Good God. I’ve become the blogger I didn’t want to become… again. I suppose it’s a natural thing, like going back to what you know, but I didn’t expect it to take hold this fast. I am literally a slave to my post views, as if I’m expecting to explode overnight. I’m like one of those people who constantly watches their stock portfolio, instead of concentrating on the overall picture.

I’m also constantly thinking of new things to write. I make mistakes because I’m trying to get content together. The true Catch-22 of blogging is that if you don’t pay attention to your hits, you will wind up in obscurity. That’s because every time you post, you give the Google bots a chance to find you. Other people come in and leave their contact information. You visit their web site and leave your URL. More hits.

If things go right, you’ll end up like Dooce. Dooce has been my hero since she first started blogging. The blog starts with writing about struggles with her Mormonism, her job, and her life in general. The blog started to explode nationally to the point where she was able to support a family just by posting, taking great pictures, and talking about herself.

Man that seems rude, talking about yourself.

Until you realize that you can’t write about anything else, because writing something else would never satisfy the need to communicate with your soul. It’s the need to express the things going on in your life so that your friends and readers can come along and say, “Oh my God! I felt exactly like that when…” The trick is to write well, and to open yourself up to both criticism and praise. If you don’t, then you’ll get down when the trolls attack you and your hits are exclusively created by bots and not readers.

Writing well is about taking an experience and making it universal. With some things, I just can’t do that because the situation is so weird that you can’t equate it to anything else. But with almost everything else, you end the post with an invitation to action, even if that action is as small as a smile of remembrance.

Because smiles of remembrance lead to sharing, building more than a web site. Building an online space where people can come to commiserate, laugh (often in spite of themselves), and leave comments that will interact with me, but more importantly, allow my readers to interact with each other.

If your blog can’t run independently of you, you’re not doing it right. Because these are the same people that will read you over and over again, not because you’re that great a writer, but your web site is where all their friends are.

At first, I thought Facebook was the way to go. I have a built-in audience of over 600 people there. However, with Facebook, you really don’t have the design control that you do with a real blog. At this point, it is more crucial than ever to create hits, because unless I’m missing my mark, most people get their “friend news” on Facebook and rarely venture out into other areas of the web.

That’s why Dooce is so special. She was before Facebook, and she grew this web site into such a juggernaut that she’s been a Jeopardy! question.

I can only hope that I can create that kind of safe space on my own web site, where we can get together and start talking. We’ll share and share and get through life together. Thank you for making me part of your life.

I need the hits. :P~

In a space where life is disheveled, you have to create your own structure. For someone who is ADD, this is not all that easy. I cope with it by having a writing schedule. Without fail, I am at my computer by 9:00, and I am writing… whether it’s crap or not.

Sorry you have to suffer through these posts. I know they’re kind of scattershot, and so do you, but you’re willing to read me anyway until I get this whole posting schedule thing down. Because right now, I don’t have the luxury of a back stock of entries. I can’t just tell the web site to post something incredible on a schedule, because I’m starting from scratch (and by that, I mean cron jobs, not that the computer can post for me. My computer is a moron).

It’s as if my body is saying that it doesn’t care whether I’m tired or not. There is new content to be delivered and t-shirt graphics to be fixed and the house is a mess and nothing will get done if I think of everything I have to do as one large mass.

I get overwhelmed and panicky, as if the nuclear bomb is already set and I’m just the guy standing next to it. I’m not even quick enough on my feet to be MacGruber.

My one saving grace is Google. I’m not kidding.

If you let it, Google will save your life. Their calendar app alone is worth signing up.

For truly heartfelt instructions on how to set up an .ical feed, leave a comment. I’m not typing up all that stuff for my non-nerds. 🙂

Forgiveness is hard.

Forgiveness is so, so hard.

Forgiveness is hard because it has its own therapied vocabulary that, in the end, does work. But it doesn’t erase the questions around why you had to forgive in the first place. Those are the tabs that stay open in the Firefox of my mind.

Some of forgiving and being forgiven is about learning new words for it. There are three outcomes to a conflict, and they rarely change:

1. Both people are happy
2. Both people are miserable
3. One person gets what they want, and the other person doesn’t

The first two are easy. The last one will keep you up at night. Both people being miserable might seem hard, but you can go to sleep knowing that both parties are in equal pain. Only one person getting what they want is damned unsatisfying.

However, if you’re the person that got what you wanted, there’s really no reason to go over and re-negotiate. Why should you? You got what you wanted! The other person may still have unanswered questions, but it’s ok. Your part is over. Go drink a margarita and celebrate your victory. Good job! You’re done.

If you are the one who didn’t get what you wanted, no margarita for you. Because you have more important things to do. You lost. You’re covered in loss soup with loss croutons on top. You have been beaten, and it hurts.

