Yesterday, my friend from Poland put me up to doing something silly in class. He assumed (incorrectly) that I’ve never been silly in class.
I really had to up my game, so I had my alter-ego Marcie, who has appeared on these pages before, teach a little of the class:
https://www.facebook.com/lleachie/videos/10156525579621153/?t=1
I’m going over some old ground here.
I insisted that I didn’t want to get published for the recognition, but just to fulfill a goal.
I have to confess that I lied.
I have fantasies about getting published, about becoming well enough known that someone from my hometown contacts me, and I can snub them.
It’s horribly unbecoming of me to be like that. I don’t even like to admit I have that fantasy, but I do. Let me explain, and maybe you will understand me.
I grew up different. Intelligent, socially awkward, overweight — I lived in my own little world. I suffered from pica and ate glue and pencil erasers, as well as handfuls of sugar and Bisquick. I bit my nails. I laughed when nobody else laughed, I sang out loud for no apparent reason, not caring if someone else heard. I cried when people attacked me. I whined. All together, I was that unattractive kid that nobody liked. I don’t know if I would blame them.
Being that child, I was prone to bullying from my fellow classmates and adults. By the time I reached high school, I had been beaten up by classmates repeatedly, sexually abused by a few people, raped by classmates, threatened with desertion by my mother.
I made myself a coccoon from the outside world — from my parents, extended family, and classmates. That coccoon was made of my fantasies, my behaviors, my wishes. In my coccoon, the monsters that everyone feared were my friends. The monsters would nurture me through the bullying, the attacks, the lack of safety I felt. As I grew older, I fell in love in my fantasies — and when I told my best friend the name of who I had a crush on, she yelled it out the window, and every popular kid in the class shamed me in the hallways.
My childhood marred me. I have trouble making friends because I don’t want to impose myself on them. I have trouble loving my snot-nosed, eraser-eating inner child. (I tend to wish I had been Marcie as a child. Marcie is me without the snot nose and eraser eating.)
I entertain sadistic fantasies about my classmates from Marseilles. I entertain the thought that someday the tables could be turned and I could, if not bully them, reject them soundly. I feel guilty about that because it’s not a “pure” reason to want to be published.
I exorcise myself by writing. This blog post is no exception.
Hi, my name is Marcie, and I am eight years old. I had my birthday two — no, two months and seven days ago, and I’m counting down to the next one. It’s only ten months and three weeks from now! Time flies like a dragonfly!
Aunt Laurie said I can talk about words today. Let me first say that words are very important, because without them, we would all just stare and wave our hands around and if that kept up, how would we get pie? It’s easier to say, “please pass the pie”, especially if it’s that really gooey chocolate chip pie Aunt Laurie won’t make anymore because it’s too fattening. I think being fat just means you’re very happy because you got to eat the whole pie.
Ok, words. There are little words like “please”, “may”, and of course “pie” and those are good words because they get things done. Then there are the big words like Aunt Laurie writes, like “flabbergasted”, “preternatural”, and “multicolor” and I have to look them up in the dictionary. Why can’t she just used “frustrated”, “spooky”, and “pink and blue and green and orange”? Aunt Laurie says that you have to use the right word for the right thing, and preternatural isn’t the same as spooky, although it tends to weird us out. Think of someone who can read minds, or who’s thousands of years older than you. That’s preternatural. Why doesn’t she just say “spooky guy who could be your great-great-great-great-great a billion times over grandfather?”
Yesterday, Aunt Laurie told me I was right. Yay! I’m awesome! She said her beta-reader said her words were too big and if she wanted to be read, she would have to make them smaller words. Like “pink and blue and green and orange” instead of “multicolored”. She said this would be hard for her because big words love her. A lot like cats, I think. And did I mention that Aunt Laurie has a lot of cats?
I think I smell pie. Bye!
First off, Marcie says hi. She’s just about done with her first novel, Chucky the Cat Saves the World. She’s tried to convince Chucky to illustrate it, but the negotiations haven’t been going well.
