The Weird Zone

My daughter left her copy of “Speak” at home yesterday. It took me maybe three hours to devour it… what a phenomenal book! I love her teacher’s choices in literature. This book made me laugh, cry, hurt, and celebrate.

In particular, I found the development of Melinda’s artwork intense and gripping. Visceral and poignant, it portrays her struggles, pain, and triumph in all the dimensions her fear-stifled voice could not bear to touch for so long. *spoiler warning (and some of this may not make sense if you haven’t read the book, but most of it will)* (more…)

I hate the nights that ride hard like thundering in the dark. I’m trampled, sleepy, weary, and still I can’t sleep. My husband lies next to me, sleeping. He slid into his slumber so effortlessly, while I remain restless in my exhaustion. I’m jealous of that ease.

The pain has really mutilated my sleep. I’m sleeping 2-3 hours at a time at least twice during the day, and then it takes me till midnight, one, two, even three in the morning to get to sleep. I’ve tried making myself stay awake all day and taking the maximum dose of my sleep meds, to no avail. I get plenty sleepy, but can’t fall asleep. It’s the pain.

It took me this long to figure it out. Don’t ask me how long “this long” is; haven’t a clue. Well, maybe one or two clues. Anyway, it’s been a loooooooooooooooooong time. Emphasis on the oooooooooo in there. It seems so obvious in retrospect. I mean, none of this is anything I didn’t already know, but it never clicked that it was relevant to my current situation. Ha.

When the body’s in chronic pain, it needs more rest so it can dedicate energy to trying to heal. When the body’s in pain at night, sleep isn’t as deep, and therefore less effective at replenishing and healing itself. And the pain is worse by the end of the day. So what I figure is that when I get to sleep at night, it’s always in spite of the pain — meaning that there’s a nightly struggle between sleep and pain and it’s only when exhaustion overrides the ouchies that I get any peace — and I don’t sleep very well. It probably takes nearly till morning just to get to the point where the pain is gone or nearly gone. By then, I’ve only had a max of 5 hours of sleep (I wake up a little before six), so once I get the kids off to school I start sliding sleepwards again. I’m usually asleep again by 9:30, and that’s the deepest sleep I get. The pain’s less after what can laughingly be called “a night’s sleep” and I’ve been up and doing things, which gives my muscles a break from being in the same position in bed for so long, so it makes sense that I get good sleep then. That’s the time when I dream, and if someone wakes me up I feel as if I’ve been woken in the middle of the night; groggy and irritable. Otherwise, I wake up feeling pretty good for a couple of hours, maybe three.

Then nap number two makes its presence known. Insistently, like a two-year-old’s screams of “Mine! Mine! Mine!” If I give in gracefully, I wake up in enough time and with enough energy to propel myself through getting flyboy through his homework, making dinner, and maybe watching something with the kids. If I don’t… well, I make sure to buy plenty of things they can make for themselves, and fruit. (I decided some time ago that since they’re obviously NEVER going to be eating any real quantity of veggies so long as they’re young enough to live under my roof, I’d better stuff fruit down them at every opportunity.) And I record shows I know they enjoy in here so that I can spend some one-on-one time with each of them that isn’t too demanding.

Sigh.

I haven’t been able to do much of anything for a good long while, and it feels good to write again, even if it’s just a paragraph for the sake of having written something. I have a borrowed laptop, which means I can be lying here in bed on my stomach in a therapeutic position, and be online. Yay! I am so sick of these walls. I’m out of things to read. I often get tired of watching TV, too. Stoopid herniated discs. (Not, you understand, the same thing as “stupid”. No, this is definitely stoopid.)

I shan’t bore you (or me) with details. Suffice it to say… I wrote something! Nyah, nyah!

… I’ll bore you later. :oP

A discussion on a list of writers (some published, some not, but we all share a love of writing) sparked a poll about prescriptive versus descriptive grammar. I’d never heard those terms before, but the person who wrote the poll defined them well, and they were the catalyst for the following opinion piece:

I’m definitely in the prescriptive camp, as far as deciding what is “correct,” and that’s where I’ve cast my vote. I believe English does have rules, and those rules facilitate the purpose of language: communication. Clarity is the goal, and language is the hockey stick, or something.

While that was a fun thing to write, it’s not quite true, is it? Effectiveness is the goal. Clarity is simply a tool for effective communication.

Language has rules, just as music and other arts have rules. Rules in arts are, generally speaking, attempts to define intangible qualities of art, a way to describe how things work. Painters and photographers learn about effective compositions; what kinds of lines and colors at which places in an image create what kinds of visual appeal. Musicians learn about chord progressions and resolution, and those rules are mathematical in nature so are absolute — which doesn’t mean they’re inviolate, just that they are rules which, as with any other rules in the arts, can be broken to achieve specific effects. Of course, in every art, there are many concepts expressed in rules, and it’s no different with writing. Grammar is only one of the sets of rules (which, it occurs to me for some bizarre reason, rhymes with tools, which is what they really are) we learn. I’m something of a purist in that I believe that the rules define what is “correct,” and anything else doesn’t qualify for that particular term.

