Blogroll

When I'm not here, you may find me wandering the pages below. (If I'm a regular visitor to your site and I've left your link off or mislinked to you, please let me know! And likewise, if you've blogrolled me, please check that my link is updated: thisroamanticlife.blogspot.com. The extra (a) makes all the difference!)

Archives

For posts sorted by date or label, see the links below.

For posts on frequently referenced topics, click the buttons to the right.

To search this blog, type in the field at the top left of the page and hit enter.

Body: in sickness and in health

I won't lie; this body and I have had our issues with each other for many years. Body image -- sure. Physical and mental overextension -- comes with being a Type A kind of girl. I still struggle with these things, so they show up from time to time in my writing.

More recently, illness, pure but not simple, has added itself to the mix in a multi-system sort of way. And the challenges in figuring out exactly what's gone wrong are many. As problems have revealed themselves in the last few years, beginning with reactive hypoglycemia in late 2008, I've documented them here, partly to gain a little clarity on managing complex conditions but mostly to give voice to vulnerabilities I feel but don't normally share with anyone face to face. Better out than in, they say, right? (Oh yes, humor is one way I deal.)

The links below cover the different angles I've examined (and from which I've been examined) within that experience.

Travel: neither here nor there

When the person you're married to lives two time zones away, you log a fair number of frequent flier miles. And if you blog about commuter relationships, you log quite a few posts en route too.

Since we're no longer in separate places, I blog less often from airports. But we do travel -- together now! -- which is much more fun to write about. So in addition to thoughts on our years of commuting, the links below cover the places we've been as a pair and, in some cases, the adventures that have happened on the way.

Writing: the long and short of it

Why do I do it? Good question. Maybe it's not so much that I like to write but that I have to write, even when the words refuse to stick to the page. Believe me, I've tried doing other things like majoring in biochemistry (freshman fall, many semesters ago). Within a year, I'd switched to English with a concentration in creative writing and wasn't looking back.

After graduating, I taught English for a few years and then worked as an editor, which I still do freelance. In 2007, I applied and got into an MFA program at a place I like to call Little U. on the Prairie. I finished my degree in 2011 and have been balancing tutoring and writing on my own ever since.

The following links cover the writing I've done about writing: process, content, obstacles, you name it. It's not always pretty. But some part of me loves it, even when it's hard. And this is the result.

Heart: family and friends

I'd have a hard time explaining who I am without being able to talk about the family I grew up in as well as the people I've met beyond its bounds. But even with such context, it's not easy! In the simplest terms, I'm a first-generation Asian-American who has spent most of this life caught between cultures. That, of course, doesn't even begin to describe what I mean to, but there's my first stab at the heart of it all.

That's what this group of posts is reserved for -- heart. The essential parts of my life whose influences I carry with me, for better or worse. The links below cover what I've written as I've learned how these forces work within me, for me, against me, in spite of me. They anchor me even as they change me, and they keep life interesting.

Recommended reading

What do I do when there's too much on my mind and my words won't stick to the page? I escape into someone else's thoughts. Below is a collection of books and articles that have been sources of information, inspiration, and occasional insight for my own work.

Wednesday, December 28, 2011

This will be brief

... because I'm writing this on my phone. My laptop's sudden refusal to boot this morning caps this year of technical difficulties, several of which were specific to the machine: the fried adapter, the bad sector. Add the recent fridge fiasco and the midyear failure of a backup drive to the list of unfortunate electronic events and you begin to wonder what else is about to go.

I'd be a lot less incensed -- these things can happen to any appliance over time, and the laptop had reached an average lifetime when its performance started going downhill -- if I hadn't been nearly done editing and commenting on a good friend's application essay for a Ph.D. program. I'd promised him the draft notes by today. I'm hoping he can take a week's delay so D can rescue the file when we get back to Seattle, but if not, I've got a lot of text to reconstruct this afternoon.

2012, you are on notice.

Friday, December 23, 2011

Sense and sensitivity

The smell of fresh biscuits is wafting upstairs from the kitchen in my parents' house in Texas. We've been coming here for the end-of-year holidays only since 2006, so the room I'm writing in -- a loft above a garage -- is not the one where I used to wake up to the promise of butter, flour, baking powder, milk, and salt, in those perfect, golden, flaky proportions that are my mother's standby recipe for daughterly bliss. It's just a loft with an elliptical machine in it, and I cycle along, willing myself to recall the tender center of this favorite baked good, how it releases a ribbon of steam when it first breaks open under my much younger fingers.

The last few years have been an adjustment -- first, the limit on sugars and starches after I became insulin resistant, then the limit on dairy and gluten after those food sensitivities came to light. I can choose to ignore these inconvenient circumstances -- nothing truly dire will occur immediately if I eat from the tray my mother has just pulled from the oven -- but I know it's unwise. At the very least, I'll feel sick and be less able to enjoy this time with my family. So I soak up the memory of warmth and comfort that the aroma brings back.

But the coziness of a different kitchen in a different time fails to materialize. I'm needled by earlier moments from the morning. "Can you butter the tray for me?" my mother asks, as I am about to leave the kitchen in search of a writing spot. "Oh, there might be flour on the counter. You can touch that stuff, right?"

I tell her it's fine -- I can wash my hands -- but then, as I clean the baking utensils left in the sink, I hesitate before setting the sponge back on the edge of the basin. "Is it okay to put this through the dishwasher?" I ask. Without a thorough soaping and scalding, a good quantity of gluten particles can stay lodged in the fibers.

"Oh, it'll never get completely clean," she replies, waving a floury hand, as if whether the sponge goes through the machine isn't important. I know she doesn't mean to be cavalier, but a flood of resentment at what feels like her insensitivity rises in my chest. Just because the sponge can't be sterilized doesn't mean I can't take the measures with it -- or anything else in her kitchen -- that will decrease my exposure to what makes me sick. It has only been a day since my arrival, but the few things I've asked her not to do for food I will eat -- like using wooden cutting boards, which are porous and also harbor gluten easily -- she's done anyway.

I wonder whether to say anything. When I do remind her, she makes the excuse that this is all new to her, which I understand. But she makes no move to apologize.

Am I wrong to feel hurt? I ask myself. Don't be so -- well, sensitive, part of me says in reply. Still, the scent of my mother's biscuits, hanging in the air of the loft, refuses to transfer the pleasure I wish it would.

Wednesday, December 14, 2011

Not biting

Back in July, after my thesis received final approval from Little U., one of the last tasks I had to complete to tie up loose ends on the manuscript was to get it copyrighted. For Ph.D. dissertations, Little U. makes copyright mandatory and takes care of this detail to ensure the filing with the U.S. Copyright Office actually happens. For MFA degree holders, you retain the right to pursue official government protection -- or decide your thesis is so objectionable to your artistic eye that you'd rather not afford it such an honor.

I have to say, by the time I was done with my manuscript, I felt only 40 percent of it was really decent enough to consider reworking for future use -- as smaller essays to send to literary journals or as a jumping-off point to reshape the work into a very different book. As it stood, 75 pages wasn't enough to sell as a complete work, especially since it had no ending. (Yes, it stops, but it has no sense of conclusion.)

Because that 40 percent had merit, though, I did go through with registering for a copyright. And within a few months, I started to get postcards from a certain company claiming interest in publication.

Don't get excited yet. This is not a company that likely pays its authors for their work. It is a subsidy press, also known as a vanity press, which will ask its "candidates for publication" to cover some or all of the printing, distributing, and advertising costs. Obviously, I haven't done further research on the particular organization that mailed me, but it is generally safe to say that any group that calls itself a subsidy press does not follow the standard publishing model -- possibly to the author's financial, if not reputational, detriment. So if you've ever been contacted by one of these companies, be forewarned (and then laugh, as I did, because you've seen through their attempt to flatter for money).

How did they even find me, you wonder? Well, per the postcard, a "researcher" "discovered" my registration -- not my manuscript, my registration -- with the Library of Congress; i.e., someone who regularly trolls the record of copyright applications, which is in the public domain, picked out my name along with hundreds of others and put me on a mailing list. How do I know no one has actually looked at what I've written to determine its literary merit? Well, when the postcard is addressed to a "Mr. Contemporary Troubadour," it's pretty clear. Really, if the work is written in the first person and begins at the patient check-in desk of an obstetrician's office, you'd guess the writer was a woman, right?

Tuesday, December 6, 2011

Unplugged

I'm not totally off the grid these days, but it feels like it after our two-week Thanksgiving trip, which ended with the discovery Sunday evening that our refrigerator had died during our absence and left its rather pungent ghost behind. Not the warm welcome we were hoping for! Everything I'd been depending on for the last few months of allergen avoidance -- organic meats amassed on sale and frozen for later use, homemade soup stock, all the gluten-free baking I'd done -- had to be tossed.

This elimination diet thing is getting a bit too literal for me.

After a day of research, we chose a new fridge last night, which will be delivered tomorrow, but until then, any foods that need chilling are crammed into a cooler on the back porch. Believe me when I say I'm counting the hours until the delivery truck shows up.

With the exception of this electronic snafu, our Thanksgiving was a good one. D and I spent the holiday and then some with his family in central Illinois -- we're trying to alternate Thanksgiving and Christmas with his parents and mine so that we don't have to do one marathon multi-city trip at the end of the year. So far, I think I like the change. We did throw in a small road trip to visit D's brother and sister-in-law in Michigan, where both are graduate students, but that was a relaxed six hours in a borrowed family minivan with leg room, rest stops, unrestricted access to personal electronics, and no worries about someone else's seat back reclining into my lap.

Of course, the view was a lot less impressive than it might have been by air, but the road did offer some scenic gems. Seriously, how can you not appreciate the comic irony in strip malls like this one?*

* I have no idea who took this picture -- we didn't have time to stop to take one ourselves -- but I am thoroughly impressed that Google, using only a search string that contained the names of the stores shown and "strip mall Indiana highway 30," was able to provide me a link to a discussion board where this image was posted.

Monday, November 14, 2011

Testing, testing

Plans are afoot chez Troubadour.

Some are sizable -- to the point that trying to write about them here in the last week has produced three different post drafts, none of which seemed to get at what I wanted them to. And that is usually a sign for me that the ideas need more than a little fine-tuning if I can't even elaborate on them in this space, where nothing has to be complete but just somewhat organized.

So, not to keep returning to food allergies, but that's what I can write about. And with the first of our many fall and winter holidays approaching, I've been busy trying to figure out how to make traditional baked goods (because what else does one eat at this time of year more than any other?) using nontraditional ingredients.

There are resources out there. Many, many resources, posted on the web by people who have similar dietary limitations. They're impossible to search through efficiently and most still include ingredients I can't eat. It's one thing to need recipes that are strictly gluten-free. But how about gluten-free, dairy-free, egg-free, corn-free ...

Well, what about the professionals, I wondered. The people who sell allergen-free baked goods? Could they have advice?

A few weeks ago, I discovered the website of a bakery that is known for its friendliness to those with food sensitivities. Refined-sugar-, gluten-, wheat-, soy-, casein-, and egg-free -- yes, they do it all. And there was a cookbook, written by their founding chef, in their online store!

I had huge hopes as I waited for a copy to become available from my local library. Could hardly walk to my car once I had the book in my hands -- I was already perusing the contents: muffins, biscuits and scones, teacakes, cookies and brownies, cupcakes and frostings. Something in here had to work.

Except that nearly every recipe in the book calls for a pre-blended gluten-free flour mix that contains potato starch (or the recipe requires just potato starch itself), and potatoes are the latest GI enemy to make it onto my list.

Yes, I felt a little cheated.

But -- but! -- it's one step closer. I still don't have to reinvent baked goods; I just need to figure out how to use the research in this book to inform my substitutions. Troubadour-friendly, gluten-free flour blend, you will be mine.

Of course, if you know of other professional resources out there that might help me speed up the testing process, I'm all ears.

Saturday, October 29, 2011

Substitutions

If you've spent any time in my kitchen in the last three years, you've seen a lot of these in the meals I prepare.

Ever since D and I stopped being able to eat much refined sugar and starch, thanks to reactive hypoglycemia, we've been using any stand-ins that would produce similar results in cooking -- even if the ingredients in question weren't those that naturally occur in foods you could buy at the farmer's market. We're talking products that have been enzyme-modified or chemically transmogrified to fool our bodies into ignoring them. Our pantry was a shrine to the gods of Splenda (packet-style, available in boxes of 700 from Amazon's subscription service), maltitol syrup (straight for baking or flavored for coffee), erythritol (granular for creaming into batters and powdered for whipping into frostings), and xylitol honey (in a squeezable bear-shaped bottle to boot).

It turns out our bodies don't take lightly to being deceived. Cue insidious digestive deterioration.*

The elimination diet forced me to stop using our usual sweetener stock, among many other staples: wheat flours; corn, soy, and dairy products; even eggs and yeast. Did you know that baking powder contains corn? And some vanilla extracts too? What in the name of all baked goods is left to make a pan of muffins with?

Plenty.

Of late, I've been craving cornbread. It's cold out, hearty soups have returned to our menu in full force, and I've been missing the sweet-savory flavor of a fresh-from-the-oven pan of golden goodness to go along with a bean-and-chicken stew. D's mother's cornbread recipe had been languishing in our kitchen file for too long, and I was getting tired of eating rice at every meal. So I pulled out the instructions and started making substitutions.

But wait, you're thinking. How do you make cornless cornbread?

With millet.

The results were more than I could ever have hoped for. These tiny little grains, when cooked, produce an uncannily cornmeal-like texture and flavor. I won't say the final product was indistinguishable from true cornbread, but it was a more than respectable stand-in that I had to remind myself not to consume in a more than reasonably sized portion. (For anyone with reactive hypoglycemia, it's still full-strength on the carb scale, even though it contains no refined sugar.)

The success made my week. It's been hard not to think of the food I've been allowed to eat as a second-rate option to the foods I've had to give up. But that is exactly what I've needed to change in order to move forward with the body I have now -- the one that probably will never be able to eat wheat or dairy again. No more thinking of our allowed options as substitutions. They're alternatives, incredibly freeing ones because they won't mistreat my body.

That said, I'm not settling for lesser quality in our baked goods. If an alternative bread or scone or muffin doesn't make me want to go back for seconds (against my better judgment), then the recipe needs tweaking.

So. I'm posting this week's cornbread recipe with original and alternative ingredients side by side. For anyone with food sensitivities or just a curiosity about different baking options, you can employ as many or as few of the suggested changes as your palate desires. (N.B.: the directions account specifically for alternatives; if you use only standard ingredients, simply mix the dry then add the wet and pour into your chosen pan.)

Corn/{millet} bread

2 cups all-purpose flour / {1 cup gluten-free oat flour and 1 cup brown rice flour}
4 tsp. salt
5 tsp. baking powder / {2 tsp. arrowroot starch, 2 tsp. cream of tartar, and 1 tsp. baking soda}
4 tbsp. sugar / {3 tbsp. sucanat** and 4 tbsp. pear butter***}
1 1/2 cups cornmeal / {3/4 cup millet flour and 3/4 cup cooked millet****}
2 eggs / {2/3 cup water and 2 tbsp. ground flaxseed}
2 cups milk / {2 cups coconut, rice, or almond milk}
1/2 cup plus 2 tbsp. melted shortening / {1/2 cup plus 2 tbsp. olive oil}

1. Mix flours, salt, arrowroot, cream of tartar, baking soda, and millet flour in a large bowl. Add sucanat and cooked millet, breaking up clumps with a fork.

2. In a separate bowl, mix water and flaxseed. Allow to stand 5 minutes (mixture will gel slightly). Stir in pear butter and milk.

3. Add wet ingredients to dry; beat quickly with fork. Stir in olive oil until combined.

4. Pour into 12 muffin cups (place extra, if any, in mini loaf pan or ramekins). Bake at 400 F for 35 minutes or until toothpick inserted in center comes out clean (crumbs are okay, batter coating is not). Cool in pan for 10 minutes, then unmold and transfer to wire rack. Centers will fall slightly -- without gluten or egg, the bread has less structural integrity -- but should not cave in. (Xanthan gum is a recommended additive to rectify this problem, but I'm holding off on experimenting with it until after the remaining food trials are done.)

Makes 12 muffins plus one mini loaf. Half recipe makes one 9-inch square pan of bread. We use a muffin pan to make single servings easier to measure.

* I do not claim that substitute sweeteners single-handedly caused the GI disaster of 2009-2011. But they were certainly associated with the problem; once they were eliminated from our diet, I started to feel better. Symptoms returned during repeated trials with at least one of the sweeteners mentioned above, as they did during trials of a number of other foods. Which just means I won't be consuming any of those items in the near future.

** Sucanat is plain old dried sugar cane juice (but not the same thing as evaporated cane juice, which undergoes more processing). We've found it at Whole Foods, on Amazon, and in our local co-op.

*** We make our own pear butter by boiling down ripe pears with a little water and honey. If you want our recipe, just send me an e-mail; otherwise, similar fruit purees can be used (e.g., unsweetened applesauce).

**** I had leftover millet that I'd prepared in our rice cooker (one part grain to two parts water). For simple guidelines on cooking millet on the stove, check out this site.

Monday, October 17, 2011

And then I got a job

Not the first thing you expected after a vacation absence, right?

It wasn't what I expected either. But a week before our departure, a posting landed in my inbox offering the chance to work as an online tutor. True grammarian wanted, the ad said, flexible hours available.

I was a little skeptical about the quality of the employer, given the odd (read: unorthodox, bordering on misspelled) abbreviations elsewhere in the text, so I asked Marketing Sis if it looked legit enough to consider -- my goal was to start earning a wage through some form of teaching while still trying to balance that commitment with my own writing, among other necessary fall projects D and I are working on. So when Marketing Sis's magical search skills didn't turn up any employee complaints (or evidence of a scam), I threw together a resume and sent it off. Look at this as a chance to get your feet wet, I told myself, and if it ends up being disastrous, you can always walk away.

The business, it turns out, is owned and managed by one woman out of her home on the opposite side of the country, from which she contracts tutors all over the U.S. for students primarily on the East Coast. She failed to notice my Seattle address and called to interview me two days later at 6 a.m., without any prior contact to schedule said conversation.

I have to admit, I'm not swift to wake up and probably sounded a bit bewildered when I answered, fearing a close relative had gotten sick or injured. But when the woman quickly made her disdain known -- "Do you even remember sending me your application?" she asked, perhaps in response to my silence after she'd introduced herself -- I snapped to attention. Simple oversight, I thought, as I explained the time difference, after which the woman was effusively apologetic. So I padded downstairs from the bedroom, D still half-asleep in the darkness, and took her questions in my pajamas.

"You'll be tutoring students who need help on the grammar section of the SAT exam," the woman explained, which sounded manageable enough, even attractive. Subject-verb agreement, pronoun-antecedent agreement, misplaced modifiers, parallel construction -- I'd always enjoyed the rules of syntax, thanks in part to my own middle-school grammar teacher. The orderliness of language that she'd revealed, the characteristics of each part of speech, the algorithmic ways of determining the functions of each word in a sentence -- I loved all of it. Could I teach it? Oh, yes.

So I left for Hawaii, agreeing to start work within the week of my return.

