WTF

Strange times we're in, but then everyone knows that. Aside from the obvious chaos, corruption and incompetence destroying this country, there are lately weird things happening on a smaller scale, even in my little corner of the world.
I lost the entire month of May to a nasty upper respiratory virus that had me coughing every three or four minutes for weeks. Finally fed up, I went to my doctor. No, wait, my excellent doctor retired last year, so I went to the guy who took over his practice. When I told him I'd been coughing for a month  (fortunately, no other symptoms), he announced I had whooping cough.
WTF?
No, I replied, I've actually had whooping cough, and while this cough was persistent and annoying, it wasn't anything like whooping cough. His response was to declare I needed testing for allergies, which--surprise--he could take care of onsite for an exorbitant fee. I do not have allergies. Double WTF. And don't even get me started on how much I had to pay for this diagnosis.
Since we all know that bad things and weird things come in threes, here are two more examples of the alternate reality of contemporary life.
The other morning as Woki and I were enjoying our morning walk, a couple of cyclists zoomed past, part of their conversation clearly audible: "Have fun, but don't use my name. If you use my name, I will deny this conversation."
WTF?
Spy? Leaker? Government troll? Or just your everyday, run-of-the-mill lawyer? Whatever the guy's profession and motivation, I find it alarming that it is now acceptable to covertly provide information without taking any responsibility or having the courage to stand by a claim. What does this say about our society? To me, such a statement might not raise an eyebrow in Beijing, but it just doesn't sound right on the leafy streets of Lake Forest.
With my imagination in overdrive after hearing that, Woki and I continued our walk, following the same route we take every morning. A mile or so farther along, we strolled past a door set in a concrete wall bordering the property of a large house. We passed this door every day for years, but this time there was a strange yellow mass foaming along its edges, as seen in the photo above.
WTF?
If it was insulation, why would anyone insulate a door in a concrete wall that leads only to woods? Makes no sense. So if it's not insulating foam? Is it a new and lethal fungus? Some alien life form? The egg sacs of sci-fi spiders who will hatch and eat all the dogs and cats in the neighborhood before starting on the humans?  Imagining took hold, and I had to steady myself, calm down and remind myself that sometimes the writer's creativity gets too wild, which is not such a good thing. There is a limit to what is acceptably bizarre.

Hoping to ground myself in reality, I remembered what is going on with our government. WTF, indeed.

Spring Fever

Spring in the Chicago area: early yesterday morning, the fragrant air hovered at a balmy seventy degrees, but by ten o'clock, the temperature had plummeted to forty-three, where it still remains this morning. And while the sun is shining brightly as I write this, clouds and severe thunderstorms are due to roll in by late afternoon and linger for days. A good time settle in for an extended period of reading and writing.
Like the weather, my moods and focus seem also to swing from one place to another. Rapid fire distractions ricochet me like a pinball through the day, making it difficult to get work done in any reasonably logical way. A variety of partially completed tasks litter my desk, not the least of which is the next section of revisions for the new novel, so in an attempt to establish some order (and to actually complete one thing) I've decided to tackle this blog post.
Clearly, the transition of seasons falls into the "limalesque" arena, but where to go from there? A photo I took of flowers acquired in the rough, woodsy area at the bottom of my property fits the spring fever theme, but then . . . what to write about?
Three minutes of brainstorming yielded the following possibilities:
Those flowers--are they jonquils, daffodils, or narcissus? Shouldn't I know the difference? The flowers showed up unbidden, and if I hadn't gone to the bottom of the garden to take care of storm-damaged branches, I never would have seen them.  How much else to I miss literally right in my own back yard? (Topic #1)
I picked a handful of the blooms and put them in a vase where, without any help from me, they arranged themselves like stars in the firmament. Rushed for time, I snapped a couple of photos, hoping to capture their sparkle and subtle pattern. The photos failed miserably. The intricate, overlapping pattern they formed might be better interpreted in a drawing, but could it be done in words? (Topic #2)
Hmm, there's another thing I've been meaning to explore in a blog post. Crossing that threshold from visual art to writing has re-oriented my perceptions, and the single most difficult challenge is how to convey in words those colors, textures, and patterns that are the language of the non-verbal world. (Topic #3)
And as for that whole pattern thing, I could write posts on patterns every week for years and never run out of new material. Patterns are arguably the key to the universe. Their importance in science, math, and art is undeniable, but how and where do patterns occur in writing? (Topic #4)
Each of the above topics makes me want to delve deeper into the nooks and crannies of the subject. More than enough to keep me occupied throughout the rainy days to come, as long as I don't get too distracted.

