Liar, Liar

"You can only talk to him," my mother explained to my nephew before letting him take the cell phone out of her hand to talk to Santa. "He can't talk to you."

"I love christmastime," my sister said, having initiated the santa calling a minute before, suggesting a cutback in presents for the three-year-old boy too busy to eat the $8 grilled cheese sandwich on his plate. He immediately took a big bite. He's been very busy for weeks, circling toys in catalogs.

My mother repeated her rule before my niece--almost seven now, missing two front teeth, perched on legs 12 miles long--took her turn. It surprised me that she fell for it without so much as a how come. Over the summer, a friend of hers--one of those smart alecky kindergarten types-- told her there was no santa, a vicious rumor long since forgotten. All doubt, even ordinary questions, are eclipsed by the bright light of the magic of christmas.

It's not just little children who believe what they want to believe. Adult reality is equally founded on little lies, self-delusions, and sometimes even willful decisions not to give in to facts and evidence. And I'm not just talking about romance. I read somewhere that the happiest people are slightly deluded; they have higher opinions of themselves than a completely objective analysis might bear out. They also tend to believe that things are going to work out for them, regardless of the odds.

It's interesting to think about how many people manage to bring about their imagined reality. Maybe it's the convincing performance, conducted by the convinced, influencing those around them, snowballing the effect. They become what they believe they are.

I've always been one of those unhappy reality-based people. A confident friend of mine states every fact as if issuing an imperial edict. Once she told me that rinsing dishes in cold water makes them shine. To be so certain and so wrong is one of my biggest fears. Yet I know from observing people that being self-assured is more important to success and to attracting people than being right. Thoughts about changing habits and negative attitudes have been dancing in my head since discovering Gretchen Rubin's wonderful blog, The Happiness Project . Of course, the question of whether one can write fiction properly without any snark, gossip, pettiness or other small habits in one's heart tangoes alongside.

Certainly, a writer has to be an honest and not a deluded observer of human nature. But many of these happiness habits, including self-discipline and not letting the perfect be the enemy of the good may, give my writing a big boost. So too may the insights into why I fall back into so many bad habits over and over. I plan to work on procrastination--starting tomorrow (just kidding, I started yesterday). One of the best tips I've read so far was keep starting, if you stop. Don't worry about the fact that you didn't finish, just get back to work.

More later, once I've met my writing goals for the week.

Comfort Zone

“I’d like to make a great film provided it doesn’t conflict with my dinner reservation."

The quote from the New York Times' review of Conversations with Woody Allen points to the hit-or-miss quality of Allen's recent films, suggesting that a comfortable work-a-day approach to art has its limitations. We all know the starving artist cliche, and we all know that cliches are cliches for a reason, right? The art is better when the artist is hungry, driven, maybe a bit desperate. And the artist needs to believe that the art will be worth the despair, the hard times.

I know I'm pretty comfortable in general. Not especially happy or successful or accomplished or well-off, but comfortable. My house is warm--I've been known to tell people I keep the heat up because I'm not living in a Dickens novel. Lord knows I'm well-fed, even on the Nicole Richie diet, by which I mean Weight Watchers--I've figured out how to budget my points for cookies and parties, and of course, meth. I stay up late, sometimes even working, but I don't start work until 8:30, and it takes me less than ten minutes to get there. I'm also free to sleep late on weekends--reminding me of Mrs. Hill in Alice Walker's Meridian, who never got over not being able to sleep until 9:00 on Saturday mornings after she had kids. That novel also makes me think of a friend's boyfriend in college--a white boy-- who asked, in earnest, whether he could kill for the revolution. He and my friend marched in the anti-apartheid protests on campus. I went to one with them, but it felt ridiculous. A group of maybe fifteen preppie college students weakly chanting "What do we want? Divestment? When do we want it? Now?" didn't have the energy of thousands shouting "Hey Hey LBJ, how many kids did you kill today." Though terrible, Apartheid was a faraway injustice, and it's hard to get worked up over an investment portfolio. My apathetic classmates and I--the ones who went to frat parties and studied for exams instead of protesting--were the children of the flower children, represented by Alex P. Keaton rather than Abbie Hoffman.

Not that my parents were hippies. They experienced Woodstock on the TV news; the TV was the cornerstone of family life in our house. We ate our meals in the family room, plates balanced on our knees, watching whatever reruns might be on at dinner time. My mother got mad if I tried to read while eating. It was important that we were all paying attention to the same thing. At night, she raced to get the laundry put away so she could sit down and watch her shows. Three's Company in particular made me hell-bent to get out of the house as soon as I could. At that point in my life, I was driven. I didn't listen when people told me I couldn't afford to go away to college, much less to a big fancy private school where people would use a knife and fork to eat an orange and I would never fit in. I didn't listen, I didn't fear that I wasn't as good as other people. I believed I was smart enough and I did it. It was after college that the fear sunk in, and turned me into someone who thought she couldn't make it after all. All the hundreds of times I saw Mary Tyler Moore toss her beret in the air and catch it, and I couldn't internalize the lesson--what good did all that TV ever do me?

It's time for me to stop being so comfortable, and to start being driven again. I'm finally in a place where I have time to devote to writing. My job is secure, but not so demanding it soaks up all my energy. For better or worse, I don't have kids, and I'm single. It's time to stop feeling morose about that and to take advantage of it. While it's always seemed crazy to me to work 100 hours a week, to never take a day off, I need to be more of a workaholic. There has to be pain, struggle, maybe a little chill in the air, a little hunger, the dead silence of no TV...I'm betting that achievement will be worth a little discomfort. That's why I'm sticking out the NanoWriMo even though I'm behind and I honestly don't know if I'll ever do anything with it--yes, it is that bad...