Given my long silence since the beginning of October, I'm sure you've guessed at this point in the story that the job has turned out to be much more of a commitment than I believed it would be. Not because I have that many students -- there are just four -- but because my employer is more disorganized than, say, a five-paragraph persuasive essay with no thesis statement and randomly collected statements of fact instead of substantiated arguments. Teaching materials? Sent the day of my first tutoring session, minutes before it was supposed to begin. Oh, and did I mention that this woman decided during my absence to assign me some SAT writing students? My feelings on teaching essay writing to college students have been, at best, mixed -- comp instructors, breathe your collective sighs with me! (And then think about doing what you do, only with high schoolers. Mm hmm, specifically what I didn't want this job to be.)

But of course, given my experience, the woman "thought I'd be perfect" and went ahead with the plan without asking if I cared.

I've spent the last week putting some safeguards in place to keep my sanity from leaking out my ear, but let's just say that there's still plenty I need to do in order to get more timely information from my boss before each tutoring session -- and prevent her from transforming my job description any further. I've promised myself that I will live up to my new duties, but I'm drawing the line at further unforeseen demands.

As for our Hawaiian vacation: it was a getaway better than any we could ever have imagined. More on that trip -- which deserves so much more than passing mention -- once I get my work-life balance back.

Sunday, September 18, 2011

Nine weeks

That's how long I've been on this crazy elimination diet.

Yes, I chose not to write about the testing while it was ongoing -- it was life-consuming enough that I needed this space to think about other things, like what I've been examining through my most recent series of musings. I plan to continue adding to that, but more intermittently now that it's established (for me, as a commitment through habit of thought).

In the meantime, I'm beginning to get the much-wanted answers I'd been looking for. Preliminarily, we've determined that dairy products from cows do not love me, as much as I love them. Goat dairy is kinder, but ambiguously so. Eggs lie somewhere in between on that spectrum. Corn and soy are friendly.

Today I will complete one of three different gluten trials, and then we will suspend testing until our return from Hawaii. Our original plan was to be done with all the trials before the trip -- this Thursday! -- but because the dairy tests worked me over so thoroughly, I needed a lot of extra recovery time between each of them, which pushed our testing timeline much further into the fall than I'd anticipated.

I'm a mess of mixed feelings about it all. Relieved to have results at last, some of them quite definitive. Frustrated but resigned to the fact that more testing has to continue when we get back. Disappointed that the dietary limitations we've discovered so far will mean some significant changes to our original vacation plan.

I'd wanted a true getaway, where we'd have largely unstructured time to lie on the beach with a stack of books, bob around in the ocean, catch some tropical sunsets, feed ourselves on inexpensive local cuisine. We can still do plenty of all this -- but we'll have to be vigilant about what I eat that I haven't personally prepared (don't get me started on the pervasiveness of dairy in commercial foods, but do check out this site if you need guidelines for your own dairy sensitivities). And we'll need to cook some food as backup for moments when we're unable to find something that works at those mom-and-pop restaurants (or roadside stands) whose plate lunches or noodle bowls we were so looking forward to sampling. I guess it's the dream of being totally carefree -- not having to think so hard about what needs to be done ahead of time or what contingencies we ought to anticipate -- that is looking more and more unrealistic, and it makes me sad.

Still, I'm determined to be over this by the time we leave. This trip is meant to celebrate our surviving much, much worse. Like, say, all of 2010; the residual aftermath of an extended thesis year; the accumulated tension from the two-year commute that changed us both indelibly.

So I'm making a plan now, to minimize the mental effort we'll have to put in when we arrive. Grocery stores? Located. Cooking facilities? Secured, through our bed-and-breakfast hosts. Restaurant menus? Downloaded and vetted. Restaurant staff? Where practical, already contacted to ask if they can accommodate my dietary needs.

I hope, hope, hope that it all pays off. We may not get to throw caution to the wind, but at least these preparations will let us use the majority of our time to relax, rather than spend it on pesky logistics ...

Saturday, September 10, 2011

Scenes from a graduation, part 6: these ceremonial rites

When we get to the concert hall several hours later, no one is wearing academic regalia -- at least, not yet. The graduates will not arrive for a little while from morning exercises. But there are families milling about, some members clutching black robes striped in kelly green, the colors for those who already hold degrees in medicine. These are for the hooders, most of them parents of the graduates but some of them spouses or siblings.

The gown my mother hands my father is cardinal red.

"He insisted that it had to be this color," she says, rolling her eyes, "because he's a fellow." Red denotes not just my father's doctoral degree but his board certification in a sub-specialty, cardiology. My mother sighs. "Look at him; now he doesn't want to put it on because he knows he'll stand out."

And she's right. As the rest of the hooders begin to unfold their garments, my father hesitates, glancing self-consciously around. Perhaps he's second-guessing his insistence on the "proper" colors for his rank. There are, without question, numerous other fellows in this crowd, but they've all opted to keep the information to themselves. Each doctor will be on stage for mere minutes, half obscured by the graduates they will hood. Why the need to make such a particular visual statement? Pride, yes. But in the case of my father, it feels misdirected. While I can't know for certain what his motivations were when he ordered his robes, I suspect self-importance guided the choice more than the desire to wear his best, so to speak, out of respect for my sister.

I pity him a little, as his insecurity flickers into view. He couldn't help himself, I want to say to my mother, not sure if it's meant to excuse his hubris or condemn it. Neither seems appropriate, so once again, I pull out my camera. Even if I can't sort out the color of my thoughts, I can save the image of the moment to muse on later.

*

Rewind six months. I am elbow deep in boxes of photos and memorabilia at my parents' house, not sure what I'm there to find, but the clock on my thesis is ticking. The idea of graduation -- mine or anyone else's -- is far from my thoughts.

My mother and I have been talking since late summer about the whirlwind weeks of my parents' courtship. Four, to be precise. They'd started dating in the final month of my father's senior year of college at a Canadian university, after which he started medical school in the U.S., on a campus nine hundred miles away. My mother still had a semester to finish and hadn't planned on moving to another country.

But my parents wanted to remain a couple, she said -- the story of which I'm intrigued by, tempted to write. They'd already started talking about marriage by the end of those four weeks. So they courted by airmail for the entire four years that my father was studying to become a doctor.

In his home office, surrounded by stacks of unread medical journals and copies of call schedules, I finger the edges of a photo taken on the day of my father's medical school graduation. His school, unlike my sister's, does not have a special robe color for degree candidates, so he stands on the lawn that flanks the university chapel, in black and green like the faculty. He is alone in the picture, hands clasped in front, mortarboard as square to the top of his head as his gaze is to the camera.

"Who took the photo?" I ask.

"A classmate," my mother says. It was too expensive for her to fly down for the festivities, she explains a little sadly. "No one from his family went either -- too far to travel from Hong Kong." This latter excuse, we both know, is only half true; my father's parents rarely made much of personal achievements. These were to be expected rather than praised or celebrated, as he'd learned early on in his childhood.

We are quiet for a moment. The story that follows is familiar now to both of us: how my father left for Canada immediately after the degree ceremony, driving all night to get back for their wedding, which was to take place within days. It's misleading, then, this portrait's pomp and circumstance, its staid, unhurried pose. That someone managed to capture it -- my father was likely on his way to his already packed car when his friend offered to take the shot -- was fortuitous and may have been the only moment, however brief, in which someone else shared in his achievement the way a family might have.

It is this image that I suddenly remember in the concert hall foyer, as my father finally lets the folds of cardinal red fall open, and I wonder if he is thinking of that day some thirty years ago, footnoted so fleetingly on film. As he fumbles with the sleeves, the zipper, the hook, his face remains unreadable, his eyes focused solely on the task at hand. Because he has been raised to be this way -- practical, unsentimental -- he will not let on, even if this garment reminds him of the chapel and the lawn and the few seconds' pause before the click of the camera's shutter.

Perhaps my mother remembers the photo too as we reach automatically to help him smooth and straighten. The hood, lined in his alma mater's colors, flops and dangles like a superfluous appendage -- "Hold on! Don't walk off yet!" we tell him as we try to get it to hang at least somewhat centered down his back. When we are finished, my father examines our work and chuckles for the first time that morning, at himself. In spite of the curious looks he's beginning to draw -- "They think he's the university president," my other sister whispers -- he looks pleased.

*

My father and Almost Dr. Sis see each other for the first time that day from across the concert hall. Or maybe only he sees her. In the images we collect from that hour, my father stands against the right-hand wall leading to the stage while my sister stands on the opposite side. The room is too large to capture them both in the same frame. In my father's picture, though, he is clearly looking toward his daughter, whose own eyes are aimed at the line of deans whose hands she will soon shake.

I do not remember thinking much in this moment, though so much thought has gone before it -- my questions about what I would feel, watching my sister and father partake in this long-running ritual, the symbolic induction into an exclusive circle, both professional and familial. All I know is that I have a job, to record the moment as it unfolds. (The video capabilities of my phone are limited, but it is the best we have.) Though I won't realize it until afterward, I'm relieved to have this duty, to be able to focus on the task so that any other thoughts -- and the emotions they might carry -- do not become overwhelming.

We know they will announce my sister's name, followed by the name of her hooder, but hers has barely been broadcast when we, too excited by the first-time use of the word doctor as her official title, cannot keep ourselves from hooting like fans at a sporting event. My father's name is completely lost in the roar.

A wisp of guilt blooms within my chest -- I would have liked to capture my father's honors here too. I know then that in spite of his ego, I still care that he has missed so much in his life: not just the presence of family -- his and ours -- but the affection that comes with it, something he has been so used to living without. You are important too, I want to tell him, for each moment he ever privately doubted this -- and felt the need to compensate for it.

It takes my sister some time to cross the stage, so we are calm when she finally reaches my father, who stands with hands folded just as he did on the day of his own graduation, serious and proper. She passes her green velvet hood to him, turning to face the audience as the deans have instructed each graduate ahead of time, then bends at the knees slightly, as if curtsying, so my father can place the hood over her head from behind. Even so, he knocks her cap slightly askew. She grins as she straightens it, and -- is it possible? -- seems to look directly at us as we wave. I wonder if my father can see us too.

There is no time to find out; they must exit the stage to make room for other graduates. Quickly, my sister turns to hug my father, her enormous diploma in its cover between them. And then, to my surprise, instead of offering his usual one-handed pat on the back, my father raises both arms, almost as if opening a pair of wings. He folds them around her, pulling her close, draping her in the scarlet of his own mantle, oblivious to the leather folder poking them both in the ribs.

The moment lasts only a few seconds. But his smile, when he finally lets my sister go, is just as broad as hers.

For more from this series, please click here.

Friday, August 12, 2011

Scenes from a graduation, part 5: details

"Dad's going to ask where he needs to go when you pick him up," says Almost Dr. Sis. I nod, still a little groggy after a few hours' sleep, at the sheaf of maps and schedules tucked next to the gearshift in her car.

In twenty minutes, after I drop my sister off at campus, I will be back in her apartment, where our other sister is still slumbering on the living room couch. At that time, I'll review the route to my parents' hotel that my sister has marked in pen and pink highlighter -- there's a road race that will close many nearby streets; I don't want to get caught in detour traffic -- and I'll reread the printout of the e-mail she's forwarded to our father about where to wait with all the other physicians who will be hooding a graduate. Though she's explained to him that all he needs to know is spelled out on this single piece of paper, we both know he'll ignore it.

It irritates me that as a doctor, this man is meticulous about procedure and expects everyone else he works with to be too, but that for this event, he won't even glance over these instructions. He's trained us well. This little exchange in my sister's car is one of too many in recent years, where we scramble behind the scenes to ensure his good humor. There's too much at stake otherwise, too many casualties in the cycle of blame. If he is tardy, fails to locate the processional line, enters by the wrong door, it will be his loss of face. But he'll tell us that we -- wife and daughters -- should have known where he was supposed to go, and then he'll sulk. The idea rankles because he is unfair, but more so because it would be especially unfair to my sister to have him mar her day so unnecessarily.

I've gone back through every page my sister's given me and added my own notes, just to make sure everything is clear, fighting off the familiar tightness in my chest that makes my breastbone ache whenever we have to keep my father on his best behavior. But I don't say anything as we drive, my sister and I, through the foggy streets of the city toward the university, where I'll deliver her for the all-college commencement exercises. (The rest of us will join her just for her hooding, a separate medical school ceremony.) Frowning into the passenger visor mirror, she fusses with the angle of her cap; I silently admire the blue-black sheen of her hair, which dulls even the rich velvet of the same color.

I can't imagine what is going through my sister's mind in this moment. At one time, I might have tried, but we've both changed -- not unexpectedly -- in these years since we lived under one roof, and the sisterly understanding we may have had when we shared an address has shifted into new territory. I want to sense, as I thought I once could, what she's feeling, but she doesn't speak, and I don't wish to disturb her silence. I can't trust the read I'm getting from the tension in her jaw, but I'm conscious of my own discomfort, that she can sense it, and that it's irritating her.

My thoughts turn to the terse whispers I overheard between my sister and her roommate as I was waking, a misunderstanding about who needed the shower first. (The roommate is on rotation at the hospital.) And then the box of Kleenex I finished shortly afterward -- not seeing a recycling bin but loath to add to the disarray spreading through every room, half of it the detritus of a messy roommate and the rest my sister's packing-in-progress, I catch her while she's ironing her dress. "What do you want me to do with this?" I ask, holding up the empty container.

"Don't recycle it," she says.

Dutifully, I break down the box and put it in the garbage can. Five minutes later, she clucks with dismay. "I needed that to hold other things," she says, exasperated.

It's a simple misunderstanding but somehow an emblematic one too. Such small incongruities -- if these exchanges are so hard for us to navigate, what else will I misinterpret? Back in the car, I'm gun-shy from the memory. Our disconnection feels more pronounced in this space than it has since those first years after I left college, the last home we ever shared.

I will myself to relax for her, not to make things worse. "You look great," I say as she gives her cap one last look in the mirror. I pull up to the curb of a circular driveway; she snatches her robes, peacock blue, from the back seat, and I tell her to call if she needs us to bring anything she's forgotten.

As she crosses the driveway toward the main hall, others in peacock emerge like rare birds. I feel the day's first ripple of excitement in my chest at these sightings, remembering what I am here to celebrate. I want to take out my camera, to catch my sister as she walks away, pulling her robe up by its billowing sleeve while juggling her purse. For a moment, in this awkward pose, she feels less intimidating to me, still very much that confident woman but with the spirit of a little girl playing dress-up.

She turns, though, noticing that I haven't pulled away. Maybe she sees me leaning over the passenger seat as I fumble through my bag and thinks I'm examining the maps to get back to her place. She steps back toward the car; I pull forward and open the window. "You're on A________ now, and you'll turn right onto E________ at the intersection," she says, not unkindly.

I smile and withhold my regret -- no picture, just the memory. I need to get out of the way so she can move on with whatever comes next.

For more from this series, please click here.

Monday, July 18, 2011

Scenes from a graduation, part 4: limits

Hello! As you may have noticed, the writing's slowed down here -- we are in the midst of a heavy rotation of back-to-back visitors. (Our friends and family know the best time to come to Seattle is in summer, when the sun is out.) We're nearly done with B&B duty, though, so please stay tuned for more!

Dinner is easier -- just family. Although this is the first time we've all been in this city together, most of us have visited my sister enough individually to have dined with her at the place she's chosen for this evening, one known for its seafood. We settle in at the table together, laid with heavy silverware and votive candles, as if we've been doing this for a lifetime.

In a way, we almost have. Fine dining -- whether it's while traveling or at my parents' house -- is what my father has come to enjoy, of very little else, in the last fifteen years, so this is what we do with him. He cites his busy hospital schedule as an excuse for his lack of hobbies. I look at Almost Dr. Sis, who'd usually rather be out -- alone or with friends -- than in on free afternoons and evenings, and know my father's limits are more a product of temperament than anything external.

I'm an admitted homebody. And maybe, just maybe, if I'd become a doctor myself, I would be, like my father, too exhausted to do more than eat. That I resemble him in many ways -- habits, aversions, quickness to anger -- has been undeniable all my life, as much as I've been dismayed as I've grown more and more aware of these similarities. On a scale of predictable to spontaneous, we both skew away from the impromptu and, as a result, miss out on the joys of surprise, happenstance, discovery. Or so I believe, when I see the tension in his small, dark eyes, which mirror my own, as a well-laid plan goes astray.

My father is also, more often than not, testy and demanding, intolerant of change or other people's differing opinions. When these tendencies are at their worst, he's able to clear the living room at home just by walking into it, each daughter conveniently finding a reason to disappear, if only because conversation among us is impossible -- too likely to invite a lecture or judgment from him, born of his need to be in control. Left alone, then, he dissolves into the couch cushions, remote in hand and laptop on his knees, lost to their steady stream of I'm not sure what for the rest of the night, save for our evening meal together. Even then, the news blares from across the room. We try to ignore it; he does not.

I see what he misses -- and what I miss -- because of who we are, and the fear that I will become him tightens around me like a straitjacket. It's irrational; I know I have a chance at a different life than he may ever have because I do see, do fear. Still, when I'm feeling frazzled or inflexible, I have to remind myself that I'm not my father's carbon copy, even as I resist and moderate the tendencies we share, perhaps more rigorously than necessary.

For more from this series, please click here.

Friday, June 24, 2011

Scenes from a graduation, part 3: projection

In the auditorium of a local hotel, finally done traveling for the day, I slip into a cushy ergonomic chair that rotates. This isn't theater seating; it's conference hall seating. An enormous projection screen dominates the front wall, and the School of Medicine's glossy logo has been carefully applied to the wooden podium beneath it (removable decals, I'm guessing). Individual ethernet jacks and power outlets, built into the console table stretching across each row, make me feel like I ought to fire up my laptop to take notes. But we -- Troubadour Mom and Dad, my youngest sister and I -- pull out cameras instead.

Of course, we're not here for a lecture. This gathering of parents, siblings, children, other relatives, and friends is like Class Day from our undergraduate commencement festivities, a smaller celebration before the next day's all-graduate ceremonies with the lawyers, the engineers, the MBAs, and so forth. Tonight, a class-chosen faculty speaker will bestow light words of wisdom, a classmate will offer humorous reflections on these last few years of training, there will be a few awards, and then we'll all disperse for heavy hors d'oeuvres. My sisters and I share the same alma mater; I wonder if they also feel a certain déjà vu as we wait for the proceedings to begin. But maybe the conference room setting is too different to them. Class Day, so many years ago, was an outdoor folding-chair affair that, in Almost Dr. Sis's case, took place in a downpour.

I have to laugh a little at myself, always seeking the structure of things, the bones of each new experience. Is it just my way of handling the unfamiliar? Perhaps -- the parallels underneath, analogous armatures, ground me. But it is also a way of remembering, better to secure the details. For our family, there will be no other sister who passes through this medical program or any other. One chance, then, to enjoy these moments for what they are.

The soon-to-be graduates process in, the men in suits, most of the women in dresses. Academic regalia is reserved for the next day. I have not yet seen Almost Dr. Sis since arriving -- does she see us? No time for her to look up, but we follow her with both eyes and camera lenses.

I don't snap any shots, though. The pictures I might get would be blurry, I realize -- the camera on my phone isn't the best for subjects in motion -- and I'm happier without the filter of a viewfinder limiting what I can see. I lean forward, watching my sister in a soft white frock, glossy like meringue, cross into her assigned row.

