Universally Acknowledged

I’m currently rehearsing for a play. On an entirely unrelated note, if you are in Albuquerque between September 14th and October 7th, you should go see a show at the Adobe Theater in the North Valley. I have it from scrupulously unbiased sources that their upcoming production of Jane Austen’s Pride & Prejudice is the single best thing to hit the stage in this millennium.

Since most of the setup in Jane Austen’s stories takes place at country balls at the turn of the 19th century, the cast is learning a few vaguely Regency-era dances for the party scenes. As a result, the women are asked to wear skirts at rehearsal so that we can practice moving correctly.

Several of the actresses possess varied collections of flattering sundresses; I, on the other hand, have been bringing the same ankle-length skirt to every rehearsal and adding it to whatever blouse I wore to work that day. It usually makes me look like a colorblind Puritan.

I’ve started doing my grocery shopping after rehearsal without changing. It’s fun watching the checkers try to decide from my purchases which fundamentalist sect I belong to.

It probably doesn’t help that the grocery store is my favorite place to talk to myself out loud.

There may also be some dancing around.

I even got stopped at my car last week by a sixteen-year-old Albertson’s parking lot monitor. Apparently they frown on exuberance after 10 p.m.

The poor guy seemed kind of disappointed when I started obediently pointing out the items on my receipt. Next time I’ll have to make more of an effort.

Secrets

Lots of people have life-altering secrets.

Some of them aren’t even Harry Potter characters.

I have a few secrets of my own, and of course they are clearly in the same class.

There’s an art to keeping this stuff out of the public eye. Like the Dread Pirate Westley up there, I invest a lot of energy and cunning in misdirection and subterfuge to keep the people around me from discovering the dark truth.

The need for secrecy comes from a firm conviction that none of them share in my transgressions, and that the full revelation would be too much of a shock to bear.

It’s not as if I imagine other people to be devoid of complicated inner lives. I just tend to suspect they might be better than I am.

Also, no, we never had a second flavor of pudding. Why do you ask?

Not Writing

Not writing is so, so, so much easier than writing. Even so, it is a specialized skill, and you can improve through dedicated practice.

The art of not writing is different from regular procrastination. Procrastinating is putting off work until the last minute by playing tetris, going out for ice cream, or watching three straight seasons of Star Trek: The Next Generation on Netflix.

Not writing is the next step. It’s the stage that begins once your guilty conscience strips the Blendtec YouTube channel of its power to thrill. In order to feel better while still avoiding work, it’s time to start lying to yourself.

I was already pretty accomplished at not writing in college, but deadlines and grades kept getting in the way of truly perfecting my craft. Now that all of my literary deadlines are self-imposed, though, I am rapidly approaching mastery. My most effective techniques for not writing fall into two categories:

Things that I tell myself are more important than writing

The key to satisfaction in not writing is believing that the other stuff you are doing is just as worthwhile, if not more so. In school, this category includes finishing the next three weeks of astronomy homework or putting 20 hours into that papier-mâché diorama of the Boer Wars that’s due after Christmas.

In the post-collegiate environment, I’m more likely to start with baking duck-shaped cupcakes for work or finally listening to that band my brother likes. These activities are obviously legitimate uses of time, I explain to my blank Word document, because I’m doing them for others. How could writing narcissistic comedy even hope to compete?

As the level of self-reproach increases, I escalate against it with home-upkeep oriented tasks, like alphabetizing the spice rack or trying on everything in my closet to decide what should go to Goodwill.

Eventually all of the sinks and toilets are really clean, and I sit down at the computer. I’m still open to more self-delusion, though, so it’s time for the second category of crafty ploys:

Things that I tell myself actually are writing

This is the real balancing act: avoiding the project by pretending to work on the project. The secret is developing ironclad mechanisms for achieving imaginary progress. In school, these tricks include picking fonts, setting margins, organizing sources, creating headers and footers with automatic page numbers, and figuring out how to type the accents in “papier-mâché diorama.”

Now, I prefer to start off by rereading my own existing material. This process is absolutely intended to help Maintain a Consistent Style; it is clearly not about Reliving Past Accomplishments Instead of Doing Anything. It also means that every post I finally finish gains me a few more minutes of delay for next time.

After all that staring at a screen, it’s about time for a round of cleaning out my purse while focusing single-mindedly on writing ideas.

When I eventually run out of fuzzy hard candy, I’ll turn to practicing ways to draw facial expressions in case I need them later.

As it turns out, not every picture is worth a thousand words.

In college, the not writing always had to end before the paper was actually due. But as a graduate who is neither graded nor paid for writing, I get to decide when everything is due. Sometimes I decide it’s never. When all else fails, though, there’s always writing an entire column about not writing things.