Downtown

When you're alone and life is making you lonely You can always go downtown ...

The Petula Clark song may be upbeat and hopeful enough to score a Visa commercial, but it's never worked for me. Driving downtown makes me feel not just alone, but lost and terrified.

There's the inadvertent trips through Buffalo's blighted East Side, only a turn or two away from the tall buildings that form our pretty skyline, a detour I've taken on my way to temp jobs, baseball games and jury duty. There's the traffic circles, including the one that interrupts Delaware, the street the courthouse was on the morning I had jury duty. The case was a big one, a nun murdered by a crack addict--he'd confessed and she'd predicted it years before, in her journal, and had asked for mercy for her killer. The trial was about the sentencing, I think. I smelled novel, which the assistant DA must have suspected, because she kept asking me questions for no particular reason during voir dire. They used a peremptory challenge on me, and I still feel ripped off, not to be chosen, after missing three days of work, going the wrong way on a one-way street, and driving home in a big blustery snowstorm. I felt guilty after leasing a new car, instead of buying a used one like I intended, salesman's wet dream that I am, but that night, the traction control may have honestly saved my life.

My mother didn't drive on the thruway until she was in her forties, and I always thought I was braver than she is. Now I'm not so sure. I don't let fear stop me, but my incompetence always seems to trump my independence. Tonight I was supposed to see Orhan Pamuk, downtown. Instead I got lost. And scraped my car on a concrete abutment after getting in a tight spot in a parking lot (I don't need to be downtown to do that). I drove up and down Delaware in the dark, not sure where I was going. Somehow, the Google map printout didn't have the full address--I was supposed to arrive approximately one minute after turning right. I didn't check--I was too busy picturing turns, musing on the names of streets: the Scajacuada Exressway, Nottingham Terrace. My mother never would have ventured out alone in the first place. She would have made someone come with her. I didn't want to drag anyone along. The tickets were $25, a lot for someone who isn't really into literature.

Last year, I didn't go to see George Saunders because it was winter and dark and Canisius College, where he was speaking, is not in a good neighborhood. But I bought the Just Buffalo series, and so have three more chances to make it downtown and hear an acclaimed author read. I plan to make it, even if I have to walk. Or get a ride from my Mom. When she really has to, she drives on the thruway now.

44,000 words to go....

At a word count of 6032, three days into Nanowrimo, I'm a little ahead of the daily goal. So far, it hasn't been hard to churn out 2k words a day. I haven't had to resort to any of the tricks posted on the forums, like eliminating contractions, piling on the adverbs and foregoing pronouns. Even so, I'm strictly following the no editing rule and letting anything and everything pour out, including details in direct contradiction to something I wrote a few hundred words back. I'm also enjoying the vast expanse of real estate available in a novel--we'll call it the Montana of fiction forms, unlike my usual realm, the short story, which feels more like a New York City Studio apartment. I think the general idea of nanowrimo is true; there will be bits worth keeping in December, even though it will be a lot of work to revise.

This may change, but I'm setting the novel in the past, in the era of my own childhood, which has me plumbing random memories and finding strange bonding opportunities. My father and I discussed what might have happened to his Uncle Johnny's finger after it was chopped off by the machinery at the Chevy plant, a memory that probably came into my head after reading the wonderful scene from Jeffrey Eugenides' Middlesex set in the Ford plant in 20's Detroit:

Wierzbicki reams a bearing and Stephanides grinds a bearing and O'Malley attaches a bearing to a camshaft....

This phrase is repeated, more than once in the scene, creating a poetic effect and giving the reader a sense of the monotony and the pressure auto workers faced. My grandfather and his brother worked at Chevy, not Ford, a couple of Great Lakes to the east, and a couple of decades later, but I'm sure it was just like that for them. How sad, my father said, that they're gone, so many people are gone. I wish I'd gotten to know my grandfather and his brother as people. My grandfather was always teasing us, occasionally scolding us, but there was something superficial about our relationship. My grandmother talked more, and not just because my grandfather had a laryngectomy and couldn't talk much after that. He would cover his trach with his finger and squeak out a few words when he had to. We didn't see Uncle Johnny often; to me he was little more than a kindly old man with a stump finger that was both fascinating and disgusting at the same time. He used to pretend his missing finger got stuck in my brother's nose, like he was picking it, or maybe it was his own nose. If he did it to me, I don't remember.

I also don't remember my first day of high school, not even a flash. I remember odd things; South's confederate flag (we were North). There was an East, a modern (at the time) building comprised of classrooms without walls. I think they may have had sliding doors, but I've never been inside. OJ Simpson's house was around the corner from East High--that was before Rockingham. I do remember driving past it, in the car with my family. I also remember looking for Carl Sagan's house in college, walking around with friends on the suspension bridge. I could never tell which house it was, since it was always dark out when we did this. Carl Sagan is now gone too...I wish I'd gotten to know him better as well.

Learning about nature, another random memory. The boy next door caught a frog, or possibly a toad, and put it in a cool whip container with grass to eat. We all went swimming, and when we got out of the pool, the amphibian was dead, dried up. We laughed hysterically, without a hint of sympathy or remorse. The thing looked so rubbery, so flat and black. I'm sure you had to be there to get the joke, and you had to be there at the age ten or so (kids, don't try this at home). One of the moms on our street predicted that this boy would end up in jail (not because of the frog). With novelistic irony, he, a cop now in our suburb, got the call after she hung herself last year.

Here's hoping my novel is more interesting than my blog...I plan to plod--and plot, groan--on