The other night, I dug into my stash of fabric samples and made my first thing with it–a pillow. Since I was too lazy to get my sewing machine out, I sewed it all by hand. I am pleased with the results. I had never made a pillow before.
Unfortunately, I don’t get much light in my house in the morning, so this is the best photo I could get of the pillow. I am too lazy to mess with lamps. Someone buy me a camera light!
This week I’m reading through my novel before starting a new draft. I have filled a notebook with notes of things to change and I haven’t even gotten to the end yet.
Overall, I’m feeling better about the book this time through, but I am still amazed by my tendency to repeat myself. Although I don’t repeat major events or metaphors without meaning to, I do repeat small things within the scene. Thus, I have learned that my characters:
Love to smile. Oh how they smile. They beam. They grin. They smile slowly. Their smiles fall off their faces. Their smiles bloom. Their smiles turn their faces from plain to beautiful. They smile deliberately, with calculation. It is a book filled with smiles, and it will make you smile when you read it.
Cry easily. Yes, as much as my characters love to smile, they also love to cry. Fortunately, they do not cry as easily as they smile–that would be quite a rollercoaster!–but they sure do burst into tears when provoked. In my characters’ defense, most of the crying is manipulative or after a great tragedy, so it is somewhat understandable.
Look people up and down. You might think that with all these emotional outbursts, my characters lack analytical skills, but you would be wrong. They are good at sizing people up. They look along people’s bodies, sometimes suspiciously, sometimes sexually. Nothing gets past them, boy howdy.
Are well-dressed. At least, that’s the best I can figure what with all the description of clothes in this novel. There are entire wardrobes of clothes in this novel. Very little of it is relevant to the plot, but it helps you to know that the main character is wearing a pink dress, right?
In light of this, I am considering the possible title: All Smiles: The Story of Crying, Well-Dressed People Who Will Look You Up and Down by Joy Lanzendorfer.
I’m really feeling this poem today:
I’m nobody! Who are you?
Are you nobody, too?
Then there’s a pair of us — don’t tell!
They’d banish us, you know.
How dreary to be somebody!
How public, like a frog
To tell your name the livelong day
To an admiring bog!
–Emily Dickinson
Applies today more than ever, don’t you think?
Every so often I get it in my head that I want to do something and then drag my friends along to do it with me. For example, I will have a party surrounding the Kentucky Derby or decide that I really really need to shoot a gun. This time, I decided that I wanted to have girlie English tea in San Francisco. So last Saturday, Marcia, Krista, and I met up with Stephanie at the Secret Garden Tea House in San Francisco for just that.
I am not really a girlie-girl, but if you’re going to do it, do it. Therefore, I wore my pink dress and Krista did my make-up and I ordered vanilla tea. We ate tiny sandwiches and scones with Devon cream. I liked the curried egg sandwich the best.
Krista gazes at our bountiful tea tray
Apparently having tea can bring even reserved San Franciscans together, because all the other patrons of the the Secret Garden were friendly and cordial. We had a lot of fun watching two little girls play with the frou-frou hats and dance around and wave plastic wands at each other.
The mother holding one of the girls
All and all, it was a great experience. Afterwards, Marcia mentioned how pleasant San Francisco is when you have someone drop you off and pick you up like Kyle and Troy did for our tea outing. I concur. I might even live there if I had a driver to drop me off and deal with parking.
Hooray for occasional girlieness!
LtoR: Me, Marcia, Krista, and Stephanie
Did you hear that the FDA decided that cloned meat and milk are safe to eat? I looked into this issue for my newest article in the North Bay Bohemian.
Excerpt:
THE Food and Drug Administration may think cloned animals are ready to enter our food supply, but some local ranchers and dairy farmers do not. In fact, they are concerned that this new technology may put our food supply at risk. And once that happens, it’s hard to go back.
