Yoda Can Stick It

Here I am, four months into life as a mom to four kids, and several people have asked me, "Darling, brave, Kristen, what’s the big difference between having four kids versus three?” 

Well, here’s what I can tell ya: With three kids, not surprisingly, a lot of stuff falls through the cracks. 

With four kids, the cracks fall through the cracks.

Let’s discuss the phone in my kitchen for illustrative purposes.

It’s an old phone – not cordless -- and it has an answering machine integrated into it. I prefer to use this answering machine to take messages as opposed to the craptacular Verizon voicemail service I could use because, Oh, I don’t know, I’m one of those nutters who likes to actually receive my messages in a timely manner. Rather than on a four to six hour delay, which is how Verizon seems to operate. I’m pretty sure the state-run phone bureau in North Korea provides better service than that, but whatever.

Well, somebody – I’m not sure who and so far, nobody’s coming forward and fingerprint analysis has been inconclusive – knocked the phone off the wall, and when the phone hit the deck, the tiny plastic doohickey that holds the hand-set in place so it won’t fall out of the cradle broke off as a result. Then, before the plastic doohickey could be retrieved off the floor and replaced, thereby quickly restoring the phone to operational status, the dog ate it. I’m assuming she thought it was a cannellini bean, and, in her defense, it did sorta resemble one.

OK, so that pretty well took the phone out of commission because you could no longer hang it up, but I didn’t want to lose the voicemail capacity (see aforementioned reference to suckiness of Verizon voicemail), so I took a piece of duct tape and taped the phone into the “off” position. 

You know, I’m sure I’m not explaining this adequately. Let’s just have a look at the actual phone.

(Yes, that’s green duct tape, suitable for holiday gift-wrapping after the regular Scotch tape is gone because your kids used it all up to tape pencils to together to make a nine foot long pencil snake.)

In the old, just-three-kids days, I probably would have gone out and gotten a new phone within five business days after it was rendered useless. But now? Well, here’s the thing, I just haven’t gotten around to it. It’s going on a month since the stupid phone broke, and still I don’t foresee getting to a electronics purveyor anytime soon. Maybe I’ll get to it next weekend. Or how about this? I’ll *try* to get to it over this coming weekend. 

See, that right there is the crucial difference between having three kids versus four kids. I’ve become someone who says, “Yes, I’ll *try* to do that” or “I’ll *try* to be there at 2 pm…”  I now use the word "try" when I talk about doing anything, because frankly, I can’t guarantee that a series of ridiculously unpreventable events won’t occur that will keep me from doing what I intend to do.

Yoda says, “Do or do not. There is no try.” 

Yeah. Well, stick it, Yoda. In my world there’s a whole lotta trying.

What have you been *trying* to do lately?

The Inspirational Strangeness of Strangers

Before I begin this tale, you need to understand how absolutely beastly hot Washington, D.C. is in the summer. 

By mid-July, you swear that if you hear the words hazy, hot, and humid strung together by a weather forecaster one more time, you’re going to pull a grenade pin with your teeth, cross yourself, and wait for the sweet release of BOOM.  

And, sure, lots of places are hot in the summer, but even the hottest, steamiest of places, places where men catch gators off the sides of canoes with chicken legs for bait, offer an advantage over D.C. because the folks who live in them typically enjoy the freedom of a casual, more shirtless lifestyle. In D.C, dressing down at the office is not an option. You’ve still got be in work attire no matter what the thermometer says. So pretty much, once you’re three steps out the door in your nicely pressed suit, you’re wilting over like an unwatered tulip -- your head lying on the pavement, your tongue hanging out, your hair frizzed out so you look like a clown that’s been electrocuted in the bathtub (that last part may pertain only to me).

I mention this hot beastliness because it’s important you know this when I tell you about the woman I used to see as I walked to the subway.

Oh, and OK, there’s one other thing you should know: I was one of those dorks who used to wear sneakers with my work clothes as I commuted. Yeah, yeah, I know. It’s the height of unstylishness, but listen, I had to walk 10 blocks to the subway and then another 10 blocks from the subway to my office and no way was I going to make it in heels, but judge me if you must. I accept your scorn as a fair and just punishment.

