IJ quote of the day 16

“Concentrating on anything is very hard work” (202).

Good god people, are you trying to kill me?

Today alone:

Former client ran into me on the playground of all  places and asked me to do some copywriting. ASAP. Because clients often run ideas by you  several months before they need them.

Agent emailed and said that he wants to see more of my novel but already sees the same major issue that other readers have pointed out. Must reorganize whole book and get it to him by, say, tomorrow.

Peanut does not like the olallieberry crisp we made before lunch and has requested a cookie baking session after nap. I’m not entirely opposed to his demands. But how can I blog the already baked recipe if it’s loathed by 50% of the family who have thus far tasted it? 75%, really, if you consider the cats who won’t touch it. To be fair, they thought it was blackbery crisp. Also, did you notice the two other projects that seem a bit more pressing than cookies, given the ready availability of decent cookies in every case of every local bakery in this country? Hell, FatApples is two blocks away. Run over to the bakery, little boy, and bring back two cookies. Mommy has a book to submit.

Someone with no authority whatsoever has said my novel will be a huge success as a book and also as a major motion picture, floor wax, and cheese spread. I hope it’s non-aerosol. And that she gets some authority over something soon so I can start pushing for an action figure.

IJ quote of the day 15

I think this quote is a day behind. But seriously, who’s counting?

The section that most pleases me in the book, thus far, is the selected transcripts from drop-in hours of Pat Montesian. Laughed out loud. Laughed so hard I shook the bed and Spouse awoke, grumbled something about “that f—ing book” and went back to sleep. Then I read the next line and laughed again.

“So yeah, yes, OK, the short answer is when he wouldn’t quit with the drumming at supper I kind of poked him with my fork. Sort of. I could see how maybe somebody could have thought I sort of stabbed him. I offered to get the fork out, though” (177).

“So I’m sitting there waiting for my meatloaf to cool and suddenly there’s a simply sphincter-loosening shriek and here’s Nell in the air with a steak-fork, positively aloft, leaping across the table, in flight, horizontal, I mean Pat the girl’s body is literally parallel to the surface of the table, hurling herself at me with this upraised fork, shrieking something about the sound of peanut butter. I mean my God. Gately and Diehl had to pull the fork out of my hand and the tabletop both. To give you an idea” (177-8).

Ow! Not in the eye!

Sweetie? Pumpkin butter? Love? Mommy doesn’t want to talk about this right now.

Why?

Well, first of all, Mommy is driving. At breakneck pace to get you home on time after a long ass day of doing everything you want. Mommy is trying to concentrate. Also, in rolling my eyes at your question, the same question you’ve been asking all day, and the same freaking question I’ve answered, I swear to god, twelve times already, I managed to lodge a contact lens somewhere deep in my brain. Okay, honey? So not only am I gouging my eye out trying to get to the lens, to relieve the pain and fix the fauceting from my eye and potentially restore my freaking kind of necessary vision, there is a thin piece of precisely machined plastic wedged into the Why Is Harold with the Purple Crayon Happy When He Gets in the Boat  part of my brain. So it’s inaccessible at present, lovekin. I also can’t freaking see anything, doodlebug. Mommy is blind, Mommy is tired, Mommy is flying home HOPING TO GOD that Daddy is home so she can drop your ass off for, like, the twelfth time in your entire 1185 day life that she can avoid bedtime, so I can go feed a pair of cats who, it turns out later, are only going to hiss at me because they’re PISSED their Mom isn’t home. That’s not my fault. Traffic is not my fault. The sun in your eyes is not my fault. My not being willing to answer the same emotive question thirteen times in one day is, I swear to all that is holy, not my fault. I was only given enough patience to give twelve answers. Blame your grandparents. I can guarandamntee you they only answered eleven times, because they roll their eyes now every time I answer you twelve times in a row.

So please. I’ll say this again,  politely. Please put a sock in the exploring-the-emotions-of-cartoon-characters BULLSHIT while I try to get us home safely. There are, like, fourteen freeway interchanges between grandma’s and home, and I think we’re gonna wind up in the wrong county if I don’t pay attention right now.

Ah, shit, now we’re on the bridge. Did you just ask why is there water? Because we’re on a bridge. Why is it a bridge? Tell you what. You take your purple crayon and think fast and soon we can be climbing aboard a trim little boat, too, and you can tell me why that makes you happy.

Mmmmmkay?

