Oh Mighty Fortune Cookie, Give Us Your Wisdom

I went with some co-workers to eat Chinese at lunch today and here was my fortune cookie message:

Do not give up; the beginning is always the hardest.

How's that for validation of my new "doing things" mantra?!

A happy and safe New Year celebration to everyone!

'Twas The Blog After Christmas

...with sincerest apologies to Clement Clark Moore

The Blog After Christmas
'Twas a few days after Christmas, and all through the blog,
Not a post to be had, not even 'bout the dog.

All the readers were totally bummed,
Wishing that I would write something that hummed;

Gifts given, received and family fed,
I struggle to come up with something to be read;
Now TLS in his work duds and I in my jeans,
Have just settled down to keep working for our means;
When out on the Internet there arose such a clamor,
I sprang to google at Google to see what was the matter.
Pakistan's burning, war in Iraq;
The news just makes my forehead call out for a smack.
Won't write about death or destruction or pain,
But does anyone want to read about our holiday menu again?
What I am wishing would come through the door?
Blog topics, clever words, and funny items galore.

Oh, blogging muse, come visit again;
Don't tell me I've started this dang-fool thing in vain.
What will I write about? What will I share?
Something will come to me; I mustn't despair.

Suddenly a vision: a blinding white light;
Telling old stories and anecdotes to delight
Will keep you all laughing far into '08,
And then my alter-ego I can further create.

So from me and TLS, this poem shines bright;
Happy New Year to all and to all a good night!

How Cleaning Out the Refrigerator Can Bring On a Long, Involved Personal Blog Entry

Disclosure made in the interest of honesty: I started this entry many, many days ago. It has taken me several sessions to write it and even during the process of composing it, I kept thinking that maybe I didn't want to post it, worrying that it would be embarrassing to me and TLS (because even though he has a pseudonym in these virtual pages, 99% of the people who read them know his name - sorry hon!). But I finally decided to just put it out there. 1) Because I have always been honest about these things because ultimately that's just how I am, and 2) because there have already been things that I would have said in earlier blog entries but didn't because they wouldn't have had any context. So, if you're reading this entry, it means that I did hold my breath and hit the Publish Post button.
_____________________________________________________

I was forced to do a major fridge clean out before Thanksgiving so I could fit the huge container with the brining turkey in there. In addition to tossing the hunks of moldy cheese, half-filled condiment containers and mystery science experiments, I finally threw away something that has been lurking in the crisper drawer for the last two years.

Here's where my blog entry comes to resemble how I tell stories in person, by stopping the narrative to tell another story to finish telling the one I just started. It's all very confusing, but bear with me. There is some deep background that you need to know and while many of you know the whole story (probably much more than you ever wanted to know), not everyone is on the same page. I promise that it will all come together in the end.

As previously mentioned in my inaugural post, TLS and I are generally not in a hurry to make any major life changes--even if they are positive. TLS likes to call us The Universal Constant and I think that is an extremely funny, clever and insightful way to say that we are change resistant and not a little reactionary. (I think I briefly considered blogging as Reactionary Girl, but decided that it made me sound like I should be wearing a beret and riding with Che. But anyhoo... ) So after waiting almost three years after we met to get married, you could probably guess that we wouldn't rush into the whole parenthood thing and you'd be absolutely right.

We waited a few (translation: about 5) years and then decided to take the plunge and start trying to have a baby. Well, maybe not trying to get pregnant but to just stop preventing getting pregnant. (There is a difference in those two states of being, even if it is subtle, and that difference allowed us to take the plunge.) So there we were throwing caution to the wind and....nothing. No double pink lines on those ridiculously expensive home pregnancy tests and not even a late period. "No worries," the books and doctors and other people told us, "it can take up to a year to get pregnant." "Relax." "Take a vacation." "Buy some new clothes." And really, it wasn't like we were TRYING, we just weren't preventing so that bought us a fresh round of hope. And if I may make an observation here, my friends, there is nothing like hope to reach out with a Bruce Lee karate move to kick you in the teeth every so often.

Somewhere around this time, I got serious about getting pregnant. In addition to many of my other good qualities, I am (um, how should I put this?) a little intense and organized about things. I also like to know everything about everything (hence the Masters in Library Science aspirations). I was like a fertility researcher. I had calendars and charts and was comparing information from multiple websites. I was ON A MISSION and on top of that I was hiding all this intensity from TLS so I didn't scare him off. 'Cause you know how desirable men find women who are baby crazy. (I can guarantee that he's reading this right now going...what?!) Let's just say that I was the fertility ninja on a mission. How's that for a mental image?

And still...nothing, nada, zilch. Bupkis as all the yiddishers like to say. I was starting to get alarmed because in addition to being intense and organized, I am also paranoid. (Boy, don't you wish you were TLS? Doesn't he sound like the luckiest sucker in the world?) Oh, and around that time TLS took a consulting job with a large computer company whose logo is blue and this caused him to be out of town four days a week. It seemed as if the whole world was conspiring against us but when I went to the doctor, he didn't seem too worried. "Your husband isn't in town full-time and at 32 you're still young" (Really, doc? Not feelin' it so much). He all but said the words, "Patience, young grasshopper." So, more karate-chopping hope being flung in our direction obscured my panic at least for a while.

Flash forward another year or so. TLS has gone from working for big blue, to being laid off, to taking a job in a neighboring state. We were planning to move as soon as our house sold, but luckily TLS's "Spidey Sense" about his new employer started to tingle within a few weeks of his start date. (And with good cause, as it turned out, since about six months later the company went belly-up and he was out of a job again.) We took the house off the market, hunkered down to maintain two households separated by several hundred miles, and he started coming home on weekends. Again, not the greatest gameplan for conception, so our continued failure still didn't seem too alarming.

TLS found another job in town and throughout our house, there was much rejoicing. Now I could guarantee that he would be home for those few fertile days each month and we'd finally be able to hit the jackpot, so to speak. And again, nothing. Month after month of nothing. Long, interminable stretches of nothing. Well, you get the picture.

