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)* I cried when she taped the doll-head’s mouth in such a screaming expression of pain and then fled the moment it was recognized by another. Her story is laced with so many such fleeting slashes of pain, tearing at the protective walls of her silence with their need to break free.

It’s so deliciously ironic that she and others are so scornful of symbolism; they exist in a book so rife with it. The book paints her world in such vivid, living imagery, all in the colors of her own perspective as she fights to survive and then overcome the devastation the trauma wreaked on her body, mind, and soul. She is a young woman of such courage and strength. I doubt I’ll ever forget Melinda.

I find this such a remarkable story because of the powerful layers all combining to show us what could not be told, and the result is so true to how such post-traumatic stress and depression really is experienced. So many layers, both within Melinda herself and without, converge to plunge us into her life: which things she notices about her world and how she sees them, and which things she blots out; her unspoken thoughts about other people and her isolation, and her need to reach out; the physical sensations literally choking her with fear, leaving her unable to speak; the intrusion of memories, sounds, smells, sensations, panic; her growing need to escape the confinement of her silence and break IT’s hold on her; and her art, which finally takes on life when she herself begins to live again.

This is the human condition in all its secret pain and hungry need, its lonely despair and crippling fear, its hidden strength and quiet victory, and, above all, its ability not merely to survive and grow, but to snatch hope out of the blackest dark and nurture it into a private beauty, a triumph the darkness cannot diminish.

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

… I’ll bore you later. :oP

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.

Most of the time, narrative prose should be correct, while dialogue should fall into the realm of descriptive grammar. Writing which follows the rules communicates with clarity to those who read it, regardless of their idialect. (Thanks for my ever having heard that term goes to Rob Wells, who explained in his post: “We’re all familiar with dialects — people in different areas speak a certain language in different ways. Idiolects take that idea a step further: since no two individuals speak exactly the same, every single person has their own dialect — an idialect.”) The rules do matter. When I have to go back and reread a sentence or paragraph because of ambiguous wording, or when a sentence is so poorly constructed that it breaks me out of the story altogether, it’s just as bad as when someone starts talking to me while I’m trying to read. This was true long before I could point at and name a flaw that bothered me.

Deliberate ambiguity can be quite effective.

Leaving prepositions dangling at the end of questions can intensify the desire to answer the question. Try singing “I am a child of God, and he has sent–” in front of a child who knows the song and see how long it takes for the last part of that phrase to hit the air. I recall there was actually a study showing that, in an elevator, if someone hummed the shave-and-a-haircut notes, most of the time someone else would fill in the two-bits notes.

One book I’ve reread many times, Robert Asprin’s “Myth Inc. in Action,” is written entirely in first person, in a voice straight out of “Guys and Dolls.” It’s a delightful read, partly because of its heavily idiosyncratic dialect.

Writing for a specific audience increases effectiveness. What you’re reading at this moment is the voice I naturally fall into when I’m in an analytic frame of mind, and it’s great for working out my own thoughts on something like this but it would be wretched in a novel.

Sometimes, sentence fragments can be effective. Or not. Sometimes correct grammar can be placed in an odd situation for comic effect, and sometimes it’s too stuffy to be effective and can harm the narrative flow.

Varying degrees of correctness enhance characterization. The most vividly alive characters I’ve ever read have individual speech and thought patterns which show up both in conversation and in sections written from their own POV. In a conversation, when a certain kind of character is offended, it can be very effective to have his manner become stiffer and his language more formal — even to the point of being stilted. But to do that, you have to know the rules of correct grammar, right?

Here’s the bottom line. If you write off correct grammar (pun intended) as being unimportant or irrelevant, you lose some powerful tools. If you place too much value on correct grammar, you lose some powerful tools. As in everything else, balance is all.

By the way, I’m still giggling over “Clarity is the goal, and language is the hockey stick, or something.”

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

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.

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.