Time to pick a therapist. Mine is a pint of Ben and Jerry’s Cherry Garcia Frozen Yogurt (Today is Free Cone Day), but do what works best for you. Preferably both. Get a therapist to think about your grief, and get the ice cream to forget so that you can put down an impossibly large mind worm.

If you’re on the right track, though, the impossibly large mind worm is going to start with yourself. Taking credit for what you did wrong seems counter-intuitive, but it’s not. By admitting your side of the story, you are releasing yourself from a situation “that happened to you,” into a situation in which you have some control. You may think that someone is withholding information from you, but really, you’ve just missed the signs that have been cropping up all along. In our humanness, we have a tendency to just stop communicating because we have no idea how to say what we need to say. Often, when the truth is what’s necessary, it’s avoided and covered up to save someone’s feelings.

It’s a human trait to try not to hurt people (or, at least, I hope it is). It is also possible for passive aggression to lead to thermonuclear war. The longer you lead people on, the harder it gets to extract yourself. Waiting to tell someone the truth morphs with the lie until you believe it, too. But the other person doesn’t know that. Doesn’t see the way you pull away because they aren’t aware of the possibility… aren’t prepared for the possibility.

If there’s anything we as humans hate, it’s to be caught off guard. It makes people angry because it’s embarrassing. It’s embarrassing to think of how much time you’d been doing something wrong and been denied a chance to make it better. It’s embarrassing thinking about how long this person must have been “putting up with you,” because no human wants to be an obligation. When you call someone on something they’ve been doing for a very long time, they tend to respond like a wounded animal because they didn’t know there was a problem in the first place. It’s injustice. It’s more painful than the explosion that would have happened when you were angry, because it would be over.

Carrying around a grudge against someone is like accepting their resume and never calling them back. They’re hanging on to the hope that they still might get an interview, and you’re concentrating on your anger so much that every day that resume sits on your desk, you’re adding more wood to the fire.

Passive aggression is kindling for emotional destruction. Send a response, even if that response is “I hired someone else.”

I always get those memes that ask questions like, “tell me something that I don’t know about you.” Sometimes, answering those questions are hard, like, “I have to pick just one?” Today, that answer is easy.

Because I grew up as a preacher’s kid with very specific instructions on what I could and could not say (self-imposed, being the oldest child), I am an avid fan of cringe comedy. My heroes are Jim Norton, Bill Burr, Bob Saget, Lisa Lampanelli, and the list goes on. Before you go through my list of comics to hear them, let me warn you that Bob Saget is the dirtiest motherfucker you will ever hear in your entire life. He’s not the “safe one of the bunch” just because he played Danny Tanner on Full House.

Actually, come to think of it, I think Bob Saget is as dirty as he is for the same reason I’m as dirty as I am. It’s a rebellious phase. It’s lasted a while. Maybe we should see a doctor.

This has caused no end of hilarity and confusion as people realize that I am funny, perky, innocent, child-like, etc, and at the same time, when playing Cards Against Humanity, the black card was “How did you lose your virginity?” The white card I put down was “African children.”

I’ll wait while you gather yourself. Yes, I am that dirty.

I only have three or four friends who can go down that rabbit hole with me who I know for sure won’t disown me, because they know that I’m just going for the cringe and I don’t mean anything harmful by it at all.

It’s just the one time that the mask comes off, and I’m not pretending to be anything other than who I am… a middle-aged white woman who is tired of being a middle-aged white woman and all the implications that come with it.

Cringe comedy is a way not to be invisible.

I’ve been thinking a lot about this article. It creates a thunderstorm of emotion for me, because it is an exact description of the kind of crap I’ve lived with my whole life. The good thing is that now I have better answers than when I was a teenager.

When I was in middle school/high school, the gender roles “wave” hit hard core. I wasn’t sure I was a lesbian, but I for damn sure didn’t want to be a “woman.” By that, I do not reject the fact that I am female. I reject all the bullshit that is required to be “a lady.” I dress the way I dress and talk the way I talk (and write the way I write) to expand what it means to be female. I do not, in any way, want to feel that I am for sale. I do not want to dress so that men look at me that way, that tantalized look that says “I want her, and she’ll give in eventually.” I genuinely enjoy male company when it’s just “being one of the guys,” but when the same guys turn around and look at me differently because I don’t have the same parts, I’m out of there. In short, I dress to protect myself, and it confuses me. I don’t want to be part of the weird gender-assigned roles that argue I should be submissive to men, and I don’t know enough about myself to judge whether that’s totally weird or not. Stay tuned.

It’s hard to step out of my comfort zone, because to me, dressing up is putting yourself out there. I turn on the charm and flirt with everyone, male or female… also in protection because I think if I’m funny enough, people will focus on that instead of the outward shell. If I punch you with humor, you’ll be laughing too hard to notice anything else… like my baseball cap with REALLY short hair underneath. If I’m lucky, you won’t notice I’m gay.