My doctor finally agreed that maybe it was time to start giving us a little extra help with conception and we took our first dip of many in the Infertility Pool. After TLS's "men" were tested and judged to be suitable, and I had undergone several painful and invasive tests, we were given the greenlight to try insemination. The gateway fertility drug of choice is Clomid and I swear to you it is the marijuana of fertility drugs. Those five little white pills look so innocent and innocuous but often they are just the beginning of the slide to the hardcore--Lupron and Follistim and Repronex and the like. Those Clomid were only the cost of a co-pay and went down easy. Sure, they caused some hot flashes, but there were the resulting follicles up on the ultrasound machine's screen--shining down on us like hope writ in scratchy gray and white. On the appointed day, TLS would make a trip to Collection Room #1 and forty-five minutes later we would pick up our sample encased in a Styrofoam cup that always reminded me of the containers of nightcrawlers you find in the refrigerated sections of rural gas stations. We would carry the cup upstairs to the doctor's office, I would lie on the table with TLS's hand clasped in mine, and the doctor would complete the procedure. Off we would go to commence our lives and wait. And again, nothing. Four times worth of nothing. And because hope had been hurling a bare foot or open hand into our guts, each time the disappointment would be magnified, but the desire was still there.

I wish that I had been blogging back in those days. It would have provided endless fodder for posts and I would have been able to relate many of the events and emotions that are lost to me today in the mists of time and forgetfulness.

My doctor informed us after that fourth strike, that statistically, we should have already gotten pregnant if insemination was going to work for us and that it might be time to consider consulting a reproductive endocrinologist. I chose a doctor who had been successful with a friend of Youngest's and we met to discuss our options. These consisted of attempting more inseminations using injectable fertility drugs or doing in vitro fertilization. Either way, it seemed that we were going to have to become proficient in the art of shots--the giving in the case of TLS and the receiving for me. Mostly because insemination hadn't been getting the job done, we decided to step it up a notch and begin in vitro.

I hope to regale you in the future with some of the stories from those days, because really, we did manage to find humor in the most odd places. Not the least of which was that the nurse assigned to us for our time utilizing the Assisted Reproduction department was completely without humor. A nice enough and competent enough person, I'll grant you, but nary a laugh to be had from Caroline. And here she was matched with two people that have yet to find a subject for which we cannot find a joke. It was quite the mis-match.

Suffice it to say that after two rounds of in vitro (totaling hundreds of injections and five figures of payments), it all came to naught. We had invested time, money and emotions to be left without a positive outcome. And it was painful. Most painful of all was to sit across from my dear, wise doctor and have to hear that based on my body's response to the medications and the (lackluster) condition of the few embryos that we did create, his medical opinion was that for whatever reason, I was running out of eggs and the ones that I did have weren't good. Whew. That'll take the wind right out of your sails. We talked about how our options from here were to adopt, utilize egg donation, or be childless. And at that moment I realized that hope had brutalized me one too many times. I was through with experiencing the kind of disappointment over which I had some control. Ultimately, in this situation, inertia was the least painful option. And it has been the one that we have pursued, if pursued is the right word to use in this instance.

I tell you all of this not to make you feel sorry for me, because despite the infertility and the disappointment, I am a very lucky person. I have a wonderful and loving spouse who is possibly the best thing to ever happen to me. I have a happy marriage. I am gainfully employed and have a cozy house in which to live and a snazzy car in which to drive to and from it each day. I have money to buy the things I need and those I just want. I really can't complain too much about anything. I lead a full and happy life. But I will always have what amounts to an emotional scar. A psychic hole that has been filled with whatever happened to be at hand. Most of the time, it's virtually invisible, but every so often it will "itch" and make its presence known and then I have to deal with it. Mostly, this means I have to remind myself of all the things I've already listed in this paragraph, but I don't kid myself that it will ever totally go away.

So you're saying to yourself, this is all well and good but what does it have to do with your refrigerator? Well, after all that toil and disappointment, I had one vial of medication left after our second in vitro attempt. Those medications have to be kept cold, which means that they are kept in the fridge. I didn't move that box (little bigger than a deck of cards) at first because I couldn't bear to look at it and then because I thought that I might have a friend that could use it.
Every so often, when it seemed that hope wanted to give me yet another jab, I would take the box out and check the expiration date, but I could never bring myself to throw it away. But the Thanksgiving clean out frenzy caused me to do more than give it a glance and put it back in. I set it out on the counter and really pondered the reasons I was keeping it. And decided that it had come to represent the chance (however infintesimal) that I had to keep trying. And then I realized that I didn't need or want that anymore. I was ready to give up the illusion and send it away. Into the contractor grade Hefty bag it went and I have slept better since then.

Taking a deep breath and pushing the button...

To Add Insult To Injury

So what's the lead story in the news today? Sixteen year old Jamie Lynn Spears, sister of that bastion of morals Britney Spears, is pregnant. Heaven help us all. Of course, TLS had a witty quote in response to the news: "I guess those Spears girls are singlehandedly taking it upon themselves to guarantee the continuation of the species." Heh!

I'm Still Seething...

This article was the lead story on the news this morning in my area. Go out and read it; I'll wait. (Just to warn you, when you return, I'm going to climb up on my soapbox and start ranting. I totally understand if that's not your cup of tea, so I'm giving you permission to bow out gracefully.)

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

Where do I start on the things that angered me about this incident?
Let's see, could it be the 17 year old mother of a three year old and a 22-month old?
How about having those two children riding around in a vehicle after midnight instead of home asleep?
In a van driven by your drunken cousin?
NOT STRAPPED IN?!?!
A tragic accident? Yes, but totally avoidable.

Don't think me a hard-hearted b***h. I will channel some holiday forgiveness and goodwill toward the mother who just lost her oldest child, but not before I marinate a little longer in my righteous indignation.

Siblings, Welcome Back Kotter, and Feuds Averted

I was talking with TLS's youngest sister last weekend. She and I are good friends--although had things been a little different, our first meeting could have been the start of a feud. Let me 'splain.


TLS and Youngest were always thick as thieves during their formative years. They were the self-proclaimed Sweathogs (can you tell we all grew up during the 70's?!) and Middle was left to be, well, the Middle. Back when I met him as a college-aged adult, they had outgrown the Sweathogs club, but were still much closer to each other than to Middle. TLS and I met at a university on one side of Texas and Youngest was attending one on the other side. When TLS brought me home for the first time--for his birthday celebration--everyone converged. Youngest came home from East Texas, Middle and her fiance (who is now her husband) from the suburbs, and his grandparents who lived down the street joined his parents to pack around the table to witness the first girl that TLS had ever brought home from school. It was just a teeny bit nerve-wracking, but luckily, my in-laws are very welcoming and I survived intact.