Opponents say that it’s just too soon for this new technology to enter our food supply. After researching and writing this article, I’ll say I tend to agree with them. Although I understand the FDA’s argument that cloned meat looks and acts like all other meat and it’s therefore logical to assume it’s safe, I found myself wondering what the rush is here. Allowing cloned meat and dairy isn’t even something the ranchers particularly want at this point–although those companies coming up with the cloning technology certainly do.
This article was also picked up in the Metro Silicon Valley.
One of the reasons I sometimes write about education is because I’m concerned about anti-intellectualism in America. I don’t think Americans are dumb, but I do think that as a culture we have embraced that which is shallow, trivial, and worthless and it’s leading to major problems. It’s not just that younger Americans have worse reasoning skills and shorter attention spans than past generations–which they do–but also that they don’t care as much about becoming educated. They equate getting an education with getting a job, not with becoming smarter and better people. (Worse, many Americans seem threatened by education, as if going to school will brainwash them, not give them the intellectual tools to think rationally and logically–and thereby avoid brainwashings and other scary-yet-unlikely threats.)
So naturally, I’m interested in Susan Jacoby’s book The Age of American Unreason, about American anti-intellectualism. Jacoby blames this phenomenon on the rise of video and the Internet. And while some of her points sound like an older person threatened by the changing media landscape, her column in the Washington Post makes some good points. In particular:
According to a 2006 survey by National Geographic-Roper, nearly half of Americans between ages 18 and 24 do not think it necessary to know the location of other countries in which important news is being made. More than a third consider it “not at all important” to know a foreign language, and only 14 percent consider it “very important.”
That leads us to the third and final factor behind the new American dumbness: not lack of knowledge per se but arrogance about that lack of knowledge. The problem is not just the things we do not know (consider the one in five American adults who, according to the National Science Foundation, thinks the sun revolves around the Earth); it’s the alarming number of Americans who have smugly concluded that they do not need to know such things in the first place. Call this anti-rationalism — a syndrome that is particularly dangerous to our public institutions and discourse. Not knowing a foreign language or the location of an important country is a manifestation of ignorance; denying that such knowledge matters is pure anti-rationalism. The toxic brew of anti-rationalism and ignorance hurts discussions of U.S. public policy on topics from health care to taxation.
Whenever I think about this, I get nervous about the future of our country.
Happy Valentine’s Day! Today I woke up to roses on the dining room table. Awesome!
This is Not About Love by Fiona Apple (featuring Zach Galifianakis).
UPDATE: video gone because Sony owns Fiona Apple’s soul.
I must be having the worst bad day in the history of bad days. All the bad things that can happen in a bad day? They happened to me today. Isn’t it weird how that seems to happen?
I like to think of myself as strong, but today reminds me that I am really a delicate porcelain cherry blossom that can be destroyed with one well-placed finger flick.
So let’s all look at the expression of joy that is this little dog:
Via Cute Overload
UPDATE: Thanks for all the kind e-mails and calls. I feel very loved. I am fine. I just had a bad day. Yesterday involved tricky conversations, accountants, and broken voice mails. Today involves laughter and really ripe grapefruit. Hooray!
Make lemon pancakes with homemade lemon curd.
This weekend I discovered that lemon curd goes really well on pancakes. It kicks syrup’s ass. It really does. Lemon curd is the new jam, yo.
Description of photo: Three pancakes, dab of lemon curd, pat of butter.
I have the cover story in the Pacific Sun this week. It’s an interview with David Roche, who has written a new book called the Church of 80% Sincerity. I really enjoyed the conversation I had with David. Here is an excerpt:
“I am facially disfigured,” writes David Roche. “Woven through the left side of my face, head and neck, extending into my soft palate and airway, is a benign congenital tumor consisting of my own engorged and tangled veins and capillaries. My left cheek is tuberous and misshapen. My dark bluish-purple tongue is twice the normal size.”
So begins David Roche’s book, The Church of 80% Sincerity, which is being released this month by Penguin Group. Roche, who lives in Mill Valley, now makes a living off of his face. He tours around the world giving motivational speeches about what it’s like to be facially disfigured.
Read more here.