Frequently Asked Questions

Check it out—I have an FAQ* page now! You can get there from the previous sentence or from the “FAQ” tab at the top of the page. I’m counting it as my post this week because I’m a slacker and didn’t draw anything.

Trivia: People don’t actually ask me questions about this blog. These are questions that I have imagined people asking, though, and my personal paranoia thus makes most of them sound somewhat accusatory. You can think of the responses less as “answers” and more as attempts to justify myself.

Feel free to leave your own questions in the comments. I will try to answer them in at least mildly informative and/or amusing ways.

* Those of you who pronounce it “fak” may now twitch and mentally substitute “a” for “an.” You’re welcome.

Allow Me to Clarafy

The name “Clara” hasn’t been super popular in America since the 1940s. This is cool because, unlike all my friends named Ashley, I never have to ask, “Which Clara do you mean?”

I’m uncommon in literature also—I show up occasionally in old books as the upstairs maid or someone’s spinster aunt. I never have to worry about being the villain, though I did recently come across a short story in which a college-aged Clara refused an offer of ice cream. That’s tantamount to libel.

The heroine in The Nutcracker is a Clara, of course. Like most little girls I logged several Christmases in a velvet dress watching the children’s ballet with my mom, and I felt a justified sense of ownership over the whole show. My parents found me a pop-up book version of The Nutcracker for Christmas the first year, and when I opened it…

…they had changed the little girl’s name to Marie. The writers must have wanted everyone to think they were French and sophisticated. I just thought they were mean.

I was similarly disappointed last month when I found out that Clara Barton, founder of the American Red Cross, was actually named Clarissa. At least she had good taste in nicknames.

Anyway, I’ve still got Clara Bow, leading sex symbol of the roaring twenties, and Clara Rockwell, virtuoso of the sciencey-delightful theremin. I can also claim an 18th-century rhinoceros and a minor planet.

In practice, 40% of the people I meet say, “Ooh, that’s my great-grandmother’s name.” The other 60% say, “Nice to meet you, Claire.”

The real problem with this phenomenon is that I don’t always catch on right away—I tend to just assume that people are mumbly. Then I realize a month later that someone I work with every day has been calling me the wrong name, and how am I supposed to explain that I’ve never corrected it before? It’s a lot easier to ignore it, get incrementally more irritated, complain to outside parties, make 6-inch nametags for my desk, and finally lose all my composure in a poorly timed burst of self-righteousness.

This unfortunate fate befell a very sweet lady at my office last week. I couldn’t bring myself to embarrass her directly about the syllable she’d been missing for weeks, so instead I changed the desktop on our shared computer.

Then I changed it again.

Then I tried some cleverly constructed, loud conversations with nearby coworkers.

Finally, on my way out the door for lunch, she said it one more time.

This is the response I had expected and stayed silent for weeks to avoid:

This is the response I received:

The moral of the story is probably something about bottling up frustration, or assumptions, or possibly listening skills. The lesson I prefer you take away, though, is this:

Also don’t call me Carla.

(P.S. It tickles me to think that, 40 years from now, kids will say, “Courtney?! That’s an old lady’s name! Just like Britney and Krystal.”)

Is There a Continuing Ed Class for That?

Somewhere in middle school I missed the class on how to dress in clothes that look good. This omission left me incapable of distinguishing between outfits appropriate for not getting teased in 7th grade and those appropriate for repainting a doublewide outside Wal-Mart in 1987.

Conveniently, I also missed the lessons on how to be self-conscious, thus preserving my love of brightly-colored stretch leggings and extra-large t-shirts from the science fair. That’s how I reached the decision to adjust for cold weather by wearing red stirrup pants with my new lavender dress.

This was the day my balloon of blissful ignorance began to leak and I begged my mom to buy me a pair of jeans. This was also the same classmate who, a few weeks later, took advantage of our napping substitute teacher to wrap masking tape around my eyes and drag me across the floor by my braided hair, so I got those lessons in self-consciousness after all.

Anyway, my continuing lack of fashion standards makes clothes shopping an ordeal that I only attempt when all of my existing garments develop enough holes to be used for draining pasta. Paralyzing anxiety about the term “business casual” couples with my ingrained unwillingness to spend more than $20 on anything short of a life-saving appendectomy.

On top of that, I primarily shop at discount superstores that require you to navigate around the 87% of the options that proclaim either “Hootchie Mama” or “Thanks for coming to my retirement party.”

