The Last Laugh: A Letter to Mr. Trump

Dear Mr. Trump - 

I won’t honor you with the title of President because you haven’t earned it. Not in votes. Not in behavior. Definitely not in respect on any level. Indeed, the “Mr.” is merely the result of years of devotion to Miss Manner’s daily newspaper column

I know you will never read this letter. I’m going to write it all the same. 

Because I’ve come to realize something that I don’t think you know. Or perhaps you do know it very deeply inside the darkest corners of your mind. Perhaps it is the reason for your mental illness.

You see, you may have connived your way to the pinnacle of power, the epitome of all success. But I will get the last laugh. 

I am younger than you. My children are younger than you. If my math and the 2010 US Census are correct, 87% of Americans are younger than you.

Odds are very good that you will die long before I will. Definitely before my children.

And we are the keepers of your legacy. 

After you are gone, we will remain to write the history books. We will tell the truths and report the facts. Not your mind’s twisted, distorted alternative facts, but the cold, hard realities. We will choose what gets remembered and what gets forgotten.

You will not be remembered as a great man. You will not be recalled as having been beloved or popular. The adjectives “admirable” and “respected” will never be attached to your name. Your attributes will not ever include “wise” or “compassionate”. 

Your meager successes will fade beneath the bright light we will shine on your failures. The name that brings you so much riches and pride will become, once again, the punchline of a bad joke, the short-hand slang for a corrupt, morally bankrupt politician. “He’s a real Trump,” we’ll say, and that will explain everything we need to know about a person.

We will not build monuments in your honor or remember you on holidays. The company you keep will be Hitler, Putin, Hussein, and Chavez. You will receive credit for bringing on the darkest time in America’s history. A host of ills will be placed at your feet.

We will openly mock your tiny hands, your ridiculous spray tan, the bad toupee. We will speculate how small your manhood must have been to warrant such overcompensation. We will point at the pictures that demonstrated how few people supported you and how many hated you. We will watch the videos and we will mock you, as you once mocked a disabled reporter. 

And the best part?

You will be powerless to do anything about it. You won’t be able to tweet your outrage. You won’t be able to force your surrogates to try to sell us your lies. You won’t be able to threaten and bully and abuse your power.

You will be gone, but we will remain, and we will be laughing at you. We will teach our children and our grandchildren to laugh as well. 

That will be your legacy and your hell. Doomed for all eternity to be laughed at.

Call it Karma.

Please Mr. Hollywood Producer, Make This Movie For Me

There are a handful of books I remember reading in my youth, ones that really stuck with me such that thinking about them - or rereading them - puts me back in a very specific time and place in my life. One such book was The Outsiders by S.E. Hinton, which I read when I was around 13 years old and remains my all time favorite book ever to this very day.

But a close second is the classic Johnny Tremain by Esther Forbes. The edition pictured above is the one that I read when I was young, and I still own this book today. The pages are yellowed and the cover is so worn it's cloth-soft. There are more recent editions with way cooler covers, but I prefer my copy. The other day, at the library, I found Johnny Tremain on CD which I checked out to listen to in 10 minute bursts in the car as I zipped here and there during the week. But these snippets were too much of a tease, so I broke out the book and reread it again.

And again, I was completely captivated by the story of Johnny and his experience during the early days of the Revolutionary War. If you haven't read this book, do so. You won't be sorry.

Disney made a movie. It was horrible. Well, maybe not horrible for the time - 1957. But now, it's excruciating to watch a single second of it. The acting is amateurish, the dialogue just silly. The colors are over-bright and over-saturated. The costumes are laughably inaccurate (check out Johnny's Davy Crockett fringe jacket). The depiction of mid-1770s Boston is too clean and sanitized. And the Disney-fied version holds none of the dark, haunting undertones of the book. It's like what would result if Disney created an amusement park ride called The Wonderful World of Revolution!

Which leads me to beg anyone who reads this and who has any connection with the Hollywood Movie Making Machine (6 degrees of separation put into action), please, please, please - this movie is begging for a remake. It needs the Last of the Mohicans or The Patriot treatment. It needs to be made real, with dirt and blood and brooding.

Mostly, it needs a fantastic actor to play Johnny Tremain. Because Johnny (along with Ponyboy Curtis) is the first fictional character who ever haunted me for days and weeks after I'd finished his story.

Heck, years and decades later, I think about Johnny Tremain. I remember when I first read this book oh so many years ago, the song Into the Night by Benny Mardones was in rotation on the AM radio dial. To this day, when I hear this song, I think of Johnny Tremain. Not that the song or lyrics have anything at all to do with a young man in the time of the American Revolution. Just that the book made such an impression on me at the time, other aspects of my life latched on and became permanently connected with the experience.

That's one powerful character.

(Side note, and nothing to do with Johnny Tremain, but the song My Eyes Adored You by Frankie Valli reminds me always of Laura Ingalls Wilder because I was reading These Happy Golden Years when it was popular on the radio. Am I really weird?)

So I'm officially starting the petition. With all of the remakes and remakes of remakes out there, Hollywood is clearly hurting for ideas. Johnny Tremain is a fascinating story about an amazing time in our country's history. It contains tragedy and heartbreak, love and romance, war and violence, villains and heroes, oppression and victory.

