You’ve all seen this one on Facebook by now:

GAME RULES: if you choose to play, grab the book closest to you right now. Open to page 56 and choose the 5th sentence. Publish it as your status and write these rules as a comment. Don’t choose the book you think is the coolest; use the closest one to you.

And my answer is . . .

A Collect for Saturdays

Almighty God, who after the creation of the world didst rest
from all thy works and sanctify a day of rest for all thy
creatures: Grant that we, putting away all earthly anxieties,
may be duly prepared for the service of thy sanctuary, and
that our rest here upon earth may be a preparation for the
eternal rest promised to thy people in heaven; through Jesus
Christ our Lord.     Amen.

— Book of Common Prayer

(Note that this, as are the majority of collects, is one sentence long. There are only three collects on the page, so you have to count the “Amen”s as sentences too. Note also that it’s pronounced KAH-lekt, etymology available upon request.)

OK. Fair enough. But . . . every single time this little game has come around for me, it’s the same damn thing.

I’m not what you’d call devout, really. In fact, for the past few years, the most God-friendly description of my attitude has been, “pretty agnostic at best.” (God and I have Issues.) Yet at every fairly widely separated time, the BCP has been the closest book, and I’ve had it out for random reasons sort of research related: A saint’s day; some overly irate response to some troll. Yesterday morning for some reason or another “O Holy Night” was stuck in my head, and as usual, that second “divine” came out like a rusty chicken. It’s a note well within my range, and I was fishing to see what the interval was. (My BCP has the hymnal in back.)

Anyway, it turns out that a) that’s not in our hymnal, b) it’s a major third, and c) beats the sheep out of me why I can’t do it.  And clearly, d) I’m bad at putting Mr. Book back on Mr. Shelf–or on top of the box under the stereo holding my daughter’s dried corsage from high school graduation and the occasional castrated mouse ball, as the case may be.

I thought it was weird that the BCP was always the winner, and for a while was wondering why, in a world of feast, famine, woe, and maniacal Republicans, the putative Almighty was all about me praying for Saturday. Then I realized that the answer was perhaps a little more disturbing–at least to me:

I really don’t read anymore. At least, not books.

Back when I started grad school (in English), I finally realized that most of what I read was inept crap; i.e., badly written (but published!) science fiction and fantasy.  Wooden characters exchanging featureless and stilted dialogue, highly predictable plots, you name it. I didn’t have time to read it, especially when plowing through the reading list for the M.A. exam.

By the time I got to graduate school #2, and its own reading list for the A.M. exam, I was so burned out that all I read was non-fiction. And then there was the dissertation, and the simultaneous beginning of my own novel.

I realized right away that reading other people’s stuff would be the kiss of death for me–I’d either ventriloquize that in my own work, or get depressed that somebody actually got paid for that dreck, or something. And I didn’t really want to.

So I stopped reading. Well, almost.

For the usual vague sorts of reasons that lead to your being friends with the best friend of your sister’s cousin’s best friend whom she met at the supermarket, I ended up being particularly enamored of Mr. David Weber and his fellows at Baen Books (see link in my blogroll)–and of Ms. C.J. Cherryh’s Foreigner series. And I discovered manga; and re-discovered the graphic novel.

But I used to read a hundred books a year. (I kept track.) Now, I think it’s under ten. I’m really appalled by this. Is my brain shriveling? What am I doing with myself instead?

Well, I play more video games, and I do more art–but mostly I write. The huge majority of it is in my head as I wrestle with my characters and try to get to know them and to understand their motives. And I am distressed by this, but Facebook eats a measurable part of my days.

Maybe I’ll try giving it all up for Lent and hunting out a book or two. But only on Saturdays.

Today a friend shared that OKCupid has been acquired by Match.com, a site they had rightly lampooned as being essentially a waste of time. Fear not; as of this blog, they’re tweeting that they’ll still be free.

I used to love OKCupid, but then one day several years ago I was out with my laptop and wanted a profile picture for my new Facebook acount. I went by OKC to grab that one–and immediately got hit by a drive-by, Virtumonde–the one causing those pop-ups pretending to be Windows security alerts; fortunately easy to scrub since it’s probably the biggest PITA out there. (These people are as gods to the Internet, having saved my desktop from an even bigger menace literally right before I was about to reformat.) I panicked and *never* went back.

But when the news above came up, I was curious, so I Googled “OKCupid virus.” Apparently the nice folks at OKC had found and squashed it right away; it’s not their fault their advertisers are such sheeping scum that descriptions fail. What intrigues me is that I’d actually never done this before; never tried to fix the essential problem of “hey, this isn’t fun any more.” (We all know I’m all about the fun.)

Part of this was that this was the first virus I’d ever had, and I reacted as though it were cancer. (The nervous should not follow that link if they’re weak of tummy.

For a while, I was really bummed and self-pitying. I’m that drag on the market: the middle-aged divorcee. Being unnecessarily cynical, I had more or less decided that all the worthwhile men had already been snapped up. Worse in many ways is that I don’t tend to act my age, and on average my friends are at least ten years younger than I am. (Part of this is that raising a bright teenager who shares many of my interests shows me new shiny things.) OKCupid seemed my only hope. (Help me, Obi-wan Kenobi!)

How did I get to this place of desperately hoping that the Internet would fulfill my life in every possible way? Simple enough: One day, a friend sent me a link to one of those amusing quizzes, and I poked around for several hours.

