In Which I Give Up Before I Get Started

A friend of mine, through a fluke of gift subscriptions, receives two copies of Better Homes and Gardens every month. She very kindly gives me the extra magazine, giving me a chance to study the lives of people who have too much money and too much time on their hands.

The chief purpose of magazines like this is to make the reader feel inferior. Are there really people who never have dishes in the sink? Whose pantries stay perfectly organized? Who have boxes of craft things and can always find the tape when they need it? Who have matching dishes? Who manage to keep all their children's toys confined to a few tasteful baskets? Who repaint their kitchens every two or three years? Who display orange and pink throw pillows? Who put the bed skirt on the bed instead of tossing it in the back of the closet? Who wear heels and pearls while washing dishes? Who arrange vases and antique-looking knick knacks on their bookshelves instead of books?

This last point is the one that really gets me. Any picture of a home that includes bookshelves inevitably looks like this:



Seriously. The caption on this photo is actually "Arrange perfect bookshelves every time." On these bookshelves are vases, candles, framed pictures, large shells, and boxes (which probably contain scented pine cones and other out-of-season decorations). Where the poop are the books?

Oh. Here they are.



Very charming and artistic and everything, but what happens when you want to grab a book that isn't on the top of the stack?

Boom. That's what happens.

But magazine people don't have that problem, because magazine people don't actually buy books to read them. Magazine people buy books to fit their décor.

So I flip through the home section pretty quickly and move into the gardens. Which is just another opportunity to feel inadequate, because I can keep a plant alive for about a week and a half before it dies a grisly death. I also skip through the craft section, because I am not the sort of person who should be allowed anywhere near scrapbooking supplies.

But I can make a mean French onion soup. The kind that takes a whole afternoon to simmer. The kind with inch-thick baguettes and melty, bubbly Gruyère on top. If I had the magazine people over for dinner they'd ask questions about calories and fiber content, and they'd note that our books are arranged by genre and author, not color, and they'd politely choose not to remark on the fact that I still have gourds and dried corn on the table from Thanksgiving.

I have genetics working against me here. Twenty years ago my parents were trying to sell their house and they painted the living room a particularly striking shade of blue. It wasn't even dry when the realtor walked in and said, "Well, the first thing that has to change is that paint." Like them, I will never attempt dramatic decorating. I will never have a charming country home. But I'll always have soup and good friends and the man I love, and plenty of books to keep me company on rainy days.

In Which I Humbly Request Your Assistance

My computer got all sluggish again tonight. (More sluggish than usual, I mean. It's pretty elderly, and just like elderly folks it wakes up pretty slowly and likes to take the occasional nap in the middle of the day...usually when I'm trying to watch the new episode of Downton Abbey.) When it gets slow I usually just give up and figure I should have been doing something more useful with my time anyway, but the hubby does this mysterious thing where he cleans out the cache--or, to continue with a metaphor I should probably abandon, gives it Alzheimer's. So it forgets all the things it doesn't really need to know and gets all speedy again.

So the hubby was cleaning the cache, and as he did so he remarked, "Crazy! I'm removing half a gigabyte!"

And I did that thing where I go "Hmm!"

Because here's the confession: I don't know what a gigabyte is. I know it's a lot of bytes. I know that a megabyte is a lot of bytes, too, but giga doesn't really sound that much bigger than mega. I understand both prefixes to mean, "Oh, gosh, a whole bunch." And now apparently I have to know about terabytes as well. Why couldn't they just stick with the metric system?


I start to panic whenever bytes of any size come up in conversation. I never know what I'm supposed to say, so I start examining the other person's face for clues. Do they seem impressed? Appalled? Irritated? Geeked out? I always say exactly the same thing ("Dude, seriously?") but I vary my tone to suit their facial expression. This is the quickest way to end the byte conversation, I've found.