As a side note, after we got back to school from the visit, TLS came over to my apartment to "study" and found me writing a note at the kitchen table. TLS: "Whatcha doin?" Me: "Writing your parents a thank you note for my visit." TLS: "Ooh...you are so in with my mom." And so it was, since I'm still around sixteen years later. Moral of that story is that thank you notes can often win you extra points.

Unbeknownst to me at the time, had I not been there, Youngest and TLS would have hung out together the entire weekend. My presence definitely put a damper on the sibling togetherness. At one point TLS asked me if I wanted to go out on the boat, I said yes, and off we went. I heard later that the scene back in the living room went something like this:
Youngest standing at the picture windows watching TLS and I zoom away from the shore in the boat: "I can't believe it."
Their Mom: "Believe what?"
Youngest: "He didn't even ask me if I wanted to go."
Their Mom: "I know, honey, but it looks like your brother has found someone he really likes and he just wants to impress her."
Youngest: Sigh.

So, in short, we had the makings of an all-out cat fight--a close relationship being changed by an interloping girlfriend. Luckily for everyone involved, Youngest and I are more alike than different and we genuinely liked being around each other so that we could share the super-fantastic TLS instead of fighting over him.

So, thanks Youngest, for not making me feel like I was stealing your brother (even if that's what you might have been feeling at one point) and for giving me the experience of having a sister!

If The Shoe Fits...

Received from one of my blog reading public...

Too true, Scott. Too true.

(This comic is from the strip, Pearls Before Swine, and it always makes me laugh.)

I'm In Triple Digits

Just checked the site meter and I've had over 100 site visits. Woo! Just a few million more to be an official internet sensation...

My Favorite Things

Oprah has a show every year where she reveals some of her favorite products and then gives them out to her studio audience. And while I'm not a billionaire TV talkshow host, and I won't be able to give out samples, I thought you might be interested in a few of Inertia Girl's favorite things. (In no particular order)

1. 5 Gum: Flare This is a new cinnamon gum made by Wrigley's and it lasts forever. I have yet to be able to outlast the flavor. If you've got to have your gum spicy, try this out. Plus, it has cool black packaging.
2. Neutrogena Norwegian Formula Hand Creme The. Best. Lotion. Evah. My hands used to get so dry in the winter that they would crack and bleed. Doesn't happen anymore with one application a day. I don't know what those Norwegians put in it, by jiminy, but it works!
3. Satsuma Mandarin Oranges It's true that I have never been a big fan of citrus, but one hit of this Vitamin C-filled edible crack made me a believer. These are easy to peel and so sweet! Unfortunately, they are only available mid-October through early December. It's going to be a long ten months until next year's crop. (Sigh.)
4. iPod and iTunes The first step is admitting that you have a problem. "I'm Inertia Girl and I am a music downloading addict."

Looking over my list, it's quite plain that I'm a cheap date. TLS must have known what he was doing when he married me!

You're A Mean One, Mr. Grinch

So here's the deal with me and Christmas. It's not that I don't enjoy the giving and receiving of gifts and I do love a good rendition of O Holy Night as much as the next person and I adore sending and receiving Christmas cards with letters and pictures, but I just don't get into the whole decoration aspect. It's completely lost on me. I have no desire to put up the tree (or trees!), climb on the roof to string the Christmas lights, or blanket the house with red and green decorations. To be truthful, it seems fairly pointless, but again--that's just me. I can appreciate the beauty of other people's Christmas style and I bow to their industriousness with all that the decoration process entails. It's just not going to happen at Chez Inertia. Does this make me a Scrooge or a Grinch? Possibly. But I bet when you open your world-famous Inertia Girl Christmas letter, you'll know that deep down, I really do have some Christmas in my heart.

It's The Little Things In Life...

Let me just go on record right now and say that I am very easily amused.

Background for my story:
Through work, I volunteer by reading to preschool kids once a month. It isn't always easy to keep the 3 -4 year olds entertained with Goodnight Moon or The Cat In The Hat (and let me tell you from experience that if you try to read a Curious George book to a preschooler whose primary language spoken at home is Spanish, then you're in for a very long, uncomfortable five to ten minutes), but they are such a ginormous bundle of cute that I can hardly stand it. Adorably cute to me, I'm sure, because I only have to be there for about 30 minutes. But when they all yell "Hello Miss!" when I come in and act genuinely happy to see me, well then, I just melt.

When I'm at work, I park in the garage that is attached to the Dallas Symphony Center.

On to the story...
I was leaving the garage the other day to go read to the kids. Unbeknownst to me, some of the area schools were having field trips to the symphony, so once I was on the ramp going out, I ran into a couple of cops directing buses around the entrance. Naturally, I had to stop and wait and this put my car right at the level of a walkway filled with kids about third grade age. Out of the corner of my eye, I can see them frantically waving at me, so I turn and give them my best pageant contestant wave. They start getting excited and I can see them saying, "She waved!" to each other. Pretty soon I can see one kid doing the international "honk your horn" gesture. (The one we used to give truckers on the highway when we were kids). I turn to them and shake my head with a big "NOOOOO" but now all the other kids have started to chant, "HONK YOUR HORN! HONK YOUR HORN!"

Normally, I don't have any problem playing along with these kinds of things, but I was directly in front of about four of Dallas' finest and I really didn't want a ticket. I started shaking my head, but the chanting just got louder. "HONK YOUR HORN! HONK YOUR HORN!" Well, what was I going to do about that? As the cop in front of me finally motioned me out into traffic, I gave the horn a couple of short beeps and the kids went bonkers. They started jumping up and down, high fiving each other and pumping their little fists in the air. It was fantastic. You'd have thought that I was Oprah giving away cars based on their excitement level.

I giggled all the way to the school and then when the kids all greeted me and started inching close to my chair while I was reading, I felt like the coolest person on the planet. (Or at least like Sally Field at the Oscars years ago. "You like me. You really like me.")