It’s true, and I didn’t even put that together until now.

Growing up in the South taught me that I wasn’t normal at an early age, and I’ve been trying to make up for it ever since. I just wanted to be me, and it seemed like everyone had an opinion on whether I should be gay or not. Never mind that I could change my sexuality as easily as I could change my eye color. Actually, I could change my eye color easily with contacts, and that would turn out as real as “being straight.” It’s a mask where authenticity should be.

Moving to Portland and out of the Bible belt allowed me to start asking who I really was, because Portland doesn’t have a problem with gay people being affectionate in public. I do.

I friggin’ remember all the gay bashings in the Montrose. I remember getting royally hassled at High School for Performing and Visual Arts- a school that would lead one to believe I’d be safe(r). It’s a good thing that when bad things happen, it makes for good writing. I wrote a lot.

I come by it honestly, and I’m still working on it. In the meantime, though, I have to believe that I am hilarious.

The following is a repost from Facebook on Feb. 1

Dear Joan,*

There is no easy way to say this, so I will try to put it as gently as I can. If you are gay, God cannot help you right now. What I mean by that is not to say that God can’t help you later. As scary as this sounds, you’re on your own.

I do not mean this in the absolutely terrible way it sounds. You have been harmed by religion and told that you are less than perfect. You have been told that these feelings for women will go away, but you haven’t seen any evidence of it. You think you must be celibate for the rest of your life, never experiencing the joy of a really great marriage. The constant messages that have been drilled into your head have made you feel the fear that comes with thinking that God doesn’t love you.

Walk away. Leave that where it is. Give yourself time to heal from those wounds, because you need time to work out what you really think. Trying to undo years and years of indoctrination is going to take time, especially if you want to reach out to a more liberal denomination and keep church in your life. Stop going to church, and don’t go back until you’re ready to, in a sense, take it on. Knowing God is bigger than you think. It can and will absolutely change your life. But right now, you need to rest.

You need to rest in the same way that a church gets what they call an “interim pastor.” After a beloved pastor leaves a church, an interim is there (for lack of a better term) to take all the bullets. The congregation can be angry and upset~ why shouldn’t they be? The person responsible for teaching them things that change their lives emotionally and spiritually is not going to be one of those people that leaves without incident. The interim is a time to take a breath so that the congregation can welcome a new pastor, having resolved the issues and conflicts that came before.

In the same way, I think you also need the “peace of interim.” Leave God where God always sits on your heart. Fill the time that you used to fill with church with something else. Join a soccer team. Learn to make beer. Go to concerts and read books. Stimulate your senses in a way that you haven’t done before. Think about something else and let God fade into the background.

Eventually, there will be a time when you can think about God and not the hurt that you endured. You will see the everpresentlovingkindness. You will want to pray for your friends and family. You will see the amazing clarity that comes from getting your thoughts organized enough to speak to God one on one. There is no specific order to prayer, but in my own life, I find that if I have some idea of what I want to say, the answers come more easily.

And when that everpresentlovingkindness has arrived, you cannot nurture it in isolation. Christianity is not a solo endeavor. You’ll want to reach out to a group of people that will hold you accountable. Pray with you in pain and ecstasy. Give you the opportunity to give back to your community and feel the uplifting feeling you get when you’ve helped someone else. Allow yourself to feed your soul… that part of you that is your still, small voice.

But in order to feel that level of joy, you have to work through that level of pain. That’s going to be the hard part. In order to make yourself open to what God has to say, you have to work on yourself, first. Get a therapist. When I pick out a therapist, I go through the directory listing and write down all the names that sound like New York Jews. It’s profiling, yes, but it tends to yield the best results. My current therapist, for what it’s worth, is absolutely friggin’ brilliant and could pass for Larry David. But that’s my system. You’ll have to find what works best for you.

The point is that in order to receive God, you need to give attention and love to yourself so that you are able to recognize God when you’re ready. Again, you need to separate your old relationship with God and give yourself space to create a new one. Give yourself permission to protect your heart, because you are about to go through a tremendous loss.

The friends you currently have that are not enlightened enough to let go and love you for who you are will drop you in a hot minute. It’s going to be lonely, you’re going to be more scared than you’ve ever been in your life, until you realize that friends who don’t love you for who you are aren’t really friends. You’ll find new ones, and welcome the old ones back into your circle as they finally realize that they were wrong. And not only that, but embarrassingly so.

Your former friends won’t know what to say when they realize that they’ve been acting like segregationists in the Jim Crow south. Worse than that, they acted that way toward you, their old friend, the one that despite their condemnation, you’ve loved them the whole time. Despite their brazen attacks on your personhood, you still remember the time they stuck a glue stick up their nose in second grade. You will follow this path over and over as more and more people seek you out to tell you just how terrible they feel that they made your childhood so much more difficult than it had to be. It’s a good time to pull out that glue stick story.

