Cheetos Stains

I was reading On Writing by Stephen King today while I was eating a $2 meal from Taco Bell. The $2 Meals come with Doritos, and it was the Doritos that inspired me to write. See, when I turned the page, Dorito dust turned the corner of it orange, and that instantly sent me back more than 20 years into the past. Some people connect smells with memories, some people hear sounds that bring them back to their childhoods (childrenhood?), for some people it's songs or certain times of year. For me, it is books. Name any important event in my life, and I can tell you what I was reading or what kind of books I liked. And with the orange-stained pages of On Writing came a very distinct set of memories, almost like I am watching a movie starring my child-self.

I was probably 9 or 10, maybe even 8. My parents had to go somewhere, I don't remember where. They tried to procure a babysitter for me with no luck. All the neighborhood girls had better things to do. And then, grabbing for a straw, they called one of my regular babysitters one last time. "Do you think any of your brothers or sisters might come over for a while? Could you ask?" And that's how Melanie's brother came to be my babysitter for the night.

Melanie's brother. Sigh. I don't even remember his name, but I sure do remember his face. I fancied myself in love with him. Which made me a nervous wreck. My mom dressed up a little, spent time in the bathroom curling her hair and smudging on makeup. Right alongside her, I dressed myself in my best pajamas and carefully pulled my hair into a ponytail, then messed it up a little so it wouldn't look like I had tried too hard. Then I cleaned up my room a little, grabbed the book I was currently reading, and hopped into bed. I carefully propped myself up on pillows and covered myself with the quilt on my neatly made bed. I imagined that I must look like the girls in movies always did when they got in bed to read at night. My hope was that Melanie's brother would notice how sophisticated I was and fall madly in love with me. It didn't really enter my mind that our age difference made that hugely unlikely; the only thought I gave to his age at all was that since he was older, maybe he could like me. See, my mom always told me that the boys at school who lived to belittle me would grow out of it someday, so logic told me that I had to look for an older man if I didn't want to be rejected.

All of this makes me sound rather bold and calculating. I was not. I was shy and hopeful. Once Melanie's brother arrived, my mom brought him into my room to have him say hi while she said bye, and I managed to utter out a strangled hello. And then he went out into the living room to watch TV and I curled up with my book and tried to forget that the love of my life was 50 feet away from me and I was too scared to so much as talk to him.

The book I was reading was called "Me and Cece," or something like that. (I just looked it up on Amazon to see if I could find it, but no dice. Damn.) I had gotten it at a garage sale my parents had stopped at on a rainy Saturday afternoon, and it had only cost me a nickel. It was a book about a girl who didn't get along with her mother but somehow ended up in a time warp and was able to make friends with her mother when her mother was her age. Of course, she found out all kinds of horrible things, like that her mother had smoked a cigarette once, and even climbed out her bedroom window to meet boys. It was filled with the prerequisite awkward moments that characterize fiction on that topic (Freaky Friday, anyone?), such as when the main character accidentally calls her new "friend" Cece "Mom," and when she catches herself just short of calling Cece's mother "Grandma."

Suddenly, something made me look up from my book. Most likely, it was the feeling of someone watching me, although I'm not sure how that got through while I was reading. My mother's car once slid off the road in a storm, spun around twice, and ended up in a ditch, and I looked up from the book I'd been reading and asked if we were home yet when I finally noticed that the car had stopped moving. Anyway, I looked up, and there was Melanie's brother, standing in my bedroom doorway.

"Want some Cheetos?" he asked me. I shyly nodded yes and he disappeared for a few minutes and then reappeared with a bowl of Cheetos and a glass of milk. He set them both on my dresser next to my bed. He sat on the edge of my bed. My heart stopped and accelerated at the same time and I clutched my book to my chest like a security blanket. "How's the book?" he asked me.

"Good," I managed to say, probably with a stupid grin on my red face. I wanted to something more, anything to keep him there, but I forgot how to talk.

"What's it about?"

I managed, somehow, to swallow my nerves and shakily begin to speak. I probably kept him quite entertained, too, because when I read a book back then, I became the book. There was no such thing as a brief synopsis in my world. I told him the story without leaving out a word. Pretty close to literally, probably--my memory for books was pretty unbelievable. I have no doubt that at some point in my childhood, I probably wrote a book report that was longer than the book it was about. He listened politely (I imagined back then that it was with interest, but it was probably just politely). Then he gave me a one-arm-around-the-shoulders kind of hug, wished me a good night, turned on my bedside lamp and off my overhead light, and returned to the living room. I was in heaven.