I grinned like an idiot the rest of the day. Nothing bad could touch me--not idiotic requests, not bad drivers, nothing. If we could all keep a real cheering section handy, I guarantee the world would be a much happier place.

Winter or Summer, Customer Service Run Around, and Other Random Thoughts

I don't know whether it is due to global warming or not, but to say the least it has been a mild autumn into winter here in North Texas. It was 81 degrees yesterday and is supposed to be in the 70's today. I could probably have gotten away with wearing a short-sleeved shirt today but figured I'd try to think my way to cooler weather by dressing the part by wearing a kicky red scoop-neck sweater with a plaid wool just-above-the-knee length skirt, tights and boots. A fetching ensemble, if I do say so myself.

It's a good thing that I had the feel-good vibes from my outfit, since I spent some time in customer service limbo this morning. TLS ordered me a shirt on November 15th. The company said it shipped on the 19th and gave a tracking number. All well and good, except that the tracking information has said that it entered the "sortation center" on the 19th and then...big fat nothing. I called FedEx this morning and was told that despite the online tracking, they never got the package from the company and to contact them. Greaaaaat. They don't have a phone number so I had to send an email and hope for the best. I predict that I will have to send at least one more email before I get any action. Arghhhhh.

Hoo's on First

An actual conversation from our house last night:

Me: I think there is an owl living in the neighborhood.

TLS: Hoo?

Me: An owl.

TLS: You didn't get it.

Long pause.

Me: Hahahahaha

That, my friends, was a time-release joke or in TLS's words, a way-homer. And, yes, we are certifiably insane.

Step Two, Three and Four of Four Hundred and Twenty Seven? Check!

Intertia Girl is on a roll today. In the getting things done file, here is what I have accomplished:

1. Applied online to the School of Graduate Studies
2. Mailed my transcripts and application fee to the graduate school
3. Sent the recommendation forms to my three references

Granted, these are steps two, three, and four out of the approximately four hundred and twenty-seven that it will take to receive an MLS, but I have taken them nonetheless. Yay me!

Now all I have left to complete is the School of Library Science application and to write my one-to-two page essay and then my portion will be done. After that, I'll just have to sit around and obsess over whether or not they are going to accept me. Someone asked me the other day about my Plan B. I barely have a Plan A so I better hope this all comes together.

Random Movie Musings

So I was talking to my BFF Pam (shout out!) yesterday about movies from the good ol' days. Those good ol' high school days when we would go to her parent's house, make some cookie dough to eat directly out of the bowl, and watch movies on that paragon of 1980's technology, the VHS. (Can't you just taste the nostalgia?)


Here are a few blasts from the past:

1. American Dreamer - JoBeth Williams, amnesia and Paris. 'Nuf said.
2. The Princess Bride - Swordfighting, revenge, giants, poison and true love ("wuv, twue wuv") Best. Wedding. Scene. Ever.
3. Pee Wee's Big Adventure - "Tell 'em Large Marge sent ya." An 80's classic, my friends.
4. The Chick-Flick Trifecta of Driving Miss Daisy, Fried Green Tomatoes, and Somewhere in Time - Better drive to Sam's and buy that case of Kleenex. You're gonna need every single tissue you can get your hands on.
5. Out of Africa - Hands-down, my all-time favorite movie. "I had a farm in Africa at the foot of the Ngong Hills." Those damn lions on the grave at the end get me every single time.

Am I missing any?

Good Googly-Moogly, I'm Glad That's Over!

Whew! Thanksgiving Day's come and gone and boy am I glad to have survived it without any major (or minor) cooking incidents.

My Thanksgiving Day

7:00 a.m. Alarm sounds. Internal voice says, "I really should get up", but that 1:30 a.m. coughing fit/rummaging for cough syrup run through the kitchen cabinets wasn't really condusive to quality sleep. I can snooze once. I think I have time for that in my schedule.

7:09 a.m. "Alarm? Huh? Wha? It's so warm here under the electric blanket. One more snooze won't kill me."

7:18 a.m. Pete (a.k.a Rocko, a.k.a. the black and white dog) is trying to will me out of bed using only the power of his walnut-sized brain. The dogs are all dying for their breakfast, which is not surprising since they only ate a mere 12 hours ago and have been getting their two squares a day for the last decade. Fine. Get up and feed the mongrels. Stumble to shower.

8:15 a.m. OMG! I really am cooking an entire meal. A turkey and five sides plus desert that all has to be done at approximately the same time. What if I just went back to bed and pretended that it was all a bad dream? Nope, you're committed. Haven't you just been whining on the internet for everyone to read that you want to start DOING things?! Get goin'.

9:00 a.m. Whipping mashed potatoes for the Gouda Mashed Potato Casserole. Remember (just a tad too late) that you are incapable of preparing mashed potatoes. I know it might sound crazy since I've just made a Carmel Pudding Tort with Almond Shortbread Crust completely from scratch, but it's true. I have never successfully made mashed potatoes without lumps. LUMPS!!!! TLS walks through the kitchen just in time to see me ripping the beaters out of the mixer and tossing them in the sink. "Problem?" "I CAN'T MAKE MASHED POTATOES!" Long pause. "Well, I guess this'll give you something to blog about." I definitely can't fault that logic. Well, it is part of a casserole, so maybe the lumps won't be as noticeable. Onward and upward. No time to waste on crying over spilled milk...or lumpy potatoes.

10:00 a.m. Turkey goes in the oven with the help of my brawny and ever helpful TLS.

10:30 a.m. The familial units arrive.

Cooking frenzy continues...chopping, mixing, pot and pan washing, sauteing, rising, baking...

1:15 p.m. Things are coming together. The turkey is about 5 degrees from its appointed internal temperature. Casseroles are warming. Rolls have baked and are cooling. Salad dressing is made. Crap. I haven't sliced the apples for the salad. Make mental note.

1:30 p.m. Making the whipped cream for the tart. Must remember to double the recipe, which means 1 cup whipping cream and, um, 1 cup powdered sugar. Ooh, I do love freshly made whipped cream, I need to taste test. What the? Oh doody. That should have been 1 tablespoon of powered sugar. I think I have enough whipping cream to make another batch.