You are going to be fine, because you are already sitting in the perfect white light, the everpresentlovingkindness of the Holy Spirit. Turn inward, and see what happens. Knowing yourself is knowing God, knowing what you are capable of giving and receiving in this absolute abundance of joy. But take your time. Don’t try to accept all of this at once. It is a journey, and not a race. I am here to walk beside you. I do my best thinking while mobile.

Grace and peace from the everpresentlovingkindness of that Holy Spirit, both now and when you decide to put the first foot forward and step down on sacred ground.

Amen.

Here, in no particular order, are things I’ve learned about working in a professional kitchen. Please note that I am not specifically talking about my current kitchen, just an amalgam of stories taken from every kitchen job I’ve had thus far.

Rule No. 1

No one is coming. Count on that. If you are knee deep in tickets and you are the only one scheduled, you are going to feel as if the world is ending, and possibly in a matter of minutes. Breathe. Just feel the panic wash over you and give yourself a minute to get yourself together. If you think that minute is taking away from your ticket time, you are sadly mistaken. It will save you from having to go back and forth from the line to the rail to see what you’re supposed to have going if you know ahead of time where you are. Take two minutes if you don’t have an expo that can call out which ticket is in which priority. I know that when I’ve been in that situation, my own name has wiped itself from my memory. Taking a second to go over the entrees and their cook times before you start will help you to lean on yourself when you’re all you’ve got.

AGAIN, breathe. There’s only three and a half more hours of complete chaos left.

Rule No. 2

Be other-aware. If you don’t know what I mean, it is possible that the rest of the cooks in the brigade hate you if you’ve left the line a lot… or been an asshole to the other cooks because you didn’t work as part of a team. You put  your needs above theirs and screwed them to the wall. In the end, it doesn’t matter. You won’t be there long.

Be relentless about calling “behind you,” “corner,” “coming down the line,” and always, always, always “behind you with a knife.” Break that rule and you’re most likely not going to hurt them. You’re going to draw back your knife quickly and miss them entirely unless the person is someone you wanted to shank, anyway. If your cut is bad enough, you’ll have to leave the line because you’re bleeding. That is several levels of deep shit all the way around.

You’re trying to clot your cut with super glue off the line, or you’re being rushed to the emergency room. Either way, the brigade is down a man. We’ll remember that absence forever if there’s twice the customers then usual on that particular night… because every time we tell that story about the night we got slammed, we’ll talk about your injury and how much pain we were in at not having you, as well as every gory detail about your wounds and the scale to which they were gross. We know it’s an accident, but we’ll still call you a dumbass for not being careful enough to avoid injury in the first place.

By the same token, realize when someone is ankle-deep in Ranch dressing and might need help with a cleanup at the same time there are five people waiting for their dinner and every order comes out of her station. Notice when pantry has nothing and saute has 15 orders that have to get out in the next 10 minutes and you need to bail them out. In fact, Rule No. 2 can be shortened to that one word- NOTICE.

Rule No. 3

There are no secrets from the chef. This is less about their interest in what you’re doing and more about being proactive about communication. This is particularly important when orders are dropped off in the morning. The chef may have ordered it last night, but things like making sure they know their veggies arrived are important. Don’t know what’s important and what’s not? Ask. Do not pass up a chance to say you don’t know something, because there’s only a short period of time in which the details are given. If you don’t know the layout of the kitchen, where everything is stored, how much we have in the house of every ingredient, and what arrives when, you are going to be hopelessly lost at your job.

The kitchen, as Anthony Bourdain has said “is the last meritocracy.” Don’t know the answers to too many questions after you’ve been there more than a month? You’d probably better study up before you get canned. When the chef asks you a question and you can’t answer it quickly, you will be sized up as a moron. The clock is ticking. Admit what you don’t know sooner rather than later, because not to do so would be a career limiting move.

It’s embarrassing, but tell the truth at all times. No one can help you if you don’t admit that something doesn’t look right and you don’t know how to fix it and the ticket time is already fifteen minutes. You’ve all been there. Don’t look at me like that. When you were coming up, you made bechamel and mayonnaise and broke both… in the same day. Your chef’s eyes went over the back of his forehead, and then everything you chopped was too big and now has to be re-sized to actually fit in someone’s mouth. Your chef may scream, but he/she does not have time to listen to you explain why something happened. Ain’t nobody got time fo’ dat (Thank you, Sweet Brown). What needs to be conveyed, even if you want to crawl into the floor, is that the bechamel, mayonnaise, and vegetables aren’t ready yet. It’s the chef’s ass on the line if you’re weeded and haven’t told him/her, and he’d rather bail you out than have the customers suffer. Be warned, though. He/she will do it, but they may take it out on you in a most unpleasant manner. No matter what happens, though, if you care about your food and your diners at all, you’ll be honest and let people help you.