It turns out that she is in charge of presenting the class gift this evening. As she steps toward the podium, the screen behind her suddenly lights up -- the audiovisual crew working this event has zoomed in, and my sister's head, now ten feet tall, smiles back at us in startling digital glory.

And I can't focus on her, the small woman in the flesh at the microphone. Her slight movements -- a nod, a turn, a tilt of the chin -- become giant ones on the screen. I'm reminded for a moment of Dorothy's audience with the Wizard of Oz. Of course, my sister and her video image are identical, unlike the thundering puppet head and its master, but the projection is still a bit disturbing. So dramatically magnified, it draws the eye away from the real person below.

But isn't that the point of it? I think. To help us see better, to allow us an enhanced point of view?

Maybe. I feel like I'm losing something, though, if I ignore the woman standing right in front of me in favor of the bobbing on-screen head. I can't watch both. I try to anyway.

*

The hors d'oeuvres at the reception are, indeed, heavy. Fortunately, to save me from eating too much, there are scores of my sister's friends to be introduced to. Some I recognize from my last visit a little over a year ago. Others are mentors I've heard of only by name.

There is one woman whose face gives me a double-take. The wire-frame glasses, the slightly upturned nose, the sandy curls, front teeth that peek out below a thin upper lip with a bit of mustache, and that raspy voice with a New York accent -- she is the doppelganger of a professor who has sat on my thesis committee for two years. The woman at Little U. is the sort of person who invited my research methods class, which she also taught, over to her house for potluck on the last night of the semester, just before I moved back to Seattle.

The woman at this reception supervises a group of medical students who travel each summer to run a clinic in South America. I realize my sister introduced me to her on my last visit, at a coffee-shop planning pow-wow for one of those trips. The woman doesn't remember me -- and I don't expect her to -- but the memory of her warm hug from that first meeting comes back as I greet her now. She is effusive, pouring forth compliments about my sister, this class, how special they are to her. It's impossible for me not to remember my own professor's words from potluck night, the same sort of praise overflowing from her in uncannily similar tones.

I'm not looking for these parallels in this moment; they've somehow found me. But for once they aren't grounding. In fact, I realize, I wish not to see what I see this time because it's made me aware of the other comparisons I can't help making -- between the path I chose, to write, and the path I rejected, to become a doctor myself. At one point, that was what I truly believed I wanted to do.

The need to be present for this rite of passage, then, the importance of getting here. You wanted to see what could have been, a voice whispers in my ear, and I recoil.

Don't, I hiss back silently, guiltily. This isn't about you. I glance around the circle my family has made around my sister and the woman who continues to effervesce. Good -- they haven't noticed the extra head I've suddenly grown, or the conversation I'm having with it.

For more from this series, please click here.

Tuesday, June 14, 2011

Scenes from a graduation, part 2: compromises

To my relief, the electronic monitors at O'Hare have no abnormalities to report. There's just enough time to grab a salad from one of the vendors on the walk between Terminals H and G, call D to let him know all is well, and fall into line at my connecting gate.

I am, short of my footwear, dressed for the evening reception we'll be heading to directly from the airport -- no time to change -- so I'm careful as I poke my fork into the chicken and greens in my lap, wary of wayward dressing drips. Though I would have preferred one of my favorite dresses, a soft silk whose pattern reminds me of thin washes of gray ink with occasional streaks of butter-yellow watercolor, I've opted for darker wool slacks and a pink paisley blouse. Still pretty, but slightly less feminine -- at least, as it feels to me. But I guess that's the point: in pants, I can stride, even run if I have to, without having to worry that my skirt has rotated or hiked itself into unladylike territory.

As I eat, I make note of the things I have to do when I land: call family, find bathroom, apply makeup, change sneakers to heels, unpack purse from luggage, transfer wallet and phone. The makeup and purse are already within easy reach toward the top of the items in my backpack, the shoes at one end of my suitcase. The heels are low in case I have a lot of walking to do with the heavy bags. I am, if nothing else, extremely practical.

I know, though, that my mother and sisters will all be in dresses tonight, that this will bother me even though I resist the feeling adamantly. This -- blouse, slacks -- is what is comfortable for me on this 2,500-mile travel day, and yet, in their company, it will leave me not ill at ease but something like it. As if my lack of willingness to do as they would -- just wear the dress -- is indicative of some personal deficit in the quality all Troubadour women ought to have, a tolerance for inconvenience in the name of feeling our outward best.

I picture the gritty airport bathroom stalls at my final destination, the acrobatics of changing in that narrow space with luggage to boot, and I know I will feel anything but my best -- inside or out -- after attempting a transformation there. I'll be meeting my sister's doctor colleagues and doctor professors, whom I'm mildly intimidated by, at this evening's reception, and I'd prefer not to be fighting a case of the cranks after playing public restroom Twister. So, gaping toilet? Questionably sanitary walls on which to hang so many dry-clean-only garments? Given my choices, I'd rather feel the needling sadness of being conflicted over how I look, sadness that I can't just be confident in this fairly inconsequential decision, rather than feeling certain frustration with trying to be more than I'm able. Just for today, anyway.

For more from this series, please click here.

Sunday, June 5, 2011

Scenes from a graduation, part 1: getting there

This is the first in a series of posts chronicling my whirlwind second half of May -- there was too much to put in a single post, and the trip generated much for me to think about, so here's the compromise: a story in parts. For the entire series, please click here.

My suitcase gapes at me from the bedroom floor and I wonder if the zipper will close. Nine days of clothing for three different cities with three different climates and three different kinds of celebration -- this is what I have to pack within the confines of a single carry-on.

My first stop on this trip is Almost Dr. Sis's graduation from medical school, which promises to be cold and rainy. Very rainy. Here in Seattle, we're used to mist and drizzle, but in the Midwestern town where she's lived for half a decade now, there are thunderheads gathering and a long sweep of heavy gray downpour following behind.

On this Friday afternoon, I've just tucked a pair of wool slacks into place -- it promises to reach the mid-40s in the evening, though we're in the latter half of spring -- when the phone rings. It's my mother. "Our connecting flight was canceled and we're driving from Chicago," she says, with irritation. "Can you look up directions for us?"

I can hear my father at the wheel in the background naming interstates. "Do I want 290? 294? Ask her which one, which way -- " His agitation rises with what I'm guessing is each passing road sign. They are on the arteries that skirt O'Hare, circling blindly.

My mother tries to address my father's question before I've even had a chance to grab my laptop from the bed. He doesn't trust her answer; they bicker. I fumble at the keyboard, calling up maps, the hair on the back of my neck beginning to stand on end. The memory of previous car trips from childhood: my mother misreading directions, their ensuing fights, my sister and me shrinking small and silent in the back seat with our younger sister, still a baby, between us. My hands work faster now as their voices escalate.

"Here," I say. They're too busy arguing to notice. "Mom. Mom." No answer. In my own home, two thousand miles away, their presence is suddenly too loud, too close. "WILL YOU BOTH SHUT UP ALREADY?"

Silence.

I wince, expecting even now, as an adult, a sharp reprimand from my father for my tone of voice, but maybe only my mother has heard me clearly -- she is the one holding the phone. I plunge ahead before either of them can say anything, offering exit numbers and mileage estimates in lieu of an apology. "It's about seven hours," I note.

"We'll make it in less time," my mother assures me. "You know how Dad drives. By the way, he wants to know which flight you're on tomorrow."

I suppress a sigh, knowing my father is worried that I'll end up in the same predicament -- except with the graduation ceremonies scheduled for Sunday morning, I'll have much less of a window to get from Chicago to my final destination. It matters. My father, a doctor himself, will be the one to place the doctoral hood on my sister, a moment that, to me, feels somehow essential to witness in person, though there will be professional photographers and videographers to capture it all. And I wonder, suddenly face to face with that truth, why it should be so. Of course I am proud of her. But it is more than just being present to let my sister know, more than sitting in the same room with her for this long-anticipated, hard-won induction into the professional circle my father has been a part of for many decades. What is it? I ask myself. And -- with even more curiosity, as I suspect it is for different reasons -- what is it that makes my presence so important to him?

There isn't time in this afternoon to muse, only to finish packing. "Can she take the red-eye tonight?" I hear my father ask.

"No, but I'll look into bus options for tomorrow afternoon, just in case," I promise.

*

On the jet bridge the next morning, I check my seat assignment: 10A, on a window. When I can, I pick seats with a view; it helps with the tendency toward motion sickness both my sister and I have inherited from my father.

As I step into my row, however, I'm greeted by a solid wall. No porthole, not even half of one like some seats get when they happen to fall between windows. Just a beige expanse of siding. I peer at 10F on the opposite side of the aisle; the oval pane there throws light back at me, ordinary as can be.

I feel, not surprisingly, closed in against this blank barricade. I check the status of my next flight on my phone; still on time. But this flight, the captain suddenly tells us over the intercom, will be delayed. Chicago's still having weather.

D has my flight information and instructions to be near his phone around the time I'm supposed to land at O'Hare, in case he has to make a quick bus ticket purchase for me online. Will I be able to make my connection? Will there be a connection to make? I turn my frown to the wall to my left. I can't see what's on the other side, can't see what's to come.

*

It is the first flight I'm taking from Seattle after finishing my thesis, and for a moment, when we finally leave the runway, I'm a little giddy. When the flight attendant announces that we may now use approved electronic devices, I will not need to wrestle my laptop from my backpack and attempt to write. The goal I've been working toward for four years is all but done; only Little U.'s approval of the document -- formatting compliance, verification of my committee's signatures endorsing the final submission -- is pending. Perhaps by Monday, I tell myself, the day my sisters and I will fly to Texas to spend the middle of the week at our parents' home.

But as I speed toward the thunderheads in Chicago, without a view and without the deadlines I've been so used to, I'm forced to sit with my new lack of purpose. It's only transient, I know. Still, I envy, just a little, my sister's waiting future. A residency at a prestigious hospital in Boston is the next step for her. What the experience will hold is certainly unknown, but it's better defined than the summer I have before me. The plans for whatever I choose to do next with my life still wait to be constructed.

The plane banks as the captain adjusts our trajectory. I turn automatically to the window I don't have and feel my stomach protest. A quick glance to the right, to the view I can steal from 10F. It's limited, but it's better than nothing.

Thursday, May 26, 2011

In the last two weeks, I ...

... visited three cities in three separate time zones via seven airports.

... slept, because of travel, an average of five hours per night. Yes, an average.

... received final clearance on my thesis from Little U. on the Prairie.

Which of the above is the most likely reason I've been catching up on R&R in the last 24 hours (and, as a result, neglecting* this blog)?

* A return to more regularly scheduled programming is promised as soon as the circles under my eyes are a little less prominent. I'm off to take another nap.

Wednesday, May 11, 2011

It's not starting over

It's just a new point of embarkation.

That's where I feel I am, now that Monday is past. That's when I mailed my final deposit of my manuscript to Little U., where, hopefully, it will arrive and undergo review for archiving by the end of the week. Once it receives clearance, I will be DONE. My degree should arrive in the mail in late summer.

We -- D and I -- are thankful to have this nearly behind us. It's been an incredible strain on both of us for four years, first because of the return to a commuter relationship it required and secondly because the thesis portion dragged out and drew resources from me in ways that made our marriage suffer. I can't begin to encapsulate how exactly that worked (or, rather, didn't), but the effect was a stagnation in our growth as a couple. We'd never had the chance to have a "normal" existence together because of the long-distance situation that limited us before we were married and then our work schedules afterward (D worked days and I worked nights and weekends). We did our best, but we were inexperienced. We floundered.

The holding pattern we maintained during this last year was only just bearable, with much of the credit to the help we sought. Now that thesis work is essentially done, we are refocusing on what we need to get to a better place.

D's been angry about the idea of starting over. That's how it all feels to him -- that somehow, everything we'd been through in the last twelve years together "didn't count." I'd argue that it very much does. We learned a lot of survival skills; they just don't apply as much anymore.

So, as we construct a new set, I'm doing my best to foster some optimism for both of us, even though he's not quite there yet. It's exhausting. You want, at times, to scream when you feel someone else scattering the fragile pieces of hope you've propped together like tinder waiting for a spark. But it's not nearly as crazy-making as battling a past-due project, deadlines come and gone, alone. As much as D wanted to, he couldn't help me write, and the responsibility I felt for our misery put me in a constant low-level panic (with intermittent high-level spikes). Now that the precipitating factor for much of that is gone -- and I'm saying no to any new deadlines that involve paying tuition on top of having to meet them -- I feel like the balance in our dynamic has a chance at restoration.

There will, without question, be other events to throw that balance off. But before then, my hope is that we'll have better tools in place to make what comes more manageable. That this will be our hope soon.

Sunday, May 1, 2011

Things I can no longer ignore

It's funny how timing works out.

I've had my head in my thesis pretty steadily (and intensely) since February -- and in the midst of concentrating on the project with so much of my brain, I had to let a lot of other things on my radar remain, at best, peripheral. Which included some aspects of my health. Nothing debilitating: some skin irritation, nerve wonkiness in my hands and feet, intermittent GI protests. The last issue has been ongoing since the middle of 2009 (despite the work-up a year ago), and after so long, I'd practically gotten used to it.

But about two days before I turned in my thesis to my committee, things started to get noticeably worse. Fortunately, I had a follow-up appointment with my doctor (the new one) the day after my draft was due, and her advice, after hearing everything that had been going on for so long, was to consider a food sensitivity as the culprit.

"Gluten and dairy," she said -- these were the most likely suspects. So she suggested an elimination diet followed by an allergen challenge. "Just try going gluten-free for three weeks then dairy-free for three weeks," she said, "and see what happens."

What else is a girl to do with all her newly available time?

I took the news back to my dietitian, who happens to specialize in this kind of testing, and she printed up the protocols. I figured the process wouldn't be fun, but it would be short-lived. Then I looked at the instructions.

"To make this kind of testing accurate and meaningful, you'll want to do more than eliminate gluten and dairy," she told me, pointing to a greatly expanded list of foods and food additives. "Sensitivities can occur in groups. So ideally, you'll want to test all of them."

I won't reproduce the whole catalog here. But let me name a few choice items besides gluten and dairy. Corn. Soy. Eggs. Peanuts. Tomatoes. Peppers. White potatoes. Processed and/or non-organic meats. Shellfish. Strawberries. All citruses. Caffeine. Alcohol. Refined sugars and artificial sweeteners. Processed oils. The list is, even for someone who already has experience with dietary restrictions, more than daunting. And the diet has to be followed for nine weeks, four to allow the body to get rid of residual allergens, then five that cycle in -- very carefully -- each group of potential irritants, one set at a time every third day.

Let's just say this isn't how I envisioned I'd be spending most of the summer.

There is an upside: if I can get this done by mid-September, I will potentially know exactly what's making me feel less than terrific -- and, after getting rid of the little menace(s), be able to go to Hawaii feeling better.

So. After the thesis is officially finished, I'll be looking into the logistics of this new project. It wouldn't be quite so intimidating if I lived on my own and had no one else to answer to. But we've been looking forward to being more social, inviting people over for potluck, taking an extended bike trip with a few friends, visiting and being visited by family. All of that suddenly seems incompatible with the trial because it's inconvenient for the people around me. Imagine subjecting visitors to all of those restrictions when we eat at home or outside the house. Or, in the opposite vein, consider the culinary acrobatics of preparing dual meals so guests can eat "normally," hosting a potluck but not eating what your friends have prepared, going to restaurants but not ordering anything and packing my own food to consume before or after. (Seriously, what are the chances a mainstream eatery will have something, besides a naked lettuce leaf, free of refined sugar, processed oil, corn, soy, eggs ...)

And then there are those looks. The ones you get from people who don't understand your limits and, once they realize just how many there are, back away warily. I shouldn't have to apologize for my circumstances but I often feel like it's warranted -- for the relatively few restrictions I have now, which already make some people uncomfortable.

I know -- those instances are occasional and I shouldn't expect to run into them all the time, but they reduce me to a sense of profound and irrational loneliness. I can't let that prevent me from doing the testing and I can't let the testing keep me from having a life. But how?

Well, if there's anything I'll learn from this experiment, it will be some kind of answer to that question.

Thursday, April 21, 2011

Printed and mailed!

And good riddance.

I can't say I like the revision I sent to my committee on Monday afternoon, but in the limited time I had to address all the comments from my advisor, I did the best I could with the file. The hard copy, which goes to the graduate college review board for more technical assessments (formatting for the purposes of binding, archiving, etc.), went out from the post office today.

So I am, until my defense a week from Monday, free of responsibility for this draft!

The last two weeks have been disheartening because the writing really did become an endeavor for the purpose of finishing my degree, to satisfy my advisor's concerns rather than adhering to the larger vision I had (and still have) for the book project. Because the work is by nature incomplete -- writing a book and writing a thesis are not on the same scale -- and because the thesis also needs to be "complete," i.e., must set forth enough evidence of thought and inquiry into my subject to merit a sense of a focused investigation, I found myself revising at cross-purposes when I tried to satisfy my instincts and my professor's. Obviously, she and the rest of my committee will determine whether I graduate, so I ended up making some changes that I will be taking out again once I have the degree in hand. (I'm trying not to think about the remaining round of post-defense revisions that I'll have to complete before that happens.)

Life here has calmed down some since my last post. It's a relief. Thank you to the lovely people who sent private words of encouragement -- you know who you are. You helped me endure a craptacular two weeks where everything seemed to go pear-shaped and I had no choice but to get through it.

In the interim before my defense, I'll be doing some serious decompression (in between a lot of backlogged household chores). And I have a new project. Not one I'd say I elected to take on, but one that has taken on unexpected priority. More on that very soon ...

Thursday, April 7, 2011

How to eff the ineffable

A writer classmate of mine once used that phrase, which she'd acquired from a former professor. I'm invoking it now because, well, there's a lot I'd like to eff.

I don't mean eff as in that wonderfully flexible expletive I would have liked to utter (as noun, adjective, verb, or other part of speech -- thank you, George Carlin) when, at the end of yesterday, my manuscript was not in my hands. Yes, I've e-mailed my professor to get the tracking number.

No, I mean, the unbloggable kind of things I'd like to eff. There are those things that, though usually not trotted out in conversation with acquaintances, I do write about here: thoughts on family, thoughts on illness.

But then there's the stuff of ugly fights, in person, on the phone. The kinds of things you take to a mediator because you just don't have the perspective to work through them in a constructive way. Because both parties involved are raw.

That's been the last month, after many more months of buildup. And I'm not inclined to go into it here because it's not constructive. Not yet.

But that plan for getting through thesis? Well, it works when it's just thesis stuff getting me down. It's not enough for the specific kind of loneliness you feel after you hang up (by mutual agreement), after you sit for hours in silence not knowing what to say or do (because the alternative -- speaking -- will make things worse).

This is what makes my thesis feel so pointless sometimes.

Yes, we have professionals lined up; yes, it's helping. A lot. I don't want to imagine where we'd be without all that in place. We are so new, however, to the changes we've agreed to make, so used to the old habits. Under duress, we fall back on what we know and everything refragments.

I confess: yesterday, I totally effed my plan. Today, I get back to it. And reshape it to address what I can't eff here.