Meanwhile, I’m trying to convince Girly-Girl, who’s sitting next to me, to write a memoir. I’ve suggested the title I’ve Seen Everything and I Don’t Care Anymore. She didn’t care for that.
i’m trying to convince my husband to seek out an agent. He writes in science fiction and he understands the genre very well — its subject matter; its focus on machines, science, and battles; its masculinist roots. I believe he could find an agent pretty quickly, and I wonder if the reason I felt called to writing was to get him to write, and find him a career.
I’m still confused as to what I’ve been called to do, and whether I’ve been called to write. Callings are very important among Quakers — we believe that if we sit quietly enough, God will show us our callings. I haven’t felt anything as a calling for so long that I feel adrift.
When I start writing again, calling or no, I don’t know what I’ll start writing on again. I’m afraid of the creative memoir about bipolar disorder. Although it’s attractive being heard, I don’t want people to think of me as “THAT person,” the one you have to keep an eye on. Yes, as open as I am about my situation, I am afraid of people who judge. Sometimes I want to run away from this blog because I’ve talked about it here.
I feel stymied by Hearts are Mountains. It’s reading like a depressing travelogue, and I don’t know what it needs. It’s a bit flat. I might want to go back to Prodigies, but I wonder if that’s going very well either. I doubt everything since all the rejections.
I hope that I find my direction soon — in or out of writing, I don’t know. But I hope I find my calling.
Hi, it’s Marcie. Remember me? Aunt Laurie let me come to class on Tuesday because she said it’s about happiness. My aunt gets to teach a whole class about happiness! I want to take that class. It sounds a lot more fun than math.
I was the youngest person in the class; everyone else was almost as old as Aunt Laurie. I mean, not old-old, but grownup. Aunt Laurie talked about two different types of happiness — they had big word names, but the first type of happy was the happy you get when you eat ice cream or binge on Netflix — I think she called it “hee-DON-ick”. I think the “ick” part is when you eat too much ice cream. The other was called “ew-die-MON-ick”, and it has nothing to do with dying. It’s the happy you get when you’ve done something good, or you do something you really like and you’re good at it, and then Aunt Laurie said you feel those two types of happy differently —
I knew about this from talking in one of Aunt Laurie’s other classes! So I waved my hand real big and Aunt Laurie, who was of course wearing her teacher clothes and looking all official and stuff, called on me. I explained to the class that when you eat ice cream, you get a biiiiig happy that goes away quickly, and when you do something good, it’s not as big a happy but you feel it longer. I think I should be a teacher when I grow up.
Yesterday, one of Aunt Laurie’s students walked up to her before class and asked her if she could bring me in because his best friend was having a birthday and he wanted me to pop in. So I did and I told him that having a birthday felt like a big happy and then, the next morning, you wake up and say “I’m older now!” I know I felt like that when I turned seven.
I still feel happy when I think of that. I think I did a good thing for someone.
Hi, my name is Marcie, and I just turned 8! I spent Thanksgiving with my Aunt Laurie and Uncle Richard at a big hotel called The Elms. It looks kind of like a castle until you go inside, and then it looks kind of like a castle inside, only not in the big stone sort of way. They haven’t decorated for Christmas yet, and they play old music — really old music Aunt Laurie calls Sinatra.
Thanksgiving dinner was wonderful, but a bit strange. They had the turkey and the stuffing and the cranberries and the mashed potatoes and the gooey yams, but they also had salads and shrimp and this smoky undercooked salmon. I tried everything — including too much pecan pie with lots of whipped cream. Real whipped cream.
I sat in the lobby by the fireplace for a while — people brought their dogs indoors, can you believe it? I petted a big dog with stripey spots on it, and he leaned against me so I had to keep petting him. I tried to pet a little fluffy dog in a vest, but the owner said it was a service dog. Aunt Laurie said that the dog should have said “Service Dog” in big letters so you could see it.
They have hot tubs, cold tubs, and a place where you can walk in circles in the water. Aunt Laurie calls that a lap pool. That water’s cold! I walked two laps in it and then got too cold and hopped into the hot tub, which was hot! I guess that’s why they call it a hot tub.
