Monthly Archives: June 2013

Linguistic Limbo

30 Sunday Jun 2013

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Plinky prompt: If you could permanently ban a word from general usage, which one would it be? Why?

This is a toughie. I’m not one for censorship. The obvious problem is that words are like weeds: Pull one up, and two or three others spawn in its place. Can’t think of a replacement offhand? Hell, borrow some from other languages. It’s what we do here in English.

Moreover, even if you yank both signifier and sign–you still have the signified sitting there, with all its zits, grinning like Alfred E. Neuman. And sometimes that’s the real problem you have with a word–deep down inside, you want to ban the thing itself.

The problem with the words we use, love, hate, fear, and fumble for at the tips of our tongues is that they describe life. “Cancer”? People will still be sick. “Fat”? You’ll still take up a little more than your allotted seat on public transportation. “Illegal”? “Law” itself? Committees will form to make new ones by the time you get back from the john. Fundamentalist? There will always be new bombers and the Westboro Baptist Church.

If we get rid of all the words using “z” to form a plural, we still have the problematic social fear of young urban black and Latino people. “Awesome?” Banal things will still inspire awe and delight in people you look down upon. “Fuck?” Oh please, madam and sir. It’s possibly the most flexible word in the language; I propose we take it off the no-no list out of respect for its versatility: adjective, expletive, noun, verb–how awesome is that?

That said, I will admit to some peeves, and they involve the words which mean you have no idea of what you’re talking about; the ones that tell people you don’t read very much or very well. “Irregardless” always makes me embarrassed for its user. But the all time winner is “nucular.”

Another wince when falling from a friend’s mouth; I try to sit on the English degree, but it’s one of the ones that has “NUCLEAR!” popping out automatically before I can stop it. However, the people I hear use it most are responsible for the ultimate usage of the thing itself–politicians. And that scares the fuck out of me. Is it just me?

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Because I don’t want to be fired . . .

22 Saturday Jun 2013

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. . .  I just redacted my last post. It talked about stuff at work, and in a sort of recursive fashion talked about how they have a somewhat slavering belief in Being Very Careful About Email. Seeing as this is a blog, and I’m sure the dead-curious can find out who I am, I figured better safe than sorry. Damn it.

I was fairly annoyed when I wrote the post, and now having to self-censor makes me even more annoyed. However, I am sure my lack of skill at office politics will bite me in the ass sooner rather than later; I just hope like hell the kids have jobs by then. But then I can publish without being damned, bwah ha.

It’s a toughie–for so many of us, work is such a big part of our lives. How do you handle this, folks? I change names and small facts and try to be as anonymizing as possible. But I’m pretty sure that anything other than a glazed-eyed, slogan-spouting chirp will be seen as some sort of tragic heresy.

The slogan I’m thinking of is “Recovery is Real,” and it refers to the fact that people with mental illness can and do recover, using a combination of therapy, medication, recovery planning, and alternative therapies. It’s a powerful and exciting thing–I’m living proof of it–but sometimes . . .

. . . like any new idea, it can be kind of culty, and in a sense, we’re supposed to act like ministers for a religion that frowns on any critique of the church because it might be snapped up by the Evil Opposition. I’m not sure of who the E.O. are, as the concept of recovery is spreading like the good news it is.

But I’m an INTJ working with ESFPs (if that makes sense to you) and I totally fail at being circumlocutory. My emails have been harshed on because I keep confessing the emperor to be naked in matters great and small. It would help if the only professional training available didn’t only meet once a year with 30 slots; I’m pulling a lot of this out of my butt as I go along, and because for five months they just dumped me alone at my center, I haven’t even had the benefit of more experienced people in the field until just recently.

But in general, I do love the job, and am going to be telling myself so all week as I pull together a proposal for my first conference (woot!). God alone knows how *that* will be critiqued.

Le sigh.