Tuesday, April 5, 2011

Pruning and grafting

My manuscript is somewhere over the U.S. today.

I'd e-mailed the full draft to my advisor last week, as instructed. She wrote me a harried reply late Sunday night to say she'd only started reading it that day, was halfway through, and was exhausted. (She's teaching an overload and is on seven other thesis committees, she said, as she's said numerous times this semester.) She'd been writing directly on the hard copy she'd printed off. Could I give her my address so she could mail it to me, two-day air? Just the first six chapters. On the seventh, she'd had nothing to suggest.

Nothing? That gave me some pause. They say any editor, when she's giving your work the attention it ought to have, should be able to find something.

I gave my advisor the information, hoping she'd keep duplicates in case what she was sending got lost. I almost asked her if she'd do that for me, just for my own peace of mind. But I couldn't quite ask her to make copies. She was already fried. She didn't need to hear my implied mistrust -- of her judgment, the postal service, the universe. I'm working on that last one, but old habits die hard, especially after last year.

When that package hits the front porch tomorrow, I'll need to be in the frame of mind to dive in, assess what and where to add or subtract with my advisor's guidance, limited as I'm afraid it might be. And I knew that, when I sent it off, given her increasingly frazzled notes in the last two months. So I took the last days of the previous week and the weekend to leave the draft completely, to prepare myself: laundry, yard cleanup. I can't edit well when I'm surrounded by clutter.

The lavender we planted two summers ago is turning green again after the winter. And it was looking leggy. I squatted for an hour, clipping away dead wood, tidying, shaping, peering at tiny silver shoots, trying to determine how the plants would look in a few weeks' time when they had filled out.

This morning, I saw them from the kitchen window -- six little fuzzy globes by the flagstone walk -- and mumbled some kind of prayer: let me be able to see what I need to see tomorrow and for the rest of this month.

The routine my advisor and I have kept for the past two years has been more like this: I send her pages; she writes a note back summing up her general impressions with a list of specific concerns at the end. It sounds like I'll be getting the specifics as they appear in the margins, but the big picture, right when it really matters? That's what she won't be pulling together for me; she asked my permission, in a way, to be excused from that. I'm disappointed. If there was ever a time that the larger impression felt crucial -- but I can't worry about it. There just isn't anything more I can ask of her, so enough. I'll make do.

Six little fuzzy globes, six hairy chapters. At least it's not a delicate bonsai ...

Addendum 4/6: No package as of 8 p.m. PDT. Insert choice expletive here.

Wednesday, March 30, 2011

Alternatives

The hazards of heavy deadlines: a heavier Troubadour.

Not by much, but I can feel it in the way my clothes fit and I know exactly where it's coming from. I wish I could say it's just the excuse and abuse of a few irresistible restaurant menus from celebrating our birthdays earlier this month (both D and I had them). But really, it's days of an extra spoonful of this at lunch, an additional morsel of that at dinner, straight-up standing in the kitchen with one's head in the pantry in search of something to take the edge off all the stress, the kind that builds up in between those outings I wrote about last week. Salty or sweet, this girl has been going after snacks that sate her inner child who is long past tired of being told just one more page, hell, one more sentence ...

And I need to, um, scale that back.

But I also need alternatives. Because I still have a month to go before the defense -- Chapter 7 is heading off to my advisor tomorrow, after which we will do a broad assessment of the project for the purposes of revision -- and mental resources are running thin. I'm still five pages short. There are other unbloggable things going on that are making me crazy in my downtime. And my habit of medicating with food, while a tried-and-true (tried-and-false?) quick fix so I can get back to the so-called degree-finishing plan, is not working in my favor.

I'm holding myself to this by writing it here -- a plan to help me deal with my other plan. To wit, instead of sticking my head in the pantry, I will ...

  • stick my head in a book, even if only for fifteen minutes. And if I don't like the one I have on hand, I'll go find another one. Who says you have to read books one at a time? Different moods, different texts. To make this work, I'd better pile a few choice items in one place. It's ridiculous, but the endgame of thesis writing increases personal inertia some thirty fold. Don't ask me about the laundry that hasn't been done.

  • do something nice for somebody else. Small things that don't take a lot of time, like looking up and e-mailing a recipe that someone asked you about. Because if you're thinking about other people, you're not thinking about yourself, and that is EXACTLY what I need when I'm trying to get away from my own stress.

  • work on plans to go to Hawaii. Yes, travel preparations come with their own stress, but what's fifteen minutes of reading about where I might stay/sunbathe/swim in a lagoon fed by a natural waterfall/forget I ever thought this degree was a good idea/reward myself for getting done?

  • indulge in some TV via Hulu or Netflix. I usually save this exclusively for when I'm working out on the elliptical machine, but since January, I've been writing while on it (a funny picture, I'm sure, but it works). So I have a backlog of shows I keep telling myself I'll get to. Such entertainment without accompanying cardio may indeed lower my resting metabolism further, but at least it's not more calories in, just fewer calories out.

  • look up potential bike trails in our area. Summer is coming, and D and I want to try a few local outings once all of this thesis business is out of the way. It's not skiing, but we need an outdoor physical activity during non-snowy months that we enjoy together. We've figured out it's one of the better ways we bond.

Okay, I think that's enough for now. Take that, thesis! I will get done with you yet.

Monday, March 21, 2011

Feelers

I've been quiet here, I know. It's a mixed silence, some of it imposed largely out of respect for the devastation in Japan. What sorts of things that I normally write about here have any importance in the face of the aftermath there? I've watched the headlines, counted my blessings. Inched forward with writing elsewhere -- thesis, primarily, and other notes to self.

I'm on the home stretch, despite my advisor's rejecting my most recent plan to get my page count where it needs to be. We don't do analysis in this program, she said; it's not required. By which she meant, no, I don't want a report. I want more of the story.

So I went back to my draft. She'd looked it over and sent good comments, so I had new ideas on how I might make Chapter 6 grow. Early last week, I forwarded a revision to her. Now, with Chapter 7 under construction, I have just nine pages or so to go.

It's a relief -- April 1st is my goal for the final chapter -- but it's also meant a certain amount of living under a rock (beyond reading the online news). I'm taking it in stints. Each weekday, a morning session, an afternoon session. Nights off. At the worst part of the struggle to get Chapter 6 started, I was staring at the screen at all hours, still getting nowhere.

To counter the feeling that I'm turning into an earwig, I've imposed mandatory outings that involve interaction with people. To get lunch with new acquaintances during the week (a girl has to eat). To peruse an art exhibit on a Saturday afternoon, to attend the symphony with D on a weeknight, even to ski. For that last one, I took the thesis with me and nearly got carsick working on it while D drove into the mountains, but it was worth the effort. I wrote until I was nauseated and then skied until my legs threatened to buckle. Went back home with a clear head, which, above all, is what I need to keep my writing brain moving.

It's not what I expected my writing process to be, but it's true that you can't write well if you spend all your time with your attention turned within. So I'll take it, even if the workaholic in me keeps tapping my shoulder and pointing at the time.

Nine pages. The end's in sight.

Addendum 3/22: Airline tickets for the defense have been purchased. No turning back now!

Friday, March 4, 2011

Creative writing?

Another week, and still not much progress. My thesis is trying to write itself in the best way it can, but there's no brain behind it. Or rather, no heart. The paragraphs I've strung together have technical finesse, but the words feel hollow and directionless, like a blurry facsimile of the real story I want somehow to tell. And the writer in me knows it. After letting the thesis grow so many lines of text, like mutant tentacles searching for a place to catch hold, my own brain balks. This just isn't going anywhere, it says.

I've hit the point in the narrative where the story is too big for me to see its arc again. Unfortunately, this isn't a block that can be solved by reading the words of other writers for reinvigoration. In a way, it's like I've been trying to work my way out of the center of a bull's eye. The tiny circle in the middle was the first chapter; the next ring out, the four that followed. Finding a vantage point from which to see that second group of chapters took months -- from last February to last August -- and I don't have the luxury of time anymore.

I have some twenty pages to fill and two years' worth of research. Even if the story isn't falling into place, my process of seeking answers is certainly well documented. So my plan, which I've now e-mailed my advisor, is to use all of that to write an afterword. It'll give voice to a lot of questions that haven't yet been asked within the narrative and reveal the as-yet-unaddressed pieces of the story, rough as their introduction there might feel to me.

It's not the way I want to finish this. But finished is what this needs to be.

Addendum 3/6: My laptop fried a portion of its hard drive today. First the adapter cord, now the disk itself? I'm not liking this trend.

Friday, February 25, 2011

Note(s) to self

I feel like I need to write them.

I have been, actually. A quick e-mail here and there, just a sentence or two. Don't forget to do this, be sure you remember to pick up that, call this person, mail that letter, tell yourself these things because if you don't, they will blow away like powdery snow that refuses to stick.

But there's more than a list of chores accumulating in my inbox. There are ideas, baby ones, for writing. For essays that will have to wait till the thesis is done.

Trust me, I'd work on both if I could, but I know the limits of my energy and concentration. Still, I'm excited. For so long, I've wondered if all I had was this work, and if it was never to get finished or I lost interest, what then?

What then.

I wrote about inspiration in the days after my conference, and then I found myself without it last week. Out of some instinctive need, I went to the library and turned to the voices of the writers I'd met -- some in person, some through the mention of their work. And the fog in my mind began to clear.

It was not the exact subject or idea that helped me. In fact, reading someone else's work on the same thing you might be writing about can be very intimidating -- it's been done, it's so easy to think. And there are critics who will say that it's true, that love and death and trauma are all tired topics. But it's not the what of the writing; it's the how. One of the panels I attended was dedicated to that idea, what happens when we're told that something is too "done" -- or so the language runs -- to write about anymore.

I came away from that panel with more resolve behind what I'd been trying to do in the last few years. Not that this alone can clear those pesky blocks from my mind when the work doesn't know where it needs to go. But in reading the prose of one of the panel members this week, I was able to get away from my own tangled thoughts and understand, through her way of narrating her story, that sometimes not knowing how to proceed is itself the fiber that can tie words together. Instead of trying to sew up holes, I needed to point them out. And what each person doesn't know, how she navigates that -- this is what fingerprints a work, making it its own.

Chapter 6 is at last under way, and no, I still don't know where it will end up. But I know with certainty now that this is okay. That the examination of the unknown itself may be just where it needs to go.

Thank you to everyone who's sent me suggestions, exercises, and even talismans for kicking the writer's block! It's been incredibly helpful to know you're cheering me on.

Monday, February 21, 2011

Wordless

So I turned in Chapter 5.

And then I crashed.

Not that I wasn't trying to get the next part of this thesis done -- I spent every day last week staring at a blinking cursor, typing sentences only to delete them or hit enter to move them down the page because they led nowhere. False starts. Words that felt labored and unclear because the direction of the work itself, at this juncture, is nebulous too.

I fear these moments most. Chapter 5 closed a major section of the project -- an accomplishment to be proud of. But with it, the momentum of the story shut down too. There's much more I need to say, and in turning this work into a book after I finish my MFA, I will. But for now, for the next two or three chapters that I must write to make my page count to graduate, I need to know what piece comes next in this puzzle. And because all the previous chapters have so cleanly packaged themselves together (not something I anticipated, but that's where the writing went), it's like I'm starting a new thesis, in a way.

I'm not good at beginnings. And last week, in the face of this unexpected return to one, I thrashed, going back again and again to the keyboard when I should have just given myself a break. You see, I wanted to speed up the process. These blocks don't crumble without a lot of trial and error, and I figured the more time I put in, the sooner I'd find a way through.

It hasn't happened. And after so many miserable days, I need a new approach. So I'm reading other writers' words, hoping for inspiration, and trying to ignore that feeling of powerlessness as the clock ticks on.

It's still staggering.

Thursday, February 10, 2011

Reconnecting

The conference is over, and I'm spent. Three days of attending panels, meeting editors and agents, and familiarizing myself with -- well, I'm not sure there's a term to describe what the ins and outs of being a writer entails. It's art and business and mentorship and a tenuous work-life balance, at the very least. I got to hear about that in detail from many different people, who have experienced it in vastly different ways.

I'm still wrapping my head around it all. And I hope to do that in part by writing about it here. But first, I need to get down in words a different story that has run alongside the writing I've been doing for many years.

When I was an intern at a magazine in D.C., the summer before I started my last year of college, a fairly prominent photographer, but not one I'd ever heard of, gave a talk during lunch. He was about sixty at the time, married without children. He spoke about his work, which took him around the world, but more importantly, he spoke about how he came to it from a childhood in rural Ohio and described the family he grew up with there. While he didn't say this explicitly, I saw how their stories were entwined with his and, as a result, were knitted into the photos and writing he crafted long after he'd moved away, like fiber wicking ink.

Under his words whispered a stranger language that my ear didn't understand but some other part of me did. I wouldn't have called it a soul at the time, but I will now. It sat up and took notice, recognizing, though we'd never spoken directly, writing-kin. I was only beginning to learn, in crafting narrative essays, what he seemed to be demonstrating in his photos: the act of examining one's life by looking at and documenting, counterintuitively, the lives of others we encounter. And I wanted to say, yes -- yes! This is what my work is for me too, and thank him for revealing this to me, even as more questions about that impulse threatened to overtake the thought before it was fully formed.

He invited the interns in attendance to contact him at any time after his talk if we had questions or were interested in chatting more, so I sent him a note toward the end of the summer. Coffee, I suggested. Dinner, he replied, his treat. And so, at a tiny Japanese restaurant, with a chef who would introduce me to my first taste of sushi, we talked in the way an intern and a mentor might about writing and life -- or were they, in some breaths, the same? -- until the lights were bright on the sidewalk and the heat of the city had gone.

*

We didn't speak again for years. I graduated, began teaching, got engaged, took a different job that leached what soul I did know I had from me, planned a wedding, and neglected my writing throughout it all. Then came grad school and commuting, not a year after D and I were married. I had no reason to go to D.C., and certainly nothing I felt compelled to share with this man who had encouraged me in his own way to pursue what mattered to me. The challenge of the commute overshadowed my work at Little U., and it made me doubt my drive to write. I stared at white space without excitement or joy or even curiosity about what might appear.

But I remembered what the photographer had said in his talk, so many years ago, about his own challenges before a near-empty page. "Never stop in a tidy place," he said. "Leave a sentence unfinished, an idea only halfway developed, a paragraph mid-stride, as it were. That way, when you come back, you will be able to pick up and re-engage."

So as I did begin to put one word in front of another in this last year, I followed his advice. And the work that has emerged is in some ways the result.

Once I knew I'd be going to D.C. for my conference, I wanted to find the photographer to return, at the very least, the kindness of the meal he'd treated me to. I found his name in a posting for a photography class several months old, but fresh enough that the media contact might still know how to reach him. I wrote to her, telling her in brief this story.

Two days later, the photographer wrote me back. "I remember you well and have often wondered where you were and what [you] have been doing," he said. He'd moved away from D.C. but still visited the city from time to time to meet with his editor. "So please tell me when you will be there. Perhaps your visit will coincide with one of my trips. I hope so."

On Monday, we met for lunch. I was early and tried in vain not to be nervous; he was late and put me completely at ease. From the moment we saw each other, it was as if we were simply picking up the conversation we'd suspended. And so we talked about writing and life, just as before, but this time as friends.

I remembered then what it was to love what I do but even more so how much a connection to other writers is essential to me in sustaining such a solitary art. So I am glad for this dialogue we've restarted, one that promises to continue for a long time. As it turns out, the photographer visits Seattle once a year, so we have an informal standing get-together for the foreseeable future.

As for that strange language I first heard during his talk, I was surrounded by it all week, even in the moments when I was overwhelmed by all there was to take in. So I think it's safe to say I was doing what I needed to for a long-forgotten part of me, and I won't question that further. Or at least, not as much -- as long as this language is mine to hear.

Wednesday, February 2, 2011

And there goes another one

Fastest chapter on record -- yes, No. 5 is off into the electronic ether. It may very well remain out there for a few days while both my advisor and I are at this week's conference (assuming she's able to get in tonight), but that's fine. I'm relieved that it's off my desk and I can now focus on the next few days here.

Speaking of here, I very nearly didn't make it because of the weather yesterday. But I was lucky enough (seriously, how long has it been since I've gotten to say those words!) to finagle a flight change out of Seattle when my original itinerary through Dallas was canceled -- as well as the second and third rebookings automatically generated by the airline's computer system. No. 2 routed me through Chicago (into even heavier snow?); No. 3 put me back through DFW on the red-eye (16 hours after my original flight, into sub-zero conditions in a metropolis that handles temperatures in the 20s only rarely). Damned connecting cities!

I'm no fan of six-hour flights, but when the very cranky gate agent I sidled up to managed to find the last open spot on a nonstop operated by a partner airline, I was delighted. So, only an hour after I was originally supposed to take off, I squeezed into a seat between two gentlemen and tried to get comfortable.

Believe it or not, that's where I finished Chapter 5.

It was definitely a challenge, trying to do that with so many interruptions -- captain's announcements, the shuffling of beverages, turbulence (the flying-over-a-blizzard kind, not just a few bumps here and there). But with the new laptop battery that arrived just in time for the trip, I got a solid two hours of writing done. A big thank-you to my seatmates for being the quiet kind (one seemed to be studying for an interview; the other was writing a PowerPoint presentation on his own laptop). Not that I don't like being social, but the window of opportunity was invaluable.

So now I'm on page 51. Twenty-four to go ...

Thursday, January 27, 2011

I just wanted a trim, really

Next Tuesday, I will get on a plane and head for the Other Washington, where I'll be attending a conference. It promises to be lively -- hundreds of writers talking about what they do, how they do it, and why. So I'm excited. Mostly. After all, it's also intimidating to wander among the well-published or -- gulp -- their agents.

I'm in prep mode, trying to get all my ducks in order before I leave. Bills paid? Check. Clothes washed? Almost check. Toiletries packed? Check, and check. How about a haircut? Check ... please.

I present, for your amusement, a conversation (sort of) that transpired when I went for a trim this week. Let's just say that the small talk the stylist tried to engage me in was not what I'd expected.

Scene: a local bargain-basement hair salon (conveniently advertising half-price cuts). The service in the past has been hit-or-miss because of the rotating staff. But the long layers our protagonist usually requests are a fairly straightforward job, and even a few misplaced snips disappear within two weeks as her hair grows out. For $7.99, it's still a deal.

Hairdresser: [Draping her client in a smock] "What would you like today?"

C. Troubadour: "Just a clean-up on the ends, please."

H: "No problem."

She begins combing and snipping. CT watches in the mirror but stays quiet so as not to disturb the woman's concentration.

H: [As she runs her fingers through a section on one side] "Love that Asian hair. So thick and strong. When I was younger and wore extensions, that's what I would get."

CT: "Oh?" [Looks up at the woman's longish chestnut-colored pixie cut.]

H: "Yep, I loved it because you could bleach it but the pigment in it was so strong that it would turn orange -- I liked that look."

Unsure what else to say, CT nods.

H: "I still dye my hair now -- do it myself." [Smiles proudly.] "But it's to hide all the gray."

CT: [Relieved to find something to respond to, swiping at trimmings gathering on her face] "I've got some of that coming in at the crown."