Rule No. 5

Front of House and Back of House are always going to be at each other’s throats, and there’s no way around it. Do what you can to diffuse anything that crops up. Making it worse will in turn make your life miserable. It doesn’t matter whether the kitchen fucked up or the waitress left the food on the window until it got cold and asked for a re-fire. It just doesn’t. Shit happens and it’s so irritating that you might want to scream. Don’t. I repeat- don’t. The next time the wait staff sees you, you are so in for it… especially on days like Rule No. 1. Get mixed up in a fight between cooks and front of house and you are going to be in a world of gut-wrenching pain… and the horrible thing is that you knew it and you did it anyway because sometimes it feels good to take the low road.

Rule No. 6

If you are offended in any way by anything, you need to quit. Front of house, back of house, it doesn’t matter. The things you will overhear, and in time start saying, will be atrociously offensive. Your mother is never off limits. Neither are jokes about rape, pedophilia, sodomy, incest, racism… you get the picture. You think we’re idiots, and we know that we are just blowing off steam from a night that ran us over like a slow-moving 18-wheeler.

Your non-kitchen friends will be horrified, and eventually, you’ll stop hanging out with them, or you’ll quit and you won’t. They won’t understand the rhythm and patois you’ve developed, hate the fact that your newest body accessory is a five-inch scar across your arm, and are generally unfriendly to learning what you’ve been up to at work.

This is because the idea of a cook is so much different than the reality. Non-kitchen people do not care for stories about funny things that happened at work, because so much of the time it involves things you should never say in polite company, as well as a cacophony of microdetails that we’re still thinking about from the night before. You don’t care that my restaurant needs lettuce, and you for damn sure don’t want to know where the six pan of pizza sauce is in located my low boy. You judge us for jokes that to us, seem harmless because they are told to blow off unimaginable pressure.

However, we cannot help it. We’re like doctors, in a way, because even if we leave the job, the job doesn’t leave us. On our off hours, we’re still thinking about what we did and how many mistakes we’ve made. The pressure is so intense that when we try to disengage, the switch breaks.

Rule No. 7

Always fart in the walk-in. God have mercy on your soul if you don’t.

I’ve come up as several different variations in the Meyers-Briggs assessment, but the one I get the most often is “INtroverted Feeling Judging” or INFJ. For people who don’t know me that well, it is a misnomer. No one can believe that with as boisterous as I am in public, I’m not just like that all the time. Part of the reason that people are so shocked is that introversion doesn’t necessarily mean shy. It means I get tired of you people (that was a joke).

I need lots of time to recharge my batteries, which is why most of the time, I stay home. I don’t say anything to anyone for any reason. That is because out in the world, I never *stop* talking. It takes a lot of energy for an introvert to be “on,” and once I get home and I take off my bra, I AM DONE. If you catch me in the nanosecond between getting home and changing into my PJs, I might go out with you (but you’re paying). Otherwise, sitting at home and reading or watching TV gives me the strength to go out the next day and do it all over again.

Introversion is what makes me able to be loud on the Internet. (Look for my next documentary, “Being Loud on the Internet.” It’s a blockbuster.) Typing big ideas is not the same as saying them out loud. As my friend Diane told me when I was a teenager, “saying it out loud makes it real.” She was so right. Hearing words come out of my mouth in my own voice is terrifying, especially when I have to say things like, “we don’t have the money for that.” There’s no Escape key for hard conversations, and Control-Z does not do anything in the real world (CTRL + Z is “Undo” on most operating systems).

So I hide.

But this is not necessarily a bad thing. I find that when I write it out, I have a chance to better explain what I mean. There is a thought process to communication, and I don’t put words to paper lightly. The drawback is that often, I type so fast that what, to me, is a five-minute conversation takes someone else all day to read (really must work on my editing). The plus is that if you get a letter from me, it means that I really thought about what I was saying.

There are, of course, standard clauses and provisos:

I am so ADD that I will not likely remember what other people think of as important details. For instance, I don’t know the date I moved to Oregon the first time around. I don’t know the date I moved to Oregon the second time around, either. But I can go back to my journals and letters, teasing out what I thought was important to me at the time.

It was raining the day I drove in. I went directly to my friend Diane’s office, then at the opera on SW Morrison St. I didn’t know anyone else, so it was a quick trip just to say “hi” and “where’s the Target?”

That night, I went to my church and helped stuff envelopes for some kind of financial campaign. It was fun because that was the night I met Dana. She chased me down the street, her in her green Saturn and me in my purple one.

But I don’t remember the date.

Then, I went back to my new roommate’s house and sat through all the obligatory house rules, which were extensive. I am a carnivore. She is vegan. Portlandia ensued.

Those are my important details. I remember that Diane was in the middle of what looked like PE for grownups, that the rain on the windshield looked like mist and it didn’t stop for six months, that my then-wife wasn’t just leaving, she was gone, that Dana was wearing a grey sweatshirt with a George Mason University logo.