The Private and the Personal

15 Saturday Jun 2013

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About two weeks ago I found a mostly blank book which had a few entries in it from when I was homeless, and I published the first as “Waiting for a Bed,” which talks about my first evening as an individual homeless person with no set shelter residence. (Otherwise known as a bag lady.) I was going to run the other two entries, written from the family shelter my daughter and I moved into shortly afterward, but much of it is riddled with people’s names, and I think that changing them defeats the purpose and negates the entries, as one entry is concerned with the difficulty of learning the names of 15 other moms and their kids. It took a while–I wasn’t good at it.

It wasn’t entirely my fault; it was a historically Latina shelter (Casa Nueva Vida), and my Spanish is rudimentary at best. Two of the women’s names differed by an “s” which wasn’t pronounced in the ambient dialect, so they were called “La Gorda” and “La Flaca,” or “the fat one” and “the skinny one.” What really thrilled me was that these terms were meant to be descriptive, not pejorative–bodies were bodies, and the less Americanized my sisters there were, the less they cared about how much they weighed.

I love Casa; they’re in a corner of the city that’s a minor pain in the ass to get to, or I’d visit more often. They are kind, warm, and caring people who made our seven month stay as comfortable as it might be, given that I shared a single bedroom with my 18-year-old daughter, who spent the last semester of her senior year in deep humiliation and terror that people would find out where she lived. Whereas I became at least a bit politicized there, and ended up serving on the board of Homes for Families, she just wants to push the whole horror out of her mind. (It didn’t help that I needed to go back to the hospital twice for short visits while they tweaked my medication.)

There are many things one can say, and many have said, about the particular horrors of having no room of one’s own–or any room at all. But the very worst part for a homeless introvert was the lack of privacy. Not just the annoyance of having my teenager as a roommate, but the larger sense of privacy rent away by the poverty system.

Everywhere you go, from housing worker to food stamps to Medicaid to this worker to that worker, you carry a folder. It becomes more and more battered with time and being carried about in shopping bags, bulging purses, and the undercarriage of strollers. Inside of it is your life: where you were born and to whom, who you married and when you divorced, the proof of custody of your children, disability attestation from your doctor, your Social Security card, criminal record (though everybody runs it themselves), probate records of name changes, titles of automobiles, bank records, income letters, tax forms, immigration history, the correspondence from all the poverty agencies–and the same set for each child. (If you are ever in this position, here’s a tip: Watch what they do with your original documents. Make sure you get them back after the inevitable photocopies. Not that they mean to steal them, but they don’t have time to care.)

No privacy. Anything not stripped away by opening your folder is shredded away by the inevitable questions: How did you lose your housing? Do you have anybody else to stay with? Where did you stay last night? What’s wrong with you anyway, you lazy loser bitch? 

And they mangle your name. (At least if it’s mine.) Sometimes it’s all we have left, that name-meaning-us, as opposed to the word which appears all through that folder, being misspelled, mispronounced, and sometimes misassigned. The private made public, the personal impersonal.

So I can’t take away the names of my sisters from Casa; it took me too long to earn them.

Over and Over Again

14 Friday Jun 2013

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As my 300K word epic trilogy Dark Crimson Corners will never be published as such, I’ve started taking it apart for quilting. I’m serializing the biography of serial killer Damascus to run here. (Toria and Tristram had been tossed in as a prologue; I’m surprised that I didn’t find a way to work in my Bad High School Poetry.) This means going through the bio and adding and fixing a gazillion tiny things.

I caught at least one of my aphasic neologisms. (One of my mood stabilizers adds a tendency toward mild aphasia to my already-numerous middle-aged moments and poor ADHD memory.) Sometimes when I can’t think of the word I just (put stuff that means what I want into parentheses) and keep on writing. Or else out pops something not-quite-right, like the word, “contentness.” (Thank heaven for redlining; the problem with self-editing is always that you know what you meant!)

It was a toss-up between “contentEDness” and “contentment,” and I was amused and intrigued to see that the closer one, which I’d clearly been trying for, conveyed the right nuance of not-as-permanent-a-state as “contentment.” How interesting that my brain got it partly right after all.

Anyway, I’m now going over this piece of writing for at least the twentieth time, what with all the past hopeful editing and re-versioning back when I thought my white elephant was comprehensible, let alone saleable. I need to make sure there is just enough info about my aliens to not confuse the hell out of new readers, which means a lot of tucking in and darning together (the quilting metaphor really seems to be the best) — and, oh my dear sweet sheep-all, I’m tired of it.