A Thing of Beauty

I plan to have a salad for dinner this evening. The lettuce I bought is pictured above. This photo doesn't really do it justice: the beautiful rosette pattern of the leaves, their sheen and rich color, the lack of blemishes, tears, or wilted edges so common to ordinary heads of lettuce set this particular specimen apart as a thing of beauty.
This afternoon, I indulged myself at the bookstore (yes, again), purchasing two non-fiction books, Lab Girl, by Hope Jahren, and Stoned, by Aja Raden. The first title is a scientist's memoir, remarkable for its wonderful writing as much as for the information imparted. In one of those lovely happenstances some people call coincidence (I don't believe in coincidence), within the first pages of the book, the author talks about looking at leaves. Really looking at them. How are they shaped? What shade of green are they? Are they large? Small? You get the idea. Clearly, I got the message to study my dinner with Zen-like attention.
The second book, Stoned, is about jewelry and it, too, is receiving accolades for excellent writing. In the first few pages, Raden argues that "the history of the world is the history of desire," and humans naturally desire beautiful things.
Ah, therein lies my conundrum. I want to keep the beauty of this perfect, fascinating plant. But that's impossible. I can't keep it sitting on the kitchen counter. Like all living things, it will ultimately spoil. The leaves will wither. Its perfect symmetry will be lost forever.
Yet, shredding the plant, ripping off the leaves, and tearing them into bite-sized pieces fills me with angst. Shoving them in my mouth and eating them smacks of absolute savagery.
However, it's nearing the dinner hour. I've duly recorded this lovely lettuce in a photo and with words. Savagery is rearing its ugly head, and this thing of beauty can not remain a joy forever.
 

A Trip to India

My latest mini-odyssey started with a novel that I picked up purely for some escapist reading. The story, set in Ceylon, was not particularly well written, but what it lacked in literary merit, it made up for in setting and cultural details. Within the first few pages, I ran into an unfamiliar term: jaggery. The dictionary defines jaggery as a course, brown sugar made from palm tree sap.
A few days later, perhaps with subconscious influence from my reading, I spent the evening watching The 100-Foot Journey (Helen Mirren and Manish Dayal), a delightful movie in which culinary scenes are so beautifully photographed one can almost smell the spices, curries, and haute cuisine of a Michelin-quality restaurant.
I've always been partial to a good curry and had been experimenting with adding extra turmeric and fresh ginger to my weeknight stir-fry (read: mix up of various leftovers). The movie, along with a colorful Williams-Sonoma catalogue chock full of exotic Indian-inspired table settings and their new line of masala and curry seasonings, put me right over the edge. I needed an excursion to the Indian subcontinent.
Lack of time and money precluded actually going to India, so I did the next best thing: I found my way to an Indian restaurant not too far from home where I was able to indulge in a marvelous buffet. Samosas, patek paneer, channa masala, vindaloo, and tandoori. Fresh, aromatic, spicy but not so hot the flavors got lost in the burn, the dishes in this restaurant and its quiet ambience carried me along on my little travel fantasy. At the end of the meal, there was a table by the door on which sat four bowls (pictured above). Instead of the usual starlight mints or plastic-wrapped toothpicks, these bowls contained more interesting breath-freshening agents: cardamom seeds, fennel seeds, cloves, and sugar-coated anise seeds.
To keep the fantasy going after I left the restaurant, I found my way to a nearby Indian grocery store. The small strip-mall space was stuffed to the rafters (literally) with exotic merchandise, most of which I had never seen before. I'm no stranger to ethnic groceries, but with the exception of a place in San Francisco's Chinatown, I've never been so transfixed by shelf after shelf of the unfamiliar. (MCH, if you're reading this, call me to schedule a field trip.) I made my purchases, coming away with mango powder, sandalwood soap, cardamom seeds, a jar of ghee, and, of course, jaggery.
How fortunate I feel to be able to make an excursion like this. Within an hour's radius of my home, I can cross thresholds into many other cultures. I can purchase items I might not be entirely certain how to use and discover treasures I didn't know existed.
In my humble opinion, that is what makes this country great.

Deadlines

This post is featuring a guest artist because this is the last day of January and the very last hours of my self-imposed deadline for my also self-imposed rule of writing a new post once a month.
I haven't been good with deadlines lately, something I'm not proud of. Actually, I can't remember a time since sixth grade when I've failed to complete work by its due date. Setting goals and completing them when I say I will helps me pretend I can keep the general chaos of life at bay. Right now, however, we are living in unusual times. There have been a lot of distractions lately.
Last week, I spent an inordinate amount of time writing emails and making phone calls to senators. I did this. Anyone who knows me will realize how weird that is. But like I said, these are unusual times. They are getting more unusual (and scarier) every day, too.
Instead of working on my novel, I've spent far too much time letting my imagination run rampant over the dismal prospects that could be our future if this country continues to allow the current administration to systematically dismantle seventy-plus years of progress in human rights, environmental protection, public education, regulation of mega-corporations, and funding for the arts.
Speaking of the arts, my guest artist, whose work is featured above, is Benjamin Williams, age two. I chose to use his creation today because it's clear evidence that humans need art, even very young humans. While it's wonderful to experience the art of the talented and widely acclaimed, many of us also need to create our own art. By painting or writing or playing music or whatever means is used to express oneself, troubles recede and the world becomes a better place, at least temporarily.
Sounds like I should get back to that novel, eh?

