Grandma Alaska

One of my favorite books is called The Big Love by Sarah Dunn. The December I spent in Utah trying to muster enough strength to begin to make a decision about what would be good for me, rather than what would be good for Yuval, Abbie and I went down to Southern Utah. She had just finished reading this book and handed it off to me as a light, chick-lit read. I ended up laughing out loud, and Abbie would ask, "Oh, which part are you reading?" and I'd read her the page or the paragraph. After a dozen times of this happening, I just ended up reading the entire book out loud to her.

The protagonist is a formerly-religious young woman discovering dating and love as a newly non-religious, completely neurotic adult. What I loved about this protagonist is that she was so similar to me and what I loved about the book is that it read like sitting down and having a series of long talks with a close friend, or soon to be close friend.

One of the elements of the book that I related to entirely and had never heard expressed in writing was the Grandma Alaska dilemma. In the book, the protagonist finally sleeps with the man of her fantasies, but instead of actually describing the scene, she steps away from the action and apologizes. She explains that Grandma Alaska is her religious grandma, whose name, by the way, is not actually Alaska, and that Grandma Alaska will read this book and be so proud of her granddaughter for having written it. She knows that if she wrote a sex scene into the book, Grandma Alaska would clearly read it and she can't write about having sex knowing that Grandma Alaska will read it, and so, as long as Grandma Alaska is alive, there will be no sex scenes to speak of and the reader is just going to have to imagine one for herself.

My response to this is two-fold. First, I think, you have got to be kidding me! You are an adult and a writer and you need to get over Grandma Alaska and actually write. How can an artist limit themselves and their work like that? That seems weak and rather shameful. The other part of me wants to slap the author on the back and say, "You too? Man, I dream about writing a book, but the only way I can imagine doing that is as a "novel" with a pen name. I mean, what would my aunt Jaydene who spends all her time doing genealogy for the Mormon church and researching religious composers say if I wrote how I really talk, let alone how I really think? She's so sweet, she'd buy a copy of my book to support me and then have to remove it from her house as inappropriate reading material. I mean, I don't think she's seen a Rated-R movie in her life."

I don't know how to handle my own Grandma Alaska dilemma. I do dream of writing a novel, but it does seem so frightening to put my wholly improper self down in words. I don't know if I could stop worrying about Grandma Alaska.

Where does the time go?

I walk around baffled these days. I am busy all of the time and yet, am accomplishing what feels like absolutely nothing. It's the banal trap of modern existence; I seem to be spending so much time not letting life pass me by, that it appears life is passing me by.

I found myself eating "dinner" (baby carrots and hummus) at 9:00 tonight in the Target parking lot and breathing deep. I'd been to The Home Depot about an hour before to buy Round II of mouse traps. Apparently, the mice in my house (newly discovered as of yesterday) laugh in the face of the Tomcat brand mousetraps carried at Target and all my neighborhood grocery stores. They licked every little bit of peanut butter off the traps and then scampered away carefree. They've set up camp around the trashcan under my kitchen sink. I am utterly horrified that I have to decide to either kill them or live with their tiny little poop and it turns out, murder is easier to bear than poop. So I stocked up on two new types of mousetraps, ran to the liquor store for tequila (it's Cinco de Mayo tomorrow), and then Target for Margarita mix, and before I knew it, it was 9:00 and I was eating dinner in my car.

I rushed home to make brownies for a co-worker's birthday and while those were in the oven, I mixed up another batch for book club, did a batch of laundry, attempted to clean my room, set up a plethora of mouse traps, took out one batch of brownies, drizzled it with an attractive topping, and put in the second batch. I tried to cut the first batch of brownies and found that they weren't really brownies, so much as they were warmed brownie dough that had already cooled and then been decorated. I couldn't even get a knife through them. It just sort of balled up the dough like freshly turned mud after a hard rain. I started playing with the dough, since there was no sense preserving these non-brownie brownies. I absolutely love to bake and a brownie mix is something I use only in extreme cases, like today, so I find it particularly entertaining that I managed to screw it up. But what really kills me, is how happy I just made a little family of mice who have probably already discovered a warm mess of brownie dough in my kitchen trash can that came down like chocolate manna from heaven.

