While listening to The Tavis Smiley Show on NPR

Uppity: Tavis Smiley is awesome. And what a great name. I wish my last name was Smiley.

Kevin: Rachel Smiley?

Uppity: I would be happy all the time. My family crest would be a bright yellow happy face. I would –

Kevin: Rachel Smiley?

Uppity: Well, it’s better than Rachel Frownie.

Kevin: I wish my name was “Kevin Fuckstain.” Paging Mr. Fuckstain. Mr. Fuckstain, please pick up the white courtesy phone. I now pronounce you Mr. and Mrs. Fuckstain –

Uppity: That’s Mrs. Smiley-Fuckstain, thank you very much.

Kevin: Fuckstain, party of two, your table is ready…

On watching My Big Fat Greek Wedding for the millionth time

Uppity: If I were Greek Orthodox and we wanted to get married, would you convert for me?

Kevin: [instantly] Yep.

Uppity: [suspiciously] What if I were Jewish? Would you convert then?

Kevin: Yep.

Uppity: [thinks, then snaps fingers]  Mormon!

Kevin: Yep.

Uppity: But you hated it in Salt Lake City!

Kevin: [shrugging] It’s all the same pack of lies to me.

By any other name

From my Valentine.

Today I am thankful for Saintly Supporters.

Or: The Novel That Almost Wasn’t

As of 1 pm, Friday, November 30, 2007, I have written 50,092 words and am an official NaNoWriMo winnah. It is a brilliant novel cleverly disguised as a terrible novel, as only a novel written at breakneck speed can be.

In due time, when it’s published in its true, award-winning form, the following will be the author’s Acknowledgments:

I would like to thank Kevin, my primary Saintly Supporter,¹ without whom this book would quite literally never have been written.

On the eve of the long Thanksgiving weekend, at precisely 18,202 words, I quit. Gave up. Said goodbye to NaNo and its ridiculous expectations.

This did not sit well with my primary Saintly Supporter. He takes his job extremely seriously and apparently, I was making him look really bad.

An argument ensued. It went on for probably an hour, but in the end, only two things were said. I insisted that doing NaNoWriMo was, for various reasons, “too hard.” Kevin said, “It’s the hard that makes it great.”

Turning point. (Cue moving music.)

For those of you who haven’t seen A League Of Their Own, go rent it. Tom Hanks plays Jimmy Dugan, a former major league baseball coach-turned-alcoholic loser women’s baseball coach. When his players whine, he comes out of his stupor long enough to give them a necessary what-for. His “It’s the hard that makes it great” is the best line in the movie.²

That afternoon, Kevin was doing his best Coach Dugan, minus the chew lip-bulge and Jack Daniels smell.

There may be other parallels than just dialogue. Coach Dugan may want his players to win so they will become famous and support him in the way to which he wishes to become accustomed. He may want them to win so he’ll look good. He may want them to quit whining so he can enjoy his Thanksgiving weekend.

But the truth is, Dugan doesn’t want them to win so much as to do the best they can with what they got. To do what they said they would do, even when the going got tough - to step up to the plate, as it were. Because that’s what winning really is. That’s the hard that makes it great.

My book is dedicated to Kevin, the Saintliest of Supporters and most beloved of sweeties.

I would also like to thank the following players on Team Saintly Supporters:

Michael, MVP, for writing tips and pom poms and unflagging faith in me.

Ribsis, for pre-orders and not giving me any shit for not coming down for Thanksgiving dinner.

Jo, for sage advice and Dad, for the writing genes (even if you are a hard act to follow).

Lachlan, Bayou, and Amaya, for steadfast encouragement, true friendship, and link love.

The bodacious babes of Beautiful_Us, for the healing power of listening and virtual hugs.

Mushell, Kellie, James, Jennifer, and all the righteous Rib Readers, for giving me the best reason in the world to write.

And Kevin, again, for talking-tos, space heaters, turkey sandwiches, inspiration,³ coffee delivery, back rubs, and the freedom to rediscover my love of the game. I love you.

Technorati Tags: writing, National Novel Writing Month

1. Term coined by Chris Baty, NaNoWriMo creator, for those family and friends who support the mad writer as she huddles over her computer, writing like a bat out of hell, shirking all responsibilities, throughout the month of November. [↩]
2. Except for maybe “There’s no crying in baseball” which I also heard a few times this month. [↩]
3. Woodchipper. You’ll see. [↩]

In Flanders Fields

IN FLANDERS FIELDS the poppies blow
Between the crosses row on row,
That mark our place; and in the sky
The larks, still bravely singing, fly
Scarce heard amid the guns below.

We are the Dead. Short days ago
We lived, felt dawn, saw sunset glow,
Loved and were loved, and now we lie
In Flanders fields.

Take up our quarrel with the foe:
To you from failing hands we throw
The torch; be yours to hold it high.
If ye break faith with us who die
We shall not sleep, though poppies grow
In Flanders fields.

Lt Colonel John McCrae, MD (1872-1918)
Canadian Army

Happy All NaNo’s Eve

Kevin and I have handed out candy every Halloween since we bought our house. The first year was a kind of milestone: our first trick-or-treaters in our first house together. Awwwww.

Of course, this new warm-fuzzy didn’t come without a price - specifically, the big fight we got into earlier that day in grocery store.

It went something like this: I felt one can never have enough bags of Halloween candy, and Kevin disagreed, suggesting that I was an impulse-buying spendthrift. I countered loudly that he was a party-pooping tightwad. Soon the bags were flying in and out of the shopping cart with increasing violence and nearby children were crying into the backs of their mothers’ knees.