What they don’t have is toys. That’s okay, because I brought my doll and my writing stuff. My Barbie’s chubby, and I picked her that way because she looks like my best friend Sara. And my Aunt Laurie. Lots of people are chubby. Barbie danced on the back of the couch (which Aunt Laurie said was leather) and then the wedding party strolled through with white and black dresses, and I thought it would be cool if the big dog was best man and the little dog was the ring bearer. Nope, they had little kids doing that.
Did I have birthday cake and presents, you ask? Nope, not yet. My birthday’s not till Sunday and my mom does birthday things. I think my mom is going to get me art supplies like I asked — not fingerpaint but paper and colored pencils and a coloring book with cats. And a cat! I get to pick her up (all cats are girls, by the way) from the Humane Society Monday.
Gotta go — Aunt Laurie’s walking over to the coffee shop like a zombie — BRAIIINS! — and I want to watch her order coffee!
My seven-year-old honorary niece, Marcie, asked me if she could teach you about satisfaction, so here goes:
“Satisfaction, Aunt Laurie says, is a type of happy. I like the word ‘happy’ better. There are different types of happy, and they make you feel different ways. There’s big wow happies, there’s little fluffy happies, and there’s the ‘I’m so happy the tiger didn’t eat me’ happies.
“The thing is, how you get the happy makes a difference in how you feel the happy. If you want to do something like write a book, and you finish the book, you’re like ‘Wow! Big happy!’. But the next morning you’re like ‘ho hum, time to find something else big to do.’ It’s like eating ice cream — you want real food a couple hours later after you weren’t hungry for dinner. But if you have something you want to get good at, and you do it all the time and get better and better, you feel this little warm glow and it lasts a long time. So getting better at something isn’t as yummy but it keeps you full longer, like oatmeal with raisins and honey — not as sweet, but it lasts longer in your tummy.
“Aunt Laurie just typed 50,000 words — that’s a lot of words! — and so she won something she calls NaNo. But this morning she woke up and said, ‘Now what? I met my goal!’ Then she looked at her computer and said, ‘I still need to learn how to write better, so I’m going to keep practicing and maybe someday I’ll get published!’
“The End!”
Hi, my name is Marcie, and I am seven years old. Aunt Laurie took me along to this really neat party called Archon. Aunt Laurie called it a con, but I didn’t see anyone conning anyone. (Aunt Laurie said that anyone who publishes your book and gets all the money for it is a con, but I’m not supposed to tell anyone she said that.)
I think it was a party because people were running around in really cool costumes, like the really tall guy in a wolf costume with a long bushy tail. Aunt Laurie called him a furry, and he was really furry. I saw men in skirts (Aunt Laurie called them kilts), chain vests, robot costumes, and one girl in a short plaid skirt and a shirt that didn’t fit her well. And bunny ears. I liked the costume, but Aunt Laurie said I couldn’t have one until I was much older.
People had tables where they sold stuff. Aunt Laurie bought two pictures called prints — one is a flying bald cat with fairy wings. I liked it even though the cat looked a little scary. The other is a secret, because Aunt Laurie bought it as a surprise for her sister, and I promised not to tell. (I didn’t promise not to tell about the publisher con.)
I didn’t like the sessions so much. A lot of people talked about stuff. Aunt Laurie got a lot out of it, but I wondered why so many guys weren’t polite and would talk over the women like they weren’t even talking. Aunt Laurie said they had sexism, and that that was wrong. I asked why they did it, and she said they were scared of women. I don’t think Aunt Laurie is scary at all — she’s like she’s wearing a big marshmallow costume, and she’s still gooey inside.
I tried to talk to the little robot scooting around, and all it said was bleep bloop squoink. Then it ran away and I chased it, trying to get it to talk again.
I liked the con. People laughed a lot. I had fun, but I want Richard to take me to the kids’ stuff next time. But then, Aunt Laurie said, he wouldn’t be able to carry her stuff around. Richard is so useful that way. Maybe I’ll become an author like Aunt Laurie and then I’ll understand what they’re talking about.
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Note to newbies: Marcie is my alter-ego, a seven-year-old girl with a bit of precociousness. A lot like me at age 7, actually. I find her a refreshing writing exercise now and again.
Words Like Me 