The moral of this story (besides that perhaps I shouldn't feel bad for giving my mice a last meal (I hope it's their last meal)) is that I need to quit something. Why must I celebrate every random holiday, agree to host book club, be the person to make something for my co-worker's birthday, and still work out 5-6 days a week? That's right, there is absolutely NO reason. If all it takes me to see this is a $3.00 box of ruined brownies, I'll consider this a cheap lesson indeed. We'll see.

Hunting for my dream job

I've been out of town three of the last four weekends this month. Two of these weekends were purely recreational, but one left me feeling more stressed rather than less. The other weekend was a weekend cat sitting for a friend of mine who had major surgery last week. She has two spoiled cats with a plastic fetish. A truely insane and frightening disorder, which causes them to hunt out and actually consume plastic in any form, but particularly plastic bags. I watched them with an eagle eye and safely kept them away from my grocery sacks and garbage bags. Little did I realize that my sexiest pair of three-inch silk heels was lined with plastic kitty-crack, until I glanced down at my shoes at work the next day and found the sole of my shoe, right around the peek-a-boo toe, missing. For those of you not into shoes, this means the one spot that is meant to draw your attention has been gnawed. I wore them into the office today anyway and found myself absent-mindedly tracing little kitty teeth marks around the edge of the plastic lining all around the silk. Somehow, in spite of the stress of guarding living animals from something that their instincts should clearly have prepared them to avoid, I found myself refreshed from the weekend.

I think in part it had to do with spending time at the hospital with my friend. She was in a morphine haze and remembers that I visited her only because of the sound of my chewed up heels clicking on the hallway as I escorted her to a follow-up x-ray. But I remember helping her sit up and transfer to her wheelchair, giving her a foot rub so some part of her body would experience something besides pain, listening to her ramble, reading her get-well cards to her because her eyes couldn't focus, and doing anything else I could to make her feel comfortable. I left the hospital incredibly light-hearted, realizing once again that I am the happiest when I am taking care of other people. Which was a lovely realization, particularly now, as I am trying to spend some time focused on identifying what I want to be when I grow up.

In the past, I never had to waste too much time pondering. It seemed like opportunities were constantly falling in my lap in the past. For example, I'd think, "I'd like to live in Israel" and life would answer, "How about an all expenses paid internship that you don't even have to apply for because no one else is on campus and we'll send anyone, just so we can have a program up and running?" Or I'd think, "I'd like to go back to grad school," and life would answer, "Why not in public health- we'll pay for it?" And I said, "Sure! What's public health?" Or how about a job in Israel, or a job in Salt Lake? I took both with less than a week or two off from the previous job. I needed a switch and there was the opportunity.

So, now, I need another switch and life has yet to hand me a game-show style life-changing gift. It turns out I may be at that point in my life where I need to go out and look for it. I'll be honest, I've been spoiled and at first I think I was a little put out, but now, I am looking around and thinking, "What is it I actually want out of life?" and "What will it take me to get there?" Surprisingly (to me anyway), thirty years on the planet hasn't done much to help me answer those questions. And so, leaving the hospital with my heart light it was enlightening to remember that taking care of people is something I really love. So, then, how do I apply this knowledge? Along with the knowledge that I love to write, I love to collaborate with people, oh, and I love to eat, but I am not really sure I should have a dream job that would involve eating. I might love that a little too much.

Linsey thinks Facebook has ruined her ability to blog

Linsey misses thinking in entire stories, with small plots. (Posted at 6:21 pm)
Linsey now thinks in sentences that will fit in her status bar on Facebook (posted at 6:20 pm)
Linsey thinks facebook has ruined her ability to blog. (Posted at 6:19 pm)