1:45 p.m. Since it has reached an FDA safe 180 degrees Fahrenheit, the turkey is out of the oven. Here's the beauty! Well, okay, looking at it in a two inch square, it looks more than a little splotchy and frankly kinda weird. It was much prettier in person.

1:50 p.m. Making gravy from the pan drippings and heating the green beans. I still need he apples sliced to assemble the salad. "Honey, help!" TLS slices the apples in fine form.

2:00 p.m. Thanksgiving is served. Here are a couple of photos of the table. Note my cat, Newman, looks like he's ready to dine on some of the bounty.

3:00 p.m. Time for some tart. Yum!

6:00 p.m. The kitchen cleaned, leftovers stowed safely in the fridge, it's game on! Anyone who knows us knows that Mom and I are extremely competitive. Time to get out Yahtzee and commence the grudge match started last Christmas. Last year TLS was the Yahtzee king and must have thrown five of them. I've vowed to avenge my loss.

7:30 p.m. We played three games. I won the first one, TLS won the second and Mom won the third, but I had the best combined score so I'm the ultimate win-nah. Wooo! My score card:

Happy Thanksgiving Greetings

So here's what's on my agenda today:

Working from home, which I thought would mean a nice quiet day to leisurely get through the few things that people would need, but has turned into everyone freaking out because of the four day weekend.

Starting on the Thanksgiving cooking. I'm about to go start on my Carmel Pudding Tart with Almond Shortbread Crust. I love this dessert and it is quite a show-stopper, but I also like to call it my Two-Day Dessert. I need to make the crust today and freeze it overnight before baking it tomorrow morning (or maybe, now that I think about it, late tonight since the oven is going to be full of turkey come tomorrow morning).

This is about when all my entertaining anxiety starts to reach a fevered pitch. I need to start chanting to myself, "Everything will be fine. Everything will be fine."

A happy Thanksgiving to everyone! I hope you all eat to your heart's content and then watch the Cowboys beat the Jets tomorrow afternoon. (Hey, I can't help it. I'm a fan!)

Your Questions Answered

Someone commented on my story below and asked if any of it related to anything in my own life. I'm pleased to report that the answer is no. I am not (or have never been) in an unhappy relationship, never been unemployed for an extended period (frantically knocking on wood...), nor pondered suicide. This truly is a work of fiction.

One thing I know for sure is that writers love to talk about their stories and how they came up with them, but what I'm not so sure about is whether or not everyone else likes to hear these explanations. So, be forewarned that this may be exceedingly boring for any non-writers among you.

The idea for this story came from a newspaper article I read about a bridge in China that was a magnet for people committing suicide and how the government (mostly didn't) handle the situation. There was also another part to the article, but in the interest of not spoiling my ending, I won't reveal that here. I thought it was truly touching and haunting and it stuck in my brain until one day the first line just came to me. The words were in second person (from Wikipedia: Second-person narration is a narrative technique in which the protagonist or another main character is referred to by employment of second-person personal pronouns and other kinds of addressing forms, for example the English second-person pronoun "you".). Since I was using the second person to help convey the idea that the narrator could be any of us, I decided to not use any pronouns to indicate the gender of the protagonist or his/her significant other. While this convention made some sentences a little "bulky" I think that it works nicely (or is really annoying). I used the suspension bridge in Waco as the setting for "THE BRIDGE" since I went to school there (Go Bears!) and I totally stole the bridge named Bob from the town of Avon, Colorado. I also have to give props to my friend Steven (shout out!) for the "prostitution in a suit comment"--pure genius!

See. I told you. Boring.

I did have plans to work on the story this last weekend, but came down with a hideous head cold on Sunday morning and spent the whole day on the couch surrounded by Kleenex. Ugh.

Thanksgiving As Brought To You By An Insane Person

I just got back from the grocery store where I finished the majority of my shopping for Thanksgiving dinner. My mom and brother are joining us at our house for my first ever turkey. Yikes! Here's the thing. I really do like to cook and have people over, but I have become a real cooking purist. Not sure how it happened but there you have it. When entertaining, I make my own salsa, salad dressing, bake my bread from scratch and generally make things as difficult as possible for myself. It's a pain in the patootie, but somehow it seems like cheating to do it any other way. (I by no means want to imply that I hold anyone else to this standard--hell, I'm always thrilled if anyone else cooks for me. Whatever it is. Really.)

I think this comes from being a perfectionist. (Being a perfectionist and motivationally challenged is not a good combination. Trust me on this one.) It's as if I'm competing against myself to create the most lavish, delicious, spectacular feast of all time. As one of our friends said to me during a dinner at his home where I brought a salad (complete with homemade vinaigrette and almonds I toasted) and 7-grain bread baked fresh that afternoon, "Take a pill, Over-achiever!" Sigh.

The Thanksgiving Menu at Chez Inertia
Honey-brined Turkey with gravy
Green Beans with Caramelized Shallots
Green Salad with Cranberry Vinaigrette
Gouda Mashed Potato Casserole
Sweet Potatoes with Prailine Topping
Parkerhouse Rolls
Caramel Pudding Tart with Almond Shortbread Crust

It also isn't me entertaining unless there is some inkling of an impending preparation melt-down. So many questions flying through my brain for hours on end. Is it all going to come together? Will everything taste okay? Did I neglect to buy some vitally important ingredient that is now unavailable because it is Thanksgiving Day? Generally, though, everything always works out--except for The Pork Loin Incident, which I still maintain had to do with our oven starting its inevitable decline into decrepitude and not my cooking skills.

I'm also hoping to avoid The Sweet Potato Casserole Debacle from several years ago. Picture Thanksgiving Dinner at my mom's house. Everything is done and we're getting the last of the sides out of the oven and are getting ready to dish out the food and sit down to eat. I'm pulling the sweet potato casserole out of the oven. I only have to take the Pyrex casserole dish out of the oven, pivot and put it on the kitchen island directly behind me. I didn't even have to take a step. With my trusty oven mitts on, I pick up the dish and turn. It slips out of my hands, hits the floor and shatters, flinging molten sweet potatoes all over the kitchen and my shoes. Thank goodness I wasn't barefoot. Needless to say, those yams weren't on the table after we finished wiping up vegetable puree and sweeping up slivers of glass. Ah, there's nothing like the holidays!

I'll try and post pictures of the food next Friday.

