. decide to be outgoing, 2. do it) is proving nebulous at best these days. All that's certain is that if I'm going to be a writer that more than five or so of my beloveds read, I've got to get into the submissions game.

But this is practice I love, that my fingers can fly over and not want to rend each other when they stop. It's form-fitting, and it's free.

Losing My Spanish

Last night I had two separate dreams and in both, my very existence was crucial to the survival of a people. In the first, I helped a group of Mexican strangers cross the I-10 after Katrina. A line of cops all in a row linked arms, Red Rover-style, a blockade the visual rhetoric for, All ye brown ones may not pass. But I am bilingual, see, and I was able to charm the officers by telling them that they didn't understand, that these were some of the good ones (wink wink), and I was simultaneously able to mollify my compatriots' fears. The officers unlinked their arms and we passed, and then like so much dust in my 7:30 a.m. living room, visible only by the sun's forty-five degree angle rays, they were gone, as was the dream, and I was on to the next one.

My other dream was, believe it or not, even more dramatic than the first. It was 9/11 again, or soon thereafter, and I was living in the rubble of the city and decided the only way I knew to help was to set up a translation booth just yards away from ground zero. The booth was made of cardboard, with a cardboard sign across the front of it reading something like, "Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled brown masses..." Separate from the dream, I've always thought the inscription on the Statue of Liberty should've been more honest in its pronouncement by including "your light-skinned masses," because dark-skinned immigration has always been more controversial than those of lighter-skinned folks. Then again, I was never a 19th century Irish immigrant to the U. S., or an Italian immigrant at the turn of the 20th century. But then again again, the Irish nor the Italian ever had to suffer Lou Dobbs.

Back to the dream: I'd set up my booth. Wait, that's all. After the booth was set up my dream ended. But what was important about the booth was that it had a purpose: I was going to help those who couldn't speak English figure out where their lost 9/11 family members were, have them sign a list and include their phone numbers. In other words I'd do the English-speaking legwork they couldn't. In other other words I'd be a goddamned American bilingual hero.

And then I woke up.

Tonight I went to a party where there was a charming but loud blonde who I could hear from my place at the doorbell, the woman who introduces herself profusely but whose name I forget a moment after and whose voice I can still hear weeks later, the type of blonde most parties are wont to include. The woman was a scientist whose professional job title I cannot even pronounce, so don't even think about conjuring up any blond jokes. Chick was wicked smart.

So smart, in fact, that at one point she summons her boyfriend by saying, "Demme mis llaves, tengo que ir al carro."

I was incredibly close to answering for her boyfriend, saying to her, hey man, I'll get your keys, just tell me where your purse is. But my fear was that once she knew I spoke Spanish, she'd try to engage me in a conversation in which I'd remain stuck. I cannot tell you how many times in my life this has occurred. An acquaintance does mission work in Costa Rica or spends a summer in Spain. When they see me, they want to engage, parlay, fucking talk, in Spanish. And at some point one of us is going to have to give it up. None of us are professionals here, but if anyone is expected to be, it's me. Which means if they are able to hold up the conversation longer (or I become disinterested in the game first, as I am wont to do in these cases), then they win.

Once a Spanish-speaking telemarketer called Lala's home while I was there and she was in the bathtub. The call was not important--the woman was trying to sell some nonsense--but what it was I couldn't understand. She spoke so quickly, and in such a foreign way, nothing like Lala's fashion, which is to roll out words deliberately, smoothly, the same way an accordion arches itself open. All I could tell the lady was, "Look, no entiendo." Then she asked me probably the most disturbing question of my life up to that point, "Is there anyone in the home who actually speaks Spanish?"

My Spanish in all its fullness had been a source of anxiety for me growing up. Some school kids took me literally for an alien. After the first time Lala picked me up and they heard her speak to me in Spanish, and heard me speak back to her, they were entralled in the way kids are enthralled at the zoo. Little Patrick would speak for a few moments in pure gibberish, completely goobledy-gook nothingness, and then ask me to translate what he'd said into Spanish. And when I told him he'd said nothing, that his sounds were untranslatable, he responded by saying when I spoke Spanish, I spoke nothing too. Because he couldn't understand them, my words did not exist.

