Category: awkward

Just Another Marble in the Brain Jar

Lately, I’ve been thinking a lot about the nature of memory.

Mainly, because my own memory sucks.

What was I saying?

Oh yes.

Some of this memory loss is, I think, is a hazard of having put in a few years on this ol’ planet. Over time, one tends to collect a few things in the closets like bottle tops, tattered paperback books, and stacks of memories, both good and bad.

I sometimes think of my brain as a big storage device. Lots and lots of space. Too many bits of memory get shoved in there, and it’s time for an upgrade.

But maybe that’s a little too Silicon Valley for my tastes.

Let’s try another metaphor.

Maybe my brain is more like a big glass jar filled with marbles. Some are large, some small, some are in between. So as I go about living this crazy mixed up life, these marbles roll their way toward the jar and drop in. These new residents tend to push out the old when I’ve run out of space.

There is only so much room in the jar, of course, and once filled to capacity, something’s gotta give.

As I was getting my hair cut last night, I spent the color “cook time” working over this particular visual metaphor. Unfortunately, I was thinking about it while also pouring over the pages of the current “People” magazine.

Without my consent, some fresh, small marbles found their way into my jar.

For example, I don’t really need to know that one of the Jonas brothers broke up with his girlfriend. *plink*

Or that Jon and Kate plus 8 lady just celebrated the birthday of her sextuplets. *plink*

That some blonde chick named Heidi needs “time alone” from her overbearing husband. *plink*

And that weird Svengali-like husband of that sad, tiny, actress that recently died has now also shuffled off this mortal coil. *plink*

These are not vital memories. These don’t need to be kept in the jar. If they do manage to stay in the jar, then other, better, memories have to slip out.

Oops, there goes making Thanksgiving turkey drawings by tracing my hand onto the paper.

And there goes the name of my childhood friend who lived by the park, across from the swimming pool. We took gymnastics class together at the YMCA. What *was* her name?

Don’t tell me a Jonas brother shoved my friend out of the brain jar!

I suppose the trick is to let those lightweight worthless marbles flow in for a moment and then find a way to shove them right back out.

If I get too many of the trivial marbles, there’s no room left for the big meaningful marbles to find a permanent home.

Of course, some of those big marbles are so heavy, they can’t possibly be washed out. My wedding day. Holding my oldest goddaughter for the first time (I cried). Cracking jokes with my pops while he was in the hospital.

The big ones stick around, no matter. The middlin’ sized tend to go all floaty without my permission. They are the hardest to hold onto.

But I try. Oh I try.

Let’s just hope that at the very least, I can manage to hang on to most of my important marbles.

Because I surely would hate to, you know…lose my marbles.

Photo from the KM&G-Morris public Flickr photostream.

Oh my mortality

I had a doctor’s visit this morning. Nothing special, just a routine check up for blood pressure and all of that.

My doctor was running late so I had some time to sit and entertain myself.

When all my email was read on the iPhone and I’d caught up on Twitter, I started people watching. You know, people watching at a medical center is quite a thing. You see a lot…

Anyhow, pretty soon, a nurse came down the hall pushing an elderly man in a wheelchair.

They came into our waiting area and the nurse helped the man to get up onto his feet, and he then took a few steps with the aid of a cane.

As he shakily got to his feet, he said to the young nurse, “Who would have thought it would come to this, eh?”

He said it in a wry way, but it carried a deep note of sadness.

The man was, by all appearances, pretty healthy. He was probably in his late seventies and from what I could see, was suffering a very bad hip.

The nurse helped the man get settled into the seat, with a groan.

He gave me a weary smile and I smiled back.

The nurse said to the man, as she departed, “one of my patients told me that his best advice was simply this: just don’t get old.”

“Yes, certainly,” said the man, with a sigh.

The whole exchange made me a bit melancholy. I remember when my dad struggled with rapidly advancing lung disease. His mind was fine but his body crapped out on him way too early.

How angry that must make a person, your legs, your lungs, your eyes, your whatever body part you want to name just doesn’t work like you know it should.