The fight ended with me grabbing the cart and ordering Kevin to “just go away and let me buy the fucking candy.” He stomped off, disappearing into the dairy section to mollify himself with free cheese samples.

We reconvened later at the register, Kevin glaring in stony silence as the cashier rang up approximately 300 bags of mini-Snickers. He stayed mad at me for the whole rest of the day, until the first trick-or-treater showed up at the door, which is when warm-fuzzy kicked in and all was forgiven.¹

We’ve managed to make it through subsequent Halloweens without arguing, mainly because I say “Yes, dear” on the shopping trips and then supplement the candy stash on my own time.

This year it may be a moot point, however. Tonight Kevin will be helping a friend move into a new place, and I will be hard at work worrying about the story I’ll begin writing in just twenty-four hours for NaNoWriMo.

My brain is crowded with vague characters elbowing each other and staking out territory and badgering me for a plot. How can I court the muse with the constant interruption of needy, masked midgets at my door?

Then again, if I hide in the dark all night, I’ll be stuck with 300 bags of candy. And with my luck, all my characters will be doing Sugar Busters.

Technorati Tags: NaNoWriMo, writing, Halloween

1. And for the record, even with all the extra bags of candy I bought, we still ran out too early. Let that be a lesson to all party-pooping tightwads. [↩]

Guest Blog: Smokey the Muffin

When I was a little kid, my favorite show on TV was Emergency 51. It had these two firemen who ran around in a little firetruck and did paramedic good deeds every week. These guys would get on the radio and talk to Rampart Hospital and save lives.

Those guys should have been at our house today to treat us for smoke inhalation.

So it’s Saturday - our typical chore day. I’m planning on grocery shopping and my beloved will go out for a few hours before she starts doing the laundry. But first we need to eat breakfast. Since I want to get an early start, my beloved says she will cook eggs and english muffins while I get ready.

I’m in the shower when I start to smell it. Smoke. Then the upstairs smoke detector starts to howl. Not too unusual when my sweetie practices the domestic arts, but enough to get me to turn off the water and grab a towel.

Then the downstairs detectors start going off, one after the other. Then the house security alarm starts up, all in the time it takes to wrap a towel around me. I open the door and the smoke billows in. A whole goddamn bunch of smoke. The fucking house must be on fire!

I peer down the stairs and I can barely make out my love standing down in the grey hazy smoke.

“I burned your muffin.”

Well, we rush around pushing the cutoffs for the smoke detectors (we have smoke detectors with shut-offs, see paragraph three, line four). We yell at each other. My cranky beloved has a bellyfull of my pissiness and vacates the disaster area while I open the windows and get all the fans going. Then I find the muffin.

It wasn’t in the toaster. It was in the microwave. I open the door and a cloud of smoke puffs out, which is a pretty neat trick considering the air outside the microwave is also 99% smoke. A sour, stinky, grey smoke that comes from food burned to cinders.

The glass tray inside the microwave has a black slick of melted muffin on it. How hot does a muffin have to be before it melts? Jeezus!

That’s when I see the timer on the microwave. The poor fucker still had another 10 blistering minutes to go when my love popped the door open and released the fumes.

Fridge Poem by Kevin

Jam Band Widow

Kevin just got back from a long weekend at a String Cheese Incident concert on some guy’s farm in Oregon. He spent three days barefooted in the sunshine doing the hippie spin and, uh, other recreational activities, and has returned, exhausted in body yet refreshed in soul.

And tells me I have to check out this website, man.

Hippie humor. Oy.

Harry Potter Widower

My woman has thrown me the keys to her blog. You see, she is far too engrossed in that damn Harry Potter and the Geeky Unwashed to sit down and correspond with the likes of you and me. She has prepared a couch nest, in which she has stored various candies and teas, blankies and tissues, pillows and bookmarks. She is in it for the long haul, it seems.

And so am I.

It all began yesterday at 10:36 A.M. when an obviously pissed UPS driver delivered the book to our door. Poor Mr. UPS guy had a truck filled with Harry’s last outing. He looked like a guy who had a long day ahead of him and had already heard every possible lame-ass Potter joke. He did not care that he was bringing the last, crucial component of my sweetie’s nest.

The box was torn open, nephews shooed away, and reading began.

Now in the interest of full disclosure, I’ll admit that I read the last chapter while my sweetie was getting one of the boys ready to go home. I felt this was justified - I needed to know if I should lay in a stock of hard liquor in case “the boy who lived” became “the boy who lived until page 648 of Book 7.”

Since we have a no-spoiler policy in the house, I can’t list the after-reading provisions and preparations. But I can list the while-reading requirements: Food that can be eaten with one hand and won’t leave grease stains on the book, bottled water, chocolate, wine, silence.

She started Saturday afternoon. One day later, she’s somewhere around page 400. That’s a little more than half way. Tonight, I will feed her turkey and mashed potatoes. The tryptophan will help her sleep after a long day of limited physical activity. I try to predict all of her needs before she knows they’re needs. It’s easiest that way for both of us. She doesn’t have to pull her bloodshot eyes from the book to croak “Accio wine bottle” at me. And I don’t have to know what “Accio wine bottle” means.

I know I’m not alone. There must be millions of folks providing support for the world’s Potter junkies. We fetch drinks and make lunches. We deliver books and fluff pillows. In a few days, we’ll be rewarded with the return of our loved ones.

Until then, we get to use the computer for a change.