Anyway, nearly every day I saw this woman – she was probably in her late-forties – and like me, she also wore the sneakers with the work clothes. She invariably had on a suit – often a wool skirt and blazer – with a silky blouse and earrings and pearl necklace. Her hair was always styled and she wore a face full of make-up -- lipstick, eyeshadow, the works. She also carried this huge, fargin’ backpack. The kind of overstuffed backpack you see people trying to ram into overhead bins so they don’t have to check their luggage even though they’re traveling to New Zealand for six months.

And now here’s the kicker: she jogged to the subway every morning. Yes, jogged. In her suit and silky blouse and pearl necklace. In the Washington, D.C. swelter.  Carrying a backpack the size of a Neapolitan mastiff.

The first time I saw her I figured she was late and rushing somewhere. But then I saw her day after day and realized that she was doing this jogging with a backpack and pearls thing on purpose.

“What the hell” didn’t even begin to describe my reaction to this woman.

I found this behavior so inexplicably odd that here it is, more than 10 years later, and I STILL wonder about that lady. Why was she jogging? What was up with the backpack? What kind of sweaty mess did she become by the time she arrived at her office each day? I’m assuming this behavior was a misguided effort at multi-tasking. Or maybe she was performing some kind of religious purification ritual. Alas, I’ll never know the real story.

There is a truism in writing fiction that if you insert something real, something nonfiction, in your story, it will somehow ring false. This is why I’ll never be able to use the jogging, pearl-wearing lady in anything I write. (Except for in this blog post, of course.)

I wonder all the time why people do what they do, and if I can’t get at the real story, I can’t stop myself from making one up to fill the vacuum created by my unsatisfied curiosity. Some days I think writing is just another form of nosiness. Either that or I’m justifying my nosiness with this whole, “I’m a writer” thing. I’m not sure which is more accurate.

How about you? Has any strange(r) behavior ever inspired your creativity?

Breaking Rocks

It’s been that kind of week here, folks. Yes, indeedy. Lots of hard, hard work. 

But I keep thinking about this quote* and it’s given me some much-needed inspiration:

Look at the stone cutter hammering away at his rock, perhaps a hundred times without so much as a crack showing in it. Yet at the hundred-and-first blow it will split in two, and I know it was not the last blow that did it, but all that had gone before. -- Jacob Riis

Every swing of the hammer is meaningful, even if it doesn’t feel that way sometimes. 

Carry on with your work now. And don’t forget to stay hydrated.

*this is the epigraph for Peter Mathiessen’s Shadow Country. It’s awesome, is it not?

At Least We've Got That Going for Us

Bon Jour, mes amis!

I’m still fully committed to my schedule of erratic blog posts this summer, but I did want to share one small thought with you. 

As I may have mentioned -- many times, while your eyes glazed over – I love the sport of cycling, and in the world of cycling, July is all about the Tour de France. Someday I’m actually going to get over there and ring my cow bell along the roadside of the Alpe d’Huez with a million drunk Dutch fans who’ve painted their entire bodies orange and run alongside the cyclists wearing little more than a Speedo, but for now I must watch Le Tour on TV.

So I’m watching yesterday’s stage, and I realize something about being a writer than hadn’t occurred to me before, and here it is: Writing as a profession is emotionally punishing, mentally taxing, and really, really bloody hard and all that, but in terms of your physical safety? Like, the chance that you’ll get injured on the job? Writing couldn’t be better.

Take a look at this video. This is what a bad day at the office looks like for a professional cyclist. (The audio is in Flemish, but you’ll get the idea what he’s saying)

Say what you will about our struggle to create and the endless waiting we do and the pain of rejection – at the end of the day, the chances of getting hit by a TV crew covering you while you’re working is pretty much negative 100 percent. 

So take heart in knowing that no matter what happens this week while you’re writing, you’re probably not going to get pitched into a barbed wire cow fence.

There. Doesn’t that make you feel much better?