Trust Me

I like being an expert on things. If there were a way to harness this “internet” thing to regale imaginary strangers with long stories they don’t care about, I would definitely be all over that. I might even draw pictures.

The best times, though, are when you get expert status as a bonus—it just so happens that everyone else in the vicinity has less knowledge or skill in this area than the paltry amount you’ve got, plus no way of judging your own ineptitude.

A sudden snowstorm recently handed me one of those glorious moments of unearned authority. I was checking the freezer for ice cream around midnight when I noticed the snow through the window, and I went out front to look at it in case it melted before morning. That’s where I found my next-door neighbors and their abbreviated dog, staring around them at all of the weather and looking awed but apprehensive.

With a hand to my sagacious chin, I dispensed the deep wisdom of the ages.

They listened, confident in their newfound guru, as I nudged them toward enlightenment through sticking to major streets and looking for closures on the news. They had no way of knowing that I had spent the previous February frantically Googling how much road ice it would take for me to die of fear before even starting the car.

Of course, operating under unearned credentials is a risky game, and there’s always a chance they’ll figure you out. During the summer educator-training program for Teach For America, I once spent about twenty minutes as the person in the room who could draw. This is not typically a title I can claim in the presence of an even moderately capable fifth grader, so I was as surprised as everyone else by my answer to a colleague’s plea of, “Help! Can anyone draw a pet that kids have?”

However, in that rush of sudden exalted proficiency, you have to be careful not to push your luck. With everyone else thinking you have superior skills or knowledge, you can start to believe it yourself…

It’s easy to ruin the illusion.

Sometimes it’s just better not to reveal your expert knowledge in the first place. For example, the assortment of 65-and-older ladies assembled for Sunday School do not necessarily want all of their questions energetically answered.

In any case, you can definitely trust my advice on all of this. It’s pretty clear that I’m the expert.

Pretempathy

I am not always exactly the tops at compassion and human fellow-feeling. Various individuals who have been patient enough to live around me over the years can attest to this quality; they have all discovered my impressive ability to get aggravated over offenses that, in retrospect, might not actually require a full Red Alert.

As far as I can tell, this penchant for escalation is not a universal human trait. A few people I know seem supernaturally capable of seeing the best in everyone.

I, on the other hand, am considerably better suited to making up nonsense than to consistently appreciating the value of humanity. Luckily, this is a power that I can use to disguise my shortcomings.

In order to infiltrate productive society, I’ve started to artificially approximate empathy by inventing stories to explain other people’s behavior. It works particularly well with the phone calls I get at work.

These calls come in a variety of flavors, so I get a lot of practice.

My own demeanor, of course, never requires explanation.

NaNoWriMo

November is National Novel Writing Month, or NaNoWriMo for those who are saving the extra syllables for use in their literary efforts.

The idea is to write at least 50,000 words of a novel over the course of the month, which averages to about 1,667 words per day. It’s not too late to start, but you’ll have to put in some overtime.

I am not participating, since I am too much of a sissy for serious fiction. As we all know from high school, a book cannot have literary merit unless terrible things happen to any characters worth liking. Whether an honest farming family slowly starves on the way to California or Death Eaters slay a loyal house elf, the good guys have got some suffering coming.

I have taken a few creative writing courses, but my short stories always chickened out when I reached the possibility of anything important happening. I had just made up lives for all these people, and it didn’t seem right to invent them a bunch of pain.

As an alternative, then, I am celebrating NaNoITrToWriInFoGrMo by presenting excerpts from the Novel I Tried To Write In Fourth Grade.

Most of my memories from that year involve the ambitious plans I had for my world-changing contribution to literature. I worked on it during every writing hour and rainy-day recess, filling double-spaced pages and occasionally leaking previews to my teacher so that she could enjoy the privilege of witnessing my genius.

As a basically show-off-y kid (who totally grew out of that), I wanted two things to surround this epic: Absolute secrecy, and universal knowledge that I had something super amazing and was keeping it to myself.

I installed a homemade lock on my spiral notebook, limiting access to only advanced masters of paperclip-and-string technology. To foil those remaining wily invaders, the first few pages were filled with warnings and cunning deceptions.

The problem was that my security measures worked. No one cared about seeing my story, and no one from school could access its hiding place under my dresser. The only audience left was my little brother, so I had to whet his appetite for my sweet, sweet, secret magical prose. I “accidentally” revealed my storage spot. I started leaving the notebook in the middle of my floor, with a hair across the pages to detect tampering. I held little readings of the most impressive parts and dropped tantalizing hints about the plot.

The plot in question was the combined product of my all-consuming Dog Phase and roughly twenty viewings of Babe, specifically the parts with the border collies. I also saw a local production of Camelot and discovered the dramatic potential of betrayal and revenge.