H: "You do!" [Continues snipping.] "Mine's at the temples. I always thought that looked so good on a man. But on me? It sticks out all over the place like little wires. As if I needed pubic hair coming out of my head."

CT pauses mid-swipe.

H: [Gesturing with her scissors at random points around her head] "I mean, it's like sproing! sproing! sproing! sproing! sproing! -- "

CT's eyes widen.

H: "So that's why I dye it. You know, I wonder why armpit hair doesn't turn gray. I mean, don't you?"

CT is speechless.

H: "I wonder too sometimes if my eyebrows are graying as well. It looked like they were getting lighter, but I couldn't tell for sure since I started coloring them to match. What a nuisance, eh?"

A pause. CT flounders for something, anything to say --

CT: "Well ... at least you know what you're doing?"

End scene.

Posts by date

Posts by label

Air travel Airline food Allergic reactions Astoria Awards Bacteremia Bacterial overgrowth Baggage beefs Bed and breakfast Betrayal Blues Body Boston Breastfeeding British Columbia California Canada Cape Spear Clam-digging Colonoscopy Commuter marriage Cooking CT scans Delays Diagnoses Dietitians Doctor-patient relationships Doctors Eating while traveling Editing Endocrine Endoscopy ER False starts Family dynamics Feedback Food anxiety Food sensitivities Gate agent guff GI Halifax Heart Home-making House hunting Hypoglycemia In-laws Intentional happiness Iowa Journaling Kidney stones Knitting Lab tests Little U. on the Prairie Liver function tests Long Beach Making friends in new places Malabsorption Massachusetts Medical records Medication Mentorship MFA programs Miami Monterey Motivation Moving Narrative New York Newark Newfoundland Nova Scotia Olympic Peninsula Ontario Ophthalmology Oregon Oxalates Pancreatic function tests Parenting Parents Paris Pets Photography Portland Prediabetes Pregnancy Process Professors Publishing Reproductive endocrine Research Revision Rewriting Rheumatology San Francisco Scenes from a graduation series Scenes from around the table series Seattle Sisters Skiing St. John's Striped-up paisley Teaching Technological snafus Texas Thesis Toronto Travel Travel fears Traveling while sick Ultrasound Urology Vancouver Victoria Voice Washington Washington D.C. Weight When words won't stick Whidbey Island Why we write Workshops Writers on writing Writing Writing friends Writing in odd places Writing jobs Yakima

Wednesday, December 28, 2011

This will be brief

... because I'm writing this on my phone. My laptop's sudden refusal to boot this morning caps this year of technical difficulties, several of which were specific to the machine: the fried adapter, the bad sector. Add the recent fridge fiasco and the midyear failure of a backup drive to the list of unfortunate electronic events and you begin to wonder what else is about to go.

I'd be a lot less incensed -- these things can happen to any appliance over time, and the laptop had reached an average lifetime when its performance started going downhill -- if I hadn't been nearly done editing and commenting on a good friend's application essay for a Ph.D. program. I'd promised him the draft notes by today. I'm hoping he can take a week's delay so D can rescue the file when we get back to Seattle, but if not, I've got a lot of text to reconstruct this afternoon.

2012, you are on notice.

Friday, December 23, 2011

Sense and sensitivity

The smell of fresh biscuits is wafting upstairs from the kitchen in my parents' house in Texas. We've been coming here for the end-of-year holidays only since 2006, so the room I'm writing in -- a loft above a garage -- is not the one where I used to wake up to the promise of butter, flour, baking powder, milk, and salt, in those perfect, golden, flaky proportions that are my mother's standby recipe for daughterly bliss. It's just a loft with an elliptical machine in it, and I cycle along, willing myself to recall the tender center of this favorite baked good, how it releases a ribbon of steam when it first breaks open under my much younger fingers.

The last few years have been an adjustment -- first, the limit on sugars and starches after I became insulin resistant, then the limit on dairy and gluten after those food sensitivities came to light. I can choose to ignore these inconvenient circumstances -- nothing truly dire will occur immediately if I eat from the tray my mother has just pulled from the oven -- but I know it's unwise. At the very least, I'll feel sick and be less able to enjoy this time with my family. So I soak up the memory of warmth and comfort that the aroma brings back.

But the coziness of a different kitchen in a different time fails to materialize. I'm needled by earlier moments from the morning. "Can you butter the tray for me?" my mother asks, as I am about to leave the kitchen in search of a writing spot. "Oh, there might be flour on the counter. You can touch that stuff, right?"

I tell her it's fine -- I can wash my hands -- but then, as I clean the baking utensils left in the sink, I hesitate before setting the sponge back on the edge of the basin. "Is it okay to put this through the dishwasher?" I ask. Without a thorough soaping and scalding, a good quantity of gluten particles can stay lodged in the fibers.

"Oh, it'll never get completely clean," she replies, waving a floury hand, as if whether the sponge goes through the machine isn't important. I know she doesn't mean to be cavalier, but a flood of resentment at what feels like her insensitivity rises in my chest. Just because the sponge can't be sterilized doesn't mean I can't take the measures with it -- or anything else in her kitchen -- that will decrease my exposure to what makes me sick. It has only been a day since my arrival, but the few things I've asked her not to do for food I will eat -- like using wooden cutting boards, which are porous and also harbor gluten easily -- she's done anyway.

I wonder whether to say anything. When I do remind her, she makes the excuse that this is all new to her, which I understand. But she makes no move to apologize.

Am I wrong to feel hurt? I ask myself. Don't be so -- well, sensitive, part of me says in reply. Still, the scent of my mother's biscuits, hanging in the air of the loft, refuses to transfer the pleasure I wish it would.

Wednesday, December 14, 2011

Not biting

Back in July, after my thesis received final approval from Little U., one of the last tasks I had to complete to tie up loose ends on the manuscript was to get it copyrighted. For Ph.D. dissertations, Little U. makes copyright mandatory and takes care of this detail to ensure the filing with the U.S. Copyright Office actually happens. For MFA degree holders, you retain the right to pursue official government protection -- or decide your thesis is so objectionable to your artistic eye that you'd rather not afford it such an honor.

I have to say, by the time I was done with my manuscript, I felt only 40 percent of it was really decent enough to consider reworking for future use -- as smaller essays to send to literary journals or as a jumping-off point to reshape the work into a very different book. As it stood, 75 pages wasn't enough to sell as a complete work, especially since it had no ending. (Yes, it stops, but it has no sense of conclusion.)

Because that 40 percent had merit, though, I did go through with registering for a copyright. And within a few months, I started to get postcards from a certain company claiming interest in publication.

Don't get excited yet. This is not a company that likely pays its authors for their work. It is a subsidy press, also known as a vanity press, which will ask its "candidates for publication" to cover some or all of the printing, distributing, and advertising costs. Obviously, I haven't done further research on the particular organization that mailed me, but it is generally safe to say that any group that calls itself a subsidy press does not follow the standard publishing model -- possibly to the author's financial, if not reputational, detriment. So if you've ever been contacted by one of these companies, be forewarned (and then laugh, as I did, because you've seen through their attempt to flatter for money).

How did they even find me, you wonder? Well, per the postcard, a "researcher" "discovered" my registration -- not my manuscript, my registration -- with the Library of Congress; i.e., someone who regularly trolls the record of copyright applications, which is in the public domain, picked out my name along with hundreds of others and put me on a mailing list. How do I know no one has actually looked at what I've written to determine its literary merit? Well, when the postcard is addressed to a "Mr. Contemporary Troubadour," it's pretty clear. Really, if the work is written in the first person and begins at the patient check-in desk of an obstetrician's office, you'd guess the writer was a woman, right?

Tuesday, December 6, 2011

Unplugged

I'm not totally off the grid these days, but it feels like it after our two-week Thanksgiving trip, which ended with the discovery Sunday evening that our refrigerator had died during our absence and left its rather pungent ghost behind. Not the warm welcome we were hoping for! Everything I'd been depending on for the last few months of allergen avoidance -- organic meats amassed on sale and frozen for later use, homemade soup stock, all the gluten-free baking I'd done -- had to be tossed.

This elimination diet thing is getting a bit too literal for me.

After a day of research, we chose a new fridge last night, which will be delivered tomorrow, but until then, any foods that need chilling are crammed into a cooler on the back porch. Believe me when I say I'm counting the hours until the delivery truck shows up.

With the exception of this electronic snafu, our Thanksgiving was a good one. D and I spent the holiday and then some with his family in central Illinois -- we're trying to alternate Thanksgiving and Christmas with his parents and mine so that we don't have to do one marathon multi-city trip at the end of the year. So far, I think I like the change. We did throw in a small road trip to visit D's brother and sister-in-law in Michigan, where both are graduate students, but that was a relaxed six hours in a borrowed family minivan with leg room, rest stops, unrestricted access to personal electronics, and no worries about someone else's seat back reclining into my lap.

Of course, the view was a lot less impressive than it might have been by air, but the road did offer some scenic gems. Seriously, how can you not appreciate the comic irony in strip malls like this one?*

* I have no idea who took this picture -- we didn't have time to stop to take one ourselves -- but I am thoroughly impressed that Google, using only a search string that contained the names of the stores shown and "strip mall Indiana highway 30," was able to provide me a link to a discussion board where this image was posted.

Monday, November 14, 2011

Testing, testing

Plans are afoot chez Troubadour.

Some are sizable -- to the point that trying to write about them here in the last week has produced three different post drafts, none of which seemed to get at what I wanted them to. And that is usually a sign for me that the ideas need more than a little fine-tuning if I can't even elaborate on them in this space, where nothing has to be complete but just somewhat organized.

So, not to keep returning to food allergies, but that's what I can write about. And with the first of our many fall and winter holidays approaching, I've been busy trying to figure out how to make traditional baked goods (because what else does one eat at this time of year more than any other?) using nontraditional ingredients.

There are resources out there. Many, many resources, posted on the web by people who have similar dietary limitations. They're impossible to search through efficiently and most still include ingredients I can't eat. It's one thing to need recipes that are strictly gluten-free. But how about gluten-free, dairy-free, egg-free, corn-free ...

Well, what about the professionals, I wondered. The people who sell allergen-free baked goods? Could they have advice?

A few weeks ago, I discovered the website of a bakery that is known for its friendliness to those with food sensitivities. Refined-sugar-, gluten-, wheat-, soy-, casein-, and egg-free -- yes, they do it all. And there was a cookbook, written by their founding chef, in their online store!

I had huge hopes as I waited for a copy to become available from my local library. Could hardly walk to my car once I had the book in my hands -- I was already perusing the contents: muffins, biscuits and scones, teacakes, cookies and brownies, cupcakes and frostings. Something in here had to work.

Except that nearly every recipe in the book calls for a pre-blended gluten-free flour mix that contains potato starch (or the recipe requires just potato starch itself), and potatoes are the latest GI enemy to make it onto my list.

Yes, I felt a little cheated.

But -- but! -- it's one step closer. I still don't have to reinvent baked goods; I just need to figure out how to use the research in this book to inform my substitutions. Troubadour-friendly, gluten-free flour blend, you will be mine.

Of course, if you know of other professional resources out there that might help me speed up the testing process, I'm all ears.

Saturday, October 29, 2011

Substitutions

If you've spent any time in my kitchen in the last three years, you've seen a lot of these in the meals I prepare.

Ever since D and I stopped being able to eat much refined sugar and starch, thanks to reactive hypoglycemia, we've been using any stand-ins that would produce similar results in cooking -- even if the ingredients in question weren't those that naturally occur in foods you could buy at the farmer's market. We're talking products that have been enzyme-modified or chemically transmogrified to fool our bodies into ignoring them. Our pantry was a shrine to the gods of Splenda (packet-style, available in boxes of 700 from Amazon's subscription service), maltitol syrup (straight for baking or flavored for coffee), erythritol (granular for creaming into batters and powdered for whipping into frostings), and xylitol honey (in a squeezable bear-shaped bottle to boot).

It turns out our bodies don't take lightly to being deceived. Cue insidious digestive deterioration.*

The elimination diet forced me to stop using our usual sweetener stock, among many other staples: wheat flours; corn, soy, and dairy products; even eggs and yeast. Did you know that baking powder contains corn? And some vanilla extracts too? What in the name of all baked goods is left to make a pan of muffins with?

Plenty.

Of late, I've been craving cornbread. It's cold out, hearty soups have returned to our menu in full force, and I've been missing the sweet-savory flavor of a fresh-from-the-oven pan of golden goodness to go along with a bean-and-chicken stew. D's mother's cornbread recipe had been languishing in our kitchen file for too long, and I was getting tired of eating rice at every meal. So I pulled out the instructions and started making substitutions.

But wait, you're thinking. How do you make cornless cornbread?

With millet.

The results were more than I could ever have hoped for. These tiny little grains, when cooked, produce an uncannily cornmeal-like texture and flavor. I won't say the final product was indistinguishable from true cornbread, but it was a more than respectable stand-in that I had to remind myself not to consume in a more than reasonably sized portion. (For anyone with reactive hypoglycemia, it's still full-strength on the carb scale, even though it contains no refined sugar.)

The success made my week. It's been hard not to think of the food I've been allowed to eat as a second-rate option to the foods I've had to give up. But that is exactly what I've needed to change in order to move forward with the body I have now -- the one that probably will never be able to eat wheat or dairy again. No more thinking of our allowed options as substitutions. They're alternatives, incredibly freeing ones because they won't mistreat my body.

That said, I'm not settling for lesser quality in our baked goods. If an alternative bread or scone or muffin doesn't make me want to go back for seconds (against my better judgment), then the recipe needs tweaking.

So. I'm posting this week's cornbread recipe with original and alternative ingredients side by side. For anyone with food sensitivities or just a curiosity about different baking options, you can employ as many or as few of the suggested changes as your palate desires. (N.B.: the directions account specifically for alternatives; if you use only standard ingredients, simply mix the dry then add the wet and pour into your chosen pan.)

Corn/{millet} bread

2 cups all-purpose flour / {1 cup gluten-free oat flour and 1 cup brown rice flour}
4 tsp. salt
5 tsp. baking powder / {2 tsp. arrowroot starch, 2 tsp. cream of tartar, and 1 tsp. baking soda}
4 tbsp. sugar / {3 tbsp. sucanat** and 4 tbsp. pear butter***}
1 1/2 cups cornmeal / {3/4 cup millet flour and 3/4 cup cooked millet****}
2 eggs / {2/3 cup water and 2 tbsp. ground flaxseed}
2 cups milk / {2 cups coconut, rice, or almond milk}
1/2 cup plus 2 tbsp. melted shortening / {1/2 cup plus 2 tbsp. olive oil}

1. Mix flours, salt, arrowroot, cream of tartar, baking soda, and millet flour in a large bowl. Add sucanat and cooked millet, breaking up clumps with a fork.

2. In a separate bowl, mix water and flaxseed. Allow to stand 5 minutes (mixture will gel slightly). Stir in pear butter and milk.

3. Add wet ingredients to dry; beat quickly with fork. Stir in olive oil until combined.

4. Pour into 12 muffin cups (place extra, if any, in mini loaf pan or ramekins). Bake at 400 F for 35 minutes or until toothpick inserted in center comes out clean (crumbs are okay, batter coating is not). Cool in pan for 10 minutes, then unmold and transfer to wire rack. Centers will fall slightly -- without gluten or egg, the bread has less structural integrity -- but should not cave in. (Xanthan gum is a recommended additive to rectify this problem, but I'm holding off on experimenting with it until after the remaining food trials are done.)

Makes 12 muffins plus one mini loaf. Half recipe makes one 9-inch square pan of bread. We use a muffin pan to make single servings easier to measure.

* I do not claim that substitute sweeteners single-handedly caused the GI disaster of 2009-2011. But they were certainly associated with the problem; once they were eliminated from our diet, I started to feel better. Symptoms returned during repeated trials with at least one of the sweeteners mentioned above, as they did during trials of a number of other foods. Which just means I won't be consuming any of those items in the near future.

** Sucanat is plain old dried sugar cane juice (but not the same thing as evaporated cane juice, which undergoes more processing). We've found it at Whole Foods, on Amazon, and in our local co-op.

*** We make our own pear butter by boiling down ripe pears with a little water and honey. If you want our recipe, just send me an e-mail; otherwise, similar fruit purees can be used (e.g., unsweetened applesauce).

**** I had leftover millet that I'd prepared in our rice cooker (one part grain to two parts water). For simple guidelines on cooking millet on the stove, check out this site.

Monday, October 17, 2011

And then I got a job

Not the first thing you expected after a vacation absence, right?

It wasn't what I expected either. But a week before our departure, a posting landed in my inbox offering the chance to work as an online tutor. True grammarian wanted, the ad said, flexible hours available.

I was a little skeptical about the quality of the employer, given the odd (read: unorthodox, bordering on misspelled) abbreviations elsewhere in the text, so I asked Marketing Sis if it looked legit enough to consider -- my goal was to start earning a wage through some form of teaching while still trying to balance that commitment with my own writing, among other necessary fall projects D and I are working on. So when Marketing Sis's magical search skills didn't turn up any employee complaints (or evidence of a scam), I threw together a resume and sent it off. Look at this as a chance to get your feet wet, I told myself, and if it ends up being disastrous, you can always walk away.

The business, it turns out, is owned and managed by one woman out of her home on the opposite side of the country, from which she contracts tutors all over the U.S. for students primarily on the East Coast. She failed to notice my Seattle address and called to interview me two days later at 6 a.m., without any prior contact to schedule said conversation.

I have to admit, I'm not swift to wake up and probably sounded a bit bewildered when I answered, fearing a close relative had gotten sick or injured. But when the woman quickly made her disdain known -- "Do you even remember sending me your application?" she asked, perhaps in response to my silence after she'd introduced herself -- I snapped to attention. Simple oversight, I thought, as I explained the time difference, after which the woman was effusively apologetic. So I padded downstairs from the bedroom, D still half-asleep in the darkness, and took her questions in my pajamas.

"You'll be tutoring students who need help on the grammar section of the SAT exam," the woman explained, which sounded manageable enough, even attractive. Subject-verb agreement, pronoun-antecedent agreement, misplaced modifiers, parallel construction -- I'd always enjoyed the rules of syntax, thanks in part to my own middle-school grammar teacher. The orderliness of language that she'd revealed, the characteristics of each part of speech, the algorithmic ways of determining the functions of each word in a sentence -- I loved all of it. Could I teach it? Oh, yes.

So I left for Hawaii, agreeing to start work within the week of my return.

Given my long silence since the beginning of October, I'm sure you've guessed at this point in the story that the job has turned out to be much more of a commitment than I believed it would be. Not because I have that many students -- there are just four -- but because my employer is more disorganized than, say, a five-paragraph persuasive essay with no thesis statement and randomly collected statements of fact instead of substantiated arguments. Teaching materials? Sent the day of my first tutoring session, minutes before it was supposed to begin. Oh, and did I mention that this woman decided during my absence to assign me some SAT writing students? My feelings on teaching essay writing to college students have been, at best, mixed -- comp instructors, breathe your collective sighs with me! (And then think about doing what you do, only with high schoolers. Mm hmm, specifically what I didn't want this job to be.)

But of course, given my experience, the woman "thought I'd be perfect" and went ahead with the plan without asking if I cared.