By the time I got to graduate school I assumed I was no longer a Spanish speaking person. In the interim between Little Patrick and my language episode with Rodger Kamenetz, my thesis advisor, several things had taken place. For one, the telemarketer phone call. And for two to a zillion, I'd figured I no longer knew how to talk to Lala. I no longer liked the way she made me feel. If we'd speak and I'd forget a Spanish word or phrase, she'd ridicule me. Or she'd say my pronunciation was incorrect, but not tell me how to fix it. Most of all it seemed she didn't really like me much anymore, and I didn't know whether it was because I didn't call enough, or I was dedicating my life to the English language she'd loathed enough never to learn, or simply because the sound of my mueca lengua (the ugliest kind of Spanish pronunciation there is) had just grossed her out after all these years in which I was slowly losing my Spanish, and she'd had enough. In graduate school I felt Lala-less, and it was a lonely place to be. Losing Lala and a language

Perhaps these were the reasons Lala was such a frequent subject in my writing. That, and how many grandmothers actually talk to their grandchildren about fellatio before they reach school-age? What fascinated me was how fascinated others were in my grandmother, who I couldn't (and still to a certain degree can't) conceive as a character. But this is just how she is, I'd protest when someone thought she'd crossed a physical or emotional line with me. This is just how she loves people. Writing about her made me fall back in love with her all over again, and reminded me how lonely it was to be without her. Crazy people have this affect on you: if they are there for you to care and worry and feel insecure and lost over, then you're really lost. Maybe you become the crazy one.

Anyhow, Rodger loved her. He wanted to know everything about her and basically prodded me into the rough draft of the memoir about Lala, Lying in Translation, which I haven't read since I cobbled it together almost five years ago. Lala has since taken the book's place. She is in my life, and though I still don't call her as much as I should, I talk to her as much as I can. In my mind I've created a false dilemma: you must care for Lala or you must care for the book. I've opted for Lala, because I've got to live with myself for the rest of my life. Walking through nothingness into nowhere, since wherever I go, there I am.

Of course I could recognize this is a false dilemma and do something about it like, say, work on the book and love Lala too. But that's so grown up and complicated. And sometimes I prefer to be simple and stupid.

Back to Rodger, who loved her. When he asked me whether or not I spoke Spanish, because of course he spoke a little (mission trip to Mexico in the 70s), I told him, "Un pocito," and left it at that. But when day in class when we were reading Robert Bly translations, he asked me to go for it, since he hadn't used his mouth for Spanish in years, and he assured me I'd do a better job than him or any of my other cracker classmates. (Do I need to tell you that was a gross paraphrase of his language?) So I read the Spanish version of Bly, and congratulated myself that I hadn't fumbled any word, and just hoped I sounded moderately okay, which is all I ever ask of myself. I looked up in hope of, what, not being looked at like the asshole I often feel like? Rodger and everyone else were gaping. Why, he asked, didn't I tell him I spoke so beautifully? Why had I been so modest, why was I hiding my language? I told him I'd thought I'd lost it, and he assured me I hadn't. For the next hour I read poems in Spanish aloud in class, and someone else would read the translation in English, and we'd talk about connections and disconnections and why words sound more beautiful as they are originally intended.

And the metaphor of my life didn't escape me as I wondered whether or not I was more beautiful as I was originally intended. Yes, I learned both English and Spanish concurrently as a child, but the language I spoke more often, or at least the one I remember speaking most, because Lala was always there as listener and speaker, to tell me who I was and to have me tell her back, was Spanish. A language I now relagated to the classroom. Which I used to impress college professors and which explained to my classmates my slightly darker pigment. Which to use, in earnest, with Lala had grown into an impossibility. By ceasing to love her (actually to talk to her, which in her world are one and the same) I'd ceased to earn my language, and know it. I was mueca all the way and deserved to be. At the end of class we closed Bly and I went off into my English world of English folks where for a moment I'd been a Spanish-speaking star. The frustrated telemarketer didn't exist. Lala lived in a world I'd need a translator to inhabit, a scary place in which I wasn't ready yet to live.

