The Muse

Meet my muse

My muse showed up in my dream last night, pale and red-haired and willowy, and kissed me on the forehead, then darted away.

My muse, the Muse of Things Hidden in Plain Sight, reminded me of my purpose when I thought I had long lost it.

My muse appears as a friend of mine, but isn’t really, because that person would not kiss me in dreams, however chaste. I would also not want to get in trouble with my friend’s wonderful wife. I understand symbolism, however. Long red hair and mischief speak to me. Muses should be wild, unpredictable, capricious. One does not possess muses. Muses possess one instead. So, of course, he would appear like my friend, knowing it would rattle me.

The message

What is the message when my muse leans in and kisses my forehead? The first message is that Spring is here, even though we don’t feel it yet? Astronomical Spring is in 20 days (or so), and the weather has become warmer. The robins aren’t here yet, but the mourning doves are making plans for chicks. Snowdrops haven’t broken the ground yet, but my seedlings in the basement are making their way to true leaves.

The second message is that it’s time to write, and that there are reasons to write. I write about relationships — some of them romantic; others not. The muse’s kiss awakened my characters and gave me the blessing to write about them. The muse reminds me of who I am and what makes me who I am.

The end of winter

I guess I have been going through Winter. The last time I wrote significantly was November (but to be fair, I wrote a book that month.) I didn’t feel like writing; I didn’t feel inspired to write, and I didn’t know if I was a writer anymore.

For me, to be a writer is to be beautiful and mysterious, to hold within oneself multitudes, to hear strange harmonies. I think I might be there again.

Five Minutes

Growing up gifted

I hate the word “gifted”, but I don’t know what other word to use to convey the place I was when I was younger. I had some of the highest grades on standardized exams that had ever been seen in my school district. If I got a B in a class, it was because I marked questions wrong that were right, so as not to be caught daydreaming. I saw it as nothing special, and in fact all my brains did was make me a pariah.

And, of course, it also made me the teachers’ darling. I grew accustomed to the praise I got from them. In high school in particular, I started receiving honors and scholarships, and seeing my name in the paper was a secret thrill. I was a big fish in a small pond. Further, I didn’t have to do anything to get praise but be myself.

Coming down to earth

This continued through my undergraduate years — though I wasn’t winning scholarships by then, at least I was on the honor roll and the Bronze Tablet for my grades (it’s a University of Illinois thing — I was in the top 2% of my class.)

Then I became a professor in a university with many people whose abilities equalled or excelled mine. There are no rewards for doing one’s job. But those of us who became addicted to praise, like myself, are left to wonder where our value is.

Five minutes of fame

I am growing to understand that I had my five minutes of fame in high school. It demanded little of me, just an accident of birth. There are so many others like me who were just as accidentally lucky — good looks, the right Instagram post, a darling cat. Hard work may help, but it is the lucky moment that launches someone into the limelight. I think of the actors in the science fiction genre who will never become well-known stars outside of those who watch science fiction, the people who work in jobs that we assume are unskilled, all the people who are unrewarded for their excellent work.

I’ve had that praise. It’s time for me to give up the limelight.

Coming on Two Years of COVID

Two years ago next week

Two years ago, it was late February and we in the United States had just started hearing of a virus called SARS-CoV-2 that was spreading through China, then Europe. As I read the Internet accounts, part of me dreaded the inevitable pandemic; another part of me became convinced that it would stay across the ocean and peter out, as other SARS infections had. Then, when it reached the coasts of the US, I still monitored the news while assuring myself it was a big city infection that would not reach the rolling hills of Northwest Missouri.

During my spring break (I teach at a university), I watched my emails to see how the university would react to the looming threat, all the while panicking at the virus creeping ever closer, a quickly advancing threat which left in its wake so many people making inexorable slides toward death, kept alive on ventilators until their bodies gave out.

Then, halfway through Spring Break, while universities hustled to continue education online as a brave new experiment, my university sent emails warning us we might follow in their footsteps. Then, a day later, we were told we had a week and a half to move all our instruction online, and that students would not come back to campus from break.

Isolation

The state’s shelter in place order fell into place, and I panicked. I hyperventilated while trying to clean our chaotic kitchen, and I worried I was having a relapse of my bipolar from all the stress. I called my psychiatrist’s nurse, and she told me many people were having the same symptoms.