No car chases.

But there are a couple of close calls with pitchfork-and-torch-bearing mobs chasing down Tory carriages that might appeal to that male ages 13-25 demographic.

It's a guaranteed blockbuster. I promise.

Davy, You Will Always Be My First

RIP Davy Jones.

You were my first ever crush. The first guy who made my knees melt.

When you sang I Want to Be Free, I believed you were singing to me.

Oddly, you became a teen heartthrob the year before I was born, but I found you in afternoon Monkees reruns. You opened the door to the world of harmless, celebrity crushes.  Shaun Cassidy. Christopher Atkins. Rob Lowe. Boris Becker. So many others came after you.

But you were the first and the one I'll always remember.

You will be missed.

The Perfect Heroine

If I could be any fictional character on a televisions series, it would be Amy Abbott (Emily VanCamp) from the canceled family drama, Everwood.

To anyone who has ever watched the show, pointing out that Amy has Ephram Brown's (Gregory Smith) undying love and devotion would probably be enough explanation of why I'd love to be her.

But Amy Abbott is a great character in her own right. She's extremely smart but does stupid things. She's pretty and popular but still insecure and grounded. She's from a privileged background (father is a doctor, mother is the town's mayor) but isn't a spoiled, entitled shop-a-holic. She loves her older brother, Bright (Chris Pratt) but fights with him like real siblings do. She's a great friend without being too saintly. The girl makes mistakes, but she can admit when she was wrong and apologize sincerely.

For the four seasons that Everwood ran, Amy endured a lot of pain and drama - her first boyfriend languished in a coma for months after a car crash left him with a severe brain injury, she suffered from a bout of depression, skirted on the edge of the drug scene while dating a bad-boy, discovered that the love of her life had fathered a child with another woman, watched her mother battle cancer - yet Amy never came off as pitiful or martyr-like. And when the show ended and Amy earned her (presumably) happy-ever-after, the satisfaction of a story well told was profound.

The writers of Everwood did a great job creating a well-rounded heroine in Amy Abbott. She's a great model for how to create a flawed character who is likable and realistic.

And I'd kill for her wardrobe.

A Song of Ice and Fire

I didn't watch Game of Thrones when it aired on HBO. To be honest, I'd never heard of this book, nor of the uber-successful fantasy series by George R.R. Martin, A Song of Ice and Fire. On the whole, I'm not a huge fantasy reader. Other than the Lord of the Rings trilogy, I can't think of any other fantasy series I've ever read in its entirety. Well, except Harry Potter. Does that count as fantasy?

Anyway, it came to pass in mid July that my children were going to the movies, specifically to see a show that I had no desire whatsoever to watch, and I found myself needing to kill two hours before I had to pick them up at the theater at the mall. I took a tour of Target where I spontaneously picked up a copy of Game of Thrones. I wanted to see what all the fuss was about. I headed to Portillo's and treated myself to a chocolate cake shake (okay, it was my birthday, so I felt justified) and cracked open the giant brick of a book.

And now I'm totally hooked. What a fantastic story.

Mostly, I'm in awe of what an amazing writer George R.R. Martin is. His ability to pace such an astoundingly long and epic story with a cast of hundreds is an inspiration. Every single chapter - which is told from the point of view of a different, key character - moves the story forward by leaps but never feels rushed. Specifically, Martin has some preternatural gift of knowing which POV character to use to make the narrative edge-of-your-seat fascinating, and at the end of each chapter, I'm turning pages like crazy wanting to know what happens to that particular person next. But by then, he's already turned my attention to someone else and the process is repeated.

Oddly, as well paced as this series is and as much as I'm always wanting to read more, even into the wee hours, it is taking me FOREVER to get through these books. Seriously, it took me a full month to read Game of Thrones. And that was with reading at least some of the book every single day and buying a smaller, mass paperback copy to take with me on my beach vacation. I picked up the next title, Clash of Kings, immediately upon finishing GoT and have been working on it diligently, yet I'm only about half way through the book.

Part of this slow reading is because the books are long. I'm talking close to 1,000 pages each. And they are dense, with so much information you can't afford to skim. Too much happens in too short of a span of pages. Not that I'm even tempted to skim - the story is great and completely engrossing. Perhaps Martin's descriptions of castles and dark forests get a bit windy, but there aren't too many paragraphs I haven't read every word of.

I'm now wanting very much to see the HBO interpretation. We don't have HBO, and I have no desire to pay for HBO just so I can have access to 10 hours of its programming. It doesn't appear HBO has any intention of putting GoT on DVD any time soon, so I guess I'm out of luck. I'm just going to have to wait.

Then again, it's going to take me a year to read all the books, so it's not like I don't have a way to kill the time until then.

In The Dark

We've just spent the past 48 hours without electricity after a powerful storm rolled through our area on Tuesday evening and knocked down trees, branches and power lines.