Like a cool drink of water

Aaaah. Today was nice. Niyiyice. Compliant, happy, silly, observant child. Good weather. Great conversation with a genius writer with credentials out the wazoo who gave much more concrete, actionable, and loving feedback than the agent who, nevertheless, went to the trouble, if you know what I mean.

Sleep: not enough. Food: too much. Reading: not enough. Writing: way too little. Meltdown tally: two averted. Full meals cooked: two completed and edible. (Granted, one was semi-cheating, a homemade basil-heavy marinara and store-bought ravioli. But the other was all from scratch bok choy, portabello, tofu, and whole wheat soba stirfry with a homemade soy-vinegar-plum-perppercorn kind of thing.)

This was a pretty darned good day. And I owe it all to Spouse having 6 consecutive days off, getting some R&R at various family functions, a brilliant friend whose creative writing MA from Columbia is finally worth its weight in my appreciation, and a child who somehow, some way, has decided to settle down today.

Phew.

IJ quote of the day 15

Holy Mary, mother of my cousins: the grandaddy speech to young JOI is aboslutely excruciating. In a Chris Ware, father to son,”here are the defining moments of my life’s failures and why my father was ten times the asshole I am now” kind of way. Guacamole.

So today I leave you with the same thing grandpappy left us:

“A rude whip-lashing shove square in the back and my promising body with all its webs of nerves pulsing and firing was in full airborne flight and came down on my knees this flask is empty right down on my knees with all my weight and inertia on that scabrous hot sandpaper surface forced into what was an exact parody of an imitation conteplative prayer, sliding forward” (168).

No wonder himself was afraid of black widows. And palm frond pus.

You simply must read Infinite Jest.

Chillin’

No quote of the day today. I’m way behinnd in my reading, and I got to coo at new neices and play with family and friends today. So I am not up for assignments and expectations and such. I’ve been a bit too self driven all my life and I’m not in the mood today.

Got some solid feedback from an agent late last night, and I’m trying to decide what parts of it I’ll incorporate. I know I’m not fond of the “no thank you” part, but much of the rest was thoughtful.

So I cuddled babies and saw people I love and sucked on a big bag of sour grapes for a while. And I’ll tell you: having three small people smile at me today was worth not typing up a quote for you, the few readers who seem to be online this week. Where did everybody go?

Infinite Jest quote of the day 14

Appropos of Hal as narrator, by Hal as younger academic:

“We await, I predict the hero of non-action, that catatonic hero, the one beyond the calm, divorced from all stimulus, carried here and there across sets by burly extras whose blood sings with retrograde amines” (142).

Though Wallace disdained postmodern irony, and especially ironic distance that created a lack of humanity, he sure gets the self-referencing joke of postmodern lit pretty well…

And but so, this day of reading gave us the lethal purse snatching, the bricklayer’s accident clarification letter, and the page  long question that ends, “And but so why the abrupt consumer retreat back to good old voice-only telephoning?” after a huge surge toward video-TP conferencing.

Aces reading assignment, today. Stitches, from the on-the-inside laughing.

Go read Infinite Jest.

Awful truth—Uighur uprising uninteresting to Christian right

So depressing that our media covers entertainment and Alaskan stories without putting proper perspective on the violent uprising in China.

Where now are the Republicans who wanted us to shout our disapproval of Iran from the highest, most offensive, and least appropriate mountains?

Check out this post by Glenn Greenwald on the double standard.

Don’t make me use the H word.  But when you pick and choose using your far-right-colored glasses (that color, I believe, is the really distorting maroon of upholstered hotel lobbies),  hyprocrisy is the only word to use.

Let them figure it out

I have no problem letting Republicans figure out their own leaders, politics, and goals. They know much better than I what they want and how on earth they can believe the things they believe.

So I’m just saying this…of all the theories, and I’ve heard maybe eight this weekend, on why Palin quit a job she promised to do, I don’t care which reason is real and which is spin. What I care is that Canada embraces now the knowledge that I will undoubtedly leave this country if the Republicans choose her as their representative, and that by some stretch of faith, ignorance, or fraud, she gets elected President of these United States.

I’m not opposed to thoughtful, intelligent, inspiring Republicans getting their shot at running things. But I am opposed to that woman, who stands, talks, and walks for everything I find abhorrent in the way our democracy is going, putting her stamp on this nation.

Just saying. In advance. Appropos  of probably nothing.