Ugh.

And me. Still fairly young but full of the knowledge that I’m not taking care of myself as well as I should. Now is the time to tend to these things.

Time marches on, whether I’m keeping step with it or not.

And even now, I know some parts of this ol’ rig don’t work like they should. But I still have time.

Time to remember to enjoy my legs that still carry me easily, a heart that still beats strong. Lungs that take in air without coughing.

Yes. It was just a nice reminder, a needed wake up call.

Because one day I might be uttering to a kindly young nurse, “who would have thought it would come to this?”

Sorry for the sort of down post today. The rain and the doctor’s waiting room has me in a very thoughtful place.

Show and Tell Time

Since yesterday was a whirlwind of deadlines and today is a whirlwind of meetings, I thought for the blog today I’d share a bit of what I was working on yesterday.

The deadline was for the Arthouse Co-Op, located in Brooklyn.

I participated in a project they have going called The Fiction Project.

They sent me an 80 page Molskine notebook and challenged me to fill up the pages with stories. My topic for the stories was, “And suddenly…”

Whoo. And I thought this was going to be *so* easy to do. I love to write short stories and flash fiction. What a snap!

Silly me.

It was a fun challenge. Writing the stories wasn’t even the hard part, though it was hard enough. The rough part was in actually putting all the stories into the book in some coherent form. It’s harder than you’d think.

I thought I was done and had a full book of stories, but when I glued it all into a first draft piece, I still had four pages left to fill.

I suppose I could have left those four pages blank, but that seemed like cheating.

So I sat down to dash off something quick.

Dash off something quick. Har, har. Of course, that’s when writer’s block set in.

Anyhow, it took a while, but when I did finally write, what is below what came through.

It’s in need of more editing, but as I ran out of time, I had to just run with it. This is what covered the last four pages of my Moleskine book. For your perusal.

It’s called “And Suddenly…It’s Over”

*****************************

I look at my oldest, most reliable friend and plead silently, “speak to me!”

The blinking eye of the cursor just beats a perfect metronome rhythm back at me, waiting. The whole empty white page, devoid of the text I yearn for so much, mocks me openly.

I love the words, the black squiggles and marks on the page. Words that express how I feel, how I want to feel, how I ought to feel. But the words don’t flow so easily from my veins.

I plead with the empty page to fill up quick, but it never helps. So I take another course and appeal directly to The Muse. She is recalcitrant and obstinate, but I goad her along.

She wakes from her satin sheets, stretches her pale, lovely long arms, and rises.

“Oh, all right,” she concedes after I’ve wooed her with mimosas and caviar.

And so we sit down to write.

I step back, ceding control of my body, my thoughts, and my mind to The Muse. I let her dance. I let her sing. I let her weep if that’s where she wants to go.

I am at her service, totally, completely.

We write tales of the life cycles of the human, of cranky old men with faithful dogs riding in rusted old pickup trucks. We write of lost girls with music in their head and small town girls finding their way in the big city. (editors note, these were the topics of the other stories that filled the book)

Sometimes we write of horses and cows, other times about diamonds and millionaires. We write of everything and nothing. All of it and more.

Today, however, this day when there is nothing I want to do more than write, I can’t manage to coax her to give more than a single paragraph.

This is the worst. We begin the takeoff sequence, the words start to form, but I can’t get wind under my wings. Soon we stutter and the engine fails. We write, but then we don’t get very far before we don’t write anymore.

The cursor blinks. Waiting.

I sit, begging, pleading with her. I try to do it on my own, force the words to come through, but each letter oozes painfully out of me like blood from a fresh, deep wound. It’s not natural like when she does it.

I used to think this was a terminal condition, this writer’s block, and would last forever. Over the years I’ve come to know that the diva inside of me, she of all the ideas and brilliant turns of phrase, will always come back. No matter how firmly she leaves or how far she goes, one day, I know she will return.

And she does.

She’ll always find a way to embody my fingers and my soul because she just can’t resist. The pull toward the joy we feel in those moments when the words flow free is too great. It’s like an addiction, stronger than any drug or drink.