So many changes bombarded us: the working from home (which didn’t affect me as I was already working from home), the precautions of shopping, the prohibition on social activities. My life shrunk to the walls and window of my living room. My husband masked up and braved the grocery stores with their six-foot distancing.

I decided that, instead of spending all my time in a panic, I would learn to make sourdough bread with a starter I captured myself. The starter made a fine whole-wheat sourdough, and I bought 50 lbs of white whole-wheat flour because the stores were out of it.

We picked up our restaurant meals curbside, and it was not quite the same eating a steak out of styrofoam go containers.

Closer to normalcy

After a while, the shelter-in-place orders expired and my college started meeting again (with distancing guidelines). The restaurants opened up, and the stores started getting more food in stock. The mask ordinances evaporated, although my university required them and most of my colleagues and friends continued to wear them in public, as I did. Slowly, even these restrictions faded. Until this week my university has made mask-wearing suggested rather than required.

I don’t know if I’m ready to go maskless yet, given that I have been masking for so long. But when I’m free of a mask, there will be things I can do, like wear makeup and be heard in class without yelling.

A life post-COVID

I don’t know what a life post-COVID looks like. I know that, over the past couple of years, we in the US hadn’t suffered as much as other countries with crowding, with less advanced medical systems, with fewer preventative measures. But we suffered, if mostly in our day-to-day routines. And we are not done with the pandemics — another round of COVID may be in our future, or another microorganism we didn’t count on. It’s inevitable with access to other countries and terrains, where we don’t have natural immunity. Maybe I will never lose my mask, or only have it off for short periods of time. Maybe we’ll have another shelter-in-place. But what I don’t think we’ll have is a post-COVID celebration, because we’ve lived with it so long that it seems normal.

Brought to You by the Color Blue

A lazy Saturday

I have spent the morning looking at gardening plans — or what passes for plans for me. I have seeds growing in the basement, most of these herbs in the mint family. Orange thyme, lavender sage, winter savory, Korean giant hyssop, orange balm. Why grow what I can buy at the store? The Thai eggplant looks like it’s growing good and the cardoon looks like it’s going to take out its neighbors. One tray, however, looks like it’s going to fail on me, so no sweet violets or mitsuba.

Once upon a time, someone pointed out to me that there are very few truly blue flowers. Many are periwinkle, others are blue-violet. Some mauves are mistaken for blue. There are blue flowers, like a pure cornflower. Is this flower a pure blue? I’d say grey-blue.

Am I blue?

I feel like I should get a lot more done today than thinking about my garden. I can do nothing concrete about my garden right now; it’s too cold to break ground or plant or amend soil. I can’t even plant more seed — I’ve planted all I can until it’s basil season, during which I will plant impossible amounts of two different basils and wonder what I will do with all of it.

What I really want to do is drink affrogato and watch Instagram reels. A relaxing Saturday.

And what would that hurt? Not a thing.

Maybe the blues aren’t such a bad thing.

Thirty Pounds to Celebrate About

I didn’t get any likes from any agents in #sffpit yesterday, but I celebrate myself for thirty pounds lost. To make my doctor happy, I have to lose thirty more pounds. Please understand that I will still be overweight by American standards, because it would take putting myself in danger in losing any more weight than that. But my doctor will be happy, I’ll be healthier, and I’ll get to wear cuter clothes.

#SFFpit Again

Pitching the Baby

For writers, the opportunity to pitch their novel induces a certain amount of trepidation. Sending one’s baby, the result of months (or years, unlike a human baby), to an agent, brings the fear that the agent will not love the baby as much as its parent does.

So the opportunity for a pitching activity over Twitter is a blessing. It’s like one of those photo contest people enter their baby’s picture into, hoping for votes. With a Twitter pitch session, the worst that can happen is that no agent asks for a partial or full manuscript, just as if nobody voted for the baby picture. It doesn’t feel as much like a rejection.

To writers, “pit” means a pitching opportunity

I am taking part in a pitching opportunity, #sffPIT. This is a pitching opportunity for unpublished manuscripts in science fiction and fantasy, which is where I do most of my writing. I have three novels that fit this category (actually four or five, but one is not a standalone in a series, and another is a fragment which may never get finished).