But I've decided to come clean about it, and here's where I'm asking for your help. I need a clever mnemonic device to help me remember the order of the sizes. Evidently it goes:

byte
kilobyte
megabyte
gigabyte
terabyte

So I need a B.K.M.G.T. phrase, please. The hubby suggests "Bring Kleenex! My Girl's Tribulations," but this has two strikes against it:

(1) I'd prefer a phrase less concerned with my propensity to sniffle.
(2) I can't remember it.

I was considering "Burger King Makes Great Tacos," but I can't stomach lies on that scale. So I turn to you, Gentle Readers. Please, please, help me sound educated.

In Which I Demonstrate Remarkable Generosity

So. Pippa Middleton has a new book coming out. It's called How to Be the Perfect Party Hostess and she was paid a $622,000 advance for it. Apparently it's going to include "amusing anecdotes."

Now. I'm not saying she's greedy and I'm not saying that she's crap at titles. I'm just saying that I could come up with a better title if I were trapped in the Labyrinth of Crete and the Minotaur were close on my heels. (Or, for the less classically minded among us, if I were being chased by murderers with knives. Or possibly bears.) And if I were to write such a book, no way in heck I'd ask for that much money for it.

In fact, to demonstrate my generosity, here's the first draft of Do You Think They'll Notice the Chicken's Raw? And Other Adventures in Entertaining, which I offer for absolutely no money at all.

Chapter One: An Abundance of Booze


A few months after I was married, my new brother-in-law described my wedding as "an epic drinking fail." From this I learned the first rule of entertaining: always provide alcohol. Little umbrellas are appreciated but not required.

The way I provide alcohol is this: I inform my husband that we need wine, or beer, or cider (for people like me who don't really like beer but don't want to look weird and have wine instead), or delicious mixed drinks. He goes to the store and comes back with something cheap and delicious. He has an unusual talent for finding quality drinks in a reasonable price range--a talent I do not share. Once I went to the store to buy bourbon and ended up spending eight bucks on something the hubby described as "nail polish remover." This is why I'm not allowed to buy alcohol anymore.

If you are without an informed party to buy your alcohol and uncork a bottle of wine without giving himself a hernia, find one immediately. Do not attempt to entertain without one.

Chapter Two: Ambience, Or, Why No One's Talking


There are two essential elements to setting the mood for your party: decorating and creating your iTunes playlist.

To decorate, first shove all your laundry in a little-used room. Close the door and do not allow guests to enter. A quarantine sign on the door would not be amiss. Next, purchase several large swaths of batik fabric. Artfully arrange the fabric over every piece of furniture you got at a thrift store while you were in college. Finally, gather several stubby beeswax candles and position them on the table. Do not worry if they melt all over the tablecloth. This is art.

When choosing the music, it's best to start with something artsy. Something that makes people think "Hmm, my host is one classy dude." Philip Glass is a good choice. Transition into something with a discernible beat, and finish up with Shakira or Lady Gaga. By the end of the evening you want people dancing, or at least swaying their hips with a thoughtful expression on their faces.

Chapter Three: Wouldn't It Be Easier to Get a Party Platter at Costco?


Food provides not just something to chew on during those awkward pauses in the conversation, but sets the tone of the entire event. A casual gathering? A big pot of chili with mountains of cheese! A weekend brunch? Coffee cake and fruit salad. A formal dinner? Three different appetizers, brightly colored cocktails, and salmon arranged in a spiral and slathered with creamy dill sauce.

When planning the menu for your party, be flexible. Allow for the possibility that your guest of honor will inform you, as you present him with a side of barbecued ribs, that he became a vegetarian last Tuesday.

Expect compliments. These are your friends: they should tell you you're the best cook in your generation. If they don't show the proper appreciation for your garlic shrimp cocktail and pesto-parmesan straws, don't invite them back. Life is too short to make delicate appetizers for people who prefer Doritos.

Chapter Four: Isn't It Time You Found New Friends?


The guest list is the most tedious--and the most crucial--task on any host's to-do list. Who to invite? How many? And if Karri comes you can't invite Brad, because they have that history, but Josh probably won't come without Brad because he doesn't know anyone else, and if Josh doesn't come Alli will get upset because she totally has a thing for him...