The first 24 hours in the dark are always kind of fun. We dig out our No Electricity Box that contains candles, flashlights, oil for our old oil lamp and a Coleman camping lantern. The kids light candles all over the house and my husband and I fret about someone starting a fire. It's like camping out, and we joke about how hard it would have been to live 150 years ago. We wonder how we would have spent the time and marvel that people functioned as well as they did. I always marvel at the fact that it's only around 150 years we've been living with better lighting in our homes.

The kids wonder what to do and think it's a great boon to dig out the board games for entertainment. They actually read real dead tree books and interact with each other face to face instead of via text. And when things get really boring, they - gasp! - head outside to take a walk or play a game of basketball. Both my husband and I think perhaps it would be a good thing for the electricity to go down a few times a month.

The second 24 hours aren't so much fun. The storm hit just as I was in the middle of cleaning up the kitchen after dinner, so I had a dishwasher full of dirty dishes. I also hadn't yet run the garbage disposal which meant one of my sinks wouldn't drain well and I worried about odor.

Also, after two days, the laundry had begun to pile up. My daughter and I headed to the laundro-mat this morning. I have to say, there is something nice about investing two solid hours to get ALL of the laundry clean, dried, folded and sorted rather than the days-long process of doing one load at a time. Maybe not as convenient, but now I don't have to worry if we'll run out of clean towels until at least the end of the weekend.

Then there is the problem with charging. Cell phones. iPods. iPads. We have charging units that work off a running car engine, but you can only drive around so much. For years now my husband has been saying we need to get rid of our land line phone since we all have cells. But it's times like this when I feel vindicated for pushing back - once all the cell phone batteries run out, we're completely incommunicado. 

Not so cool was emptying out my fridge and freezer. I didn't bother trying to salvage any of it save some condiments, potatoes, onions and a bit of chicken that had remained frozen. I hauled six full garbage bags to the bin and felt tremendous levels of guilt for all of the bottles and plastics I failed to recycle. Without a working garbage disposal, there was no way to properly empty and rinse out the bottles to save them, so I threw things out whole. I hope future generations will forgive me.

As time consuming (and expensive!) as it was to purge the fridge, it's amazing how nice it is to start from scratch with an empty and clean unit. I've made my husband vow that we will not buy anything to put into it that we don't plan to use within a day or two because I'm not going to clutter it up again with half a dozen half-empty bottles of BBQ sauce or 13 varieties of salad dressing and ice cream sundae toppings. Gone, also, are those "experiments" we always manage to pick up at Trader Joe's or other high-end grocery stores, things that sound good on the label but either aren't a big hit or don't get used often enough such that three years later we still have a 3/4-full jar of roasted red pepper and artichoke tapinade buried in the darkest corners. Either we love it, we eat it all up or we hated it and out it goes immediately.

While I was the first one doing the happy dance when ComEd finally managed to give us back the power, I have to say that living in the dark has some real benefits. Last night, after eating dinner out (couldn't cook!), the entire family sat down and played a game together. We had a lot of fun, and my husband and I remembered how we'd always planned to have a family game night once or twice a month. Usually, we all go our own ways to plug ourselves into whatever electronic entertainment we've chosen for the evening, and no one wants to be bothered to spend time laughing and talking together.

Makes me wonder if the decline in western culture and the bonds of family might not be the fault of the light bulb. Way to go, Mr. Edison.

BTW, if you are looking for a fun, family game, I recommend Apples to Apples. While the Family Edition is great for older kids (and my kids do fall in the right age group), I actually thought the Junior Edition was more fun. But it's a great game that provokes lots of laughs.

Fledgling Writer

My daughter likes to write. She's got a dozen or so notebooks with the beginnings and bits of stories. She reads like a fiend, and her work reflects her reading passions.

She's run into the same problems all writers do, that dreaded "what now?" wall. A general idea will come to her, she'll spend some time on character names and know the bare bones premise of what she wants to happen. But the details will elude her. She manages a scene or two and then finds herself at a complete standstill, story-wise. She's not at the no plot, no problem level, she's more at the no plot, no idea stage.

I've suggested some of my favorite strategies for getting un-stuck. Things like playing the what-if game, or pulling out a blank piece of paper and creating a brainstorming web. I explained to her the difference between pantsers and outliners and that while I have no doubt many amazing stories come out of the I don't know what happens until it happens approach, I personally need at least a rudimentary road map of where I want my story to go. She agreed and created note pages for "Beginning", "Middle" and "End". Problem is, she has no idea what to put on any of these pristine pages. She's stumped. Beyond knowing that she wants to introduce her characters and have them end up happily ever after in some fashion, there is a vast, empty void between those two points. Welcome to the wonderful world of writing.

I've also described to her my idea-generating process. How I usually start with a character that pops up uninvited into my head and maybe a vague idea for a story that would fit that particular person's state in life. Or how the germ of a story idea will come out of a news article I've recently read. Or how I'll hear a song on the radio and it will evoke some specific emotion that I feel compelled to try to capture in story-form. I never have problems with ideas. In fact, my problem lies in too many idea.

But I do get what it's like to struggle with plot. And unfortunately, I don't have any magic bullet solutions to give her. She's got to work her way through the process. Figure out what method does it for her. I told her to go back to some of her most favorite stories and study them, break them down and find the bone structure beneath the prose. What caused character A to do this or character B to do that? Who wants what and why can't he/she get it/have it? So what do they do about it? And what happens then? Plotting is both so very simple and incredibly difficult at the same time. Easy to recognize, hard to replicate.

