Artist Unknown

I’ve mentioned my crazy, ramshackle house before, specifically the abundance of awful wallpaper and the monumental, embittering efforts it took to remove all of it.

Because APPARENTLY people applied wallpaper with rubber cement back in the day, thereby sentencing future generations of homeowners to eighth-circle-of-hell type labors that take up years of weekends.  YEARS. Scraping and scraping and scraping like soulless dogs doing penance for crimes unknown.

(Obviously I've let my anger go.) 

The family who owned this place for sixty-odd years before we bought it had four children and at some point--the early 1960s would be a good guess--they installed an elaborate system of intercoms. Every room has an intercom (none of which still work). I’m sure it must have been cutting-edge at the time.

They also had a live-in maid. Or rather, as the story goes, a series of young, African-American maids trucked in from the Deep South, none of whom were probably older than twenty. 

I assume the intercoms were to call the maid? Maybe? I’ve never had a live-in maid (well, I mean, other than myself) so I’m just guessing that’s how it worked. Having lived here now for more than five years, I'm not convinced that the intercoms were even remotely necessary. It’s not like the house is so huge that calling out, “Hey, Mary, bring me a sandwich!” wouldn’t have worked perfectly well. This is why I assume the former owners must have been very formal people who mostly stayed in their rooms, operating intercoms as the need arose and otherwise not speaking.

The "bedroom" where the maid slept was in the basement, and I use quotes because calling this “bedroom” a bedroom is a stretch. It’s five-and-half feet by about six-and-a-half feet and has a very low ceiling. It’s a closet, really. It can’t have held anything more than a single bed and maybe a small dresser.  We use it to store the Christmas tree stand and decorations and all that.

I’ve joked many times that my dream office would be in a bunker, with walls so thick, Saddam Hussein would have envied them. See, my children, they find me, especially when I work.  Normally I don't write on the weekends, but I’ve been trying to get a first draft done, and so I’ve been taking my laptop and slinking off, hiding here and there throughout the house, gruffly rebuffing whoever comes to the door. But they always find me. I'm like a writing fugitive. I never know when my time will be up.

Well, duh, it finally occurred to me that if I shifted some stuff around and set up a table and chair down there in the maid’s room … voila! Instant writing bunker! The kids don’t like to go down there because the maid’s room is in the dark, spidery part of the basement. Its gloominess is probably why, at some point, one of the maids who was lodged there drew a reproduction of the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel on the walls.

For serious. At one point, all four walls were filled with pencil drawings, and I guess the former owners of our house weren’t too thrilled about it so they painted over her mural with the exception of the wall pictured above.

Some days I feel like moping about the long journey to publication. Please. What about her? I don’t know her name or what became of her, but when I imagine her sitting in that basement room, alone, drawing and sketching after answering intercoms all day...yikes. 

She filled a basement room with pencil sketches of religious paintings. Talk about yearning. I got nothing on her.

Mine!

Happy New Year, my lovelies!

I know one is supposed to make resolutions to improve one's self to mark the new year, but pffft to that. I’m going a different way in 2012—with a resolution of selfishness. And here it is: No one but no one will lay a finger on my new pens.

You see them over there? They are My Preciouses. Each one special and unique and not to be used by anyone but ME without permission, and I can assure you that that permission will never, ever be given.

See, a couple years ago I went to this event where they did a gift exchange thing, and I ended up getting this stack of fancy lady note paper and a fancy lady pen. At first I dismissed this fancy lady gift as fanciful, thinking, what am I going to do with this? Write notes to myself? 

“Dearest Kristen: Smashing job today revising chapter eleven for the sixty-eighth time, darling! I think you really got it this time! Brilliant!"

Well, let me tell you, I soon fell madly and hopelessly in love with the fancy lady pen I received, and I forbade any sticky-fingered, Cheerio-eating, ne’er-do-wells from using it, which turned out to be an edict frequently and wantonly broken. Despite practically foaming at the mouth about my pen and no one being allowed to touch it, my beloved pen would still, inexplicably, migrate to locations around the house without my knowledge or consent, and over time, it even acquired a few bite marks that were not my own. Let me tell you, I want other people’s bite marks on my pen about as much as I want other people’s bite marks on my arm. I almost tied my pen to my desk with a string to prevent future thievery, but then I came to my senses and recognized that adopting a practice commonly used at most DMVs was the wrong way to go. No, instead I knew I should just keep up with the constant threats of bodily harm. Also, I may have intimated to one or two of my kids that I was going to change her name to Eunice. ("I can do it, you know. Just a quick trip to the county courthouse, a little bit of paperwork, and boom, you're Eunice Hildegarde for the rest of your natural life!")

Well, can you believe that for Christmas I got three of these fancy lady pens from Santa? Yeeeessss. So shiny, so lovely, so utterly and unequivocally MINE. 

And NO ONE IS TOUCHING THEM.

Or else, or else, or else I swear I’ll … I’ll—oh, I don’t know.  I’ll do something. I’m running out of legitimate things to threaten people in my household with, which is why I’ve graduated to more and more ridiculous fear-mongering techniques, like walking around with a pillowcase full of doorknobs at all times.