I really like this piece of writing, and I have an occasional spasm of willingness, even eagerness, to work with it, but most of it is being done page by page in the sort of unhappiness one has when one is Working and just wants to go home.

Meanwhile, my son spent an hour this afternoon playing and re-playing the same four or five bars of music on his flute. He was trying to get four similar-but-not-mechanically-exact tracks of this tune (a bit of video game music) in order to remix it. So he played it over and over again, and was very polite the time my cake-consuming fork made an itty-bitty clink against the plate. Over and over and over. Just like me and Damascus.

Sometimes making art sucks. The disturbing part of it is, you can work your butt off–and it turns out to not be much good anyway. I’ll leave you with that cheerful thought, and go back to forcing out another page of at-least-a-little-better. Le sigh.

Alone with My Thoughts

09 Sunday Jun 2013

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Like I suspect most people who end up writing fiction, I have what one might call (if one pins me to the wall and makes accusing eye contact) imaginary friends. This was long the Secret of My Soul, until I hit 50 and decided that a lot of stuff doesn’t really matter. I mentioned this casually at a lawn party to a delightful woman who then boldfaced shared that she wasn’t alone with her cats either, if one might put it that way. This made my summer. I wasn’t alone anymore.

I don’t make them extra cups of tea (although for a split second in a supermarket back when I was really sick I wondered if the roast were big enough) but it’s handy to have somebody to talk to (to think to?) who has the inside track and can call me on my sheep when said sheep hit the fan. Moreover, when my pals overlap with my fictional characters, I find that I can give them extra depth because I, you know, know them. (This doesn’t always happen. I’m not sure why not.)

But this essay isn’t so much about my imaginary life (the life I imagine), as it is about my imaginary life (the faculty within that births such imaginations). For the first, it centers around “I’d rather not be alone;” for the second, it’s more “Leave me the sheep alone NOW because I can’t think, thank you very much.” That is, I need to be alone with my thoughts.

I share a tiny apartment with two ferrets, two cats, two other adults, and the various toys, books, and art supplies pertaining thereto. The neighbors are . . . um . . . boisterous. Things were at a bearable status quo when my daughter, who describes herself as “surly,” hid in her room all day playing World of Warcraft on Skype with her boyfriend, but then my son moved in. It turns out that he plays World of Warcraft on Skype with his buddies. I play World of Warcraft all by myself, thank you. (OK, I’m in a guild, but all that’s probably another post for another day.)

My son is living in the living room pending our moving to a three-bedroom apartment. I hang out in the living room because I have this sort of ghetto desk out here consisting of an artist’s drawing board propped on a TV tray, because my desk (which takes up I-am-not-kidding half my miniscule bedroom) is covered with jewelry making cruft. My son and I get along very well (he isn’t surly), but when he’s not Skyping with several people at once, he shares his random thoughts with me. He has a lot of random thoughts, because I gave him the genetic gift of ADHD.

Moreover, things at work have conspired to keep me in the center and out of my office, and I’m um, stressed. I need to be alone with my thoughts, and have acquired an inner surliness of my own. My imaginary friends are cowering somewhere beneath my corpus callosum.  I can get a little inner peace by working on my artwork, but my own ADHD yips when it’s more than an hour and a half of that.

However: I have a nasty sprained ankle, gotten while tripping over a bag of old clothes and other detritus that I (in an attack of pre-moving virtue) was actually chucking. And I have found that I’m lucky not to be alone.

Several years ago, I had this idea (which I only wish I could blame on an attack of mania) that fat me could perform high-impact activities like jogging and club-style dancing. I micro-tore my Achilles tendon, which I ignored until I had a lump the size of a prune–and an orthopod who ‘splained that enough was enough, and my butt was going to be on the sheeping couch for six weeks, with crutches to be used to so much as go to the bathroom. I surfed up a terrifying blog on the surgery, with pictures (not linking you because it traumatized me, and I like autopsy shows) and decided to play against character and behave myself.