At the very least, my daughter has a giant leg up on me writing-wise - she's only 13 and can spend the next few years burning away the schlock so that by the time she's ready to select a career and perhaps choose to follow writing, she'll be that much farther down the path. I didn't take this crazy hobby seriously until I was well past 30, and I still have plenty of schlock on the woodpile. I hope she sticks with it. I think she has talent.

And I can't wait to see what happens next.

Indulgent Mommy Moment

Happy 11th Birthday, Jakey!

Heartbroken

I never planned to use this place as a therapy session, but I'm hoping if I put my current frustrations down in print, some day I'll be at a place where I can look back and realize that things did get better. At the moment, I feel like I'm standing at the entrance of a very long, very dark tunnel with not even a pinpoint of light at the far end.

My daughter is experiencing a very painful "mean girls" time in her life. As much as you are apart from your child, it's amazing how much their pain becomes your own. My blood is boiling and I really do want to beat some particular people into a mushy pulp. Add in my adult perspective and I feel a level of impotence that is pretty hard to handle. I can't help her. I can't do anything to make things better. I can only offer her my support and the knowledge that she's a great kid who is the better person, and that this, too, shall pass. But it isn't enough. When your baby is hurting, you would move mountains to stop the pain. Except that I can't do that in this particular case. She just has to get through the hurt on her own.

What's doubly frustrating is that I understand the dynamics at work. I stand outside of the situation and see exactly what is going on. I see why she chooses to handle things the way she does, why she believes she has to put up with the crap she's being dealt even though what she should do is tell her supposed friends to go take a flying f@$!. I also know that telling her that things will get better doesn't help her deal with right.this.very.minute. Who cares what things will be like in a couple of years, or in a month or even next week? Right now sucks and that's all there is.

And as angry as I am right now, I can only imagine the bile I'm going to have to swallow when this episode is over and things go back to being the way they were and I have to interact with these girls without indicating in any way that I'd be quite fine if they all got eaten by alligators, slowly and painfully. My adult way of handling people who don't deserve respect or decent treatment doesn't work in this scenario, so I have to keep my mouth shut, smile and try not to scream while I haul their asses around in the minivan. Moms deserve combat pay.

No one tells you when you have kids that you will have to relive all of the crap you thought you put behind you once you grew up and left high school. They should write a book for that. "What to Expect When Your Kid's Life Sucks."

Not Quite On the Same Page

I've discovered a new blog - The Book Lantern - that I love, however the post that appeared today is really causing me to scratch my head. I know how I feel about what this person is saying, but I'm struggling to put those thoughts to words.

What I get out of the post is that Ceilidh is frustrated with an industry - society in general, actually - which defaults to the proto-typical heterosexual white male/female as the standard character type with all variations of ethnicity and/or sexual orientation falling outside the spectrum of "normal". Additionally, when gay characters (or characters of ethnicity) are portrayed, they take the form of the most simplistic stereotypes (gay boys who giggle a lot), or the reader is constantly reminded that this person is capital-G Gay (or capital B-Black/capital A-Asian, etc.). Characters who fall outside of the narrow white-and-straight are under-represented, and stories that do feature someone who doesn't fit that description are classified as "issue" books rather than just stories.

While I agree with the overall sentiment - that society needs to move in the direction where every variation of human being is just as normal and accepted as another - I'm not sure if I can wrap my brain around Ceilidh's argument that the publishing industry, writers included, are perpetuating a form of reinforcement of bad attitudes in their assume standard=white-and-straight approach.

First, to state my fundamental opinion on homosexuality. I believe you love whom you love. Being a homosexual is not a choice or an alternative lifestyle or something that you can turn off or turn on or dabble in or, heaven help us, "fix". God makes no mistakes, and, to quote Lady GaGa (god!), everyone is born that way. And those who insist that homosexuals don't deserve the same respect and rights as heterosexuals are practicing a form of bigotry and racism that is intolerable and ignorant.

As for homosexuality portrayed in fiction, some of the most romantic couples I have ever encountered have been gay couples. I've stated before that the Brian and Justin love story depicted on the US Queer As Folk was one of the most beautiful and heart-wrenching of any ever. I wept over Brokeback Mountain and felt sorry for anyone who refused to experience such a heartbreaking story because of their homophobia. Gay FBI agent Jules Cassidy is one of my favorite characters in contemporary romance, and until his relationship with Robin devolved into something too cutesy for even my thirteen year old daughter, it was one of Suzanne Brockmann's best depicted in all of her Troubleshooters series.

If the romance is done well, I don't give two hoots if the couple is male/male, male/female, or female/female.

So here's my problem with Ceilidh's problem. If a character's sexual orientation doesn't matter to the story, why bring it up? Ever? Why tell the reader this person is gay? Ever?

If you insist on labeling a person as gay, you inherently imply that this aspect of their person is important to the story. That this person's sexual orientation makes a difference in some way. Because if being gay doesn't affect the story in any way, then why mention it at all?

