March 2008

I woke up sick this morning - it feels a lot like someone stuffed my sinuses with cement and sandpapered my throat. And if that wasn’t bad enough, upon realizing that I wasn’t up to doing much, I also realized that I had to. Deadlines hovered, money needed to be made, and emails and calls had to be answered.

So let’s add “no paid sick days” to the short list of reasons that this new business thing isn’t 100% perfect, not to mention that the only upside of being sick at all is that you’re supposed to get to stay home from work and watch DVDs and The Price Is Right.

On the other hand, I no longer have to physically call in sick, which I always hated - it was one of those things where I felt like I was faking it even when I wasn’t. There was that need to act extra nasally and extra miserable, as if I really, really wanted to come in and fill in some spreadsheets, and I truly would, except that I was probably going to die within the next few hours.

And even though I had to work, I did get to take some mini-naps, make myself soup, and break my work into smaller chunks.

I owe my cyber-friend April a meme. And so here we go.

1. I can’t believe I’ve never… been to a Sunday morning church service. I’ve been to weddings and confirmations but never a regular old service or sermon or whatever. Because of this, I don’t really understand what happens. What percentage of the service consists of solemn hymns? Preachin’? Snake handlin’? I don’t think I ever will go, though, considering what a great fact it is to break out during games of “I never.”

2. Every time I think about…I still cringe. As a gag, Ben and I went to our local uber-sketchy strip club that’s about 50 yards from our apartment. This isn’t the part I cringe at though - on the way out, I ran face-first into a glass door that I didn’t see. It’s a bad feeling to have two strippers wearing weird amounts of red vinyl laughing at you and not the other way around. It’s also a bad feeling to run into glass at full speed. At least I don’t swing around naked on a pole for a living. Yet.

3. I wish I’d…when I had the chance. I wish I’d written more when I was at writing school. I also wish I had traveled abroad for a semester in college.

4. I’ve never felt so out of place as when I...attempt girl talk. I’ve tried, but I just don’t understand how to connect with women like I sometime see them connect with each other in movies or vacuum cleaner commercials. Like yesterday, I was walking behind these two girls talking about their experiences boot shopping and I found myself taking mental notes on how to relate to women and boot buying for the next time I was in my most feared situation: alone with a girl who is talking to me. But I know if I did find myself in that terrifying situation and tried boot-buying talk, I’d just get it all wrong. “I occasionally buy boots. I take price and comfort into consideration. And…um, cuteness. I have to go.”

5. …is/are my guiltiest pleasure. Lifetime Original Movies. And reality TV. Maybe just TV in general. I love it. Whenever someone asks me how I have time to go to the gym everyday, I want to tell them that I also find time to watch about three hours of TV a day. I mean, what do other people do all day? I guess I save a lot of time because of my lack of hygiene.

6. I hope…knows how grateful I am for… I hope Taco Bell knows how grateful I am for their constant menu innovations. Just when I don’t think beans, beef, cheese, tomatoes, sour cream, lettuce, and tortillas can possibly be combined into something fresh and new, they come up with something crazy like the crunch wrap supreme or the meximelt. If only there was one nearby.

7. In my darkest hours, I secretly blame…for my dysfunction. I think it’s probably innate.

8. …changed my life forever. Quitting my damn office job.

Now I get to tag some people… can I be so vague as to tag all Grinnellians with blogs?

People in my age group are starting to have babies. On purpose, even. It’s a pretty big step, I would say - it was only sort of scary when my friends started getting married or buying houses, as marriage and houses don’t cry a lot and eventually turn into teenagers - but babies! Those things are an investment. Investments that spit up.

I’m not ready to jump on the baby train any time soon - as far as responsibility and desire go, I’m not prepared for anything more than a mid-sized dog (something with a 12-year lifespan). But, still, it’s nice to see my friends turning into moms and getting to look at hundreds and hundreds of pictures of the little guys doing baby-things - drooling, crawling, stuffing their own fists in their mouths like babies do.

But here’s the thing: I am confounded when people look at a brand-new infant, sometimes still covered in gunk, and say, “she has her mom’s eyes/nose/mouth/face!” or, “he’s a spitting image of his grandfather!”

So - let me in: are these just widely accepted lies that we spout to new parents? Does everyone involved including the parents understand that these are niceties? Or do I lack some sort of innate baby feature detection system? Because the babies always just look like babies to me. And unless the mother also has a purple, tiny, smooched face, I don’t see how any adult can look like a newborn. Aren’t you, through the symmetric property of mathematics, telling an adult that they look like a fat-faced baby that just spent nine months stuffed in a womb?