I lived alone at the time. I watched all of Buffy and all of Angel on Netflix, knit myself a giant knee sock to go under the nasty chafing boot, wrote a lot, and whimpered when I made myself tea, let alone had to go to the grocery store. It sucked.

But this time here I am, with the son making me the tea and the daughter cooking without much fuss. Even the kitten curls up with me at night. And it’s pretty swell. So I’m writing this with Pandora on my headphones cranked up to a suitably isolating level, and I can at least talk to you. Stress happens, and I’m lucky to be having it in a family that loves me and shakes me away from being alone with my thoughts, which all in all is good for me.

Sometimes.

In Which Our Heroine Uses Her Mommy Voice

06 Thursday Jun 2013

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I run a Recovery Learning Center for people with mental illness, being in strong recovery from bipolar disorder myself. I got hit on by a full-fledged Dirty Old Man today at work. Complete with chair walker. Mr. Smith has earlier refused to come visit our center (unless I myself am there, which is only part of the time, needing to run about and do director stuff and whatnot). He has also claimed to “be in trouble there” but hasn’t satisfied my curiosity. (I have only been there for five months.) But today he wheeled himself in and was fairly personable. He inquired as to whether I was married? Engaged? Going steady? “No,” I told him, and then with all the iron I could draw, “I prefer it this way.” He desisted.

But then another staffer took the other peers for a walk, leaving me manning the fort. In comes Mr. Smith, asking if he can talk to me. Now, being Talked To is part of my job, seeing as peers either confuse me with a Mental Health Professional (that’s what we call them) or, as do random people in the street, realize that I’m a nice lady who’s a good listener. So I told Mr. Smith that he might do so.

“Can I close the door?”

Uh-oh. But we were in a pretty big room, and I knew I could take him without trying hard, even if he used the walker as a shield.

“Su-uu-re.”

He advanced (sans walker) up to the desk, and I realized my strategic mistake: I was sitting in the reception cubie, and what with the poorly-functioning copier taking up half the space, Mr. Smith now had me barricaded, meaning that at worst I would have to hurt him. (I am a well-muscled fat woman with a stock of normally well-behaved rage issues to use as rocket fuel as needed.)

He re-established that I was single; I re-established that the single state is what I live and breathe for; and then he reached out and patted my elbow. Mr. Smith is missing a fair number of teeth and it was as well that I couldn’t make out what he was saying at the moment.

“DON’T TOUCH. Back away, Mr. Smith.” (I also have a superlative Mommy voice, essential for anybody cursed with looking like a nice lady.) To my relief and some surprise, he did so, mousing off quite nicely.

I explained in Mommy voice that We Don’t Do Things Like That At The Center Because It’s Disrespectful. And besides, Women Don’t Like It. He was abashed, opened the door, and begged me not to tell anybody. (Guess nobody wants to be shot down, even if they always bring an emergency seat to catch themselves.)

I’ve been patted at by naughty old men since I was a then-terrified child and by now I have their number. (It undoubtedly helps that I can make them into cracker crumbs these days.) So I was a little amused and kept on puttering at my email (keeping an eye on him the while). Then something occurred to me.

“Mr. Smith, did you ever offer your interest to Jane?” Now Jane is my predecessor; I am told that being assaulted in her office was a large part of why she left.

Why yes, Mr. Smith admitted. He had asked her for a kiss, and as she had bent down to do it, his hand had brushed her breast. By accident. (Of course.)

Ah. This  explained why Mr. Smith “was in trouble at the Center.” It also explained why one of the reasons I was hired was because of my “strong personality.”

I’ve never talked to Jane about this (“Hey J, who grabbed your boob, anyway?” Awkward much?) but had frankly ascribed it to one of the people my superiors say I must describe as  “peers who have paid their debt to society and are in the recovery process,” who also wander about our large Department of Mental Health building. (The unenlightened campus cops regrettably refer to them as “Level 3 sex offenders.”)  Now, let me be crystal clear about this: I understand triggering and personal boundary limits. Some of mine are just plain random. So I’m not mocking Jane. At all. I mean, yuck.

But for my own sake, I’m just as glad that it was most probably Mr. Smith.