But I don’t remember the date.

It is true that saying something out loud makes it real in the short term, but in the long term, something happens. You have time to forget the circumstances that caused you to write what you wrote in the first place. You see it with new eyes, the eyes that well up when you see how far you’ve come.

It is how I deal with both the tendency to be introverted and the tendency to be ADD. I say on paper the things most people say out loud, just to be able to remember it later.

But I don’t remember the date.

I’m reading a great book right now called Brain on Fire. It was written by Susannah Calahan, who interviewed with Teri Gross before Christmas and the book’s publication. I heard about the book as I was driving home, and in fact, I think I’ve mentioned it on Facebook before. I’m talking about it again because I’ve come across a lot in my reading that I want to share.

So relatively little is known about the brain that Calahan went through many, many neurological exams that just dismissed her as a crazy alcoholic (who didn’t actually drink, BTW) before they found the real problem, called anti-ND MA-receptor encephalitis. The book is heart-wrenching, especially in the beginning, because she has no idea what is going on with her body, and her behavior deteriorates swiftly, much to the discomfort and anxiety of everyone around her.

There’s also research in the book as to how anti-NDMA-receptor encephalitis fits into the grand picture of schizophrenic research, which only served to deepen my belief that the physical and the emotional are inextricably interrelated. This is an important point when talking about mental health issues, particularly because they are such a hot-button issue right now.

Calahan has a way of explaining mental illness so that it makes sense… in fact, explaining how physical disease affects behavior and vice versa. For instance, have you ever looked at someone and thought they were drunk or high, only to find out later that they had been given the wrong medication, or worse, in the middle of a seizure?

Medicine excites me, whether it involves physical or mental health. Books by doctors and patients alike hold my attention. To me, it is one of the last great mysteries of the modern world… medicine is not science or an art. It is a time-honored method that clings steadfastly to both.

In the middle of the book, there is a great poem, aptly named “Intake Interview.” It is a series of questions posed by Franz Wright, author of Wheeling Motel. Instead of just publishing the poem, I thought it would be fun to answer the questions themselves.

What is today’s date?

Sat Jan 12 19:05:09 PST 2013 (I love “insert date” in word processors.)

Who is the President?

Ba rack Bamako

How great a danger do you pose, on a scale of one to ten?

Internally, I’m not a danger at all. There are large groups of people all over this country that disagree with me… Something about a “gay agenda.” My “gay agenda” is so boring that these people would immediately realize the error of their ways if they ever looked at it. We got the oil changed on the Saturn. Does that count?

What does “people who live in glass houses” mean?

That if you judge someone else, you are clearly going to be sorry because they are going to throw rocks at your house.

Every symphony is a suicide postponed, true or false?

For the composer or for the listener?I

Should each individual snowflake be held accountable for the avalanche?

Sure- you take 100% and divide it among every snowflake. That way, each snowflake is taking some personal responsibility without being devastated by an overwhelming amount of guilt.

Name five rivers.

Columbia
Willamette
Colorado
Mississippi
Platte

What do you see yourself doing in ten minutes?

Since this is generally an oral quiz, I’m going to skip ahead to the part after I’be finished this post. It’s almost dinner. I’ll probably cook. It will be delicious, and you will be jealous you did’t come over to eat.

How about some lovely soft Thorazine music?

Does it come with Swedish massage?

If you could have half an hour with your father, what would you say to him?

I can’t think of anything to say to my father. When I think of him, my ability to speak is diminished to nothing. Those feelings are so deep that speaking seems entirely inadequate. I would just want to sit on his back deck, smoke a cigar, and hope that somehow companionable silence would suffice. I would’t be the person I am today without him, and not fifteen minutes goes by before I do something that makes me crack up and say, “I’m just like my dad.” Words are so gorgeous, so precious, that anything I could say would have the emotional punch of a World’s Greatest Dad coffee mug. It is my intention to write him something beautiful, something he can keep, but I’be been working on it for oh, ten years now, and it’s never been just right. I want it to be just right, because the work of being my dad is sometimes difficult. It would probably be easier for him if I was a little less shy, if I’d just come out of my shell a little more.

What should you do if I fell asleep?

Call HR! You’re sleeping at work!

Are you still following in [her] sic mastodon footsteps?

No. I stood too close and she stepped on me.

What is the moral of Mary Had a Little Lamb?

If you’re waiting for someone, you’re going to have to wait a long time.
If you love that person, you know they’re worth the wait.
If Mary hand’t loved the lamb as much as she did, the lamb would not have waited for her.
Unforeseen obstacles may separate you from the one you love, but if you both are in agreement, togetherness will come *someday.*

What about [her] sic Everest shadow?

Big with the metaphors, are we?

I will surely never climb Mt. Everest, and most of the time, I’m fine with it. But then I catch a memory in my mind, and I wish I could just get on a plane and go.