I'm sure it was a good 15 minutes or more before I snapped out of my reverie and picked up my book again. Drinking milk and munching on Cheetos, I stayed awake until I had finished the book.

And every time I read the book after that (I have a thing for re-reading my favorite books; I probably read the Little House and Anne of Green Gables series' a hundred times each), the Cheetos-stained pages brought me right back to that night when Melanie's brother half-hugged me. It's funny how memory works, how stained pages bring back to that night even now, even when the pages are of a different book and I am 20 years older than the hopeful little girl I was then.

Killing Birds

As in, as many as I can with one stone. That is my goal for the summer.

(All this talk about killing birds is making me feel a little guilty, so I am going to go with the analogy, but if you could, please pretend I have written the word "mosquito" whenever you see the word "bird." Just to make me feel better.)

Every summer, I say that I am going to be serious about my writing, treat it like a real job, really try to get published. (This is in lieu of getting a real job, of course.) And every summer, I fail. I might be serious about it for a day or two, and then once a month or so after that, but it never lasts. So, this summer, I am going to try again. Publically, this time, sort of. And with time sheets.

That's right, time sheets. See, I am right-brained. But I am in touch with the left half of my brain, too. (Funny how I am right-brained but left-politicalled. And how well those attributes seem to coincide. Maybe it has something to do with my left versus the left of someone who is facing me. Just a thought. Did I mention I might have a teeny attention deficit as well?) Like I was saying, I am in touch with the left side of my brain, too. Enough to know that the only way to reign in my right-brainedness and get the good stuff out of it is to give myself structure. So I have given myself a rigid structure to follow that will, hopefully, still allow my creativity to flow.

I can't get up early unless I have to, and I can't work at my house. I know these things about myself. So if I try, I will only set myself up for failure. So, my work hours are noon to six. That's realistic, and it won't cut into my summer fun enough to make me give up, I don't think. (That is one of the hazards of being my own boss. And I really suck as a boss, by the way. I am way too forgiving and accepting and relaxed.) I intend to spend a half hour every day reading over lunch. No Cosmo, no Glamour, and no Sylvia Plath, because those things are just depressing and will not inspire me to write. I learned my lesson there last summer. I will choose good literature or books somehow related to my writing. And I will spend a half hour blogging (or journaling, but on my blog). Since I seem to have a mild addiction to the Internet, journaling online will keep me from jonesing for Facebook while I am working, I hope.

I will also spend time every day writing-on what project, it does not matter. But every day, no matter how hard it seems, I will create. When I've clocked a couple hours writing, I will stop for the day. (Then maybe I'll have something left to write the next day, too.) Then I will turn loose my left brain loose and spend some time editing things I have already written. And a few times I week, I have dedicated time to selling myself. Um, okay, not myself, exactly. That would be easier money but it would be harder to come by business, I suspect, and I'd have to hire a good lawyer or move to Vegas. What I mean is that I will spend time submitting my writing to appropriate venues: contests, magazines, publishers, whatever.

And those birds I mentioned killing?

Well, I will find out if my writing is good enough to get me anywhere. I might not find out completely, over the course of a single summer, of course, but I will have an idea. If nothing else, I will at least get a good pile of the prerequisite rejections that every writer must have behind me. That's one bird.

I will also, with a little luck and a lot of hard work, stave off the depression that I drowned in last summer. Part of my problem was that I was at loose ends. I didn't force myself to do anything that would make me look at the bigger picture, the world outside of my own head. A schedule, a commitment, even if it is only to myself (and now to you, since you have read thus far), will force me to look outside of myself and find the strength to function. I hope. That's another bird.

And finally, I hope to make money by writing. My dream, everyone's dream, is to make money doing something so enjoyable that it really doesn't feel like work most of the time. For me, that something is writing. I am not delusional. I don't expect to become a billionairre overnight (or ever, for that matter), but it would be nice to be a hundredairre. I just want to make enough money to justify writing to my father when he asks me why I don't have a real job. I just want to know there is a little bit of hope in it for me. That's a third bird.

I am sure there are other birds I will kill, too: maybe my writing will touch someone, make someone see something he or she didn't see before. Maybe I will write myself out of my insecurity by exposing myself. (Again, I don't mean that in the way that might get me arrested.) I might gain a sense of pride in myself that I lost too long ago. I might kill two birds, but then again, I might kill a thousand.