Best analogy I can think of is hair color. Hair color is a trait that has little bearing on the bigger picture of a character's story. Unless a particular character is persecuted, lauded or otherwise treated differently because of his or her hair color, other than a mild curiosity on the part of the reader, specifying a character's hair color is unnecessary.

If, on the other hand, the author reminds the reader every chapter or so that the main character is blonde, hair color starts to mean something. By calling it out, the writer has given hair color importance. For some reason, the hair color of this particular person makes him/her different. Not better, not worse, not wrong, not anything. But being blonde affects how this person deals with the world or how the world deals with them.

Same thing with being gay. If a person's sexual orientation has no bearing on the story, then why bring it up? Why does a writer have to "state for the record" that any one character is gay or not gay?

Who cares if people assume that the character is straight if sexual orientation doesn't matter? Back to my hair analogy, it's like saying that there is something wrong with imagining a character to be blonde all through the book only to find out at the end that she was actually brunette. Why is it important for me to know all the way through that she was brunette if it doesn't make her any different?

Absolutely shining example is Headmaster Albus Dumbledore from the Harry Potter series. Never once in seven books and some 4,000 plus pages of the series is Albus Dumbledore's sexual orientation mentioned. Because it didn't matter to the story. After the fact, writer J.K. Rowling stated that Dumbledore was gay, that he'd always been gay, that this was how she had imagined him from the very beginning, and she offered zero apology for that because none was needed.

And now, readers have spent seven books and some 4,000 plus pages liking and empathizing with a character who, it turns out, is just like them even though he's gay. Well, most of us readers aren't magical wizards, but you get the point.

If being gay/ethnic/blonde changes the way the main character(s) deal with the world or how the world treats them, then you can't ignore it as a trait. And then I would argue that stories that deal with how a  character is treated differently because of some specific trait are issue books.

Net, net, what I think I'm trying to say is that by insisting that gay people (or people of non-white races) have increased representation, you are saying that their gayness matters in some way. Otherwise, who cares if the main character is gay or not?

Really, in this case I feel words are failing me.

Okay, So They Were Right

A good 24 inches with 4 foot drifts. Yep, it really was a blizzard.

School is closed. It took us 2 hours to dig out enough to get the car out of the garage to find that only the largest streets have been plowed. We're officially snowed in, and it's bliss.

Last night, however, had to be one of the scariest experiences in my life.

The husband, making a smart call, took the train into the city to avoid the rush hour home. He decided to wait, however, even though his office officially closed at 4:00, to take a later train home in order to avoid the mass exodus from the city. Thus, I get a call from him at 9:00 pm, during the worst part of the storm, informing me that his car is stuck outside the train station and he needs for me to pick him up.

?

!

So, the decision becomes, do I take the kids with me and risk us all getting stuck out in this mess? Or do I leave them at home and risk my husband and I getting stuck away from them. They didn't really give me any choice, insisting that they come along. I made them put on every piece of snow gear they owned, shoved a bag full of extra scarves, and had a smile when my son loaded up his pockets with granola bars, "just in case".

We barely made it out of the driveway. Then we barely made it off of our street. The wind was blowing so hard you couldn't see the next street light. Although I stuck to the most heavily traveled roads, I was terrified I'd get stuck in a snow drift. Our little downtown area is about a mile and half a way, but it seemed like 200.

My husband was glad to see us. And him being from Buffalo where this level of snow is just another Tuesday, he was like a kid in a candy store driving home, barely concerned at all that we'd get stuck out in the middle of a freakin' blizzard.

Like he said this morning when we were all nice and safe and warm, this experience was great one for the kids to remember. Remember how we had to pick Dad up in a blizzard! Woohoo. Great memories.

Battening Down the Hatches

So, they are predicting a "storm for the records" complete with blizzard warning and predictions of anywhere from 12-24" of snow here in the Chicagoland area. While the heaviest snowfall isn't supposed to really get started until later this afternoon, people have already lost their collective minds. I stopped by the grocery store this morning just to get some milk (can't run out of that or we'd risk being latte-free, an unacceptable state of affairs in our house) and the shelves were nearly empty. I ran into a neighbor who told me that, apparently, yesterday was so bad that people couldn't park their cars to even go into the Dominick's.

Now, call me a cynic, but is this really necessary? I don't know about most people but I have a pantry stocked far too full to ever give any concern that my family might starve unless we're forced to remain completely housebound for at least, like, a solid month. Sure, we'd be eating the canned salmon and stale Ritz crackers, but we're not about to risk empty bellies for quite some time. Do people really live so close to the edge that being unable to get out of the house for two or three days means they'd start eying the family pets like a cartoon pork chop?

Too, this storm might put a full stop to things for a few days, but I'm guessing by Friday the roads will be passable enough to make a grocery store run if absolutely necessary. We're not talking about Castaway levels of isolation, here. I get that the inability of delivery trucks to transport the goods necessary to restock empty shelves is a real possibility, meaning no milk or bread for a bit longer. Again, however, I doubt the stores will run completely out of food such that you wouldn't be able to find something to get you by if necessary. Take a cruise down the ethnic aisles and give couscous a try - it's fantastic.