What’s your favorite thing on your desk that no one is allowed to touch? 

*Update: I'm feeling much better about all this business. Thank you all for your wonderful comments on my last post. They really cheered me up a lot. You are extremely awesome. Yes, I'm talking about you there, at your keyboard, in your leopard-print Forever Lazy.*

Just Another Long, Fly Ball

I know you’re not supposed to talk about these things online, but I’m going to. 

I’ve just had a big disappointment.

Big.

To speak plainly, I had a book on submission for almost a year, and now it’s no longer on submission.

Some of you know me and know more about what’s been going on behind the scenes. Let me just say thank you to all you awesome writer-buddies for your support and camaraderie. I know you know what this feels like. And to everybody who’s visited the blog and left comments this year, I thank you as well and apologize for not replying to comments as much as I should have. My energy, especially this past month, has been at an all-time low. 

I hope you’ll forgive me if I withdraw from The Internets for a while and lick my literary wounds. The timing is right anyway since the holidays are almost here, and I’m sure, like me, you’ll soon decamp to your bucolic winter cabins in the Catskills to make mulled wine and popcorn strings with cherished family members, all of whom are wearing matching sweaters. (Oh, no, wait. That's the L.L. Bean catalog. I get that confused with my own life sometimes....)

For sure there are bigger tragedies in the world than not selling your book. But, still, it’s hard to see the ball go sailing for the fence and think you’ve hit a home run, only to hear the sound of it hitting the center fielder’s mitt at the warning track. Yep, it was just another long, fly ball.  

I’m all right. I may be standing atop the smoking ruins of my hopes, but I’m still standing. And can I say that I’m actually kind of proud of myself? Weird, huh? Just two short years ago, I started this blog, barely able to publicly admit that I was a writer. I used to get physically ill when I so much as thought about writing a query letter. Why? Because I feared what would happen if I failed. What if I worked my heart out on something and it went down in flames?

Well, that’s where I am.

And you know what? It’s really not as bad as I thought it would be. So if you’re reading this and you’re in the same boat, seriously, it’s OK. Failure is just a step in the process. The Monday after I heard the final nail being banged into the coffin for my manuscript, I sat down at my desk and worked just like any other day. I'm writing something new that I’m excited about, and I’ll keep at it. What else can you do?

So there we have it. 2011 has left me older, wiser, and frankly, somewhat appalled, but I’m still feeling feisty.  

Just wait 'til next year.

Mistaken Wisdom

This is a wee bit embarrassing, but such is the stuff of blog posts, right? 

So here’s the story.

At my kids’ school they’ve started this program to increase good citizenship and civic awareness. They’re encouraging kids to be more respectful and mindful of their behavior. You know, basically to have good manners and be polite to their fellow students and teachers. I have to say, it’s worked to some extent because I’ve noticed, for example, some kids actually holding the door for the kids behind them as they enter the school in the morning. This is something my kids could use help with because I tell you, I could be climbing the steps of Mt. Doom with Frodo Baggins on my back, trying to save the dang world from the forces of ultimate evil, and my kids would still walk ahead of me and let the door slam in my face as we went inside. 

"Uh, kids, could you hold the door for me, please?"

So a couple weeks back, as part of this civic awareness program, they put up a motivational poster or two in the school lobby. The one that caught my eye said this:

Your attitude determines your attitude.

The first time I read it, I was like, whuh? Your attitude determines your attitude? And then I thought about it, and I thought, hey, yeah, that’s kind of true, isn’t it? I mean, we don’t have control over our circumstances all the time, but we do have control over how we approach things. People often think their attitudes fall into that category of “things I can’t help,” but they don’t. Attitudes are absolutely adjustable. I mean, your attitude may be the only thing that you do have a choice about.

Huh. That’s kind of a cool idea. And definitely a good message for kids, right? To let them know, hey, you have more power than you think you do.

The past month I’ve been thinking about this a lot because, for reasons I can’t go into, I’ve pretty much needed to recharge my positive attitude on an hourly basis. I swear, if I thought it might have helped, I’d have hooked myself up to the car battery with jumper cables by now. But tough as it’s been, I’ve muddled through, occasionally thinking about that banner. 

My attitude will determine my attitude, I told myself. Yes, indeedy. 

OK, so here’s where this delightful, inspirational tale would end except that this past Monday evening, I looked at the banner again for the umpteenth time, and I realized that what it actually says is, “Your attitude determines your aLtitude.”

Ooooohhhh!

ALTITUDE. Not attitude.

I wondered why there was a picture of a hot air balloon on there. I guess that banner is saying that your attitude will determine how far you go in life. Something like that?

OK, well, duh. Guess I got that wrong, but whatever. I think I like my erroneous interpretation better. It helped me get through the past few weeks even if I was mistaken about the message. 

Additionally and obviously, it may be time for me to investigate the getting of glasses.

How’s your attitude this week?