It needs not be said I still have issues admitting my Spanish, or lack thereof, to strangers. A few months ago Brock and I went to Taco Jean, a family-owned Mexican restaurant in Tuscaloosa, a place where Jean's children work as cashiers once they're old enough to reach the counter. I hear them speak to each other about their lives, about what's left to be cleaned in the kitchen, what the kids learned in school that day, and I feel at once invasive and separate. Should I admit I'm one of them, I've often asked myself? But I'm not really, because I don't live my life in this language as they do. I get there every once in awhile on my verbal passport, that's all. When it's time for me to order I ask for a burrito without rolling my r's, without lowering my u into the gutteral as it should be pronounced. Even the pico de gallo gets no love from me (it's "peek-o day guy-o," the whitey way). The ten year old son of Jean takes my order and doesn't look at my face twice, though I get the sense he knows I've lost something somewhere. Or maybe he thinks I'm keeping it hidden too. What's funny is I'm as clueless about who I am (or should be) as he is.

And at the party tonight I let the blond's caucasian (okay, cracker) boyfriend get the keys to the car for her. He wore his ballcap backwards. The blond had blue eyes. Was it a mission trip for them too, or just three years of college Spanish? I sipped on my scotch and saw the beauty and simplicity of one human understanding the other, as the guy with the ballcap got the keys for the blond, and she took them, and thanked him, and walked out the door.

My Name is

Lately I've an obsession with thinking and writing about my name. It probably started last spring when I taught a creative nonfiction workshop and spent a week trying to convince students they should be curious about their names as an entry point to where they came from. We read an essay entitled "Being Brians," in which the author, Brian Doyle, researched all the Brian Doyles of the world and found there were about 200 of them. So he wrote them letters and told them who he was, asked them who they were, and used some of their responses for his essay, which was in part intended to speak to something about his individual Brian-ness. It was a brilliant if a bit gimmicky essay, and my students on the whole were unimpressed with it and the assignment. My name is my name, they figured. It is what it is.

There is no way to underscore how much I loathe that attitude, and that phrase: it is what it is. Using it says to your audience, I don't care to think about this matter. There is no explaining it, thus I will assume it doesn't exist. Perhaps I'm jealous because there are very few things in life my brain can easily let go. But also I think it's stupid and careless non-thinking that leads people to buy books like Going Rogue and claim it to be the first book they've read in decades (reported on CNN yesterday--sheesh!).

It cannot be just what it is. It must be more.

But my name obsession actually goes back much further than the time I'm claiming. It was an issue, though not a point of contention, when Brock and I decided to marry. Immediately he said I should stick to who I am, because I had the coolest name he'd ever heard. And I thanked heavens for that, because honestly, whenever I thought of marriage in the abstract in the pre-Brock years, I always told myself that whoever the man might be had damned well better be all right with me keeping my Champagne. This started fights with more than one boyfriend I never would've married anyway. Brock's arrival was the first point in my life when I thought, aw, I could give it up, I could be a Guthrie. And after we were married, when we saw the Avett Brothers in concert (Jen's present to us), and they opened up with the song with those beautiful lines "always remember there is nothing worth sharing, like the love that let us share our name," well, I was ready to flee the building and run to the courthouse to fill out whatever paperwork needed filling to make myself a Brooke Guthrie. But I didn't, and Brock and I are still a unit, still a family, and we can worry about whatever strange hyphenated children we'll have when and if they actually come.

My name. My name is Brooke. As a child it was Brooksita, or Bootie, or Mija, or Ninita. But Brooke was the standard, and to hear it with smaller ears is a bit severe. It always seemed a grown-up name, and one it took years to fit into. I've described it as a quick chop of wood, a cut in the air. If the name had a color it would be blue. If it had a mood it would be glum. The Eeyore of names. The "oo" sound of names.

It could've been longer. My mother, I think, was searching for something mellifluous. But Roy found something ethnic and exasperating with such long flowy names (his mother was Conchetta, straight from Italy--he didn't want another one of her on his hands). He didn't want an ethnic name, he didn't want a Jew name, and when my mother compromised the middle name of Rachel, there wasn't too much eye-rolling because he'd gotten Brooke (and if I was to have a part-Jew name, it was appropriate to relegate it to middle-child status that often goes ignored). Mom liked Brooke too; she was a beloved soap opera character, guileless, graceful, and beautiful. Already so much to live up to.