Who knows how many birds are out there waiting for me?

An Epiphany, Of Sorts

I think. Well, nothing that earth-shattering, I guess, and nothing earth-shattering happened to make me come up with the notion I just came up with, but it gave me a jolt:

I would rather do anything in the world than hurt someone's feelings, but I most likely hurt people on a regular basis without even knowing it.

The problem starts with my lack of self esteem, or at least my inability to recognize the esteem other people have for me, and ends with my tendency to use that as an excuse, however unintentionally, to hurt others. See, I posted something on Facebook about not having anything to do tonight, and nobody to do anything with. A friend shot me a text that read, in part, "I'm nobody, thanks Emily, i c." And that's what kind of gave me the jolt. You see, it wasn't that I didn't want to hang out with her, just that it honestly didn't occur to me that she might want to hang out with me.

I do that all the time. I rarely call my friends and try to arrange get togethers or whatever because I work under the assumption that if they haven't contacted me, it means they don't want to see me. I also don't call them because I am afraid they won't answer, and my poor ego automatically takes an unanswered call as rejection. Quite without my permission, I might add. It never occurs to me that someone might be busy for the moment; by the time a person's voicemail picks up, my mind's eye has already conjured an image of that person glancing at their caller ID, seeing my name, and rolling his or her eyes in disgust and frustration because I obviously haven't taken the hints they've been subtly giving that I should leave them alone.

I am fully aware that I am a very busy person and that when friends do call me to go to dinner, say, or go out to shoot pool, I often have to turn them down. And I know that when I turn them down, it is in no way rejection. In fact, I feel so guilty for turning down a chance to spend time with one person that I almost can't enjoy the time I'm spending with whoever I'm with instead. But until tonight, it has never once occured to me that anyone even remotely cares if I turn down an invitation he or she has extended.

A friend of mine called me tonight, for example, to go out for dinner. I was at a softball game and had to tell him I was busy. He acted upset, which was all a joke. At least he said it as if he was joking. But what if he was only partly joking? What if he really was disappointed that I couldn't have dinner with him? Come to think of it, I actually had two invitations, because while I was on the phone with that guy, another friend called to see if I wanted to have dinner with him, too. And so I turned down two dinner invitations only to sit at the softball game and feel sorry for myself because I didn't have anyone to have dinner with. Why? Because in my heart of hearts, I could not believe that either person really cared if I had dinner with him. I believed that the invitations were offered out of some sense of duty, not because someone really wanted to have dinner with me. Which, of course, they both probably did. I mean, if there was a person I didn't want to have dinner with, I wouldn't call that person and ask him or her to dinner just out of the blue. I might go to dinner with that person, if asked, but I wouldn't initiate. And most other people in that situation probably wouldn't either, I imagine.

There are times, like now, when I can see myself clearly. Times when my logic is logical. I wish those times came more often. Most of the time I am stuck behind a smoked glass window, seeing the world through the window's cloudy pane that is darkened by self doubt. That doesn't serve me or anyone else very well. I take full responsibility; I could, if only I tried a little harder, lift that window open and see the world clearly. Let some fresh air in.

But I'm not that brave. If I keep myself hidden, buried in my own self-perception, I don't have to worry about anyone hurting me, because I am so busy hurting myself that there simply isn't space or time to let any more hurt in.

Somewhere in the world lies a solution to this problem. I wish I had a treasure map that would lead me to that place.

In Honor Of Mother's Day

I wrote this poem several years ago (back in '99, the first Mother's Day after my mom passed), but I thought that in honor of Mother's Day, I would post it today. (Blue daisies were my mom's favorite flower and so, every year for Mother's Day, my father and I got blue daisies for not only my mom but also for both of my grandmothers.)

Daisies, Painted Blue

Blue daisies past are haunting me
from atop my mother's
cold and silent grave.

In the flower shop this morning,
I asked for three sets of daisies,
painted blue.
And then I faltered, stumbled,
cried.

One set will be seen and then forgotten,
lonely on a table buried long ago
in dusty bills and letters,
memories.
Where sunshine used to live,
my mother's mother dies.

Another set will stand out grandly,
shining from a
pint-sized empty milk jug before my
father's mother's vacant stare.
Glass vases are forbidden in
psychiatric wards.

And the last bouquet will not be seen,
instead will rot in spring's cold sun
atop my mother's grave.
I am not a child's mother
nor a mother's child.
All I am is daisies,
painted blue.