I've spent the last week putting some safeguards in place to keep my sanity from leaking out my ear, but let's just say that there's still plenty I need to do in order to get more timely information from my boss before each tutoring session -- and prevent her from transforming my job description any further. I've promised myself that I will live up to my new duties, but I'm drawing the line at further unforeseen demands.

As for our Hawaiian vacation: it was a getaway better than any we could ever have imagined. More on that trip -- which deserves so much more than passing mention -- once I get my work-life balance back.

Sunday, September 18, 2011

Nine weeks

That's how long I've been on this crazy elimination diet.

Yes, I chose not to write about the testing while it was ongoing -- it was life-consuming enough that I needed this space to think about other things, like what I've been examining through my most recent series of musings. I plan to continue adding to that, but more intermittently now that it's established (for me, as a commitment through habit of thought).

In the meantime, I'm beginning to get the much-wanted answers I'd been looking for. Preliminarily, we've determined that dairy products from cows do not love me, as much as I love them. Goat dairy is kinder, but ambiguously so. Eggs lie somewhere in between on that spectrum. Corn and soy are friendly.

Today I will complete one of three different gluten trials, and then we will suspend testing until our return from Hawaii. Our original plan was to be done with all the trials before the trip -- this Thursday! -- but because the dairy tests worked me over so thoroughly, I needed a lot of extra recovery time between each of them, which pushed our testing timeline much further into the fall than I'd anticipated.

I'm a mess of mixed feelings about it all. Relieved to have results at last, some of them quite definitive. Frustrated but resigned to the fact that more testing has to continue when we get back. Disappointed that the dietary limitations we've discovered so far will mean some significant changes to our original vacation plan.

I'd wanted a true getaway, where we'd have largely unstructured time to lie on the beach with a stack of books, bob around in the ocean, catch some tropical sunsets, feed ourselves on inexpensive local cuisine. We can still do plenty of all this -- but we'll have to be vigilant about what I eat that I haven't personally prepared (don't get me started on the pervasiveness of dairy in commercial foods, but do check out this site if you need guidelines for your own dairy sensitivities). And we'll need to cook some food as backup for moments when we're unable to find something that works at those mom-and-pop restaurants (or roadside stands) whose plate lunches or noodle bowls we were so looking forward to sampling. I guess it's the dream of being totally carefree -- not having to think so hard about what needs to be done ahead of time or what contingencies we ought to anticipate -- that is looking more and more unrealistic, and it makes me sad.

Still, I'm determined to be over this by the time we leave. This trip is meant to celebrate our surviving much, much worse. Like, say, all of 2010; the residual aftermath of an extended thesis year; the accumulated tension from the two-year commute that changed us both indelibly.

So I'm making a plan now, to minimize the mental effort we'll have to put in when we arrive. Grocery stores? Located. Cooking facilities? Secured, through our bed-and-breakfast hosts. Restaurant menus? Downloaded and vetted. Restaurant staff? Where practical, already contacted to ask if they can accommodate my dietary needs.

I hope, hope, hope that it all pays off. We may not get to throw caution to the wind, but at least these preparations will let us use the majority of our time to relax, rather than spend it on pesky logistics ...

Saturday, September 10, 2011

Scenes from a graduation, part 6: these ceremonial rites

When we get to the concert hall several hours later, no one is wearing academic regalia -- at least, not yet. The graduates will not arrive for a little while from morning exercises. But there are families milling about, some members clutching black robes striped in kelly green, the colors for those who already hold degrees in medicine. These are for the hooders, most of them parents of the graduates but some of them spouses or siblings.

The gown my mother hands my father is cardinal red.

"He insisted that it had to be this color," she says, rolling her eyes, "because he's a fellow." Red denotes not just my father's doctoral degree but his board certification in a sub-specialty, cardiology. My mother sighs. "Look at him; now he doesn't want to put it on because he knows he'll stand out."

And she's right. As the rest of the hooders begin to unfold their garments, my father hesitates, glancing self-consciously around. Perhaps he's second-guessing his insistence on the "proper" colors for his rank. There are, without question, numerous other fellows in this crowd, but they've all opted to keep the information to themselves. Each doctor will be on stage for mere minutes, half obscured by the graduates they will hood. Why the need to make such a particular visual statement? Pride, yes. But in the case of my father, it feels misdirected. While I can't know for certain what his motivations were when he ordered his robes, I suspect self-importance guided the choice more than the desire to wear his best, so to speak, out of respect for my sister.

I pity him a little, as his insecurity flickers into view. He couldn't help himself, I want to say to my mother, not sure if it's meant to excuse his hubris or condemn it. Neither seems appropriate, so once again, I pull out my camera. Even if I can't sort out the color of my thoughts, I can save the image of the moment to muse on later.

*

Rewind six months. I am elbow deep in boxes of photos and memorabilia at my parents' house, not sure what I'm there to find, but the clock on my thesis is ticking. The idea of graduation -- mine or anyone else's -- is far from my thoughts.

My mother and I have been talking since late summer about the whirlwind weeks of my parents' courtship. Four, to be precise. They'd started dating in the final month of my father's senior year of college at a Canadian university, after which he started medical school in the U.S., on a campus nine hundred miles away. My mother still had a semester to finish and hadn't planned on moving to another country.

But my parents wanted to remain a couple, she said -- the story of which I'm intrigued by, tempted to write. They'd already started talking about marriage by the end of those four weeks. So they courted by airmail for the entire four years that my father was studying to become a doctor.

In his home office, surrounded by stacks of unread medical journals and copies of call schedules, I finger the edges of a photo taken on the day of my father's medical school graduation. His school, unlike my sister's, does not have a special robe color for degree candidates, so he stands on the lawn that flanks the university chapel, in black and green like the faculty. He is alone in the picture, hands clasped in front, mortarboard as square to the top of his head as his gaze is to the camera.

"Who took the photo?" I ask.

"A classmate," my mother says. It was too expensive for her to fly down for the festivities, she explains a little sadly. "No one from his family went either -- too far to travel from Hong Kong." This latter excuse, we both know, is only half true; my father's parents rarely made much of personal achievements. These were to be expected rather than praised or celebrated, as he'd learned early on in his childhood.

We are quiet for a moment. The story that follows is familiar now to both of us: how my father left for Canada immediately after the degree ceremony, driving all night to get back for their wedding, which was to take place within days. It's misleading, then, this portrait's pomp and circumstance, its staid, unhurried pose. That someone managed to capture it -- my father was likely on his way to his already packed car when his friend offered to take the shot -- was fortuitous and may have been the only moment, however brief, in which someone else shared in his achievement the way a family might have.

It is this image that I suddenly remember in the concert hall foyer, as my father finally lets the folds of cardinal red fall open, and I wonder if he is thinking of that day some thirty years ago, footnoted so fleetingly on film. As he fumbles with the sleeves, the zipper, the hook, his face remains unreadable, his eyes focused solely on the task at hand. Because he has been raised to be this way -- practical, unsentimental -- he will not let on, even if this garment reminds him of the chapel and the lawn and the few seconds' pause before the click of the camera's shutter.

Perhaps my mother remembers the photo too as we reach automatically to help him smooth and straighten. The hood, lined in his alma mater's colors, flops and dangles like a superfluous appendage -- "Hold on! Don't walk off yet!" we tell him as we try to get it to hang at least somewhat centered down his back. When we are finished, my father examines our work and chuckles for the first time that morning, at himself. In spite of the curious looks he's beginning to draw -- "They think he's the university president," my other sister whispers -- he looks pleased.

*

My father and Almost Dr. Sis see each other for the first time that day from across the concert hall. Or maybe only he sees her. In the images we collect from that hour, my father stands against the right-hand wall leading to the stage while my sister stands on the opposite side. The room is too large to capture them both in the same frame. In my father's picture, though, he is clearly looking toward his daughter, whose own eyes are aimed at the line of deans whose hands she will soon shake.

I do not remember thinking much in this moment, though so much thought has gone before it -- my questions about what I would feel, watching my sister and father partake in this long-running ritual, the symbolic induction into an exclusive circle, both professional and familial. All I know is that I have a job, to record the moment as it unfolds. (The video capabilities of my phone are limited, but it is the best we have.) Though I won't realize it until afterward, I'm relieved to have this duty, to be able to focus on the task so that any other thoughts -- and the emotions they might carry -- do not become overwhelming.

We know they will announce my sister's name, followed by the name of her hooder, but hers has barely been broadcast when we, too excited by the first-time use of the word doctor as her official title, cannot keep ourselves from hooting like fans at a sporting event. My father's name is completely lost in the roar.

A wisp of guilt blooms within my chest -- I would have liked to capture my father's honors here too. I know then that in spite of his ego, I still care that he has missed so much in his life: not just the presence of family -- his and ours -- but the affection that comes with it, something he has been so used to living without. You are important too, I want to tell him, for each moment he ever privately doubted this -- and felt the need to compensate for it.

It takes my sister some time to cross the stage, so we are calm when she finally reaches my father, who stands with hands folded just as he did on the day of his own graduation, serious and proper. She passes her green velvet hood to him, turning to face the audience as the deans have instructed each graduate ahead of time, then bends at the knees slightly, as if curtsying, so my father can place the hood over her head from behind. Even so, he knocks her cap slightly askew. She grins as she straightens it, and -- is it possible? -- seems to look directly at us as we wave. I wonder if my father can see us too.

There is no time to find out; they must exit the stage to make room for other graduates. Quickly, my sister turns to hug my father, her enormous diploma in its cover between them. And then, to my surprise, instead of offering his usual one-handed pat on the back, my father raises both arms, almost as if opening a pair of wings. He folds them around her, pulling her close, draping her in the scarlet of his own mantle, oblivious to the leather folder poking them both in the ribs.

The moment lasts only a few seconds. But his smile, when he finally lets my sister go, is just as broad as hers.

For more from this series, please click here.

Friday, August 12, 2011

Scenes from a graduation, part 5: details

"Dad's going to ask where he needs to go when you pick him up," says Almost Dr. Sis. I nod, still a little groggy after a few hours' sleep, at the sheaf of maps and schedules tucked next to the gearshift in her car.

In twenty minutes, after I drop my sister off at campus, I will be back in her apartment, where our other sister is still slumbering on the living room couch. At that time, I'll review the route to my parents' hotel that my sister has marked in pen and pink highlighter -- there's a road race that will close many nearby streets; I don't want to get caught in detour traffic -- and I'll reread the printout of the e-mail she's forwarded to our father about where to wait with all the other physicians who will be hooding a graduate. Though she's explained to him that all he needs to know is spelled out on this single piece of paper, we both know he'll ignore it.

It irritates me that as a doctor, this man is meticulous about procedure and expects everyone else he works with to be too, but that for this event, he won't even glance over these instructions. He's trained us well. This little exchange in my sister's car is one of too many in recent years, where we scramble behind the scenes to ensure his good humor. There's too much at stake otherwise, too many casualties in the cycle of blame. If he is tardy, fails to locate the processional line, enters by the wrong door, it will be his loss of face. But he'll tell us that we -- wife and daughters -- should have known where he was supposed to go, and then he'll sulk. The idea rankles because he is unfair, but more so because it would be especially unfair to my sister to have him mar her day so unnecessarily.

I've gone back through every page my sister's given me and added my own notes, just to make sure everything is clear, fighting off the familiar tightness in my chest that makes my breastbone ache whenever we have to keep my father on his best behavior. But I don't say anything as we drive, my sister and I, through the foggy streets of the city toward the university, where I'll deliver her for the all-college commencement exercises. (The rest of us will join her just for her hooding, a separate medical school ceremony.) Frowning into the passenger visor mirror, she fusses with the angle of her cap; I silently admire the blue-black sheen of her hair, which dulls even the rich velvet of the same color.

I can't imagine what is going through my sister's mind in this moment. At one time, I might have tried, but we've both changed -- not unexpectedly -- in these years since we lived under one roof, and the sisterly understanding we may have had when we shared an address has shifted into new territory. I want to sense, as I thought I once could, what she's feeling, but she doesn't speak, and I don't wish to disturb her silence. I can't trust the read I'm getting from the tension in her jaw, but I'm conscious of my own discomfort, that she can sense it, and that it's irritating her.

My thoughts turn to the terse whispers I overheard between my sister and her roommate as I was waking, a misunderstanding about who needed the shower first. (The roommate is on rotation at the hospital.) And then the box of Kleenex I finished shortly afterward -- not seeing a recycling bin but loath to add to the disarray spreading through every room, half of it the detritus of a messy roommate and the rest my sister's packing-in-progress, I catch her while she's ironing her dress. "What do you want me to do with this?" I ask, holding up the empty container.

"Don't recycle it," she says.

Dutifully, I break down the box and put it in the garbage can. Five minutes later, she clucks with dismay. "I needed that to hold other things," she says, exasperated.

It's a simple misunderstanding but somehow an emblematic one too. Such small incongruities -- if these exchanges are so hard for us to navigate, what else will I misinterpret? Back in the car, I'm gun-shy from the memory. Our disconnection feels more pronounced in this space than it has since those first years after I left college, the last home we ever shared.

I will myself to relax for her, not to make things worse. "You look great," I say as she gives her cap one last look in the mirror. I pull up to the curb of a circular driveway; she snatches her robes, peacock blue, from the back seat, and I tell her to call if she needs us to bring anything she's forgotten.

As she crosses the driveway toward the main hall, others in peacock emerge like rare birds. I feel the day's first ripple of excitement in my chest at these sightings, remembering what I am here to celebrate. I want to take out my camera, to catch my sister as she walks away, pulling her robe up by its billowing sleeve while juggling her purse. For a moment, in this awkward pose, she feels less intimidating to me, still very much that confident woman but with the spirit of a little girl playing dress-up.

She turns, though, noticing that I haven't pulled away. Maybe she sees me leaning over the passenger seat as I fumble through my bag and thinks I'm examining the maps to get back to her place. She steps back toward the car; I pull forward and open the window. "You're on A________ now, and you'll turn right onto E________ at the intersection," she says, not unkindly.

I smile and withhold my regret -- no picture, just the memory. I need to get out of the way so she can move on with whatever comes next.

For more from this series, please click here.

Monday, July 18, 2011

Scenes from a graduation, part 4: limits

Hello! As you may have noticed, the writing's slowed down here -- we are in the midst of a heavy rotation of back-to-back visitors. (Our friends and family know the best time to come to Seattle is in summer, when the sun is out.) We're nearly done with B&B duty, though, so please stay tuned for more!

Dinner is easier -- just family. Although this is the first time we've all been in this city together, most of us have visited my sister enough individually to have dined with her at the place she's chosen for this evening, one known for its seafood. We settle in at the table together, laid with heavy silverware and votive candles, as if we've been doing this for a lifetime.

In a way, we almost have. Fine dining -- whether it's while traveling or at my parents' house -- is what my father has come to enjoy, of very little else, in the last fifteen years, so this is what we do with him. He cites his busy hospital schedule as an excuse for his lack of hobbies. I look at Almost Dr. Sis, who'd usually rather be out -- alone or with friends -- than in on free afternoons and evenings, and know my father's limits are more a product of temperament than anything external.

I'm an admitted homebody. And maybe, just maybe, if I'd become a doctor myself, I would be, like my father, too exhausted to do more than eat. That I resemble him in many ways -- habits, aversions, quickness to anger -- has been undeniable all my life, as much as I've been dismayed as I've grown more and more aware of these similarities. On a scale of predictable to spontaneous, we both skew away from the impromptu and, as a result, miss out on the joys of surprise, happenstance, discovery. Or so I believe, when I see the tension in his small, dark eyes, which mirror my own, as a well-laid plan goes astray.

My father is also, more often than not, testy and demanding, intolerant of change or other people's differing opinions. When these tendencies are at their worst, he's able to clear the living room at home just by walking into it, each daughter conveniently finding a reason to disappear, if only because conversation among us is impossible -- too likely to invite a lecture or judgment from him, born of his need to be in control. Left alone, then, he dissolves into the couch cushions, remote in hand and laptop on his knees, lost to their steady stream of I'm not sure what for the rest of the night, save for our evening meal together. Even then, the news blares from across the room. We try to ignore it; he does not.

I see what he misses -- and what I miss -- because of who we are, and the fear that I will become him tightens around me like a straitjacket. It's irrational; I know I have a chance at a different life than he may ever have because I do see, do fear. Still, when I'm feeling frazzled or inflexible, I have to remind myself that I'm not my father's carbon copy, even as I resist and moderate the tendencies we share, perhaps more rigorously than necessary.

For more from this series, please click here.

Friday, June 24, 2011

Scenes from a graduation, part 3: projection

In the auditorium of a local hotel, finally done traveling for the day, I slip into a cushy ergonomic chair that rotates. This isn't theater seating; it's conference hall seating. An enormous projection screen dominates the front wall, and the School of Medicine's glossy logo has been carefully applied to the wooden podium beneath it (removable decals, I'm guessing). Individual ethernet jacks and power outlets, built into the console table stretching across each row, make me feel like I ought to fire up my laptop to take notes. But we -- Troubadour Mom and Dad, my youngest sister and I -- pull out cameras instead.

Of course, we're not here for a lecture. This gathering of parents, siblings, children, other relatives, and friends is like Class Day from our undergraduate commencement festivities, a smaller celebration before the next day's all-graduate ceremonies with the lawyers, the engineers, the MBAs, and so forth. Tonight, a class-chosen faculty speaker will bestow light words of wisdom, a classmate will offer humorous reflections on these last few years of training, there will be a few awards, and then we'll all disperse for heavy hors d'oeuvres. My sisters and I share the same alma mater; I wonder if they also feel a certain déjà vu as we wait for the proceedings to begin. But maybe the conference room setting is too different to them. Class Day, so many years ago, was an outdoor folding-chair affair that, in Almost Dr. Sis's case, took place in a downpour.

I have to laugh a little at myself, always seeking the structure of things, the bones of each new experience. Is it just my way of handling the unfamiliar? Perhaps -- the parallels underneath, analogous armatures, ground me. But it is also a way of remembering, better to secure the details. For our family, there will be no other sister who passes through this medical program or any other. One chance, then, to enjoy these moments for what they are.

The soon-to-be graduates process in, the men in suits, most of the women in dresses. Academic regalia is reserved for the next day. I have not yet seen Almost Dr. Sis since arriving -- does she see us? No time for her to look up, but we follow her with both eyes and camera lenses.

I don't snap any shots, though. The pictures I might get would be blurry, I realize -- the camera on my phone isn't the best for subjects in motion -- and I'm happier without the filter of a viewfinder limiting what I can see. I lean forward, watching my sister in a soft white frock, glossy like meringue, cross into her assigned row.

It turns out that she is in charge of presenting the class gift this evening. As she steps toward the podium, the screen behind her suddenly lights up -- the audiovisual crew working this event has zoomed in, and my sister's head, now ten feet tall, smiles back at us in startling digital glory.

And I can't focus on her, the small woman in the flesh at the microphone. Her slight movements -- a nod, a turn, a tilt of the chin -- become giant ones on the screen. I'm reminded for a moment of Dorothy's audience with the Wizard of Oz. Of course, my sister and her video image are identical, unlike the thundering puppet head and its master, but the projection is still a bit disturbing. So dramatically magnified, it draws the eye away from the real person below.