The Post Where I Use Shame To My Advantage

So in the (extensive) list of things that I've started and not finished, creative writing sits plunk in the top five. I did take a writing class several years ago, which forced me to write a short story a week. (Not an easy proposition, take my word for it.) I continued to write for a while after the class ended, but then I just let it go. This, I know, is just shocking behavior for such a self-confessed slug, but it also meant that I have a couple of unfinished stories lying around. One in particular has been taunting me from the depths of my 1 Gig Lexar Jump Drive. "Finish me," it whispers. "I'm a reeealy good story. People want to read me." I take it out every so often and add a paragraph or two--after which the story gets even more grumpy about being unfinished--but haven't been able to finish the dang thing. So here's the deal. I can't trust the quiet come-ons of my short story about its desireability. ** I need some outside guidance and I also need the possibility of public shame for not finishing it. This is where you, my blog reading public come in. Help me help myself!

** I know that stories don't talk. I may be slightly (or more than slightly) off-kilter, but I'm not--at least that I know of now--crazy. Just pretty much a smart-ass who thinks she's amusing.

Without further ado, here is my partial story titled "THE BRIDGE"

Some days you wake up and wonder whose life you're living. When this happens, you roll around in the crumpled sheets and fret about your lack of job, your perceived ill health, The Significant Other threatening (again) to throw you out of the house. This life couldn't possibly be yours. There must be some mistake, some cosmic mix-up that will soon be corrected and then the six-figure salaried job, gorgeous lover and daily routine without acid reflux or migraine headaches will begin. The thought of someone rectifying this obvious injustice conjures the sound of angels singing a joyful chorus. Then The Significant Other throws an elbow in your general direction and barks out an order to quit your flailing and moaning. No doubt about it, this is definitely your life.

It's any given morning and you and The Significant Other go about your morning dressing and bathroom routine, which is as intricately choreographed as a fourth and long Hail Mary play. As the two of you wordlessly trade positions at the sink or wipe down the condensation from the mirror while the other is in the shower, you notice that you’ve become a little bit like the plastic players on a foosball table--unable to advance, only able to go back and forth and spin.

As the climax of the morning’s event, you both end up at the kitchen counter. You fixing some heavily blackened toast and The Significant Other slurping up Captain Crunch directly from the bowl. The Significant Other usually takes this opportunity to point out, for at least the hundredth time, that you don't have a job and that you'd better get your lazy ass out to make the rounds, network, glad hand and generally debase yourself to whatever hiring director has a few crumbs to dispense today. This reminds you of something one of your college friends once said about job hunting really just being prostitution in a suit. And while the process does make you feel tawdry and sordid, mostly it's taught you that you're a shitty salesperson. You couldn't sell a life preserver to a drowning man. Somehow, this thought makes you feel worse.

You are most likely wearing your best navy blue interview suit--the one with the subtle pinstripes. The Significant Other is surreptitiously making sure the suit is cleaned and pressed, as if you were incapable of being anything other than a cave dwelling Neanderthal. You wonder if just as a joke, some morning you should emerge from the closet dragging a large wooden club and grunting unintelligibly. You decide that The Significant Other would neither get the joke nor see the humor in it. The Significant Other is a proponent of the pinstripe (who says that it conveys a subliminal feeling of power and competence) but not a big fan of comedy.

You assure and reassure The Significant Other that you have places to go, appointments to make and a full day's agenda to keep you busy. Inside, you're cataloging the places that are open at 7:30 in the morning and don't cost anything. It's a very short list.

The final step to the ritual is the kiss; the kiss that is devoid of any warmth or meaning, but the absence of which would mean that this dying relationship is truly deceased and not just limping along. You both are so conflict averse that it will take one of you finding someone else to finally break it off. At this point, you're fairly certain that The Significant Other can't be too far away from this possibility. Who are you kidding? The only qualification to be considered better than you is having a job.

You do have a routine of sorts for leaving the house. You’ve made sure the night before that the trunk of your car is packed with a change of clothes and some snacks for the afternoon. You make quite a show of confirming that the Italian leather briefcase that The Significant Other gave you last Christmas is brimming full of resumes and lists of your current references. While The Significant Other is ostensibly finishing up the last of the morning chores, you back out of the driveway (waving frantically like a pageant contestant) and point the car toward the city’s center. Once you’ve driven to the end of the street, the day’s first decision presents itself. Should you go right, toward the river and the city parks, or should you go left, toward the business district?

Some days you do make a token effort in the job search. You’ve long ago used up any goodwill that you had with your employed friends, so networking is no longer an option. But there are times when you’ve carefully circled ads in the help wanted section, so you dutifully make the rounds of the sleek, glass-sided skyscrapers with resume in hand. You feel like a sort of modern day tinker—pushing your wares around in a decrepit wagon and begging for someone, anyone, to sample something.

This particular day, though, you’ve not given a real thought to landing another job. Waking up with nagging doubts about your life seems to sap all the confidence out of your body even before your feet hit the floor for the first time that day.

You turn the wheel of the car to the right and press the accelerator with particular gusto and decide that you'll stop by your favorite greasy spoon to get a Styrofoam cup full of coffee nearly as thick as mud. You'll banter with the owner, a beefy linebacker type, and ask him for the thousandth time if you can have a job slinging hash. He'll tell you that you're completely overqualified and that he knows you'd bolt the first chance you got. He has no idea that slinging hash just might be your dream job, but you also know that The Significant Other, your parents and the rest of society as a whole would consider it demeaning. For some reason their opinions mean something to you.

You make the rounds at the greasy spoon and it all happens exactly the way you pictured it earlier this morning. The owner slides the morning's paper across the counter to you along with your cup of joe. He always insists that you take it. On the house, he says. He knows how long you've been out of work and that you spend most of your days hiding out. You can't decide if you want to bring The Significant Other here to meet him. It might be just like the Irresistible Force meeting the Immovable Object. Or, then again, you might just want to keep your two worlds separate.

You take the paper and your coffee and have a seat in one of the booths to follow your ritual for reading the morning's paper. This means skipping the front page and immediately pulling out the Metro section. What's happening in the sleepy little town where you live is more important to you than reports of disasters from some far-away land. This is one of the guiding principals of your life—worry about your immediate surroundings first.

