Yo Mama’s noveling, rain running, and a fine weekend

Yesterday afternoon was rainy and I hadn’t been out of the house all day, so I walked to Yo Mama’s Coffee & Tea House for some writing time. It’s fairly new, over on 65th and Foster, and I liked it as soon as I walked in. Tall wooden booths with good lighting, laid-back music, and good food on real dishes for reasonable prices. Tasty hot chocolate, too. I will never forget you, Bubble Bubble, but my mourning period may be at an end.

I am starting to pull together my next ~~long project~~ novel. Just starting. I am not really sure how to do that, without overrehearsing or overdetermining or scaring it away. But without underworking it until it withers and dies, either. I have a couple of glimpsed characters and maybe a setting, that seem like they might be amalgamated. Other things will present themselves to be added in, and the energy holding them all together will somehow be the aspect of the story that makes people say, “It was very, um…you,” when they read it.

I haven’t decided whether it will be a NaNo project. I will set up a word counter for it, but I don’t know if I am willing to risk rushing into 50k words of crap. I suppose that over the next six weeks I’ll see what the momentum looks like and how much time I’m managing to give it without NaNo to boost and contain it.

Today was my first run in the rain since I don’t know when. Warm, off-and-on rain, so it was fine. I ran down to the college track and trotted around while the Ultimate Frisbee teams warmed up for their games, and listened to Octavia Butler’s Parable of the Talents. My September mileage as of today pulled ahead of August’s total mileage, so my plan to run/walk more miles each month is working. I hope I can keep it up as the weather turns and the days get short.

It’s been a good weekend, also featuring a leaky toilet repaired before the subflooring rotted, and a surprise visit from Evan, who was able to join in our celebratory lunch. Sang and I will finish the night off with purple peppers and jalapenos from the garden, stuffed with cream cheese and roasted in the oven, and eaten while we watch Friday Night Lights and share a beer. I am so lucky.

life is a serial

I goofed off at work until I felt compelled to stay late and put together some interview packets so I wouldn’t worry all weekend that our interviewer Jeremy came by to get some and there weren’t any. So then I caught a late bus to the library to pick up my holds and walked home, only to find that the dog had gone beyond his six-hour-or-so limit and peed and pooped on the floor. (He’s, or we’ve, been so good lately, too!) So I cleaned that up and took him out and it felt like a long time before I could sit down with a bowl of cheese puffs and catch up on the internet. Right now I’m about a half hour behind schedule; ideally I would have already posted this and I would be washing dishes or making mac and cheese with garden tomatoes.

(Here I was tempted to tell everyone my Whole Ideal Schedule, but that would make life too easy for the snipers.)

So would you like to know about my current breakfast cereal? Sanguinity and I were at the Fred Meyer marveling at how many varieties of frosted mini-wheats are now available (blueberry! chocolate!), and I spotted the Kellogg’s Frosted Mini Wheats Touch of Fruit in the Middle Mixed Berry. (Link leads to review with the interesting sentence “Maybe this is what happens in the wild when animals chow down on tree bark to find sticky sap and grubs.”)

“Oh, that looks like your sort of thing!” I said to Sanguinity. She likes the granola with dried berries in it. But she said no, it looked like my kind of thing. Apparently I have problems with the self/others concept when it comes to foods I find delicious. And she was right! She had one taste the next morning and said I could have the whole box. She also pointed out that it was like Pop Tarts in cereal form.

I like them, but consider them decadent enough that when they’re gone, they’re gone. On the other hand, I will let myself try a box of the chocolate variety next.

happy bits of writing news

A few sweet things have happened in my writing life lately:

I got a call from the director of Write Around Portland, asking for permission to reprint the first piece I ever published in a WRAP anthology, back in 1999! It will be in an academic book about writing and community. I read my piece over and did not cringe. I wouldn’t write that way now–too much of the Cryptic Yet Meaningful–but it’s not horrible. I’ve been thinking a lot lately about early writings. Partly because my bus book is Henry James’ The Ambassadors, and it is so very different from my beloved Portrait of a Lady and The Bostonians. Partly because I am painfully aware how much less open I feel writing on the internet now than in the early days of my LiveJournal. I don’t think it’s only me. And partly because I’m reading Barack Obama’s Dreams From My Father and it seems so, so candid! I can’t imagine someone writing it while knowing a Presidential campaign might be in the cards. And he didn’t know. Yet…he was a U.S. senator-elect when it was published, far more prominent than I expect ever to be. It makes me want to have the courage to be more open.
I emailed my former workshop instructor at the IPRC and he wrote me back to say my stories had really stuck with him! There is little that could make me happier to hear than that.
I got a rejection from One Story for “Non-Nutritive Boyfriend.” Granted, this is not as sweet as getting an acceptance, but it means I can proceed with assembling the chapbook edition and putting it up for sale. One sub-project I’m psyched about is making a light box for product photography.