To take part in a pitching opportunity, I must write twitter-sized blurbs for each of my novels and post them at intervals during the day of pitching. I have done this, setting them up using TweetDeck, so that they pop up at various times.

Now what?

All I have to do now is hope.

The Blog is Having an Existential Crisis

Too many things (and bad habits) in the way

It’s no excuse, as I’ve said before, but my writing seems to be placed on the back burner with teaching classes, taking care of my seedlings downstairs, and trying to talk myself into writing books. Early morning used to be my usual time, and I have been doing flighty, wasteful things in those hours like surfing social media that seems forever the same. Even now, I’m surfing instead of writing this, and the internet has gained few charms.

A time and a place

I need to find a time and a place to write, one which allows me routine. Perhaps I need to promise myself half an hour every day after tea and before I go to work. (Yes, I have daily tea, usually pu-erh, which is Chinese health tea, and an acquired taste).

I also need to find a reward

I’ll be honest with you; I don’t have too many readers to serve as an incentive, and I don’t know how to get more readers. So I need another incentive. I write a newsletter that has about 2400 readers, so I could let them know there’s a blog. But then there’s another consideration —

I need to agree on content

Is this a personal blog? If so, should anyone want to read it? Is it a current events blog? If so, can I do as well as others who are in that line of work? Is it a writing blog? I’m certainly up to that, but there are better and well-read clients.

I’m looking for an identity for this blog because I need one to — *gasp* — market it.

I hate marketing

This is my weakest link. I don’t enjoy bragging about my work. I don’t enjoy getting in people’s faces with a project I love. I don’t even know how to do it well, but I know that without it, nobody knows what I’m doing. Who am I? What is this blog? Nothing special. You can see why I don’t do well with marketing.

Seeking help

If you have any perspective to offer (do not offer services to me because I cannot afford them) please let me know!

Hello! I’m Back! (and a little about depression)

How long have I been gone?

According to my log of posts, I have been gone exactly a month from writing. It feels like longer. I need to write again.

Why have I been gone so long?

I could say “things got busy”, but that’s not the whole truth. I had free time, but I slept much of it. Writing my novels fell by the wayside, although I proofed a couple novels using ProWritingAid, because it was easy and didn’t take too much thought on my part. I dealt okay with routine things, but did nothing truly creative.

I have to break out of the cocoon that depression wraps around a person, the lassitude, the negativity, the self-loathing. I’m working with my doc to remedy the depression on the medication front. The rest is up to me.

I was depressed.

I’m still depressed, but I realize that I have to reach out again to break out of my solitude, just in case someone responds. I have to put myself in the stream of humanity, so it reminds me I am part of it.

I have to go back to writing, to find my soul within the flow of words.

Hello again! Expect my usual content soon.

A Short Ritual

Sometimes it’s hard to believe

It doesn’t seem to matter what religion or spirituality one belongs to — it’s difficult to believe. In oneself, in one’s deity, in one’s face, in one’s calling. Faith does not exist without the humanity involved — the struggle to believe.

We pray, we talk to ourselves, or we talk to respected elders, or do rituals. We connect to the avatars of our beliefs, even if they are a quiet place in the woods. And we ask for reassurance, for calm, for help, for confidence, and for support when we tune in. The answers do not fix our fate (for those who believe in a deterministic outcome) or the factors we can’t control (for those who feel they have more control of their fate). But they may give us hope that something better comes down the road for us. Or that our pain will lessen. Or that there’s comfort.

I am a rational (yet complex) person

Photo by Jonathan Petersson on Pexels.com

With a PhD and years of academic writing, I have developed a rational bent, as evidenced by the above paragraphs. (Ugh, that academic writing again!) I think people need comfort, need to know about the afterlife, need to feel there’s a sense of justice, and need to feel that there’s a force beyond themselves. I even teach that in a class.

Still, I have some irrational beliefs, embarrassingly irrational.

I believe in superstitions.

Moreover, I believe in curses.

Curses!

When a string of bad things happen to me, I decide I am being cursed. I do not know who’s cursing me — I have suspected everyone from God to the old Italian grandmother who thought I was defiling her great grandson (it was his idea to take me on a tour of the backyard on his dirt bike for what it’s worth). It doesn’t matter — it’s a curse.