The one pre-emptive effort I did make was to fill up the gasoline container for the snowblower, thinking we'd need the extra gas and wouldn't want to/have the ability to get to the gas stations. Unfortunately, I didn't know that you have to mix oil with the gas before using and now my husband is in a snit because he doesn't know what ratio we now have gas to oil-wise. I have to fix that before the snow starts flying. No good deed goes unpunished.

My kids are already planning for their almost-guaranteed snow day tomorrow. Hubby has cleared his schedule so he can work at home. I'm planning on doing nothing constructive since snow days are like surprise holidays and therefore should be treated as precious.

It will be interesting to look at this from the other side. I can't count how many times the media gears us up for some monster storm only to have it fizzle out. They shake their heads and tell us we were very lucky that this storm "took a turn south/north and we just barely missed it." If we end up with only three inches on the ground, I have some kids who will be mightily disappointed.

(Photo credit: Chicago Tribune archive photo, 1967)

Happy New Year and I am Still Here

Just a quick post to keep things active. The end of 2010 was unfortunately not so great, with my father and grandmother passing away within seven hours of each other. Thus my lack of posts.

But I'm back up and running. Happy New Year!

Beyond The Pale

When does a fictional character cross the line so far that he or she becomes irredeemable, assuming that said person has up to that point been a hero in the most traditional sense? It's one thing to be an anti-hero or even a dark hero, where by the very nature of the definition the character's actions and methods are already morally ambiguous. But what actions push a reader or viewer so far that they are no longer capable of forgiving that character? In fact, the reader/viewer's fundamental view of that character is forever altered, perhaps even retroactively.

The most excellent (and biggest time suck on the planet, so beware) website TV Tropes lists something called the Moral Event Horizon, a line which when crossed represents a character's descent into true evil or from hero to villain. After crossing the Moral Event Horizon, a character is marked as generally irredeemable. While a Moral Event Horizon is always a subjective thing - what behaviours one person views as reprehensible and unforgivable another person might accept given certain circumstances - it seems writers of fiction approach such an act with great intention that it be recognized as a significant point of change. You always know an MEH when you see one.

Last night on one of my favorit-est TV shows ever, Supernatural, Sam Winchester came within micrometers of the Moral Event Horizon if not actually crossed over it.

No, Thank You

I consider myself a child of the new millennium (even though I was born waayyy before the year 2000). I've adopted pretty much all forms of modern technology. I firmly believe that the laptop computer, word processing software and e-mail are the best inventions since indoor plumbing and almost equally as vital. Heck, I'd much much rather type up something on the computer than hand-write it. I get a cramp when I have to write absent-from-school notes for my kids. And I'd a thousand times over rather send an e-mail then make a phone call. I'm all about convenience and using the tools at our disposal to make our lives easier.

But I draw the line at E-Thank You notes.

My son recently attended a birthday party - invite issued via E-Vite of course. I actually have no problems with E-Vite because it's a nice way to see who else was invited to the party, who's going and who's not, which comes in very handy when you are trying to arrange carpools or to instruct your kids on how it is not polite to discuss invitations in front of others who might not have received them. I embrace the E-Vite.

But just today I got a thank-you note for the gift we gave via an E-Thank You Card issued through American Greetings electronic cards website. WTF?

Sure, the thank you card had a cute little animated doggy who barked at me. And sure, it's greener to send e-things instead of flesh-and-blood paper products because no trees were sacrificed nor landfills filled in thanking me for my gift (don't talk about the gift-wrapping used to wrap said gift).

But how much more impersonal can you get? The same E-Thank You Card was sent en masse to all of the kids who went to this party. It is in no way customized. "You" were thanked for "your gift" and "your attendance" at the party. "You" could have been a hoard of soldier ants and "your gift" could have been a bag of fake doggie poo or a brand new car.

I get it that the art of letter writing has pretty much gone the way of the Dodo bird. I'm guilty of that myself. I'd rather e-mail when I need to actually communicate with other human beings, and if I can't get away with that - ex: Holiday Cards - I will type up a generic letter, mass produce it, and send it out with perhaps a single line of personalization.

But I draw the line at mass-produced thank you notes. What a smack in the face to someone who took the time to think up an appropriate gift, drive about locating said gift and then wrap it all in an effort to make some else's special event, well, special.

My kids are always required to hand-write thank you cards. I cheat and give them a template written out that they can copy over and over - Dear So-and-So, Thank you for the X. I'm so glad you came to my party/I plan to spend the money on/I can't wait to see you... Your Friend... But at least they are required to spend some of their time sitting at the table, carefully penning out the note, putting it in an envelope, addressing it, and mailing it. They are demonstrating that they appreciate the time and effort that whoever took to get them a gift by giving back some of their own time to offer thanks.