Would you compare your education to a disease so rare no one else has ever had it, or the deliberate extermination of indigenous populations?

“Have you took yo’ nerve medication this week? …Cause everybody be wondrin.’ -Shirley Q. Liquor

Which is more puzzling, the existence of suffering or its frequent absence?

Both are equally troubling. Life is conflict.

Should an odd number be sacrificed to the gods of the sky, and an even to those of the underworld, or vice versa?

An odd number of what? Potato chips? Chevrolets?

Would you visit a country where nobody talks?

I visit it all the time. It’s called “my apartment.” Of course, this is exclusively when Dana is at work.

What would you have done differently?

That’s a whole other book, dude.

Why are you here?

I am here to help people. I often marvel at the things that come out of my mouth and think, “that was really good advice. Why didn’t I take it?”

AAAAAAaaaaannnnnnnnddddd scene.

Dear Leslie,

As you’ve probably heard or read, it’s calm again in Israel. Tuesday I was sure it was going to end, and then when it didn’t I was sure it was going to become awful. Wednesday, someone bombed a bus in Tel Aviv. I read about it while I was on the train to Tel Aviv myself, and I can’t tell you how much my heart sank. Once the news broke, too, the entire train car erupted in cellphone calls for a few minutes, although it took me a moment to notice, since I was lost in my own thoughts. At the same time, they were announcing a problem with the cease-fire talks, as well as that the Lebanese had found some rockets in the south aimed at northern Israel (i.e. me). Then, that evening, when I thought it was clear that it was going to get really, really, really, bad, a truce was announced. I haven’t read any of the reports of ‘behind the scenes’ in the conflict, but I imagine having Hillary Clinton and Ban Ki-Moon here helped, and may even have been decisive.

Things here have returned to normal, which, in Haifa, mainly means that people have stopped wondering what’s going to happen next in Gaza, and some of the reserve soldiers who were called up are slowly being sent home. Apparently, though, they plan to keep a significant presence gathered near Gaza for a while, which I imagine was the reason for an urgent call I saw for volunteers at an IDF food packaging plant for this upcoming week. At least, that’s all I hope it was for.

I’m incredibly glad it’s over. In Haifa, we only saw the rockets on TV, but living here was starting to feel like being trapped in a surreal sports bar where everyone keeps asking you which side you’re on and doesn’t understand you when you tell them that, actually, you don’t really like the game.

Dear Leslie,

The waiting is terrible. I realize that I’m impatient. I just want to know what’s going to happen, whether they’re going to stop or make it worse, if the latter, how bad it’s going to get and if I should make plans to leave for a while, and when it will finish, so I know when to plan to come back. (And also at what point my job will accept that I should leave and keep paying me if I go. I can work from basically anywhere, but technically I have residence requirements in my contract.) It’s hard to focus, and I find myself checking Israeli and Gazan news updates compulsively. It’s all the same: Rocket shot from Gaza at X, Israeli attack at Y, Iron Dome intercepted Z rockets, A people killed, B wounded – the Palestinian news prints the names of the dead as well – possible ceasefire from talks in Cairo, but not very likely that it will be today or tomorrow or the next day, if it happens at all, ground troops ready, but still just waiting.

I do worry about it spreading if there’s a ground strike, but I can’t decide if I’m being paranoid or if there’s really something to worry about. I definitely worry more about this than most people around me, but there are already some disturbing signs. A short firefight across the Syrian border was confirmed yesterday, though it didn’t lead to anything. This morning, there was an arson attempt at a mosque in a village in the West Bank, but the villagers (so far) just put the fire out and went home. It’s presumed by police that this was a hate crime from Israeli settlers in a neighboring village. It would only take a few random attacks and counterattacks to start an unfortunate chain reaction there, too… Isrealis have an extraordinary capability to act blase about war (which I find disturbing), as if they accept it as an unpleasant but unavoidable part of life that you have to accept, like, I don’t know, dental work, except that you can die from it, or be maimed for life. I haven’t gotten there yet, and I hope I don’t. On the other hand, if a war happens and you have to live through it, I suppose that being too scared or nervous about it all the time probably doesn’t help, either.

In trying not to worry, I guess, I got sick – my first flu in many years. I’m off to find myself some soup…

Best wishes,

X

There was a line in a NYT op-ed from today that I’ve actually been thinking all week, which is that everyone’s been arguing over whether the latest round of attacks are justified, but no one seems to be asking if it’s wise. I think the main thing it’s going to accomplish is to strengthen the hard-liners on both sides, which I don’t think is going to be helpful. The situation in the south before the assassination was bad, but not so different from the way things have been for the last 10 or 12 years, and you can argue that they had even improved some because of the new missile defense system. The sirens were still disruptive, but fewer missiles hit the ground in the past year or so than before. Also, they’ve tried this already, and it didn’t work. There were rockets before the last Gaza war, and the war didn’t fix it. There have been frequent bombings of launch sites after previous rocket attacks, and the rockets still came.