However, correct writing isn’t always the best choice for clear, effective writing. And I see a big difference between deliberately breaking rules for the sake of effectiveness and writing ungrammatically because it’s the only way you can write. (more…)

All unwary, you bring them home from the store. They lurk in the bathroom, waiting till the right moment of your nightly slumber to start vibrating, sounding like the Jolly Green Giant decided to hold his thumb against the propellor of a World War II aircraft as if he were a kid playing with a fan. You lurch out of bed towards the unearthly sound, blindly slapping walls and dressers and still managing to crunch your shoulder against the door frame, flip on the light so you can be more blind than before, and fumble at the blurry shapes on the sink counter till most of them have crashed to the floor and finally you grab the right thing and turn it off and stand panting and listening to the slow rattle of the aspirin bottle rolling back and forth.

Those nifty new OralB pulsar toothbrushes? Don’t get them.

Just follow the signs: I had just finished paying for my groceries and was headed for the doors, which were in the typical setup with one set of doors for entering and another for exiting. The sign on the entry door caught my attention. It was a “do not enter” sign. Granted, what they really meant was “do not enter from this side, you idiot for whom we have to spell out everything or you’ll lose a segment of your lifespan pointlessly mocking us in some stupid blog,” but still, on the face of it, it seems as they don’t want anyone to enter at all, since of course the same signs are on the outside of the exit doors. Those, however, make sense.

Something odd’s afoot: Based on the signs prominently displayed at a local gas station, I can only conclude that it has been bought by Imelda Marcos and they’re no longer accepting US legal tender from customers, but have reverted to a barter system. There are signs here and there which read:

    PREPAY

PUMPS ONLY

Geek moment: Every other Saturday, usually, I go in to work and cover the phones. Sometimes there’s a project I can work on, other times I just try to figure out what they’ve changed on the network since the last time I was in — I don’t work a regular schedule anymore apart from “mostly every other Saturday, kind of,” so I miss a lot of the cool growth and development going on.

Anyway, the phones are typically quiet on Saturdays, save for one location calling in to have a teller’s password reset AGAIN (it’s always the same client, too… we ought to charge a stupidity fee), but today there was actual stuff happening… I was troubleshooting! I miss that (ok, so I’m masochistic — no, wait, I just love the challenge, yeah, that’s it), so it was nice.

So, I’m at work, helping someone do something extraordinarily simple, thereby making her very happy and very certain that I’m a genius. Shortly after I hang up, my husband calls and says in a tired, sickly voice, “Something’s wrong.”

“What’s wrong?”

“I don’t know.”

Out of pure reflex, I was this close to asking him if any error messages came up.

So one day I’m driving along and have to brake suddenly, and Flyboy says, “Be careful, Mom!”

“That was me being careful. If the car in front of the one in front of us slowed down too much faster, we might have hit the one in front of us. You have to keep a safe distance from the car in front of you.”

“Well, if the car behind us hit us, we’d be rich.”

I was expecting to hear about us being dead or turning into skeletons or one of his generic evaluaions of “that would be bad.” He’s eight years old, and the litiginous society has already infiltrated and begun its efforts to make him its own. I wonder if this is how the Borg started out…

And today, he was watching a critical debate between well-known public figures and came to ask me my opinion. “Mommy, is it duck season, wabbit season, or mommy season?” Fortunately, as it turns out, the mommy season recipes’ main ingredients tend to be tickly fingers and lots of zerbits.

I look at the forecast for hurricane Dennis and I just feel tired. I spend all my time now just getting through the next thing. The next fight between my kids, the next meal, the next question, the next crisis… the next five minutes. Can’t I just go to sleep till this is all over? Don’t ask me what “this” is… I guess it’s the unpleasant stuff. No, I guess I can’t do that; I’d miss the good stuff, because that would mean sleeping till the end of my life.

Ah, the joys of bipolar disorder. Mixed states are the worst. You know it’s bad when three days in a row you’ve landed locked in a bathroom with the lights out, crying, for 45 minutes. Ok, two of those times I’ve no idea how long, but once I happened to know what time it was when I went in, and looked at the clock when I came out. (more…)

If I ever get another cat, she will be such an affectionate and beautiful creature that everyone will want to spend lots of time stroking her, even though she’s all mine. Her name will be Ego.

The title of this blog, of course, refers to my mind. It’s a weird zone to catch a glimpse of, to be sure, and even more so to live in. Here’s a lovely incident that happened not fifteen minutes ago:

My husband picked up the decorated flowerpot which Flyboy had given me for Mother’s Day. Naturally, it’s now populated by dirt and twiggy ex-stems. Quoth he, “I understand this is a keepsake, but it’s also dirt. What are you going to do with it?”

“I’m going to get rid of the dirt and keep the flowerpot, of course.”

He said wryly, “You can never have too many pencil holders,” and put the pot down.

I’m interrupting the narrative flow to warn you that here’s where the weirdness comes in. I have no idea where this came from. Maybe the Infinite Improbability Drive kicked in someplace and twisted my thought processes as Arthur Dent attempted to obtain another cup of non-tea. Or, more probably, contained inside my skull is a growth industry dedicated to churning out weirdness. I’ll rewind this conversation a bit, and we’ll forge onward from there.

.nwod top eht tup dna “,sredloh licnep ynam oot evah reven nac uoY” ,ylyrw dias eH

He said wryly, “You can never have too many pencil holders,” and put the pot down.

“Although Attila the Hun might disagree with you.” And then I was laughing helplessly for far too long as he stared at me, just waiting for me to be done.

He’s actually used to enduring this kind of thing. We’ve been married a loooooong time. :o)