I am also not big on shopping when it comes to gifts for non-relatives approximately my own age. I have no ability to determine maturity-level-appropriate presents. I also can’t use the “buy something you would like to receive” metric anymore because I would just get everyone Play-Doh, and anyone who has invited me to a previous birthday party already has some.

(Two-hour intermission while I browse the Play-Doh website. Did you know there’s one with confetti in it? You can also buy it by the pound, or teach children to inject it into dogs.)

Ultimately, the only shopping I really enjoy is at the grocery store. While I’m there I can imagine myself as the kind of person who prepares mouthwatering delicacies instead of just smearing things with peanut butter.

That’s how I end up with a pantry full of orphaned crab meat and saffron and a kitchen spattered in Cement of Béchamel Sauce.

The resulting failure-related reversion to a ramen-based diet is also why I keep having to go shopping for pants.

Ice Is Not My Friend

I live in Albuquerque, New Mexico, and like most of the rest of the country we have recently experienced higher-than-average accumulations of winter on our roadways.

Thanks to our customary high temperatures and lack of precipitation, we also have a higher-than-average accumulation of people who think it’s a good idea to drive 45 miles an hour downhill on roads slicker than a greased senatorial candidate made of Teflon.

Then we have me. I looked out the window on Tuesday and cackled gleefully at the ice because a lot of the time I forget that I have responsibilities and act like I’m eight years old instead. Then I went out to my car to have funfunfunfunfunsnowsnowsnow! and drive to work.

Due to academic winter breaks and an average of one snowfall per year, this was really the first time I had experienced the combined circumstances of intensely bad roads and being responsible for getting myself somewhere important. Also, my car just finished recovering from an emotionally traumatic pre-Christmas fender-bender. Thus, after fishtailing three times while leaving my apartment complex, I called upon my 5th grade D.A.R.E. peer pressure resistance skills to make the drivers behind me deal with my dial-up-modem-speed descent of the one continuous hill to my office.

Once I got there, all I could think about was how petrified I was of having to drive again when I left. Any time I sat still, I felt the sensation of tires sliding on ice.

Amount of fear the situation warranted:

Amount of fear I experienced:

It got really bad around 3:00, when we realized that management would not be sending us home early before the roads froze over again. That’s when the cold sweats kicked in, and I started Googling winter driving safety tips.

These were not helpful.

Eventually the boss released us into only slightly deadly conditions. The drive was actually kind of a letdown for my over-excited limbic system, and I had to complain loudly about ice for the next hour to burn off the leftover adrenaline and panic.

The next morning, I planned to go in an hour late in case the improvement from -4 degrees to 7 degrees might soften some ice. I was psyching myself up for combat with the forces of terror when I received a phone call from one of the valiant souls who had already made it in to work: The office was closing.

Anyway, nobody ran into me and I didn’t slide into a ditch, my electricity is on, and I don’t live in the Midwest Blizzard Zone, so I guess the whole thing wasn’t a big deal. I did learn from the storm, though—specifically, that your glasses can freeze to your face.

Extra Credit: Arnold wants you to stay cool.

The Awkward Wombat

My roommates and I went bowling last week. We’re naturally mistrustful of humanity, so instead of posting our real names on the monitor, we used arbitrarily chosen animal names.

Our initial species assignments were based on the joy of pronouncing them, kind of like ordering spumoni and okra just for an excuse to say it. During our second game, though, we realized that our names were eerily appropriate.

The most outgoing of us identified with the marmoset, an active and social little monkey. The shyest roommate is not unlike a hedgehog, prone to curling up in a ball when confronted. Meanwhile, I was the wombat, an animal that responds to threats by crushing predators’ skulls with its toughened rear end.

I learned the word “wombat” at age four or five and promptly startled my parents by announcing the presence of one in our suburban Oregon backyard.

The wombat in question turned out to be a zucchini the size of a schnauzer. My developing brain had decided on its own that “wombat” meant “something especially large for its type.”

A few of my friends report similar struggles with early language learning:

So what I’m really trying to say here is this: Parents, when your second-grader teaches your four-year-old a joke with the punchline “I’m going as fast as I can!,” she does not know that the names are all Bad Words. It’s not her fault. Blame it on that wombat in art class.

How to Keep Voldemort from Giving You Syphilis

My middle-class, suburban childhood was pretty much as safe and nonthreatening as humanly possible, so my brain compensated for the lack of danger by inventing whole legions of forces that were trying to get me.