But isn't that the point of it? I think. To help us see better, to allow us an enhanced point of view?

Maybe. I feel like I'm losing something, though, if I ignore the woman standing right in front of me in favor of the bobbing on-screen head. I can't watch both. I try to anyway.

*

The hors d'oeuvres at the reception are, indeed, heavy. Fortunately, to save me from eating too much, there are scores of my sister's friends to be introduced to. Some I recognize from my last visit a little over a year ago. Others are mentors I've heard of only by name.

There is one woman whose face gives me a double-take. The wire-frame glasses, the slightly upturned nose, the sandy curls, front teeth that peek out below a thin upper lip with a bit of mustache, and that raspy voice with a New York accent -- she is the doppelganger of a professor who has sat on my thesis committee for two years. The woman at Little U. is the sort of person who invited my research methods class, which she also taught, over to her house for potluck on the last night of the semester, just before I moved back to Seattle.

The woman at this reception supervises a group of medical students who travel each summer to run a clinic in South America. I realize my sister introduced me to her on my last visit, at a coffee-shop planning pow-wow for one of those trips. The woman doesn't remember me -- and I don't expect her to -- but the memory of her warm hug from that first meeting comes back as I greet her now. She is effusive, pouring forth compliments about my sister, this class, how special they are to her. It's impossible for me not to remember my own professor's words from potluck night, the same sort of praise overflowing from her in uncannily similar tones.

I'm not looking for these parallels in this moment; they've somehow found me. But for once they aren't grounding. In fact, I realize, I wish not to see what I see this time because it's made me aware of the other comparisons I can't help making -- between the path I chose, to write, and the path I rejected, to become a doctor myself. At one point, that was what I truly believed I wanted to do.

The need to be present for this rite of passage, then, the importance of getting here. You wanted to see what could have been, a voice whispers in my ear, and I recoil.

Don't, I hiss back silently, guiltily. This isn't about you. I glance around the circle my family has made around my sister and the woman who continues to effervesce. Good -- they haven't noticed the extra head I've suddenly grown, or the conversation I'm having with it.

For more from this series, please click here.

Tuesday, June 14, 2011

Scenes from a graduation, part 2: compromises

To my relief, the electronic monitors at O'Hare have no abnormalities to report. There's just enough time to grab a salad from one of the vendors on the walk between Terminals H and G, call D to let him know all is well, and fall into line at my connecting gate.

I am, short of my footwear, dressed for the evening reception we'll be heading to directly from the airport -- no time to change -- so I'm careful as I poke my fork into the chicken and greens in my lap, wary of wayward dressing drips. Though I would have preferred one of my favorite dresses, a soft silk whose pattern reminds me of thin washes of gray ink with occasional streaks of butter-yellow watercolor, I've opted for darker wool slacks and a pink paisley blouse. Still pretty, but slightly less feminine -- at least, as it feels to me. But I guess that's the point: in pants, I can stride, even run if I have to, without having to worry that my skirt has rotated or hiked itself into unladylike territory.

As I eat, I make note of the things I have to do when I land: call family, find bathroom, apply makeup, change sneakers to heels, unpack purse from luggage, transfer wallet and phone. The makeup and purse are already within easy reach toward the top of the items in my backpack, the shoes at one end of my suitcase. The heels are low in case I have a lot of walking to do with the heavy bags. I am, if nothing else, extremely practical.

I know, though, that my mother and sisters will all be in dresses tonight, that this will bother me even though I resist the feeling adamantly. This -- blouse, slacks -- is what is comfortable for me on this 2,500-mile travel day, and yet, in their company, it will leave me not ill at ease but something like it. As if my lack of willingness to do as they would -- just wear the dress -- is indicative of some personal deficit in the quality all Troubadour women ought to have, a tolerance for inconvenience in the name of feeling our outward best.

I picture the gritty airport bathroom stalls at my final destination, the acrobatics of changing in that narrow space with luggage to boot, and I know I will feel anything but my best -- inside or out -- after attempting a transformation there. I'll be meeting my sister's doctor colleagues and doctor professors, whom I'm mildly intimidated by, at this evening's reception, and I'd prefer not to be fighting a case of the cranks after playing public restroom Twister. So, gaping toilet? Questionably sanitary walls on which to hang so many dry-clean-only garments? Given my choices, I'd rather feel the needling sadness of being conflicted over how I look, sadness that I can't just be confident in this fairly inconsequential decision, rather than feeling certain frustration with trying to be more than I'm able. Just for today, anyway.

For more from this series, please click here.

Sunday, June 5, 2011

Scenes from a graduation, part 1: getting there

This is the first in a series of posts chronicling my whirlwind second half of May -- there was too much to put in a single post, and the trip generated much for me to think about, so here's the compromise: a story in parts. For the entire series, please click here.

My suitcase gapes at me from the bedroom floor and I wonder if the zipper will close. Nine days of clothing for three different cities with three different climates and three different kinds of celebration -- this is what I have to pack within the confines of a single carry-on.

My first stop on this trip is Almost Dr. Sis's graduation from medical school, which promises to be cold and rainy. Very rainy. Here in Seattle, we're used to mist and drizzle, but in the Midwestern town where she's lived for half a decade now, there are thunderheads gathering and a long sweep of heavy gray downpour following behind.

On this Friday afternoon, I've just tucked a pair of wool slacks into place -- it promises to reach the mid-40s in the evening, though we're in the latter half of spring -- when the phone rings. It's my mother. "Our connecting flight was canceled and we're driving from Chicago," she says, with irritation. "Can you look up directions for us?"

I can hear my father at the wheel in the background naming interstates. "Do I want 290? 294? Ask her which one, which way -- " His agitation rises with what I'm guessing is each passing road sign. They are on the arteries that skirt O'Hare, circling blindly.

My mother tries to address my father's question before I've even had a chance to grab my laptop from the bed. He doesn't trust her answer; they bicker. I fumble at the keyboard, calling up maps, the hair on the back of my neck beginning to stand on end. The memory of previous car trips from childhood: my mother misreading directions, their ensuing fights, my sister and me shrinking small and silent in the back seat with our younger sister, still a baby, between us. My hands work faster now as their voices escalate.

"Here," I say. They're too busy arguing to notice. "Mom. Mom." No answer. In my own home, two thousand miles away, their presence is suddenly too loud, too close. "WILL YOU BOTH SHUT UP ALREADY?"

Silence.

I wince, expecting even now, as an adult, a sharp reprimand from my father for my tone of voice, but maybe only my mother has heard me clearly -- she is the one holding the phone. I plunge ahead before either of them can say anything, offering exit numbers and mileage estimates in lieu of an apology. "It's about seven hours," I note.

"We'll make it in less time," my mother assures me. "You know how Dad drives. By the way, he wants to know which flight you're on tomorrow."

I suppress a sigh, knowing my father is worried that I'll end up in the same predicament -- except with the graduation ceremonies scheduled for Sunday morning, I'll have much less of a window to get from Chicago to my final destination. It matters. My father, a doctor himself, will be the one to place the doctoral hood on my sister, a moment that, to me, feels somehow essential to witness in person, though there will be professional photographers and videographers to capture it all. And I wonder, suddenly face to face with that truth, why it should be so. Of course I am proud of her. But it is more than just being present to let my sister know, more than sitting in the same room with her for this long-anticipated, hard-won induction into the professional circle my father has been a part of for many decades. What is it? I ask myself. And -- with even more curiosity, as I suspect it is for different reasons -- what is it that makes my presence so important to him?

There isn't time in this afternoon to muse, only to finish packing. "Can she take the red-eye tonight?" I hear my father ask.

"No, but I'll look into bus options for tomorrow afternoon, just in case," I promise.

*

On the jet bridge the next morning, I check my seat assignment: 10A, on a window. When I can, I pick seats with a view; it helps with the tendency toward motion sickness both my sister and I have inherited from my father.

As I step into my row, however, I'm greeted by a solid wall. No porthole, not even half of one like some seats get when they happen to fall between windows. Just a beige expanse of siding. I peer at 10F on the opposite side of the aisle; the oval pane there throws light back at me, ordinary as can be.

I feel, not surprisingly, closed in against this blank barricade. I check the status of my next flight on my phone; still on time. But this flight, the captain suddenly tells us over the intercom, will be delayed. Chicago's still having weather.

D has my flight information and instructions to be near his phone around the time I'm supposed to land at O'Hare, in case he has to make a quick bus ticket purchase for me online. Will I be able to make my connection? Will there be a connection to make? I turn my frown to the wall to my left. I can't see what's on the other side, can't see what's to come.

*

It is the first flight I'm taking from Seattle after finishing my thesis, and for a moment, when we finally leave the runway, I'm a little giddy. When the flight attendant announces that we may now use approved electronic devices, I will not need to wrestle my laptop from my backpack and attempt to write. The goal I've been working toward for four years is all but done; only Little U.'s approval of the document -- formatting compliance, verification of my committee's signatures endorsing the final submission -- is pending. Perhaps by Monday, I tell myself, the day my sisters and I will fly to Texas to spend the middle of the week at our parents' home.

But as I speed toward the thunderheads in Chicago, without a view and without the deadlines I've been so used to, I'm forced to sit with my new lack of purpose. It's only transient, I know. Still, I envy, just a little, my sister's waiting future. A residency at a prestigious hospital in Boston is the next step for her. What the experience will hold is certainly unknown, but it's better defined than the summer I have before me. The plans for whatever I choose to do next with my life still wait to be constructed.

The plane banks as the captain adjusts our trajectory. I turn automatically to the window I don't have and feel my stomach protest. A quick glance to the right, to the view I can steal from 10F. It's limited, but it's better than nothing.

Thursday, May 26, 2011

In the last two weeks, I ...

... visited three cities in three separate time zones via seven airports.

... slept, because of travel, an average of five hours per night. Yes, an average.

... received final clearance on my thesis from Little U. on the Prairie.

Which of the above is the most likely reason I've been catching up on R&R in the last 24 hours (and, as a result, neglecting* this blog)?

* A return to more regularly scheduled programming is promised as soon as the circles under my eyes are a little less prominent. I'm off to take another nap.

Wednesday, May 11, 2011

It's not starting over

It's just a new point of embarkation.

That's where I feel I am, now that Monday is past. That's when I mailed my final deposit of my manuscript to Little U., where, hopefully, it will arrive and undergo review for archiving by the end of the week. Once it receives clearance, I will be DONE. My degree should arrive in the mail in late summer.

We -- D and I -- are thankful to have this nearly behind us. It's been an incredible strain on both of us for four years, first because of the return to a commuter relationship it required and secondly because the thesis portion dragged out and drew resources from me in ways that made our marriage suffer. I can't begin to encapsulate how exactly that worked (or, rather, didn't), but the effect was a stagnation in our growth as a couple. We'd never had the chance to have a "normal" existence together because of the long-distance situation that limited us before we were married and then our work schedules afterward (D worked days and I worked nights and weekends). We did our best, but we were inexperienced. We floundered.

The holding pattern we maintained during this last year was only just bearable, with much of the credit to the help we sought. Now that thesis work is essentially done, we are refocusing on what we need to get to a better place.

D's been angry about the idea of starting over. That's how it all feels to him -- that somehow, everything we'd been through in the last twelve years together "didn't count." I'd argue that it very much does. We learned a lot of survival skills; they just don't apply as much anymore.

So, as we construct a new set, I'm doing my best to foster some optimism for both of us, even though he's not quite there yet. It's exhausting. You want, at times, to scream when you feel someone else scattering the fragile pieces of hope you've propped together like tinder waiting for a spark. But it's not nearly as crazy-making as battling a past-due project, deadlines come and gone, alone. As much as D wanted to, he couldn't help me write, and the responsibility I felt for our misery put me in a constant low-level panic (with intermittent high-level spikes). Now that the precipitating factor for much of that is gone -- and I'm saying no to any new deadlines that involve paying tuition on top of having to meet them -- I feel like the balance in our dynamic has a chance at restoration.

There will, without question, be other events to throw that balance off. But before then, my hope is that we'll have better tools in place to make what comes more manageable. That this will be our hope soon.

Sunday, May 1, 2011

Things I can no longer ignore

It's funny how timing works out.

I've had my head in my thesis pretty steadily (and intensely) since February -- and in the midst of concentrating on the project with so much of my brain, I had to let a lot of other things on my radar remain, at best, peripheral. Which included some aspects of my health. Nothing debilitating: some skin irritation, nerve wonkiness in my hands and feet, intermittent GI protests. The last issue has been ongoing since the middle of 2009 (despite the work-up a year ago), and after so long, I'd practically gotten used to it.

But about two days before I turned in my thesis to my committee, things started to get noticeably worse. Fortunately, I had a follow-up appointment with my doctor (the new one) the day after my draft was due, and her advice, after hearing everything that had been going on for so long, was to consider a food sensitivity as the culprit.

"Gluten and dairy," she said -- these were the most likely suspects. So she suggested an elimination diet followed by an allergen challenge. "Just try going gluten-free for three weeks then dairy-free for three weeks," she said, "and see what happens."

What else is a girl to do with all her newly available time?

I took the news back to my dietitian, who happens to specialize in this kind of testing, and she printed up the protocols. I figured the process wouldn't be fun, but it would be short-lived. Then I looked at the instructions.

"To make this kind of testing accurate and meaningful, you'll want to do more than eliminate gluten and dairy," she told me, pointing to a greatly expanded list of foods and food additives. "Sensitivities can occur in groups. So ideally, you'll want to test all of them."

I won't reproduce the whole catalog here. But let me name a few choice items besides gluten and dairy. Corn. Soy. Eggs. Peanuts. Tomatoes. Peppers. White potatoes. Processed and/or non-organic meats. Shellfish. Strawberries. All citruses. Caffeine. Alcohol. Refined sugars and artificial sweeteners. Processed oils. The list is, even for someone who already has experience with dietary restrictions, more than daunting. And the diet has to be followed for nine weeks, four to allow the body to get rid of residual allergens, then five that cycle in -- very carefully -- each group of potential irritants, one set at a time every third day.

Let's just say this isn't how I envisioned I'd be spending most of the summer.

There is an upside: if I can get this done by mid-September, I will potentially know exactly what's making me feel less than terrific -- and, after getting rid of the little menace(s), be able to go to Hawaii feeling better.

So. After the thesis is officially finished, I'll be looking into the logistics of this new project. It wouldn't be quite so intimidating if I lived on my own and had no one else to answer to. But we've been looking forward to being more social, inviting people over for potluck, taking an extended bike trip with a few friends, visiting and being visited by family. All of that suddenly seems incompatible with the trial because it's inconvenient for the people around me. Imagine subjecting visitors to all of those restrictions when we eat at home or outside the house. Or, in the opposite vein, consider the culinary acrobatics of preparing dual meals so guests can eat "normally," hosting a potluck but not eating what your friends have prepared, going to restaurants but not ordering anything and packing my own food to consume before or after. (Seriously, what are the chances a mainstream eatery will have something, besides a naked lettuce leaf, free of refined sugar, processed oil, corn, soy, eggs ...)

And then there are those looks. The ones you get from people who don't understand your limits and, once they realize just how many there are, back away warily. I shouldn't have to apologize for my circumstances but I often feel like it's warranted -- for the relatively few restrictions I have now, which already make some people uncomfortable.

I know -- those instances are occasional and I shouldn't expect to run into them all the time, but they reduce me to a sense of profound and irrational loneliness. I can't let that prevent me from doing the testing and I can't let the testing keep me from having a life. But how?

Well, if there's anything I'll learn from this experiment, it will be some kind of answer to that question.

Thursday, April 21, 2011

Printed and mailed!

And good riddance.

I can't say I like the revision I sent to my committee on Monday afternoon, but in the limited time I had to address all the comments from my advisor, I did the best I could with the file. The hard copy, which goes to the graduate college review board for more technical assessments (formatting for the purposes of binding, archiving, etc.), went out from the post office today.

So I am, until my defense a week from Monday, free of responsibility for this draft!

The last two weeks have been disheartening because the writing really did become an endeavor for the purpose of finishing my degree, to satisfy my advisor's concerns rather than adhering to the larger vision I had (and still have) for the book project. Because the work is by nature incomplete -- writing a book and writing a thesis are not on the same scale -- and because the thesis also needs to be "complete," i.e., must set forth enough evidence of thought and inquiry into my subject to merit a sense of a focused investigation, I found myself revising at cross-purposes when I tried to satisfy my instincts and my professor's. Obviously, she and the rest of my committee will determine whether I graduate, so I ended up making some changes that I will be taking out again once I have the degree in hand. (I'm trying not to think about the remaining round of post-defense revisions that I'll have to complete before that happens.)

Life here has calmed down some since my last post. It's a relief. Thank you to the lovely people who sent private words of encouragement -- you know who you are. You helped me endure a craptacular two weeks where everything seemed to go pear-shaped and I had no choice but to get through it.

In the interim before my defense, I'll be doing some serious decompression (in between a lot of backlogged household chores). And I have a new project. Not one I'd say I elected to take on, but one that has taken on unexpected priority. More on that very soon ...

Thursday, April 7, 2011

How to eff the ineffable

A writer classmate of mine once used that phrase, which she'd acquired from a former professor. I'm invoking it now because, well, there's a lot I'd like to eff.

I don't mean eff as in that wonderfully flexible expletive I would have liked to utter (as noun, adjective, verb, or other part of speech -- thank you, George Carlin) when, at the end of yesterday, my manuscript was not in my hands. Yes, I've e-mailed my professor to get the tracking number.

No, I mean, the unbloggable kind of things I'd like to eff. There are those things that, though usually not trotted out in conversation with acquaintances, I do write about here: thoughts on family, thoughts on illness.

But then there's the stuff of ugly fights, in person, on the phone. The kinds of things you take to a mediator because you just don't have the perspective to work through them in a constructive way. Because both parties involved are raw.

That's been the last month, after many more months of buildup. And I'm not inclined to go into it here because it's not constructive. Not yet.

But that plan for getting through thesis? Well, it works when it's just thesis stuff getting me down. It's not enough for the specific kind of loneliness you feel after you hang up (by mutual agreement), after you sit for hours in silence not knowing what to say or do (because the alternative -- speaking -- will make things worse).

This is what makes my thesis feel so pointless sometimes.

Yes, we have professionals lined up; yes, it's helping. A lot. I don't want to imagine where we'd be without all that in place. We are so new, however, to the changes we've agreed to make, so used to the old habits. Under duress, we fall back on what we know and everything refragments.

I confess: yesterday, I totally effed my plan. Today, I get back to it. And reshape it to address what I can't eff here.

Tuesday, April 5, 2011

Pruning and grafting

My manuscript is somewhere over the U.S. today.

I'd e-mailed the full draft to my advisor last week, as instructed. She wrote me a harried reply late Sunday night to say she'd only started reading it that day, was halfway through, and was exhausted. (She's teaching an overload and is on seven other thesis committees, she said, as she's said numerous times this semester.) She'd been writing directly on the hard copy she'd printed off. Could I give her my address so she could mail it to me, two-day air? Just the first six chapters. On the seventh, she'd had nothing to suggest.

Nothing? That gave me some pause. They say any editor, when she's giving your work the attention it ought to have, should be able to find something.