For example, don’t all infant noses look exactly the same? Aren’t noses things that develop throughout our whole lives? Seriously, go examine some infant noses on the internet. I know I did. They are all just tiny little baby button noses, down to the very last adorable one.

Who knows, though. This might be my own problem to wrestle with. I’m also historically bad at telling solider characters apart in war movies. To this day, I have no idea what the hell happened in The Thin Red Line.

Either way, though, next time someone says that a newborn baby looks exactly like an adult, I plan on taking that baby, placing it in a room with 20 other babies, mixing them all up, and then having the person go into the room and find the right baby. I know like it sounds like a lot of work just to prove a point, but I have a feeling that it would be worth it. Now to find 20 babies…

When I first started my blog, I vowed I would never, ever write an “I’m sorry I haven’t updated my blog in so long, I am neither sick or dead, but merely lazy” entry. So that isn’t what this is. This is more of an “I have now promised myself to make daily updates a priority again, starting today” entry. With that said, I think it’s a good time for a Brood Lifenotes catch-up entry:

1. Michael Clayton was an utterly fantastic film that should immediately move to the top of your Netflix queue. And I’m not particularly a fan of George Clooney. After Ben and I had watched it, and after we talked about how commendable it was on several levels, we decided that its only considerable flaw was its title, which doesn’t exactly tell you anything about the movie or make you want to see the movie or even watch the trailer. We thought of an excellent alternate title: The Fixer. Too bad we weren’t around when that decision was made - they might have pulled in more at the box office. I’d go see The Fixer.

2. Brooklyn Brewery’s seasonal Monster Ale is a rich, robust, and complex beer that is a sheer delight to drink. HOWEVER - and this might be the biggest however in history - you should know before opening one that the alcohol content is above 10%. On Saturday night, Ben and I decided to stay in, which for us consists of walking down to the specialty beer store and picking out something interesting and different, ordering a pizza, and yelling at each other over videogames in good humor. This week I picked the Monster Ale, which is a very limited special run and which I had never seen before (although the same company’s Brooklyn Lager might be my most favorite beer, ever). As usual, I did not read the fine print on the bottle before enjoying three of said beers over the course of the night, and it was not until I was fall-over, not-in-the-good-way, what-is-happening-to-my-vision drunk at 9 PM that I investigated the situation and discovered I had drank the equivalent of a six pack in three hours. If you know what a lightweight I am, you can imagine what a sad, ultimately messy tragedy this was, particularly when adding the fact that we also ordered hot wings. It reminded me a lot of college. Ultimate lesson: everything in moderation, especially things that have “Monster” in the title.

3. Freelancing is everything I dreamed it would be. Even though Ben and I work hard all day and through most of the evening, the familiar feelings I associate with working (rage, frustration, mopey-ness) are completely gone. It makes a difference to do what you enjoy, I suppose. In these first weeks, it’s been difficult to get my workload right, which has resulted in several tough nights, but I’m learning every day. And I’m not so used to hounding clients for money constantly, but, again, I’m guessing I’ll begin to excel at that starting in exactly three days, when rent’s due. A lot of people warned me that I’d start to get stir crazy from not leaving my apartment for days on end, but I have been strangely unaffected - if anything, I’m much more content. This is probably related to some weird neurological problem I undoubtedly have. Work what you got, I guess.

4. I wish to god that I could share with you some of the stories I have about clients. Oh, the stories. Maybe I’ll start a six-month waiting period after I’ve cut people off before I talk about them publicly.

Well, Laughter in the Dark was by far the worst novel I’ve read by Nabokov. And that’s to say that it was a solidly good, funny, and engaging book. Like many of his novels, the plot is your basic old- man- obsessed- with- inappropriately- aged- girl -who -also -happens -to -be -evil -and -this -as -you -might -guess -ends -in -tragedy and the tone is the only one you can have with such a plot: it’s a very dark comedy. I hope.

I found that this book fell into the same category as his other early work that I’ve read, Despair (you can read my review here), in that it seems to be an illustration of the timeless author learning the ropes and beginning to understand his interests and abilities. Although it’s no masterpiece, Laughter in the Dark is still a pleasure to read and a great window into how Nabokov developed both his life-long themes and writing tools.