In addition to the standard hiding under the covers to foil the bad guys who wanted to kill me in the dark, I developed a detailed system of techniques to keep fictional characters and scary words from seeping into me and working evil.

I was careful to hold any book I was reading by the very corners to keep from touching the bad guys’ names and absorbing the danger through my fingers. You also can’t just put the book down after a chapter that ends with “doom” or “evil” or “yeerks”—you have to keep reading until a safe sentence like “The travelers prepared for lunch.”

Extra-powerful bad things can even get in through your unconscious processes, like accidentally breathing in right when the White Witch kills Aslan. And if you really need to swallow and the whole chapter is going to be inside the enemy’s compound or something, you have to at least wait until none of them are talking and settle on an innocent word like “the.” “Said” will do in a pinch, but it’s not as safe because you know that it means a bad person has been speaking. And don’t ever use “he” or “she” just because they’re not names—that’s still Saruman you’re talking about.

I had to hold my breath and not touch the book for most of The Shining to keep the Overlook from getting me.

A friend of mine confided her own related safety rule in middle school: Spell the names of diseases correctly, lest they become angered by your disrespect and take revenge.

Movies and TV have their own set of dangers. You’re a lot less likely to accidentally touch the bad guys, but there’s a risk of ingesting some villainy if you swallow popcorn while the camera is on Khan.

A couple of years ago I knitted a baby blanket while watching six movies back to back, and partway through I started to worry that The Graduate wouldn’t be appropriate to weave into garments for small children. I had to put the needles down altogether for American Psycho so that the baby wouldn’t grow up to be a sociopath.

It’s possible to absorb the good things too, of course. This is why I get irritated with the short shots and multitudinous cuts in modern cinematography—Dumbledore is never on the screen long enough for me to finish all my M&Ms and gain his powers.

P.S. I typed “syphilis” about seven different wrong ways in the title before I got it right (spell check is cheating and syphilis knows that). Then I typed some other stuff, and when I looked back at the top of the page, the word “syphilis” was GONE! While it’s logical to suppose that Word deleted it on a whim the way it adds undesirable formatting, I’m pretty concerned that the disease got mad and jumped out of my computer to seek justice. You might want to wash your hands after reading this.

P.P.S. Here are some safety buffer words to protect us:

Joy kitten disinfectant bubbles happy health delight sanitary unicorn love immunity pizza.

The Ghost Club

In second grade, I joined the Ghost Club started by two cooler girls from my class. We all watched Ghostwriter and read Goosebumps, so we were confident that we were the kind of savvy kids with whom all ghosts would prefer to work.

The three of us met at lunch and recess to compare paranormal encounters and think up ways to contact the spirit world.

The club disbanded in about two weeks. Sherry broke her leg and Jennifer broke her arm, which clearly indicated that we were getting too close to the ghosts and making them angry. The girls told me that we would have to stop meeting for my safety, and obviously the club could not go on without my wise input.

The next year, my friend Natasha and I formed the Chasing Those Floating Things You See In The Corner Of Your Eye Sometimes Club. Both of us kept all our limbs intact, but for some reason we were not invited to join any more recess clubs.

Sadly, Sherry and Jennifer both moved away before the student body’s most impressive brush with the unexplained.

My elementary school sat between two residential streets and a city park, so about twenty backyards housed small collections of escaped kickballs. We all avoided the dark green house at the very back of the school, though, because that’s where Captain Hook lived. Apparently his midlife crisis included a career change from chasing Peter Pan to terrorizing suburban school children.

No one ever saw Captain Hook, which was good because he hated kids and would kill you with his hook if you even looked at him. Once Natasha and I got really brave and snuck up to touch Captain Hook’s fence before shrieking in terror and running for our lives, but it was a very close call and for the rest of the day we just knew that he had seen us and would come hook our guts out during art.

Even though the Captain never showed himself, we had proof that he was really there because of the messages he sent. The school’s gigantic riding lawnmower spat up clods of grass with perfectly round holes in them, and these were clearly a secret code that our sinister neighbor had punched in with his hook.

My classmate Jan was the only person who could decode Hook’s messages. After she revealed this talent, the rest of us would bring her grass clods and she would examine them solemnly. Finally, she would whisper the horrible warnings she had read:

Now that I think of it, Jan would have been an asset to the Ghost Club.