I gave my advisor the information, hoping she'd keep duplicates in case what she was sending got lost. I almost asked her if she'd do that for me, just for my own peace of mind. But I couldn't quite ask her to make copies. She was already fried. She didn't need to hear my implied mistrust -- of her judgment, the postal service, the universe. I'm working on that last one, but old habits die hard, especially after last year.

When that package hits the front porch tomorrow, I'll need to be in the frame of mind to dive in, assess what and where to add or subtract with my advisor's guidance, limited as I'm afraid it might be. And I knew that, when I sent it off, given her increasingly frazzled notes in the last two months. So I took the last days of the previous week and the weekend to leave the draft completely, to prepare myself: laundry, yard cleanup. I can't edit well when I'm surrounded by clutter.

The lavender we planted two summers ago is turning green again after the winter. And it was looking leggy. I squatted for an hour, clipping away dead wood, tidying, shaping, peering at tiny silver shoots, trying to determine how the plants would look in a few weeks' time when they had filled out.

This morning, I saw them from the kitchen window -- six little fuzzy globes by the flagstone walk -- and mumbled some kind of prayer: let me be able to see what I need to see tomorrow and for the rest of this month.

The routine my advisor and I have kept for the past two years has been more like this: I send her pages; she writes a note back summing up her general impressions with a list of specific concerns at the end. It sounds like I'll be getting the specifics as they appear in the margins, but the big picture, right when it really matters? That's what she won't be pulling together for me; she asked my permission, in a way, to be excused from that. I'm disappointed. If there was ever a time that the larger impression felt crucial -- but I can't worry about it. There just isn't anything more I can ask of her, so enough. I'll make do.

Six little fuzzy globes, six hairy chapters. At least it's not a delicate bonsai ...

Addendum 4/6: No package as of 8 p.m. PDT. Insert choice expletive here.

Wednesday, March 30, 2011

Alternatives

The hazards of heavy deadlines: a heavier Troubadour.

Not by much, but I can feel it in the way my clothes fit and I know exactly where it's coming from. I wish I could say it's just the excuse and abuse of a few irresistible restaurant menus from celebrating our birthdays earlier this month (both D and I had them). But really, it's days of an extra spoonful of this at lunch, an additional morsel of that at dinner, straight-up standing in the kitchen with one's head in the pantry in search of something to take the edge off all the stress, the kind that builds up in between those outings I wrote about last week. Salty or sweet, this girl has been going after snacks that sate her inner child who is long past tired of being told just one more page, hell, one more sentence ...

And I need to, um, scale that back.

But I also need alternatives. Because I still have a month to go before the defense -- Chapter 7 is heading off to my advisor tomorrow, after which we will do a broad assessment of the project for the purposes of revision -- and mental resources are running thin. I'm still five pages short. There are other unbloggable things going on that are making me crazy in my downtime. And my habit of medicating with food, while a tried-and-true (tried-and-false?) quick fix so I can get back to the so-called degree-finishing plan, is not working in my favor.

I'm holding myself to this by writing it here -- a plan to help me deal with my other plan. To wit, instead of sticking my head in the pantry, I will ...

  • stick my head in a book, even if only for fifteen minutes. And if I don't like the one I have on hand, I'll go find another one. Who says you have to read books one at a time? Different moods, different texts. To make this work, I'd better pile a few choice items in one place. It's ridiculous, but the endgame of thesis writing increases personal inertia some thirty fold. Don't ask me about the laundry that hasn't been done.

  • do something nice for somebody else. Small things that don't take a lot of time, like looking up and e-mailing a recipe that someone asked you about. Because if you're thinking about other people, you're not thinking about yourself, and that is EXACTLY what I need when I'm trying to get away from my own stress.

  • work on plans to go to Hawaii. Yes, travel preparations come with their own stress, but what's fifteen minutes of reading about where I might stay/sunbathe/swim in a lagoon fed by a natural waterfall/forget I ever thought this degree was a good idea/reward myself for getting done?

  • indulge in some TV via Hulu or Netflix. I usually save this exclusively for when I'm working out on the elliptical machine, but since January, I've been writing while on it (a funny picture, I'm sure, but it works). So I have a backlog of shows I keep telling myself I'll get to. Such entertainment without accompanying cardio may indeed lower my resting metabolism further, but at least it's not more calories in, just fewer calories out.

  • look up potential bike trails in our area. Summer is coming, and D and I want to try a few local outings once all of this thesis business is out of the way. It's not skiing, but we need an outdoor physical activity during non-snowy months that we enjoy together. We've figured out it's one of the better ways we bond.

Okay, I think that's enough for now. Take that, thesis! I will get done with you yet.

Monday, March 21, 2011

Feelers

I've been quiet here, I know. It's a mixed silence, some of it imposed largely out of respect for the devastation in Japan. What sorts of things that I normally write about here have any importance in the face of the aftermath there? I've watched the headlines, counted my blessings. Inched forward with writing elsewhere -- thesis, primarily, and other notes to self.

I'm on the home stretch, despite my advisor's rejecting my most recent plan to get my page count where it needs to be. We don't do analysis in this program, she said; it's not required. By which she meant, no, I don't want a report. I want more of the story.

So I went back to my draft. She'd looked it over and sent good comments, so I had new ideas on how I might make Chapter 6 grow. Early last week, I forwarded a revision to her. Now, with Chapter 7 under construction, I have just nine pages or so to go.

It's a relief -- April 1st is my goal for the final chapter -- but it's also meant a certain amount of living under a rock (beyond reading the online news). I'm taking it in stints. Each weekday, a morning session, an afternoon session. Nights off. At the worst part of the struggle to get Chapter 6 started, I was staring at the screen at all hours, still getting nowhere.

To counter the feeling that I'm turning into an earwig, I've imposed mandatory outings that involve interaction with people. To get lunch with new acquaintances during the week (a girl has to eat). To peruse an art exhibit on a Saturday afternoon, to attend the symphony with D on a weeknight, even to ski. For that last one, I took the thesis with me and nearly got carsick working on it while D drove into the mountains, but it was worth the effort. I wrote until I was nauseated and then skied until my legs threatened to buckle. Went back home with a clear head, which, above all, is what I need to keep my writing brain moving.

It's not what I expected my writing process to be, but it's true that you can't write well if you spend all your time with your attention turned within. So I'll take it, even if the workaholic in me keeps tapping my shoulder and pointing at the time.

Nine pages. The end's in sight.

Addendum 3/22: Airline tickets for the defense have been purchased. No turning back now!

Friday, March 4, 2011

Creative writing?

Another week, and still not much progress. My thesis is trying to write itself in the best way it can, but there's no brain behind it. Or rather, no heart. The paragraphs I've strung together have technical finesse, but the words feel hollow and directionless, like a blurry facsimile of the real story I want somehow to tell. And the writer in me knows it. After letting the thesis grow so many lines of text, like mutant tentacles searching for a place to catch hold, my own brain balks. This just isn't going anywhere, it says.

I've hit the point in the narrative where the story is too big for me to see its arc again. Unfortunately, this isn't a block that can be solved by reading the words of other writers for reinvigoration. In a way, it's like I've been trying to work my way out of the center of a bull's eye. The tiny circle in the middle was the first chapter; the next ring out, the four that followed. Finding a vantage point from which to see that second group of chapters took months -- from last February to last August -- and I don't have the luxury of time anymore.

I have some twenty pages to fill and two years' worth of research. Even if the story isn't falling into place, my process of seeking answers is certainly well documented. So my plan, which I've now e-mailed my advisor, is to use all of that to write an afterword. It'll give voice to a lot of questions that haven't yet been asked within the narrative and reveal the as-yet-unaddressed pieces of the story, rough as their introduction there might feel to me.

It's not the way I want to finish this. But finished is what this needs to be.

Addendum 3/6: My laptop fried a portion of its hard drive today. First the adapter cord, now the disk itself? I'm not liking this trend.

Friday, February 25, 2011

Note(s) to self

I feel like I need to write them.

I have been, actually. A quick e-mail here and there, just a sentence or two. Don't forget to do this, be sure you remember to pick up that, call this person, mail that letter, tell yourself these things because if you don't, they will blow away like powdery snow that refuses to stick.

But there's more than a list of chores accumulating in my inbox. There are ideas, baby ones, for writing. For essays that will have to wait till the thesis is done.

Trust me, I'd work on both if I could, but I know the limits of my energy and concentration. Still, I'm excited. For so long, I've wondered if all I had was this work, and if it was never to get finished or I lost interest, what then?

What then.

I wrote about inspiration in the days after my conference, and then I found myself without it last week. Out of some instinctive need, I went to the library and turned to the voices of the writers I'd met -- some in person, some through the mention of their work. And the fog in my mind began to clear.

It was not the exact subject or idea that helped me. In fact, reading someone else's work on the same thing you might be writing about can be very intimidating -- it's been done, it's so easy to think. And there are critics who will say that it's true, that love and death and trauma are all tired topics. But it's not the what of the writing; it's the how. One of the panels I attended was dedicated to that idea, what happens when we're told that something is too "done" -- or so the language runs -- to write about anymore.

I came away from that panel with more resolve behind what I'd been trying to do in the last few years. Not that this alone can clear those pesky blocks from my mind when the work doesn't know where it needs to go. But in reading the prose of one of the panel members this week, I was able to get away from my own tangled thoughts and understand, through her way of narrating her story, that sometimes not knowing how to proceed is itself the fiber that can tie words together. Instead of trying to sew up holes, I needed to point them out. And what each person doesn't know, how she navigates that -- this is what fingerprints a work, making it its own.

Chapter 6 is at last under way, and no, I still don't know where it will end up. But I know with certainty now that this is okay. That the examination of the unknown itself may be just where it needs to go.

Thank you to everyone who's sent me suggestions, exercises, and even talismans for kicking the writer's block! It's been incredibly helpful to know you're cheering me on.

Monday, February 21, 2011

Wordless

So I turned in Chapter 5.

And then I crashed.

Not that I wasn't trying to get the next part of this thesis done -- I spent every day last week staring at a blinking cursor, typing sentences only to delete them or hit enter to move them down the page because they led nowhere. False starts. Words that felt labored and unclear because the direction of the work itself, at this juncture, is nebulous too.

I fear these moments most. Chapter 5 closed a major section of the project -- an accomplishment to be proud of. But with it, the momentum of the story shut down too. There's much more I need to say, and in turning this work into a book after I finish my MFA, I will. But for now, for the next two or three chapters that I must write to make my page count to graduate, I need to know what piece comes next in this puzzle. And because all the previous chapters have so cleanly packaged themselves together (not something I anticipated, but that's where the writing went), it's like I'm starting a new thesis, in a way.

I'm not good at beginnings. And last week, in the face of this unexpected return to one, I thrashed, going back again and again to the keyboard when I should have just given myself a break. You see, I wanted to speed up the process. These blocks don't crumble without a lot of trial and error, and I figured the more time I put in, the sooner I'd find a way through.

It hasn't happened. And after so many miserable days, I need a new approach. So I'm reading other writers' words, hoping for inspiration, and trying to ignore that feeling of powerlessness as the clock ticks on.

It's still staggering.

Thursday, February 10, 2011

Reconnecting

The conference is over, and I'm spent. Three days of attending panels, meeting editors and agents, and familiarizing myself with -- well, I'm not sure there's a term to describe what the ins and outs of being a writer entails. It's art and business and mentorship and a tenuous work-life balance, at the very least. I got to hear about that in detail from many different people, who have experienced it in vastly different ways.

I'm still wrapping my head around it all. And I hope to do that in part by writing about it here. But first, I need to get down in words a different story that has run alongside the writing I've been doing for many years.

When I was an intern at a magazine in D.C., the summer before I started my last year of college, a fairly prominent photographer, but not one I'd ever heard of, gave a talk during lunch. He was about sixty at the time, married without children. He spoke about his work, which took him around the world, but more importantly, he spoke about how he came to it from a childhood in rural Ohio and described the family he grew up with there. While he didn't say this explicitly, I saw how their stories were entwined with his and, as a result, were knitted into the photos and writing he crafted long after he'd moved away, like fiber wicking ink.

Under his words whispered a stranger language that my ear didn't understand but some other part of me did. I wouldn't have called it a soul at the time, but I will now. It sat up and took notice, recognizing, though we'd never spoken directly, writing-kin. I was only beginning to learn, in crafting narrative essays, what he seemed to be demonstrating in his photos: the act of examining one's life by looking at and documenting, counterintuitively, the lives of others we encounter. And I wanted to say, yes -- yes! This is what my work is for me too, and thank him for revealing this to me, even as more questions about that impulse threatened to overtake the thought before it was fully formed.

He invited the interns in attendance to contact him at any time after his talk if we had questions or were interested in chatting more, so I sent him a note toward the end of the summer. Coffee, I suggested. Dinner, he replied, his treat. And so, at a tiny Japanese restaurant, with a chef who would introduce me to my first taste of sushi, we talked in the way an intern and a mentor might about writing and life -- or were they, in some breaths, the same? -- until the lights were bright on the sidewalk and the heat of the city had gone.

*

We didn't speak again for years. I graduated, began teaching, got engaged, took a different job that leached what soul I did know I had from me, planned a wedding, and neglected my writing throughout it all. Then came grad school and commuting, not a year after D and I were married. I had no reason to go to D.C., and certainly nothing I felt compelled to share with this man who had encouraged me in his own way to pursue what mattered to me. The challenge of the commute overshadowed my work at Little U., and it made me doubt my drive to write. I stared at white space without excitement or joy or even curiosity about what might appear.

But I remembered what the photographer had said in his talk, so many years ago, about his own challenges before a near-empty page. "Never stop in a tidy place," he said. "Leave a sentence unfinished, an idea only halfway developed, a paragraph mid-stride, as it were. That way, when you come back, you will be able to pick up and re-engage."

So as I did begin to put one word in front of another in this last year, I followed his advice. And the work that has emerged is in some ways the result.

Once I knew I'd be going to D.C. for my conference, I wanted to find the photographer to return, at the very least, the kindness of the meal he'd treated me to. I found his name in a posting for a photography class several months old, but fresh enough that the media contact might still know how to reach him. I wrote to her, telling her in brief this story.

Two days later, the photographer wrote me back. "I remember you well and have often wondered where you were and what [you] have been doing," he said. He'd moved away from D.C. but still visited the city from time to time to meet with his editor. "So please tell me when you will be there. Perhaps your visit will coincide with one of my trips. I hope so."

On Monday, we met for lunch. I was early and tried in vain not to be nervous; he was late and put me completely at ease. From the moment we saw each other, it was as if we were simply picking up the conversation we'd suspended. And so we talked about writing and life, just as before, but this time as friends.

I remembered then what it was to love what I do but even more so how much a connection to other writers is essential to me in sustaining such a solitary art. So I am glad for this dialogue we've restarted, one that promises to continue for a long time. As it turns out, the photographer visits Seattle once a year, so we have an informal standing get-together for the foreseeable future.

As for that strange language I first heard during his talk, I was surrounded by it all week, even in the moments when I was overwhelmed by all there was to take in. So I think it's safe to say I was doing what I needed to for a long-forgotten part of me, and I won't question that further. Or at least, not as much -- as long as this language is mine to hear.

Wednesday, February 2, 2011

And there goes another one

Fastest chapter on record -- yes, No. 5 is off into the electronic ether. It may very well remain out there for a few days while both my advisor and I are at this week's conference (assuming she's able to get in tonight), but that's fine. I'm relieved that it's off my desk and I can now focus on the next few days here.

Speaking of here, I very nearly didn't make it because of the weather yesterday. But I was lucky enough (seriously, how long has it been since I've gotten to say those words!) to finagle a flight change out of Seattle when my original itinerary through Dallas was canceled -- as well as the second and third rebookings automatically generated by the airline's computer system. No. 2 routed me through Chicago (into even heavier snow?); No. 3 put me back through DFW on the red-eye (16 hours after my original flight, into sub-zero conditions in a metropolis that handles temperatures in the 20s only rarely). Damned connecting cities!

I'm no fan of six-hour flights, but when the very cranky gate agent I sidled up to managed to find the last open spot on a nonstop operated by a partner airline, I was delighted. So, only an hour after I was originally supposed to take off, I squeezed into a seat between two gentlemen and tried to get comfortable.

Believe it or not, that's where I finished Chapter 5.

It was definitely a challenge, trying to do that with so many interruptions -- captain's announcements, the shuffling of beverages, turbulence (the flying-over-a-blizzard kind, not just a few bumps here and there). But with the new laptop battery that arrived just in time for the trip, I got a solid two hours of writing done. A big thank-you to my seatmates for being the quiet kind (one seemed to be studying for an interview; the other was writing a PowerPoint presentation on his own laptop). Not that I don't like being social, but the window of opportunity was invaluable.

So now I'm on page 51. Twenty-four to go ...

Thursday, January 27, 2011

I just wanted a trim, really

Next Tuesday, I will get on a plane and head for the Other Washington, where I'll be attending a conference. It promises to be lively -- hundreds of writers talking about what they do, how they do it, and why. So I'm excited. Mostly. After all, it's also intimidating to wander among the well-published or -- gulp -- their agents.

I'm in prep mode, trying to get all my ducks in order before I leave. Bills paid? Check. Clothes washed? Almost check. Toiletries packed? Check, and check. How about a haircut? Check ... please.

I present, for your amusement, a conversation (sort of) that transpired when I went for a trim this week. Let's just say that the small talk the stylist tried to engage me in was not what I'd expected.

Scene: a local bargain-basement hair salon (conveniently advertising half-price cuts). The service in the past has been hit-or-miss because of the rotating staff. But the long layers our protagonist usually requests are a fairly straightforward job, and even a few misplaced snips disappear within two weeks as her hair grows out. For $7.99, it's still a deal.

Hairdresser: [Draping her client in a smock] "What would you like today?"

C. Troubadour: "Just a clean-up on the ends, please."

H: "No problem."

She begins combing and snipping. CT watches in the mirror but stays quiet so as not to disturb the woman's concentration.

H: [As she runs her fingers through a section on one side] "Love that Asian hair. So thick and strong. When I was younger and wore extensions, that's what I would get."

CT: "Oh?" [Looks up at the woman's longish chestnut-colored pixie cut.]

H: "Yep, I loved it because you could bleach it but the pigment in it was so strong that it would turn orange -- I liked that look."

Unsure what else to say, CT nods.

H: "I still dye my hair now -- do it myself." [Smiles proudly.] "But it's to hide all the gray."

CT: [Relieved to find something to respond to, swiping at trimmings gathering on her face] "I've got some of that coming in at the crown."

H: "You do!" [Continues snipping.] "Mine's at the temples. I always thought that looked so good on a man. But on me? It sticks out all over the place like little wires. As if I needed pubic hair coming out of my head."

CT pauses mid-swipe.

H: [Gesturing with her scissors at random points around her head] "I mean, it's like sproing! sproing! sproing! sproing! sproing! -- "

CT's eyes widen.

H: "So that's why I dye it. You know, I wonder why armpit hair doesn't turn gray. I mean, don't you?"

CT is speechless.

H: "I wonder too sometimes if my eyebrows are graying as well. It looked like they were getting lighter, but I couldn't tell for sure since I started coloring them to match. What a nuisance, eh?"

A pause. CT flounders for something, anything to say --

CT: "Well ... at least you know what you're doing?"

End scene.