And so on.

Don't invite any of them. Once you've gone to all that work planning the menu, decorating, selecting tasteful music, even lighting candles, for heaven's sakes, why would you want to spoil any of it with other people?

However, as Alton Brown quipped, "There is no meal that can fix bad company, but I've seen great company fix meals." And so, on those occasions when you simply must entertain, invite the friends who won't hold it against you if the meat is still bleeding and the enchiladas burned and the broccoli is all gray and slithery. Similarly, don't hold it against them when they offer to spring for pizza.

Fin.

In Which the Planet Goes All Rumble-y

Slow news day today. I was driving home from work, listening to the dulcet tones of Robert Siegel on All Things Considered and frowning over the impending doom of Europe, and then the station broke away to do the local news.

The local NPR station sucks. This is a source of constant frustration to me. The announcers are always stumbling over words and giggling when they mess up and they're just so boring to listen to. When they're not stuttering and giggling they sound like they're welcoming people to a funeral parlor. The one exception is the Token British Dude, Kristian Foden-Vencil, who has the oddest name I've ever come across. He's not a particularly good speaker--not bad, just average--and I think they hired him to confuse listeners and make them think they're listening to the BBC.

Anyway. Slow news day. The biggest stories coming out of Oregon today are the following:

1. Students at Oregon public schools aren't getting any stupider, but they're not getting any smarter, either. Test scores stayed flat this year. They milked this story for about three minutes, interviewing people with official-sounding titles who all said "Well, we're glad the kids aren't stupider, and we'll work hard to make them smarter next year."

2. There was an earthquake at Mount St. Helen today. Which got my attention, believe me. They were about a minute into the story when they mentioned that it registered 2.0 on the Richter scale, and scientists then revised that number down to 0.8. This is not a very impressive number, and I decided not to have a minor freak-out about it. In fact, said a scientist, this was a fairly normal earthquake. They record rumblings of this type every single day. I think this was supposed to be reassuring, but it had me gripping the steering wheel with the Clutches o' Death. Mount St. Helen is constantly being shaken by small earthquakes? And I'm supposed to feel better? 


Apparently earthquakes are a slow-news item around here, and I guess I was the only listener hyperventilating, because Kristian quickly moved on to...

3. The grape harvest looks to be better than expected for local vineyards.

Whoa. Wait. Dude. Earthquake. Daily earthquakes. And I know for a fact that people are still hiking all over it. Don't these people have any sense of self-preservation? And who gives a crap about Greece imploding when Mount St. Helen is making ominous rumbling noises? So I got home and decided to do some research on West Coast earthquakes.

You know how sometimes you'll get a weird rash on your foot and you Google it and then you end up convincing yourself that it's fatal and at the very least they're going to have to amputate? Or you have a sore throat so you plug your symptoms into WebMD and up comes "throat cancer" and you spend the rest of the night in a cold sweat about it? This is why you should never, ever Google things that scare you and have the potential to be blown out of proportion. I should have remembered that. And I never should have looked at this article. "The amount of devastation is going to be unbelievable..."

We're doomed. We're all doomed. But I'm determined to look on the bright side: maybe, thousands of years from now, Oregon will be sort of a modern-day Pompeii and archeologists will find our apartment and use it to learn all sorts of things about life in the twenty-first century. Chief among their findings, I imagine, will be the discovery that twenty-first century humanoids didn't keep up with the laundry.

I should go work on that, probably. For posterity's sake.

In Which I Celebrate the Season

The trees are turning and the air is getting crisp and morning runs have never been lovelier. Which means it's time to begin my annual tradition of Nagging Noah About Halloween.

This is a tradition that goes back to the early days of our relationship. Every year I tell him I want to dress up as Noah and Mrs. Noah and carry around stuffed animals. Possibly we could pose the animals in an inner tube, which is about as close to an ark as we're going to get. And every year Noah celebrates his own traditions, which are Getting All Snarky About Costumes and, at the last minute, Putting on a Fedora and Calling Himself Cary Grant.  He looks darn good in a fedora, so I've never raised much complaint.