A name like a cut. My existence in the mouths of those who speak me lasts maybe a quarter of a second, tops. Thank goodness for the oddness of combining the consonant "b" with an "r" and the difficulty it proves for the lips, or else I'd hardly exist at all. I'm thinking now of Gladwell's Outliers, and how Chinese numbers take such a short amount of time to say that speakers can memorize a longer list of numbers at once, thus they can count and work with numbers more easily early in life and thus generally are better at math than their Western counterparts. My Brooke of a name might be an English equivalent of that, so small in sound that it's easily memorable, and if everyone's name had the brevity of my own, we'd be able to memorize many more names than our lexicon of Jennifers and Alexandras are capable of handling (if, after all, remembering the greatest amount of names were to exist or even be mildly interesting).

My recent Facebook status: "I love that my first name is a noun and a verb, and that verb means 'to suffer, to tolerate,' which means that martyrdom is my legacy, as I've always wanted it to be."

There is both truth and untruth to this. I'm not sure if martyrdom is a legacy I desire, but it seems inevitable, and a role well-fitted for me. Day after day I'm becoming monstrously aware of how many roles I'm taking over for Lala. The last time we spoke, for example, she said some things that made me cry. Sweet things, Lala things. And I wept, and wept, and she told me to save those tears for the death of the person who has loved me more than anyone on this earth ever will: for herself. I reminded her about my plan to keep her alive forever, and she said, out of nowhere, that a few years ago her tears just dried right up. She couldn't remember the last time she cried (I could--it was at my wedding).

Although Lala often bends toward the hyperbole, this statement was one I could actually believe in. She doesn't cry much anymore, and I feel like much of my childhood was spent bathing in her tears. Meanwhile I cry all the time now, at least a handful of times per week, and while I hope this isn't a tendency towards martyrdom (after all, I cry for the sweet things most times, and it's become a ritual for me and Brock--he goes out of his way to do something especially kind, and I swear, it can be just washing his own dirty dishes, and I'll weep and he'll feign bashfulness--really it's one of the great games we play), too many tears cannot be good for anyone. I'm not sure if I buy this cleansing business anymore. Crying profusely means one can't be a person in the real world. I've tried it. You leave the house and people think you've been beaten up or something. They can't and shouldn't want to handle you, the open wound. Will you love me, cashier at Winn Dixie? Can you understand the difficulties of being Brooke?

And the cycle obviously perpetuates itself. You get home and think, I've no place in this world! Thus the crying begins again, and at least three more hours must go by before anyone should be allowed to see you (or more specifically me, who looks hideous when she cries. When I was a kid my mom always quoted Bill Pullman from Spaceballs when I threw a fit and cried over nothing, "You are ugly when you're angry." More tears ensued, of course, and mom just laughed. It's sad but true: I am ugly when I'm angry). All over some sweetness between me and my husband, and occasionally a celebrity death, or a closer one.

Luckily it's been weeks since I've felt this, or put poor Aneesha at Winn Dixie in the awkward position of looking at my puffy pink face while scanning my milk and bananas. Am I becoming Lala? Maybe not, because at least I feel guilty for imposing myself on strangers. Lala would think, why shouldn't I, I'm me! It's what's absolutely beautiful and absolutely frightening about her.

(An aside: I'm also becoming her because of her stories: I'm learning only now to tell the ones she's always told, and to make them real, the way she used to. She's bored with stories now; the only ones she'll tell are the ones so absurd I can't even repeat them here, and if she new I'd attributed them to her, she'd say there's no way she ever told them. On another day I'll reiterate my concern that she is truly losing it.)

Combining my first and last names leads to interesting possibilities. Must I suffer champagne, or find myself awash in a river of it (knowing my drinking tendencies, it's obviously the latter). When Brock and I spoke for the first time at an Ivanhoe Street party, he learned my full name and this was the picture in his mind: a brook of champagne, in a world of gauzy pink, where the sun is always at half-mast and alcohol doesn't hurt and only brings joy, a woman made of champagne herself emerges, ready with a glass, leans into the river and fills his cup, and says, "Come see." She is me, the eclipse of a world of hurt. I say "come see," a pair of words he'd never heard before. He took a nip and loved it, never wanting me to be anyone other than who I was. Brooke Champagne. A woman he didn't know he had the right to love.