I wander from room to room and get nothing done. I start to make a list of what I need to get done today and realize someone needs their meds and go give the dose and answer a question about dinner with “I don’t know yet” and look at the clock and it’s time for me to eat AGAIN because this stupid diabetes means every time I turn around I have to figure out what to eat now, so I stare in the freezer and the cupboard and figure out what doesn’t have too many carbs and will satisfy enough that I won’t have the urge to eat more, put it in the microwave, and while it’s cooking pick up the trash around the trash can and stuff it in and tell a kid to take it out and battle the whining that creates then go into my room to cool off before I start yelling and realize I haven’t checked my blood sugar and should do that before eating, and realize I haven’t had enough water and go in search of my water bottle, which is over by the computer, and look at the screen and go over the list while I drink, frustrated that I only got as far as putting two items on the list, and I try to sort out what else needs to go on there in what order and have to break up a fight about who copied who first and who’s looking at who and whose turn it really is to pick something on tv and finally end up turning off the tv and sending one to take a bath and another to call a friend or something and the third to go play his Gameboy or something so I can have some peace to finish figuring out what to do, and the phone rings and it’s someone confirming an appointment and my train of thought has been thoroughly derailed, and by now it’s pushing lunchtime so I give them snacks and fend off more questions about what we’re going to do today because MOM WE’RE SO BOOOOORED and tell them yet again that if they keep interrupting me we won’t have time to do anything because I’ll never have a chance to work out what we can do, and now someone else needs meds so I go give that dose, and I’m so frustrated at the vicious snide teenaged glares and muttered just-under-the-breath insults that all I can focus on is keeping my temper in check and I go splash water on my face in the bathroom and realize it’s time for my own meds, and take them, and go back to the computer and look at the list and I’m still fuming so I check my email instead and go read the webcomics I follow, and half an hour later I’m feeling better and go back to the list but I’m just staring at it, my mind’s all fuzzy and just going around in slow circles, then finally I glance at the clock and it’s lunchtime for all of us and I’m feeling so drained and weak and I know I’d better eat before fixing them lunch, no, they can have sandwiches and stuff, still, need to eat first or else I’ll start eating the same stuff they are and that’s Bad so I stare in the freezer and pick out a Healthy Choice meal and go to the microwave and open it and lo, there’s the meal I’d put in earlier and forgotten to eat, and I put the one I just picked into the freezer and turn the microwave on and tell everyone to make sandwiches and that I’ll bring out something to go with them, I come out and throw chips and carrots and a cookie or two on plates and retreat with my food to the bedroom and eat it numbly, with the list still out there, mostly blank and waiting, and in my mind float disability paperwork to be signed and sent in, bills, library materials to be returned, therapy appointments for four people which need to be made and kept regularly and somehow I’m supposed to be in those appointments with two of the kids and how am I going to fit that into the scant amount of time my husband’s home when I’ve got all three kids at home all day every day and there’s no way I can leave them in the waiting room together without me there, and I need sleep, rest, peace without kids’ questions hammering at me, and they need to get outside this house and do SOMETHING, and we have no money, and we need six or seven medication refills, and shopping, and it goes on and on and on and it crushes my brain into pudding and I’m in the bathroom crying again where the sound is far enough away that the kids won’t hear, and when I come out of it into the numbness, I tell them I need to rest and I try to sleep, and an hour or so later I get up and give someone meds and trudge back to the list, knowing by now I’ll get maybe two or three things done today if I’m lucky and I’ve got to figure out which ones they’ll be, and on it goes. Ah, the joys of ADD and bipolar disorder combined. I’m exhausted and nothing’s actually been accomplished, or so little that it feels like nothing. Every so often, our electricity goes out, or our phone, or something, because I haven’t managed to keep up with exactly what’s most important right now.

And here comes Dennis. I’ll have to reassure the kids over and over again, and won’t that be fun. Right at this moment, Dennis seems inevitable. With all the internal upheaval — augmented by the sleep problems and medication changes and an autistic child’s reaction to the sudden lack of the familiar structure of school and universal summer boredom and their (unreasonable) expectation to be constantly entertained and government institutions’ paperwork and so forth and so on — it feels like an external distaster like Dennis is merely the world’s way of putting things in balance. How horribly self-centered a thought is that? Or, at least, it would be self-centered if I believed it.

I can’t ever manage to tell people all of what goes on, because by the time I’m a third of the way through the current set of problems (yeah, there’s more than the above, by a good bit) I start feeling like a drama queen. One of those people that always has to be in crisis or they’re not alive, or not getting enough attention, or something. I saw part of a movie on TV recently. A guy says to a girl something like, “No, you’re not one of those people, one of those problem people. ‘Hey, look at my shiny new problem!’ ” I start wondering if I sound like that. Am I overreacting, or are things really this bad? Am I blowing things out of proportion because I just feel too intensely about things, and this stuff wouldn’t affect a “normal” person this way?

Well, one day I told my shrink absolutely everything that was going on, and ended by telling him about my drama queen worries. He sat there looking at me in silence for a good fifteen seconds or so, and I was shrinking inside the whole time. Then he said, “I’m trying to think of something to say that wouldn’t sound patronizing, but I just can’t, because it’s that bad.”

Well, at least I’m in touch with reality. One less thing to worry about.

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)