The Significant Other doesn’t subscribe to this theory and will spend hours collecting signatures for a petition to ban land mines in Afghanistan, but won’t help the elderly lady next door unload the groceries from her car. You can’t really blame The Significant Other. Someone has to worry about the big, global issues. But no one should misunderstand, you do worry about the decimated rainforests and global warming and endangered spotted owls, it’s just that those things are so much less tangible than what tax measure the city council is going to pass next week.

It’s hit or miss with Metro. Today, the front of the section is completely covered with an article about “THE BRIDGE.” Well, you might be a little guilty of exaggeration. It’s never printed all in caps surrounded by quotation marks, but that’s the way everyone says the words. “THE BRIDGE” is your town’s only claim to fame and it’s been a source of pride for over a century. It was the first suspension bridge built in the United States and has been in continuous use since 1870. As a child, you were a little hazy on the whole concept of what a suspension bridge really was. It was the biggest disappointment of your second grade year when the view from the window of the yellow school bus was of an ordinary bridge, made of metal and brick and very much connected to the two banks of the muddy river below. All the way from school you had been almost delirious thinking that you were going to see a levitating bridge and wondered how people and cars went across if it wasn’t attached to anything.

You’ve come a long way since then and have made yourself something of an expert on “THE BRIDGE.” You might just be the only one who knows the full name of the engineer who designed and built it and who also knows the story of how it was named. A man pulled an entire family from a burning building and then went back in to save the family pet. It was the rescue of the dog that finally did him in. He survived the incident, but died several days later of burns he sustained while pulling the frightened dog out from under the kitchen table. The town was so taken by his heroics that they put his name on the largest and as of yet unfinished structure. His name was Robert Jebadiah Constantino, but who really wants to say, Let’s go down to the Robert Jebadiah Constantino Memorial Bridge? About twenty years ago, the idea surfaced as if from nowhere, to simply call it Bob.

You’re sitting in the booth at the greasy spoon and begin to think about naming a bridge Bob. The irreverent idea to give a landmark a three letter, one syllable name did give you a thrill when you were a teenager, but you have to admit that the nickname doesn’t do much for you now. It seems a shame to reduce the sacrifice of one heroic man to little more than a joke. But 1869 was a very long time ago and you suspect that people forget what the word memorial in a name really means.

Why, you think, are the journalistic geniuses at the local gazette running an article about “THE BRIDGE” today of all days? More than anyone except the sweet, arthritic old ladies at the local historical society, you know that it isn’t the anniversary of anything connected with the structure. You begin to read and note that the article is both exhilarating and horrifying. It does a fabulous job of laying out the history of the bridge and brings to life poor, doomed Mr. Constantino’s actions, but a quarter-page into the story, you realize that only a fresh tragedy or tragedies could be the reason for such in-depth coverage.

The next paragraph hits you like a slap in the face. Two people in the last week have used “THE BRIDGE” as a springboard to the ultimate solution to all their problems. The reporter has a particularly poetic way of assembling a sentence and in your mind’s eye you are standing with the first man, alone, on the railing of “THE BRIDGE” looking at the water below—how it seems like a flowing green carpet, wondering how something that benign looking could actually kill someone. You can feel the gritty bricks underneath your hand but the sensation seems more like a dream than reality and what seems most real to you at this moment is your despair. The misery feels like a living scarf, wrapping itself around and around your neck until you know that falling free into the slow-moving green water would be a relief from its choking pain.

You willfully pull yourself out of your inner view. It has been a long while since you’ve let your fertile imagination run away from you like that. But then again, you’ve always been sensitive, even as a child. The family cat once captured a mouse and you caught him in the act of pinning the poor little rodent to the ground. You could see its tiny heart pounding at the base of its little throat and you started forward to keep the cat from killing it, but your father stopped you with a simple explanation. There are predators and there is prey and nothing you can do will ever change that, he calmly explained. Saving one mouse isn’t going to change the cat.

You’ve spent the last twenty years trying to reconcile how you feel about that one statement with what you know about the ways of the world.

Your mother always described you as a dreamy child and the other mothers would nod along, as if this description was tattooed across your forehead. This one will probably think up the cure for cancer someday, she’d say with pride. If your father was present during these discussions, he’d shake his head with resignation and say that the only thing you might think up was a way to pull your head out of your own ass.

There are days when you believe your mother is the only one who really understands you, but while her belief in your greatness keeps you in the game, it is also your Achilles heel. Your father’s disenchantment with you dimmed long ago. He barely bats an eyelash when you come around for the zillionth time asking for money. This is the behavior he expects, but your mother is another story all together. Each time you talk with her on the phone and you have to admit (again) that you haven’t found a job, you can hear her almost imperceptible sigh as if it were a gunshot—the bullet speeding straight toward your heart.

The next section of the newspaper article is even worse than you could have imagined. The second person to commit suicide was a woman and the writer coolly reports that at least fifteen people watched her plunge to her death. There is a quote from a young man who was playing Frisbee. I saw her climb onto the railing, he said, but me and my friends thought that maybe she was just part of a photo shoot. You get the feeling that what he witnessed was not so much horrifying to him as it was voyeuristic.

You imagine that the girl climbed onto that railing on a cool but sunny early spring day as a sort of an experiment, a test to see how many of the happy automatons cavorting around the park would notice her. Was she the mostly invisible girl she believed herself to be or was she really gloriously conspicuous? Only one way to find out. She hoisted one leg onto the railing and pulled herself onto the flat concrete surface. She rested there for a moment to collect her thoughts and steel her nerves and then in one swift motion stood, balanced as a gymnast. It wasn’t the girl or her position on the edge that caught the attention of the people that saw her before she jumped. It was the crimson coat she was wearing, the bottom billowing and undulating in the wind like a superhero’s cape. You stop to look at the accompanying picture of the victim, stare at her eyes mostly obscured by lank brown hair and know before you read the next sentence that there was no way that coat belonged to her. And sure enough, you’re right. Her mother couldn’t understand why her daughter had taken her best coat—the one she wore only on special occasions and spent most of its days under plastic in the hall closet. She knew that coat was my pride and joy, the dry-eyed mother told the reporter. Why couldn’t she have taken her own ratty old leather bomber?