I signed up. What the hell? I was (and am) intrigued by their algorithm, which indeed pulls up interesting people with whom you might actually consider being on the same planet. I wrote an embarrassingly gushy message to the very first hit–something like 80%ish–not realizing that it wasn’t that uncommon.  (To be fair, it was within the first five minutes of logging on, and I was heavily drugged from a very bad head cold.) Later, I discovered that a number of attractive young men in Italy have a weakness for tattoos.

I also got the usual responses, like the time that even before I could get through my no-thank-you, he  changed his profile picture to  . . . well, let’s just say that when I blocked him and added that the bodily part was actually particularly unattractive as such went, I was telling the truth. And the one who takes the biscuit was the man whose correspondence followed these steps:

1: A fairly normal letter commenting that I seemed to be cooler than most PhDs

2: A fairly explicit letter requesting immediate contact

3: A letter scathingly telling me that I was just like the other PhDs (and that this doctor-ness was in some way part of My Problem)

I can only guess that this man was assuaging his incredibly high rejection rate as a human being. What amuses me is that he is apparently unaware that he is smacked on the nose by anybody with a high IQ.

Then there was the guy who had Asperger’s, and whose perseveration was drawing erotic comics. He was charming, if a little weird, and I try to be broadminded, despite having a PhD.  His pouncing on me whenever I logged on, day or night, was annoying at best, as my reflexes for hitting “unavailable” are presumably poor. But I tried to be nice. Finally, (having Asperger’s) he shared that his natural style was essentially to appear as “love” when it was merely “like,” and moreover, he commented while talking of an ex-lover that he found stretchmarks revolting. (Two kids over here, ladies and gentlemen. Man up.)  Oh dear. For all I know, he’s still stalking my long-dead profile.

So the nice people running Virtumonde not only wanted my $19.95 to rid my computer of things like their virus, they crushed my hopes and dreams.

But something odd happened. Perhaps because this last chance was denied, I faded from the misery of “I’ll-never-find-anybody” to . . . “Whatever.” Contrary to mythology, this has not immediately brought suitors to my door–but I don’t care. My daughter has gone from actively discouraging any Mommy-competition, to nudging me to look about me; but I don’t care. Just don’t care. Used to. Used to care a lot. Don’t care anymore.

The way I’ve structured my life, I’m quite content, even happy; and I strongly suspect that a boyfriend would sorta get in my way. Which is terrible, but there it is. I can only hope and trust that if said boyfriend should ever weasel his way in, I would be fond enough of him to not mind. But from this end, I’m kind of doubtful.

The only thing I really miss is being snuggled.

What annoys me is that our Noah’s Ark culture puts singlehood into three categories: a) still looking but undiscovered, b) celibate clergy, and c) loser. I find underneath my satisfaction a tiny sadness that this part of life has been denied me, but I do wonder how much of that is because of Option C.  Is it just that the grapes are sour?

Don’t know. And, really, as a practical daily matter, I just don’t care. I’m just glad I got from “Nobody wants me,” to “OKI’mSingle.”

 

 

 

 

 

 

“Write a haiku about something that drives you nuts.”

As loyal readers know, I’ve taken to cheating on my posts and answering Plinky prompts, which ask a fairly random question every day and invites readers to answer.  The intent is to whack writers into producing at least something. Today’s prompt was the above.

They encourage you to write your own title, which most people don’t. (Today’s default title was “Seventeen Moras of Frustration.” Classical Japanese haiku is a bit more complicated than our Western versions. Among the differences is that it is written in moras. If you already knew what a mora was, you have gained my respect but lost an iota of my warm affection as a peer.)

Anyway. I always write my own, particularly since they stroke your ego by telling you that your answers get viewed more that way. (Hey, I’m honest.) So today, my answer was:

Resisted the urge to turn the title to haiku itself: I didn’t.

Well, there’s always pretentious writing like the above, Annoying, eh?

[Note to loyal readers lacking curiosity or caffeine: The title isn’t a haiku because it’s 18 syllables instead of 17; the first line above really is 17 syllables. Although “pretentious” would be hyphenated, which is cheating.]

OK, I’ll stop now. *whack*

Actual haiku below:

Ah, topical as always:

My cat caught a mouse

Last night. Back and forth they ran.

Morning: Where is it?

 

Adorable, eh?  And even truthful. These mornings indeed drive me nuts, one way or another. Well, the problem is that a) I came up with the notion of the title, b) I followed up with the first line–and c) it took a bit of effort to stop counting on my fingers with the next several things I wrote.

My brain loves this stuff. It’s toys & candy & a nice walk on a sunny day. I can do it for hours. And it also has a serious problem with automatically doing what are called “Tom Swiftys,” she said cerebrally.  I have to go back into my manuscript and take them out, partly because the fact that I do it so much indeed drives me nuts–and partly because the astute reader will pick up on it and it will drive them nuts too.

What’s a girl gonna do? I have the suspicion that it’s not Real Writing when I do it on purpose, and Bad Writing when I do it accidentally. But I also suspect that I’m wrong, at least about the first. At the very least, it reminds my brain that writing is FUN!! This, as any writer knows, is something of a contradiction in terms, as writing can resemble stabbing said brain with a fork and wonder why on earth one is doing such a pointless and frustrating activity.

But at the end of the day, I’m all about fun, because there ain’t a lot out there sometimes. When we find it, we should roll around in it for a while. It’s the light of our lives, she said sunnily.

Can I go home now?