Marley's Ghost

Christmas time. For many of us, the season would lose much of its atmosphere and charm without what is perhaps the second most famous Christmas story: Charles Dickens' A Christmas Carol. Reading it is as much a part of my family's tradition as baking cookies, trimming the tree, and eating the chocolate in our Christmas stockings before having breakfast.
As a writer, an English literature tutor, and a huge fan of Dickens, I've read and analyzed several of his works, most notably A Christmas Carol,  Great Expectations and A Tale of Two Cities. Indeed, I have notebooks filled with vocabulary, plot and character information, quiz questions, essay prompts, and all manner of things Dickensian. While I pride myself on knowing these works fairly well, I readily admit there is still much I can learn about and from one of my favorite masters of the English language.
That point was brought home to me just a few days ago by my brother. Now, my brother hasn't read any Dickens except A Christmas Carol, but he managed to point out a simile that occurs early in the story (page 15 in my copy) which I had managed to blow right past. Scrooge has just returned home after begrudgingly giving his clerk Christmas Day off.
"And then let any man explain to me, if he can, how it happened that Scrooge, having his key in the lock of the door, saw in the knocker, without its undergoing any intermediate process of change: not a knocker, but Marley's face. Marley's face. It was not in impenetrable shadow as the other objects in the yard were, but had a dismal light about it, like a bad lobster in a dark cellar."
Huh??? A bad lobster in a dark cellar?
What kind of a simile is that?
So, here's what I learned from my brother, who may not be an English lit scholar, but he knows his way around the sciences better than anyone I've ever met. He'd been reading a book called A Field Guide to Bacteria by Betsy Dexter Dyer when he ran across a passage explaining Dickens' seemingly bizarre reference to cellar-dwelling lobsters. Ms. Dyer explained that in Dickens' era, it was common to store lobsters in the cellar. Lobster exoskeletons are apparently covered in a bacteria that thrives in salty conditions (sea water) and phosphoresces in low temperatures such as those found in an ice chest or the cellar of a 19th century house. Indeed, a quick search of the internet will reveal that this trait is common to other seafood, especially crabmeat, shrimp, and prawns.
Just for kicks, if you happen to be at a holiday party where a platter of shrimp is on the buffet, turn out the lights and see if it glows in the dark. Guaranteed to be a conversation starter.

Merry Christmas!!

This Was Supposed To Be About No Vacations

                                                  😡😡😡😡😡😡😡

This post was supposed to have a lovely picture from our October trip to Door County, Wisconsin, but apparently my limit has been reached with the amount of photos my computer will accept, so nothing is hitting up from my phone/camera.
This post was supposed to be about writers never being able to take a vacation because our writing means taking a computer (or at least a fat notebook) with us on all trips. We juggle story ideas, characters, and plots in our heads during driving trips, in airports, walking along beaches, and hiking in the woods.
I was going to mention the friend who recently posted on FaceBook a photo of the room that will be her home for a writing retreat, undoubtedly her idea of the perfect vacation. Another writer friend blogs about her habit of writing every day, no matter what.
Clearly, I'm not that focused, dedicated, or free from distractibility. For instance, I've just spent 15 minutes looking up how to spell distractibility, which isn't actually a word according to spell check but shows up just fine on all the ADHD sites. It's even got a medical definition, so the damn word does exist.
And this glitch with the photos probably means a trip to the Apple store, which measures only marginally higher on the Driver Scale of Blood Boiling Aggravation than dealing with Comcast. But, hey, computers make our lives so much easier, right? Here's where having Trumpian tons of money would be useful: I could just buy a new computer. Or four.

However, in an effort to prove to myself (because no one else seems to give a rat's ass about this blog) that I am a serious writer and can discipline myself to produce one post a month, no matter what, I am forging ahead, past the technical glitch, past the frustration, past the spelling issues, past my own insecurities and bad temper to get this frickin' post out there.

And once this is done, I will get back to my novel and the slew of short stories I'm working on because they are important to me. If we write to discover things about ourselves and the world, then I guess my take-away from this fiasco of a day's work is that I have rediscovered that Fictionland is my favorite vacation venue. In Fictionland, I can mine every boring, scary, uncertain, infuriating situation from real life into fictional (sort of) story material. And that is an awesome threshold to cross.   😎