We write because we must write.

And so today, I wait her out. The first paragraph is written and I wait, blinking in time with the cursor.

If I don’t squeeze too hard, if I don’t press her, it will happen.

Magically, it will happen.

So I avert my eyes and pretend it doesn’t matter. I fix a cup of coffee and I read the news and I say in a sighing way, “oh, I guess we’re not going to write today.”

And finally, when I’ve got her fully convinced that it just doesn’t matter, The Muse shows up with a “who me?” look on her face and suddenly has the will to write.

So we take another go at that runway. Faster this time, we let the words start to flow free. Soon, with enough speed and plenty of ideas to fuel our ascent, we break away from the land below and we begin to rise.

The adjectives and adverbs and participles flow smoothly over the wingtips and we soar, together, my fingers are her engine while The Muse is pulling all the levers.

It’s magnificent. Suddenly, we kill off the main character and bank hard to the left. Oh this is a great run. Then a plot twist, some suspense, upward we climb, faster, faster.

And finally, when it feels like my fingers might snap off from the speed and the altitude, the climax of the story arrives and we climb to impossible heights and finally crest that hill.

Once over the apex we begin coasting down the story arc of the glorious dénouement.

Then, the story draws to a close. The engines slow, the fingers wind down, and we touch gently back to down earth, weary but fulfilled.

Flaps come up, we coast to a stop and ease our rig back into the slip.

And suddenly…it’s over.

It is then, with much melancholy, together we type the words…

The End

That’s not *supposed* to be funny

And yet, it is.

Was reading an article today in the online version of the San Francisco Chronicle, the SFGate with the headline of “Flushed jail items cause S.F. court flooding.”

The article talks about how inmates at the San Francisco Hall of Justice managed to flush two orange jumpsuits and a bed sheet down the toilet, thus causing a major backup of raw sewage into the courtrooms.

Workers got the mess cleaned up last night only to have it flood again in the morning.

Just. Ew. Talk about a crappy day at work.

Sorry. No really, I actually am sorry. I’ve been on a pun kick lately. But that’s not the funny part.

The funny part comes toward the end of the article.

Here, I’ll quote it directly:

“…the last major problem occurred in the mid-1990s and prompted the city to purchase grinders, known as ‘muffin monsters,’ that are installed on sewage pipes.”

Giggle. *snort* Chuckle. Guffaw.

Muffin monsters?

Ok really. Honestly?

How am I not supposed to laugh at that?

I immediately dashed into the other room to share my new phrase with The Good Man.

Thus proving once more that I am the intellectual equivalent of a twelve-year-old boy.

But come ON. Muffin monsters?

Ok, ok, they really exist and that’s really what the manufacturer calls them.

They look like this:

That’s all well and good, but I don’t care who you are, that’s still funny!

*giggle snort*

Seeing myself in a new way

You know, looking at a photograph of myself is always an interesting and somewhat humbling experience.

In a photo, I never quite look the way that I imagine I look.

Where did those lines around the eyes come from? Do my hips really look like that?

Ah well.

The other day, I received an interesting photograph that surely has me pondering some things.

Here, I’ll share the photo with you, my fabulous readers, so you can see what I’m talking about.

It is a fun photo of me driving! Isn’t that neat! A perspective one doesn’t often get.

Look at me…intense expression on my face. Hands firmly at ten and two. Or maybe more like eleven and one, but no matter.

That’s a concentrated and skillful driver, no?

Yup, that photo was kindly mailed to me by the Superior Court of the county where I live.

Wasn’t that sweet?

It appears they are of the belief that I didn’t stop fully before making a right turn at a red light into a very busy intersection.

And so for the luxury of a faboo photo of me behind the wheel, I was charged $500.

I’m *ever* so pleased about that. Tickled pink. And other euphemisms I can’t think of right now to sarcastically convey that I’m not very pleased AT ALL!

Next step: onward to driving school. Yay me.

Have I ever mentioned how much I hate red light cameras? Oh I really hate them.