What's even more amazing is that E-Thank You Cards are actually a full step below what I had once thought of as the rock-bottom, can-you-give-any-less-effort method of offering a Thank You short of not sending a note at all (don't get me started on people who don't acknowledge a gift at all, especially one that has been shipped and thus could ostensibly never arrive without anyone ever being the wiser). At one point, I was scandalized by the photocopied, generic "Thank you for coming to my party and for my gift" cards that we would get in the mail. And these were a full step down from the preprinted thank you cards that had a blank line to be filled in after the "Dear" and the "Thank you for" so you could sort-of customize them without having to actually do any real work. The fill-in-the-blank cards I could even excuse because usually they came from very small children who could manage to maybe write their own names, so this was as much as they could do and I can't ask for more than that. And at least with those cards you had to stuff the envelopes, address them, hunt up stamps and find an ever-more-endangered mailbox.

With E-Thank You Cards you're talking the thirty seconds to type up one message to cover everyone and his/her gift and another thirty to specify e-mail addresses and poof! you're finished. I truly cannot think of less effort needed short of sending out a blanket e-mail without even the fancy card facade. I'm sure that's coming around the corner soon.

Sad.

While I embrace an age that allows me to watch 999,999 different movies and TV shows without ever having to get off of my couch (love my new Apple TV!!), there are definite drawbacks. I can accept a fat butt, but loss of the niceties of society should be one of them.

Something Frivolous

I just wanted to have a post on the very special date of 10/10/10. It's kind of like wanting to see your odometer roll past the 99,999 miles mark.

The Complete Stranger In the Drawing Room with the Candlestick

I just finished Cold Sight by Leslie Parrish. For the first time in memory, I actually enjoyed the mystery plot far more than the romantic plot - I actually skimmed much of the relationship stuff - up until the very end of the book. However, I'm very glad I read it because I learned something very important about the art of writing good, spine-tingling suspense.

The story is about reporter Lexie Nolan who is currently in the reporter dog house after an investigation she conducted of the disappearance of close to twenty teenage girls ended nowhere. Local law enforcement is not only unhelpful but downright hostile over Lexie's suggestions that their small town is anything but safe and that if the missing girls had been from the upper class side of town rather than from the Boro - on the wrong side of the tracks - perhaps they'd take her fears that a serial killer is at work seriously. Thankfully, Lexie has an extremely smart and understanding boss, and when he receives a tip about some human remains found just outside of town, he insists that Lexie get back on the case, especially since another girl, Vonnie, has just gone missing and there still might be time to help her.

Stuck at a dead end and with no help at all from the police chief, Lexie decides to seek out the help of disgraced psychic Aidan McConnell, a man who hates reporters on principle and based on his own bad experiences. After a search for a missing boy ended tragically, Aidan has determined never again to use his gifts as a means to find anyone since he doesn't want to be responsible for anyone else's fate or pain. At first he flat out refuses to even speak to Lexie, but slowly he finds himself compelled to help find the missing girl.

As Lexie and Aidan begin to dig into the town's dark history, they learn that the disappearance of teenage girls is only the tip of the iceberg. Prominent and supposedly upstanding citizens of the community have been engaging in acts of unspeakable evil for decades, and it appears that those missing girls are, indeed, the victims of a serial killer left to attack again and again. Lexie and Aidan race against the clock to solve the mystery while Vonnie's future becomes more and more uncertain.

Okay, going forward there are very mild SPOILERS, but if, given that this is a romantic suspense book and thus, by nature, builds on suspense and reader ignorance, those who don't want any ideas of what happens should stop reading now.

Okay, Thanks?

My blog has been included on this list of "50 Best Blogs for Creative Writers" at bestcollegesonline.com. I don't know how I ranked inclusion, but given the company I keep is Paperback Writer and Pocket Full of Words, I certainly won't ask questions. I check both of those blogs on a daily basis and recommend them highly as places for great advice on the art of writing.

I'm more excited to check out the other links on list. I'm always happy to find resources for writing advice. Bits and pieces here and there really add up.

The Freaks Come Out Again

First, read this.

*sigh*

One of my favorite movies is The American President, and one of my favorite scenes in the movie is when President Andrew Shepard (aka, Michael Douglas) gives a speech in front of the press in which he delivers a major smackdown to a Senator Bob Rumson (aka Richard Dreyfuss) who has been publicly maligning his character. In this speech is this bit that I love:

America isn't easy. America is advanced citizenship. You've got to want it bad, because it's going to put up a fight. It's going to say "You want free speech? Let's see you acknowledge a man whose words make your blood boil. Who's standing center stage and advocating at the top of his lungs that which you would spend a lifetime opposing at the top of yours."

So, while I fully understand on an intellectual level that Mr. Scroggins has a right to believe whatever he wants and to express that opinion in whatever way he wants, it sure is hard to remember what it means to be an American especially when the street is only running in one direction. If I have to respect his right to not read something that he finds offensive (?!?), then why doesn't he have to respect my right - and the right of every other American - to read whatever we choose?

The nice thing about that above little snippet: As Americans, we have to respect our fellow countrymen's rights. However...

...we don't have to respect them as people. Which is a good thing because my respect for Mr. Scroggins is in the negative numbers. Clearly he has never read Speak, the book he is trying to have banned, because he would know that it is about as far from pornography as it is possible to get. How dare he judge something he himself has never read and then attempt to enforce that judgment on others?