But for the record: once we have kids Cary Grant will be retired, at least on Halloween. Instead, we're going to throw on bathrobes or sheets or something Old Testamenty and dress the kids up as animals and put them in a wagon that we've gussied up as an ark and drag them around the neighborhood. It will be epic.

In the meantime I'm celebrating fall in all the usual ways. There's a snaggle-toothed jack-o'-lantern sitting on our doorstep and beginning to rot--no way that thing makes it to Halloween--and we've got a skillion apples waiting to be cooked into pies. I'm downing gallons of chai, but no orchard-fresh cider this year. It's bizarre--a gallon of cider costs $7.99 out here. This is, of course, highway robbery, so I'm staging a protest. I asked my mother to get a gallon and stick it in the freezer for me, so I'll have some when we go home at Christmas.

And the celebrate-fall plan for today? Pack away the summer clothes and sandals and get out the winter coats and sweaters and blankets. And figure out something to do with all my scarves. I have a lot, and I don't really need a lot--the winters here are pretty mild. Noah gives me lots of raised eyebrows over my collection. Maybe I'll pin them to a bedsheet and cut a hole for his head and call it a Coat of Many Colors. He can be Joseph this year instead of Cary Grant. It's probably best to work up to Noah and the Ark gradually.

In Which I Seek Connection

I've got another conference coming up next week. I'm pretty darn geeked about this one, actually. It's a children's writing conference and I get to spend the week talking about books and kids and why the very most important work in the world is bringing them together. Can you think of any better way to spend a few days in September? Any way at all?

I was at a conference with my father a few years back (and it might help you here to know that my dad is probably the most extraordinary children's writer of his generation) (and I only say this because so many other people said it first). He gave a keynote address about the importance of story, and by the end he had everyone weeping. Even me, and I'd already heard all his stories. Afterwards I asked him if his goal was to make people cry, and he said, "I want them to take this work seriously."

That's my goal at this conference, too. To teach the writers to take their calling seriously. To teach them the craft and give them the tools to become excellent. Also, I get to bring some picture books and read bedtime stories. (It would be easier to find a good selection, incidentally, if Hubby-of-my-dreams had let me take the unliftably-big-box-o'-picture-books when we moved. This was a source of some contention at the time. It's still a source of contention, actually. While I understand that our apartment is laughably small cozy and if we get more books we'll have to start stacking them underneath the pots and pans, or possibly on top of the refrigerator, I'd still feel a lot better if they were close by instead of sitting in the guest room at my parents' house.)

Another advantage of this conference: I get to actually spend time with the writers. This usually doesn't happen. Here's how it often goes:

I sit at a table in an overcrowded room with a bottle of water, pad of paper, and professional-looking pen in front of me. A woman walks in, looking like Marie Antoinette on Guillotine Day, and takes a deep, shuddery breath as she extends her hand. I introduce myself, give her a massive smile, and tell her to sit down and tell me about her work.

She speaks very quickly for thirty seconds as she gives me her memorized pitch. It sounds like she's reading marketing copy. She stops abruptly and looks at me, then glances down at her notes. (I can read these notes upside-down. At the top it says, it big letters, SMILE and at the bottom, DON'T LEAVE WITHOUT BIZ CARD.) She looks back up at me as if she's being hunted.

"Tell me when you first felt that you needed to write this book," I say. My whole goal here is to calm this person down. I know it's nerve-wracking to meet a publisher. I know she's been preparing for this fifteen-minute interview for weeks. But I also know that I'm not as big a deal as she thinks I am. (A few months ago I told a friend that I was teaching a class at a conference, and her jaw just dropped. "You?" she said. "Why would they ask you?" All I could think to say was, "I'm extremely important, you know," and then she just bust out laughing. Lord, grant me more friends like this.)