You finish the piece, the rest a recitation of a few dry statistics and a listing for the local suicide hotline. You’re sick at heart and your stomach seems to be rejecting the coffee you’ve drunk by making it burble uncomfortably in your belly. The thing you didn’t see in the appalling article was an idea of how to keep anyone else from using “THE BRIDGE” to do the same thing. Isn’t this what happens? Someone has enough gumption to actually kill themselves and this success causes others to contemplate taking their own lives. In your experience, it takes a leader to make most people follow.

So what’s your next step? You’ve got that antsy feeling you used to get when you were in college. It always hit when you knew you had finals and term papers and a million things you really needed to be doing, but your roommate or some friend would call needing a battery jumped, a tire changed or their lost dog found. The Significant Other wouldn’t hesitate to tell you that right now the proper thing to do would be to get yourself out of the vinyl covered booth and over to the nearest high rise building to beg someone for a job.

The owner looks at you with a concerned expression as you exit the diner. You normally spend the majority of the morning pouring over the morning paper and bantering with the waitresses. You give a distracted wave and head to the car and then, almost magically, you find yourself at the sitting in the parking lot of the park that includes “THE BRIDGE” and realize that you must have driven here in a daze, as if your car was the equivalent of the hero’s horse in the old westerns. The weathered Mazda just knows the place you most need to go and delivers you with no conscious input on your part.

You step out of the car and wander to the edge of the manicured lawn that is still covered in early morning dew. The Significant Other’s voice comes to you unbidden while you hesitate with one foot still on the concrete and the other poised above the sodden meadow. Do you know how much money those shoes cost? You’ll ruin them for sure and don’t come crying to me for money to replace them. Normally, a thought like this would pull you back in line, but it’s as if The Significant Other’s harangue is nothing more than the buzzing of a fly. A nuisance. Irrelevant. You can almost hear the crescendo of orchestral instruments as the sole of your shoe makes contact with the grass.


Does this story deserve to be finished? trashed?

What I'm Reading - November 15th Edition

In case anyone cares, here is what I'm currently reading.

Animals in Translation
Temple Grandin

Written by an autistic woman with a Ph.D. in animal behavior, this book chronicles her theory that the perceptions and thinking of autistic people has more in common with how animals perceive and think than with the way "normal" people do. While it can be a little pedantic at times, it has been a fascinating read. Of course, I am a complete science geek, so I don't know if I'm the best person to judge for a general audience. (I've read everything except the supplemental dog-training section in the back.)

The Inheritance of Loss
Kiran Desai

This is a story set in India (near the border of Tibet and Nepal) and New York City, involving a retired judge, his granddaughter, the granddaughter's tutor, the cook and the cook's son. I'm only about 75 pages in and I have to say so far this hasn't really caught my attention. While I can appreciate the beauty of the language, the story just hasn't grabbed me. If I start another book while reading one, that's when I know the current one just isn't cutting it. Which brings me to the next book I'm reading and loving...

The True Meaning of Smekday
Adam Rex

Guilty admission: This book is written for children ages 9-12. I have to say, however, that it is one of the better stories I've read this year. The year is 2013 and it has been two years since an alien race, the Boov, invaded earth and one year since they left. The protaganist, Gratuity (aka Tip), is writing an essay entitled The True Meaning of Smekday for a contest. You'll come to learn how a mole on the back of her mother's neck, a cat named Pig, a Boov named J. Lo and an obvious allusion to Disney World all relate to one another. The descriptions are spot-on and had me laughing out loud more than once. I'm about half-way done with this one and I don't want it to end.

The Post Where I Promise To Try Harder

I suppose that some of the reason I've started this blog is to try and overcome my tendencies to procrastinate and be resistant to change. So, in that spirit, I've decided to share the ways, big and small (mostly small, I'm sure) that I'm making an effort.

A couple of weeks ago, I took the Graduate Record Exam (GRE) in preparation for application to library school at the University of North Texas. You might be thinking, "Oh Inertia Girl, it sounds as if you haven't procrastinated at all," but you'd be WRONG, WRONG, WRONG. I've only been considering going back to school for this degree for .... oh ... about ten years now.

Now, while that is a great first step, I only have to complete about seven more of them to complete my application. I've at least located the three people that I'd like to write my recommendations and they've given the okay, but now I have to fill out two, yes count them two, applications: one for the graduate school as a whole and one for the school of library science and then write a one to two page essay about why I need to be doing this. Do they have any idea how the thought of writing this essay makes my head spin and my stomach clench? (Would it be wrong to have someone ghost write it? Really? Dang!)

Well, enough of the self-congratulatory yada yada.

The Post Where Inertia Girl Reveals Herself to the World

I am the object at rest who wants to remain at rest. Really. Case in point: My husband (hereafter to be refered to as The Living Saint or TLS) and I dated for three years (and lived together for almost two of those three) before we got married. Not because we didn't want to get married but mostly because it would have meant actually getting up off our duffs and doing something--planning a wedding, buying a ring, etc. You get the idea. (We've been married almost fourteen years now, so there must be something besides inertia at work in our relationship, but it does help in the longevity department.)

I like to think about things, at length, before any course of action. I also constantly think about random things. Example: TLS and I were sitting at the International House of Pancakes several years ago enjoying our Rootie Tootie Fresh and Fruity Breakfasts. We'd just been discussing how hot our Texas summer would be that year (hot as Hades, as usual). Things had been silent for several minutes while we ate our fruit pancakes. I turned to TLS and asked the burning question, "Do you ever wonder why we don't just have two gigantic teeth? One all the way across the top and one all the way across the bottom?" As you might imagine, there was a moment or two of stunned silence before TLS (Is there any question in your mind now why I call him The Living Saint?) managed to say, "No" while trying not to choke on his scrambled eggs. I had just been thinking that the cause of some cavities is the food that gets stuck between your teeth and if you didn't have any space between your teeth, voila, no cavities! TLS pointed out to me that not only would those gigantic teeth be an absolute b***h when they came out of your gums but that once you lost one you'd be completely screwed in the chewing department. I love that man. He keeps me grounded in reality. (And he makes me laugh. Alot.)

Well, that's all for now. I've probably revealed enough of my insanity for today.

Hugs and Kisses,
Inertia Girl