...we don't have to like people like Mr. Scroggins. Which is a good thing because it is fundamentally impossible for me to like anyone who presumes to tell me what to do, what I can or can't read, that I'm a bad person because I don't share the same beliefs. Or a man who insists that he knows better than I do what is right for my children and would deny them anything that is their right to have, including the right to read whatever they want. People have gone to war to protect the rights of their children.

...we are allowed to form opinions about people such as Mr. Scroggins and his beliefs and express them on blogs such as this and in letters to the editor and in any way that makes our voices louder than his. Yay free speech!

...we are allowed to employ our own religious beliefs and tenants to come to the conclusion that Mr. Scroggins does not represent the true spirit of Christianity, that he clearly has no clue What Jesus Would Do, and that what goes around comes around, Karma is a bitch, and St. Peter has made note of this and will most definitely have words with Mr. Scroggins when he goes knocking on those pearly gates.

...we are allowed to speculate what kind of psychological issues Mr. Scroggins must suffer given that he equates the brutal horror that is rape with the titillating nature of pornography. I'm sorry, Mr. Scroggins, for the traumas you must have suffered in your past that have given you such a twisted and unhealthy view of human sexuality. I also ask you to stay very far away from my family and friends.

...we are allowed to ask what kind of person could call himself moral when he advocates the blame-the-victim mentality that causes rape victims to remain quiet about a violent, cruel crime committed against them. We are allowed to worry about the women in Mr. Scroggins life knowing that he would show them the same lack of compassion and human empathy should they ever - God forbid - suffer such a horror.

...we are allowed to call Mr. Scroggins un-American and question his patriotism. Banning books is about as un-American as you can get. It goes against everything we stand for - freedom of people to determine what is best for themselves and their families as long as they do not hurt or infringe upon the rights of others. With his crusade to ban Speak and other books, he's stomping all over my rights.

...we are allowed, in fact, to imply that Mr. Scroggins' thinking is far more in-line with those of members of the Taliban and Al Qaeda given that he proposes nothing less than a government and legal system based on a slate of fundamental religious "laws". Gah! What's next, Mr. Scroggins? You planning to make your fortune selling burkas?

 ...we are allowed to read Speak and to encourage our teens to read Speak. I own a copy and when my daughter is a bit older and more mature, I will encourage her to read it.

And in that way, we will be victorious over petty tyrants such as Mr. Scroggins and his posse of fellow book banners.

God Bless America.

Write Like You're Dying

I sometimes wonder what my family would do with all of my writing things if I suddenly died.

My husband is generally not the nostalgic type, and despite my certainty that he would be sad about my passing, I can't imagine him holding on to my writing stuff as some sort of shrine or tribute to my memory. He hates clutter and I would suspect he'd sweep the contents of my shelves into the garbage without a thought, although I'd at least hope he'd go for recycling all of the paper and giving the empty binders to Goodwill or something.

I wonder if anyone - my kids or my mother - might take the time to read my notes or the pages of various manuscripts that I've printed out. I have everything very nicely organized, with each story idea in its own binder or folder. I wonder if they'd be able to understand my plans or make enough sense out of my notes and scribbles that they'd be able to see what story I'd wanted to tell. Maybe they'd shake their heads sadly and determine that I'd been completely delusional about ever thinking I could be published. I like to think they'd shake their heads sadly and think what a waste it was that I never finished what I'd started or that I didn't have the chance to get all of those stories out of my brain and onto paper.

As morbid as this line of thinking is, I've been doing it more recently because the uncertainty of life has been smacking me in the face. My father is currently undergoing treatment for leukemia, a battle he's been fighting for almost a year now. Cancer is one illness that had never struck my family until now, so I'm getting my first taste of how this disease completely and totally takes over your life. Plans implode and intentions for projects disappear in a poof. Between the constant exhaustion and the side effects from the drugs and the trips to the doctor and the time spent in the hospital, there simply isn't time or energy to do much other than survive the day.

To punctuate this reality, the gals over at Smart Bitches posted a tear-jerking video made by an Australian man who has cancer as a birthday gift for his wife. I was so moved by the video that I found his website and am determined to follow him as he fights for his life. Hard to believe I could care so much about what happens to a complete stranger, but my heart goes out to him and his family, and I pray for his recovery.

Finally, Adele over at Persnickety Snark recently posted about her frustrations and despair over the status of her writing, and I find that her thoughts very closely echo my own. Between a lack of discipline and a crisis of confidence, I'm doubting my ability to ever become a successful writer. It's very embarrassing to have friends and family ask me about my writing and to have no good news or even a decent excuse as to why it's going so slowly other than that I'm a slacker.

So I think about all of those partials sitting in various stages on my shelves or residing in the folders on my laptop's hard drive and I think what a shame it would be if something happened that I couldn't finish all of the things I started. Or if all of those stories in my head never got told and died along with me. Surely I don't think that I would be changing the world by putting them on paper, but how sad if I didn't at least try to share them in some way, to leave behind that part of me as some sort of legacy for my kids.

Clearly the gods are conspiring to remind me that the time we have is limited, and waiting until tomorrow is a risky thing to do because you never know what's going to come at you. If for no other reason than to leave behind stuff that my husband might be reluctant to toss, I need to finish what I start.