In non-writing news, I walked through the western rose garden in Ladd’s Addition this morning and was swept off my feet by a hybrid tea called Voodoo. I don’t usually like coral-colored roses–they make me think of lipstick–but this one was gorgeous and smelled sweet and complex. Fragrant roses get harder to find in September.

the bookstore of my dreams

The bookstore I dreamed about last night was small, just a few hundred square feet. The books on the first floor weren’t for sale, because their magic might not last if they were removed from the premises and because the store’s footprint was so tiny that it might run out of books if people bought the books and took them away.

But the first-floor books were pretty awesome. There were sequels you hadn’t known about to all your favorite series, and how-to books that came with the right equipment and exactly the right level of instruction to make you a master. (A couple of my friends were trying out the martial-arts ones in the store.) As I browsed, the owner unpacked a rack of brand-new yet somehow original-series Nancy Drew mysteries. And I found a novel by Stephen McCauley that had an author photo of him beaming! This was the Stephen McCauley book where he was happy and not cynical!

The second floor of the bookstore had the regular books, new books that you could buy and take home. The magic of the second floor was that the exact right book for you would come to hand. If you wanted, you could think about topics or questions as you browsed on the first floor, and when you got upstairs, the book addressing them would be waiting.

To get to the second floor, you had to go up a steep ladder and pull yourself over a carved wooden gargoyle. My head had just cleared the top of the ladder when my alarm went off. I was disappointed, but it was so clearly set up that way I also had to laugh.

the library haul

I got off the bus a mile from home to pick up my library holds. Even though I’m in the middle of both Maisie Dobbs and James’ Ambassadors, I had to bring the new ones up on Spaceship Couch with me and sample them.

David Carkeet’s mystery novel (starring a linguist) Double Negative, because I so loved his piece The Crap In My Head the other day. (His crap has become my crap– I hear “A B? A B?” now too.)
Something called My Business Is to Create: Blake’s Infinite Writing, a writing advice book based on William Blake’s life and writings. Partly because, what chutzpah, and partly because I’m hooked on the genre.
Vivian Gussin Paley’s The Boy on the Beach: Building Community Through Play. I love her, I love the respect she gives children and their work together in the classroom. As she’s talking about play I of course experiment with substituting “writing,” just as I do when I read about religion, or about business or work. But here I wonder about substituting “television” instead– isn’t this why I prefer good television to movies?

As in a really good research study, play does not value closure. It seeks new direction and unexpected results. We want to be surprised but also reassured that we know the territory.

But now I have to find clothes to wear tomorrow, and put a frozen burrito in a sandwich bag, and floss, and stretch over the big orange ball so I’m not a curled-up, barely breathing reading thing.

Pudding On The Rice

The clerk at Pudding On The Rice said she was sorry, she couldn’t make Sanguinity and me the Shrimpy Pig crepe we ordered, because they were out of the cheese spread. “Somebody used it all up and put the container back empty,” she said.

“Co-workers are the same everywhere,” Sang said darkly.

When I paid and stuffed a tip through the slot in the paper glued down over the top of the tip jar, the clerk told me about the tip thief and how he came in, scooped money out of the jar, distributed it to his friends waiting outside the door, and they all ran in different directions. Hence the new lid.

I like being around employees who don’t feel like they’re paid to take on the corporate voice of their employer too much.

The food was just okay, but then again I don’t see a case with 20 flavors of cold rice pudding every day. White chocolate rice pudding, cheesecake rice pudding, lemon poppyseed rice pudding. We shared some rum rice pudding, which was strongly flavored but not actually boozy.

Try Broadway Coffee & Tea for a better crepe. But since I’m working days and Sang works most evenings, it was good to sit outdoors by the Park Blocks and spend an hour together before I went to catch my bus.

I am a mess of aspirations as usual

It is August, and The Librarian is off on adventures, for maybe two years. She has her tiny adorable netbook and her folding bike and vintage Volvo and will be reporting via blog and/or book. WOW. I’m sure I am not the only one feeling thoughtful at the sight of her actually marching off to pursue some dreams. And maybe even more so after witnessing a parade of other friends who came by to pick up stuff or help with house chores. She had a way of using help wisely and without fussing when it was offered, but still taking full responsibility for how things were going, and having the bandwidth to listen to and pay attention to people throughout. In short, there is more than one axis on which I want to be more like The Librarian. In the meantime, I now have a little experience painting a ceiling with a roller and putting down stick-on vinyl tile. And she saved the masking tape around the painted trim for me to tear down, because she knows I like that!