People can think of curses as bad luck, a losing streak, “someone hates me up there”, terrible fates, unfair consequences, or “the devil’s trying to beat me”.

And nothing is going to get better until one breaks the curse.

How are curses broken? That depends on one’s belief system. Prayer, ritual, good luck tokens, a visit from a shaman — all are ways one breaks curses.

For me — a strange and convoluted story I’ll leave for another time — I use a ritual of burning all the bad things out of my life after writing them on a piece of paper.

To be truthful, I felt better. More importantly, from a strictly psychological view, I quit framing every minor annoyance as another terrible proof of the curse.

That may be the only result of the ritual, but hey, it works.

Food and Reality

Weight is not a fun subject

In this blog, I will talk about dieting (and the “non-dieting” that passes for dieting now), weight and health. I am approaching this as an obese person who is now being asked to change my way of eating and exercising in order to get healthier. I struggle with lifestyle changes, often because the instructions seem vague to the obese person.

I will not use the word “fat”, which has been used to shame people with a specific health issue, unless mentioning fat-shaming. (If you don’t believe this, ask yourself this: Do I shame athletes with fractures and pulled muscles by calling them “gimps”? You know, they did it to themselves.)

What it means to diet

I have been dieting all my life, or at least half of my life. Anyone with weight issues has. It’s an alarming lifestyle, spending half of one’s life eating bowls of green leaves, and the other half trying to make up for the feeling of deprivation by eating ribs at Applebee’s. My true nemesis, though, is really sweet things like good chocolates, toffee, and gooey butter cake.

Other people eat sumptuous things much of the time. Those of you who are less than twenty pounds overweight for your height and age, you’re unaware of how lucky you are. You don’t have to work as hard to be your weight, whether this be that you can eat anything, or that your body moves the way your heredity designed a good body to.

After a doctor’s visit

A few weeks ago, I went to see my doctor, and it turned out that my “numbers” were not good. Not only the weight, but the glucose and other numbers that weight may affect. This was something I’d never experienced as an obese person before, and I found it alarming. As a result, my doctor easily convinced me to eat a plant-forward diet with low fat and moderate carbs.

The advice from my doctor was simple: half your plate should be vegetables. The vegetables should be colorful. Eat lean meats. Cut back on bread. Don’t weigh yourself. Exercise more.

Easy-peasy, I thought.

So now I’m eating a plant-forward diet

The plant-forward diet takes a lot of work. It takes a bit more cooking and less “here’s two hamburgers for dinner.” It takes a bit more variety — sugary foods had been my substitution for boring dinners. Sometimes it takes eating frozen vegetables for convenience, and I’m not always hungry for those at the moment (I’ve had some terrible frozen vegetables). It takes menu planning, and as I’m not the menu planner in the family, it takes a certain amount of patience.

I have questions

Now, after a couple of weeks living this way, I have questions. Lots of questions.

If you have a small (of course) bowl of spaghetti, do you count the tomato sauce as a vegetable? How much of the plate does it take up?
Are potatoes a vegetable? Corn? Lentils? Edamame? A veggie burger?
How whole-grain does the bread have to be? (I’m living on Wasa crackers)
Can I have desserts? Ever?
How do I know how much I’m progressing if I can’t weigh myself?
If I haven’t been exercising at all, does walking to the parking lot count as more exercise?
How do I motivate myself if I lose weight really slowly?
How perfect do I have to be at this? How often can I not be perfect??

These are questions I’ve never seen answered. I know well that this dietary and behavioral change will have to persist for the rest of my life. I wish someone who coaches lifestyle changes could answer these questions for me.

I will never be of normal weight

The thing to remember here is that I am not doing this to be of normal weight — my body will never be of normal weight. My lifestyle change will take me from obese to overweight. I will be healthier, but I will still be “fat” by judgmental societal standards, and I will have to accept that. If I could afford a tummy tuck, that might put me in the weight range for my size. But the insurance industry considers that cosmetic surgery and not a matter of health. So I have to accept that I can only be smaller, not actually small.

A note

We all have different lives and different choices. I won’t say “wherever you are on the journey”, because that sounds incredibly condescending, like my journey is best. I don’t know if my journey is best, because I lose that identity of “fat culture”, and that’s a great togetherness space. And I want gooey butter cake. My goal is to help my health, and maybe this “lifestyle change” does nothing for that.