What did work was an power-sharing agreement with the Palestinian Authority in the West Bank, which is largely peaceful now, and even safe, except for the Arab areas where Israel is responsible for police work, because they don’t do a very good job. Unfortunately, the PA is extremely corrupt, not well liked by a lot of Palestinians, and now that it isn’t causing any trouble, the Israelis aren’t doing much to improve the situation there or move them toward more autonomy. Hamas is not inclined to make such an agreement with Israel, but there were indications that they were open to a long-term truce, but that’s now dead in the water. I guess what I’m saying is that the rockets shot at Israel were a serious problem, but not an existential one, and that this is a terrible way to handle it. It’s already causing a big mess, and I would be shocked if it fixed anything in the long run.

The region has also become even more unpredictable since the Arab Spring started, and, while it’s very likely that a ground invasion will stay contained to Gaza, it’s not completely certain, and not be joined by over-enthusiastic Syrians who are shooting people anyway, or Hezbollah will decide to bomb the north, too, which is more vulnerable, or if it will prompt Egypt to re-evaluate it’s peace agreement. In fact, an IDF jeep apparently just received some shots from Syria in the Golan, according to a local news web site.

In the end, if Egypt and/or Turkey manage to broker a cease-fire, whether it happens now or in a few months, they’re the ones that ‘win’ the conflict, since they can then claim to be the real brokers of power to deal with in this new Middle East. It will be interesting to see if Israel agrees to that (or even if they realize that that’s how they set up the pieces), or if they will keep fighting until Hamas can’t fight anymore and Israel feels like it’s done for now. At the moment, it looks like the latter, but right now, at least, it could improve with the same speed that it could worsen.

I’ll write more soon, if you like. I really need to sleep now.

Best wishes,

X

It’s hard out here for a blogger. I have so much to say, and yet, when I sit down at the blank page, I get to about “there once was a lady from Dallas” and I’m ready for the cooldown… maybe a beer or a cup of tea. Endurance is only partially my strong point. When I’m “in the zone,” I can concentrate for hours. It’s literally like Zeus giving birth to Athena- the words come out of my forehead and onto the page as if just pushing myself harder will move the writer’s block out of the way. Let me tell you, on the days when I’m not feeling inspired, that is a BIG DAMN BLOCK.

Writing is even harder when you’ve just read someone else’s work, and it’s as finely crafted a sentence as anything you’ve read in the last ten years. I subscribe to Esquire, because they tend to have a stable of writers (including David Sedaris) that knock my socks off. [Incidentally, you might want to pick up the July and August issues- they contain part 1 and part 2 of a novella written by Stephen King.] The July issue has a lot of fiction in it, and there’s one story called Ice by Colum McCann that literally made me lose my breath for a few seconds. Here are the haunting lines: The bed of their wagons was black with blood. It had fallen on the wheels too, so that their lives seemed to circle and turn beneath them.

Dear Jesus, how can I follow that? So succinct that the impact hits you like a 12 gauge kickback [RACK!]. Perfect synecdoche (naming the part for the whole, e.g. blood for life). It’s a grasp of the English language to which I aspire, so deeply and sincerely that it is my life’s work, no matter my daily occupation.

Speaking of which, my dad was the one who told me that… but he is not alone. So many poets and prose writers have worked in restaurants, sold insurance, anything to make ends meet… and they prefer it that way. Sitting in a locked tower with a typewriter is not being a writer. What do you possibly have to offer the world if there’s nothing to write about? To me, that’s the best take-home message that one writer can offer another.

Some of the best stories come from work, play, relationships… living life to the fullest. Of course, there are limits- don’t get fired for telling company secrets (like your hatred for the Asian Database Administrator). One of the best blogs I’ve ever read was called True Porn Clerk Stories- now available in paperback and Kindle editions. It’s the type of writing that will make you love your job more than anything in the world, because even if it’s bad, it’s not as bad (or at the very least, as weird) as this. What made Ali (TPCS author) so successful is that every word she wrote was absolutely true. She couldn’t have made it up if she tried.

So that’s where I am. Living life, collecting stories, and when I write, putting down Truth. What’s the difference between truth and Truth? Truth with a little t is something that’s true for you and you alone. Truth with a capital T is something that, when people read it, their hearts say to them, “I remember feeling like that!” Sometimes the reaction is more like, “I am sure that the writer is telling the truth, because there is nothing about him/her that screams “that never happened.”

Truth with a capital T also comes from the Deep South, because many of the stories we tell there have been so embellished that what really happened is long gone. But if the moral of the story is sound, it’s still true. In that way, truth and Truth are reactions, and neither of them are up to the writer. The writer is responsible for taking on the project and writing in such a way that whatever feeling they’re trying to elicit comes to the surface.