Ultimately my main job is to Brooke myself. I must suffer who I am daily, and though delighting in being Brooke isn't part of my name's job description, I'll do that too.

Though I won't say I am who I am. Because the deepest answers to who I am I'll never really know, and don't want to. What else will there be, then, to write about?

Restoring Bugginess

Doing it because I have to. Tonight our library held a compulsory workshop (compulsory only because I signed up for it before death and nausea crept up on me) on researching databases for our EN 102 argument/research-oriented classes next spring. After the workshop I ran into a colleague, Ray, and somehow we got onto the subject of RateMyProfessor.com. (Oh, I know how: I looked and felt like crap, Ray could tell, and he wanted to make me feel better.)

So Ray says that he's sorta kinda friends with an ex-student of his, a 20ish guy, who out of nowhere the other day said there was a really hot teacher at UA and her name was Brooke Champagne, and he asked Ray if he knew her. I don't know, and don't want to know, where the conversation went from there.

If you don't know RateMyProfessor, it's a semi-evil website that allows college students to login and rate their teachers. I say semi-evil because my early experience with this site was full-on awful. Early in my teaching career, when I was at Southeastern, my office mate Megan suggested we post our pictures on the site because, oh I don't know, everyone else was doing it? Anyway, I did, and proceeded in that semester to teach the worst group of students of my life in which our mutual hatred for one another was reciprocated daily, the bastards. More than once I was told I didn't make sense, and there was one sort-of death threat, though it was by a boy under five feet tall, so I kinda had to laugh.

Anyway, here's one of the first comments about me on RateMyProfessor, which dates back to that semester, and to a particularly evil student (oh, Savannah, you dirty bitch, you):

"Only take her if you ALREADY know English really well. She didn't know how to help when we had questions. Her favorite word is 'Umm...' Deffinitely not professional, she curses a lot. She would be more suited to teach English if she actually had a degree in it (her degree is in creative writing). Not too much h/w though. Easy grader on papers."

So this was mean and made me cry more than a few nights, though I naturally found (and still find!) solace in her careless misspelling of "definitely." What hurt about these comments is that they're all pretty much true, but I expect students to like, respect, and learn from me despite them (though not necessarily in that order).

Fast-forward to tonight, and Ray's comment, which reminded me it's been ages since I checked out my online evaluations. So when I got home I did, and happily, there were several nice new postings asserting how cool, awesome, and laid back I am. Here was the latest one:

"Young and loves what she does. Will help you in any way she can and does a great job of connecting with her students. The papers are not hard and she will e-mail you and help you through any problems you may be having. Fun class discussions. She's openly liberal but she's not obnoxious in the slightest. Not bad to look at either. TAKE HER CLASS!!!"

Here's the rub, though: this student is commenting on my EN 091 course! I've never taught that, and I'm not entirely sure that course exists at Alabama. So I'm wondering if I'm being confused by someone else (after all, I'm not openly liberal, and I'm hella obnoxious!), or if this poor student doesn't know the difference between 091 and 101.

And the prose of this comment so very much exceeds those of students writing on this site, that I halfway believe Ray did it himself, to make me feel even better than he had earlier, to be a good buddy.

Now I'm thinking of the nature of the latest comment though, and what it means for students to say I "connect well" with them. Does it mean that they like me, or that I understand them? Or that they understand me, or I like them? Or that we share a bond that the world doesn't understand when we discuss semicolons/Milton? I've seen this beautiful and perplexing comment on student evaluations over the years, and not just on RateMyProfessor, but on the official school administered ones. Only now am I trying to figure out how to use it to feel better about myself after a craptastic week.

It need not be said that it's important to me to be loved and held, by both people and words. Also it's nice to love and hold others with my words when my arms are too far away. I am sentimental tonight. I'm nostalgic for events that haven't yet occurred.

Now I must be off to write a letter of recommendation for a very talented student who is seeking entrance into an MFA program. I told her, get ready for the pain, sister. She's tall and blond and reads Virginia Woolf and has skills for miles. My main worry is that, once she's a famous poet, she'll forget all about me.