WARNING: Top secret material below! Continue at your own risk! If you tell anybody, I WILL KNOW AND GET YOU!

“Blaze was a one-year-old workdog on the McLoftlen farm….He had a happy life on the farm. Hearding seep, and chaseing rabbitts, birds, and butterflies. But one day he was afraid that it would all come to an end—much too soon for Blaze.”

He is out herding one day when a duck brings him a threatening, anonymous note about how the farmers think Blaze is responsible for a recent sheep killing. Sure enough, the farmer’s wife tries to shoot Blaze, but fortunately she is as bad at aiming as she is at maintaining a consistent personality from page to page.

As Blaze recovers, his most feared enemy dog, Mordred, shows up in the field. An epic dog battle ensues, featuring the grittiest action I could conceive: “First Mordred jumped at Blaze, then in a burst of fury, Blaze would jump back. This went on for almost an hour, and then Mordred slyly slunk away.”

The farmer and his wife tend Blaze’s wounds while producing authentic country dialogue such as, “I reckon’e got in a fight with a’other dawg.” Farmer McLoften calls his neighbors about their dog bully, and they hang up on him.

…and with this cliffhanger finish, I stopped writing my masterpiece and forgot what else was supposed to happen. Probably a lot more jump-fighting and apostrophes.

Despite all my careful buzz cultivation, chances are good that I just got distracted. The next thing in the notebook is this piece of fine art:

I remember spending most of 5th grade on these and stussies. That specific distraction is the biggest threat to NaNoWriMo, from what I hear.

How I Keep Injuring Myself in Progressively Lamer Ways

Someone gave me a diary when I was about six, and all through elementary school I would unlock it once a year or so to write another variation on “My brother is anoeeing when he trys to play with my freinds.”

Shortly after the entry on a possible monster with bloody eyes in the church basement, there’s a whole page dedicated to “I want a Broken arm or fott please.” This sentiment was inspired by numerous classmates who, unlike me, were awesome enough to arrive at school with day-glo casts for weeks at a stretch.

Broken limbs didn’t just get you special permission to sit in the rocking chair for story time; they also proved that you led a life of incredible daring.

I could not compete.

My childhood lack of grievous bodily harm has matured into a lifelong talent for injuring myself in spectacularly undramatic ways. I still get hurt occasionally; I just do it in the least interesting manner possible.

A Few Examples:

• I grew really fast one summer in middle school, which made my legs hurt a lot. I also spent half of 7th grade limping due to not damaging my knee in any discernable way.
• In high school I developed an ingrown toenail, and then I contracted a case of Persistent Wrist Pain Caused by Nothing.
• In college I strained my shoulder by reaching too enthusiastically for a salt shaker, and one morning I was physically unable to get out of bed because I had coughed all night and worn out my core muscles.

Given this history, I wasn’t too concerned a couple of weeks ago when my right arm developed a sudden enthusiasm for random, stabbing pains. Since I could still scoop ice cream, the problem wasn’t seriously affecting my way of life.

Pretty soon, though, my shoulder wouldn’t rotate much without expressing its rage. I started feeling like a poorly designed action figure—one where you try to activate the Kung Fu Grip, but his arm won’t come back all the way because his veiny bicep collides with his rippling pecs.

After a few days of using my left arm for everything, that hand started to hurt, too. A small part of my brain acknowledged what was logically happening, but the rest of it was busy panicking.

Finally, I woke up to a right arm that couldn’t even reach my face and the firm belief that every movement was sawing away at permanent nerve damage. My roommate found me on my bed waiting for the clinic to open, whimpering quietly and imagining the worst possible things that could happen.

When you arrive at Urgent Care with a case of “my arm hurts,” they smirk and send you to sit next to “I have the sniffles” for a couple of hours. My roommate sat patiently while I talked determinedly at her about anything except how I was probably dying.

When my frothing anxiety and I finally got to see the doctor, he revealed that I had an acute attack of tendinitis caused by something thrilling like typing wrong. In retrospect, I don’t know why I was worried. It’s probably not physically possible for me to be injured in any interesting and dramatic way. I’ve never even had strep throat—I’ve just had a lot of cases of, “Oops, never mind, it turns out that’s just another cold.”

I ended up with a sling, some low-end drugs, and a diagram of goofy-looking rotator cuff exercises.

This episode has been the crowning achievement of my lame injury history so far. I had an immediate visual representation of my suffering, but nothing good to back it up when people asked what happened.

I wore the sling for the better part of a week, and I spent most of that time trying to come up with a better story.

Also, it turns out that tendinitis sticks around for quite a while once you develop it. This means that I’m still putting the sling back on about once a week, and all the same sympathetically eager questions crop up again.

(P.S. If you were naming an affliction of the tendons, wouldn’t you spell it “tendonitis”? So would I.)