So this woman and I chat about her work. Sometimes she tells me a story--a sickening, heart-wrenching story--about an event that changed her outlook on life. Sometimes she cries. Sometimes she laughs. Sometimes she takes my hands and prays with me. And then the fifteen minutes are up, and another writer is waiting in the wings, and we shake hands and say goodbye. And the part that I hate about conferences is that I have sixty appointments like this in the space of two or three days, and I don't always recognize the writers when I see them again. I hate that. I hate making a connection with a person that I know is going to be so temporary. I hate that my next communication with this person will probably be a rejection letter.

But the connection's important, brief though it may be. That's why we're here, after all. To look another person in the eye and make them understand that they matter. Their work matters. Their passion matters. Their pain and their joy both matter.

And that connection is even more important when it's made with children. When you take the time to give a kid a hug, to ask about their hopes and dreams and the mundane little details of their lives. When you dig a little deeper than "What grade are you in?" or "So, do you like school?" Writers for children have the enormous joy--and enormous responsibility--of connecting with more kids than they could ever reach individually. Of teaching them that they matter and their stories matter.

That's what I'm going to be saying, in one way or another, at the conference next week. I'll be making connections with writers and hoping that they, in turn, pass that connection on to a whole generation of kids.

I absolutely love what I do.

In Which I Wonder How Things Got This Bad in the First Place

The hubby and I are moving again. Not too far--just to a new apartment across town. And as with every move, we're standing back, hands on hips, staring at our possessions with a critical eye and thinking "Now, what can we throw out so we don't have to put it in a box?"

I suppose this purging is good for the soul. I don't need six pairs of black dress sandals and I never wore that swimsuit and I have always hated that sweater. But today that critical eye has turned toward the bookshelves. Our ever-growing pile of Donate-or-Sell includes the following:

• Two copies of To Kill a Mockingbird. One has my ninth-grade scribbles all through, with every third paragraph underlined and highlighted. There's even an occasional post-it with words like "IRONY" and "FORESHADOWING." The other has a mangled cover. We're just keeping the nicer hardcover edition.
• The Book of Vice, by Peter Sagal. I've got the same crush on Mr. Sagal that every girl has, and I liked the book, but I don't see myself cracking the cover to learn about the porn and gambling industries ever again. 
• Time Enough for Drums, by Ann Rinaldi. Discovered I had two copies of this. Not sure where the second copy came from. Are the books breeding?
• Two copies of The Little Prince. (I still have three, two in French and one in English.) The two on the donate pile appear to be encrusted in yogurt. 
• Sense and Sensibility: The Barnes & Noble Cheap Paperback Edition.
• L'Etranger. This was another duplicate book, but it has footnotes with English translations throughout. Evidently this is the "For Students Too Lazy to Pick up a Dictionary" edition. 
• Stiff, by Mary Roach, because it was good and probably important but also pretty gross. 
• My Life as an Experiment, by A.J. Jacobs. After The Know-it-All and The Year of Living Biblically I was pretty sure this guy had a screw loose, but My Life confirmed it. I don't deny the guy can write, but he's just a little too abnormal for me. 
• The Romanovs, by Robert Massie. He's a great author but it's not his strongest book. He spends an extraordinary amount of time documenting the assassination. It's some of the most detailed gore I've ever seen in print. 

Happily, however, I have persuaded the hubby to leave my Bill Bryson and Agatha Christie collections intact. (There was only mild grumbling about Agatha Christie.) And he didn't grumble at all when I said I wanted to keep both copies of Jamaica Inn. See, here's my dilemma. The older copy is beat up but I love love love the elegant sleaze look to the cover, while the newer copy is in great shape but has a deeply embarrassing cover. Would you want to be seen in public with that thing?

No. Of course you wouldn't. That's the sort of cover you stash under your pillow and hope no one sees. 

I'm off to make a gut-wrenching decision on Into Thin Air. I loved it in tenth grade but haven't cracked the cover since. It's sort of pleasing to have it on the shelf, but probably not pleasing enough to justify boxing it up and lugging it across town. Wish me luck.