In order to get to her house, I got my bike out and cleaned it up for riding. About time now that it’s August, right? It’s a beater, with a little rust problem that’s never gone away since Burning Man, but it’s pretty smooth, fine for neighborhood trips. I’m not an enthusiastic cyclist, so I let myself count cycling mileage in my monthly training totals. (But not for the official Million Mile Ultra.) Aspiration: do this earlier next year and try some Pedalpalooza events.

This morning on the way to the bus stop I ate my first Himalayan blackberry of the season. Most of them aren’t ripe. Every year I say I want to make free-blackberry jam for Christmas presents–maybe this year! Any locals want to make a project of it with me? I’d probably be more motivated with someone to share the suffering and triumph.

I’m looking forward to finding a story to work on and finish– lately it’s been scraps and fragments, KFC assignments, stuff like that. Speaking of longer projects, remember the AlphaSmarts that people were typing their NaNos on back when, because they have like a 500 hour battery life and no internet and no big screen to suck you into premature editing? Well, they’re like $20 on eBay now. I’m tempted, for the next time I write something long. But that’s probably aspirational shopping.

physical or mental?

From GearJunkie’s short interview with Kilian Jornet, this year’s Western States winner:

Is ultra-running more physical or mental?
It is impossible to separate physical and mental — if you have mental, you construct the physical. It’s not just a percentage of one or the other.

Reed campus report

a mallard hen with a batch of five tiny beeps! It seems late for this. And, further down the canyon, one beep on its own, ignored by all the adults. I hope that has a happy ending.
ripe salmonberries in the canyon. Someone else had been at the thimbleberries up by the track, so I just smelled the roses.
the swingset has shiny new chains. Putting the seats at adult height is easy on the legs but makes for a short pendulum.
a CSO riding a Segway!

My four-mile run felt awesome. I’ve been running in NB790s, a minimal shoe I bought on super-sale when New Balance quit making them and then let sit in my closet. So far so good. Low mileage is fun. I think I’m going to enjoy every stage of my running comeback. Maybe that’s why it took me about seven years to get to a 50-mile event? Who knows how long it will take me to get to 100. But the scenic route is better than guilt and frustration, for sure.

Here’s something I never would have believed as a child: I’m seldom tempted by garage sales anymore. I have enough stuff…even books.

Reed is 100 and I am 41

I shared my birthday this year with Reed College, which put on its 100th Anniversary reunion celebration this weekend. I actually set foot on campus three times yesterday. My run in the morning was through the canyon, where quite a few older alumni were walking in ones and twos on the trails. Just since I was a student in 1992 there have been a lot of improvements and added trails, so I gave directions more than once. They all seemed like people I would like.

Sang and I did a walk-through in the early afternoon to see what was going on. A small Ferris wheel, tethered ballon, and ring-toss stalls were set up on the lawn with a few art projects; families were playing on the grass and the vibe was low-key picnic. All very…nice. Why do alumni not set up the naked slip and slide? Why is all the music so very inoffensive? It kind of depresses me how sanitized alumni events are compared to what goes on when the students are actually there. It feels a little fake, like a simulacrum of Reed.

We went back for the fireworks, where we met up with our friend N and also finally ran into people we knew from our freshman dorm. Up til then neither of us had recognized anyone. The fireworks at Reed are awesome! I hadn’t attended for years and forgot how close up they are. I kept being surprised I wasn’t showered with burnt paper, as I have been at Reed fireworks in the past. It was fifteen minutes, but a very full fifteen minutes. I was lying on the ground and could feel all the thumps as they went up. I am grateful that I haven’t been traumatized by anything explosive and can thoroughly enjoy fireworks. As a bonus, the dog has lost enough hearing so they don’t traumatize him anymore either! (He was at home, of course–but he used to hear them going off at Reed or the waterfront before they had even registered in my awareness.)

I also happened to read yesterday about two kidlit writers whose work didn’t take off until they were about my age. That’s always encouraging. The first was E. Nesbit, who published various things from age fifteen on, but suddenly around age 40 took quite a different tack and came out with her classic children’s stories. I found this out as I finished off The Enchanted Castle yesterday. To my commenter who recommended it after I was so disappointed by The Treasure Seekers, thank you so much! I felt wholly different about the authorial asides in this one. They didn’t seem condescending at all. I liked the book.

The other author is Patrice Kindl– I looked her up after seeing on the children’s literature listserv that she has a new title coming out soon. Owl in Love was her first book, published when she was in her early forties. It is wonderful and I want to read it again soon, but The Woman in the Wall is even closer to my heart, because I am shy and because its matter-of-fact surrealism suits me exactly.