To those Nabokov snobs who might say, “Laughter in the Dark is nothing more than a shoddy rendition of Lolita,” I say to you, how many novels did you write in your mother tongue when you were thirty and then translated into a foreign language two years later? I mean, of course it’s not as good as Lolita, which is one of the best books of our time and written in the prime of Nabokov’s genius. But it can still be good.

In fact, more than anything, I’d recommend this book to anyone about to board an airplane. The whole time I was reading it, I was almost wishing I had saved it for my next trip.

1. It is printed in a big, easy-to-read font that makes it hard to lose your place even when you get distracted by airplane stuff.
2. It only takes about 3 or 4 hours to read.
3. It has a very fast-moving and weird, deviant plot - so deviant, in fact, that you could probably forget you are flying through the air at dangerous speeds.
4. It makes those around notice that you are interested in early-era Nabokov, which makes you really smart and interesting. They don’t have to know that it’s a pretty easy, fun read filled with weird sex.

For my birthday, my husband, parents, and grandmother all pitched in and gave me enough money to buy a refurbished MacBook. It was much needed, especially considering that I now use my laptop for most of the time I am awake and cram it full of the crazy copy I write all day.

But here’s the thing: it is better than my old iMac in every way except one. It has a slightly bigger screen, it goes faster, it holds more, it picks up our wireless internet consistently. But the keyboard is considerably bigger than my former keyboard. I heard that there were lots of complaints about the original iMac keyboard being too small, but it was perfect for my puny, stubby little hands.

The result of the keyboard size shift is concentrated in a problem with my left ring finger and its constant confusion of the “S” key and the “Z” key. It seems like it can’t quite reach to “Z” key when it needs to and that, as a result, it now often overcompensates and hits the “Z” instead of the “S”, as if that’s going to help matters.

The result is that I’m very often mixing up my Zs and Ss, especially near the end of words. More specifically, all of my copy has started sounding like a British Rapper. Here are two examples:

“…that allow educational policy students to realise the skillz needed in….”

“… analyse chartz and tables for further….”

Let’s hope I can correct this problem before I turn in something like this to a client. …home boyz.

Can’t I, for once, get away with doing something embarrassing without getting caught for it? Is it a law, written in stone, that one cannot do stupid things without running into someone who will point it out, or, in my case, an entire group of people?

Here’s the deal:

I don’t eat too many dessert-type things these days. Even when I do, it’s usually in the form of a sugar-free low-fat pudding cup or a Kashi while grain oatmeal raisin excuse-for-a-cookie. Mostly, I am totally lame and increasingly old and increasingly responsible that way.

However, every once in a while, a feeling in me builds for a no-holds-barred out-of-control ice cream sundae. Something monumental. Something breathtaking.

One of these days was Sunday night. It had been kind of warm for the first time since spring began and while I was finishing up my work for the day, I heard the alluring sounds of the neighborhood ice cream truck that had been silent since September. I had an ice cream need.

By the time I had roused Ben to my cause the truck had left, so we made our way the short two blocks to the local Carvel. Once there, I ordered what turned out to be the biggest sundae the world has ever known. It was easily eight inches high, with the cherry perilously perched on top of the whole production as if the whipped cream around were high-altitude clouds - as if it should be pitching a flag.

The thing was huge. The thing was enormous. I had to carry it like a science project.

On the other hand, while my ice cream turned out to be much larger than we had imagined, Ben’s choice turned out to be much smaller than he wanted - his ice cream looked like it belonged in a doll house. Together — little me with my huge ice cream and huge Ben with his little ice cream — we headed home.

Then, though - then! - with only two blocks to hurry home - two! - we ran into some friends. And we never, ever run into friends in Queens. They seemed excited to see us, and I was mortified. There was Ben, looking overly fit and healthy with his child’s size scoop pinched between two fingers, and me looking like a glutton. I didn’t know what to do, so I did what naked people do in the movies: I took my tiny hand and tried to cover as much of the sundae as I could, which wasn’t much at all. It was a sad effort.

Then someone pointed it out and I laughed it off.

Then someone pointed out how small Ben’s ice cream selection was in relation to mine and I laughed it off.

Then we hurried home and I ate the whole thing, as if I were destroying the evidence.

The point, though, is that I can’t ever seem to do anything embarrassing without someone else finding out about. Just once, can’t I fall down without someone being there to see? Just once, can’t I eat an enormous dessert in peace? Perhaps while crying a little?