Well...

So it's Sunday night, and I'm just realizing that I don't have anything to say.

This is a little odd. Usually I have something.

Thing is, I've been busy. I had something for Helen that needed to be done by the weekend, and I started an ERWA essay. I'm also working on a book. Writing it, not reading it. And I was practicing. Tomorrow, I'm going to look at a gas grill. I've never been able to have a grill before.

My hands feel amazingly good right now. It's faintly possible that the new, and somewhat loopy, lupus meds might, just might, be working.

It's a loopy prescription because I have to go to a compounding pharmacy to get it. Thankfully, it's cheap, because Medicare Part D never covers this kind of thing.

The migraine drug is kinda-sorta working, which has made this weekend a little rough, but not as bad as it might have been. It's funny. I can sleep okay until I need to roll over, at which point the headache kind of spikes, and I have to wait until it settles down again to go back to sleep.

Having the boy home for the summer is fun but amazingly time-consuming.

I also have a bit of food for thought from Barbara Ehrenreich in the NYTimes.

The message from the affluent to the down-and-out: Neither we nor the government is going to do much to help you — and you better not help one another either. It’s every man (or woman or child) for himself.

From Bob Sutton's blog: wisdom and randomness

I'm managing a Wednesday entry this week in spite of exhaustion. Having my kid home during the summer is turning out to be even more tiring than having him during the school year! Anyway...

This is from Bob Sutton's blog. Click the title of this entry to read the whole thing.

The lesson, or at least one lesson (there are dozens in this paragraph), is that there is a delicate balance between acting as if everything brand new and everything is the same as it ever was, and wise people find constructive ways to strike that balance. And the implication is also that, in many decisions we make, we are so biased by our past experience and cognitive biases that introducing more randomness (and perhaps naivete and ignorance than usual) rather than less might do the trick.

Posting through a meds fog

Sometimes I think I would be better off if my disease wasn't treated, just because the meds required can seriously kick you in the head. Three medications that cause drowsiness! Three! Trying to concentrate through this crap is rough.

Now that that's out of my system...

My thought for the day is self-esteem.

I've come to hate the word. It's usually used when trying to make people live out our Horatio Alger fantasies. We want every disabled person to climb mountains, and blame it on low self-esteem when they don't.

It goes beyond that, though, and yes I'm still thinking about Fruits Basket. There's a character in it who is possessed by the spirit of the cat. According to the legend, the cat was tricked out of his place in the zodiac by the rat, and is a bit angry about it. In the manga, the person possessed by the cat has an alternate form, one that looks and smells like something rotting.

Over the centuries, the people possessed by the included animals have come to discriminate against the cat, even to the point of imprisoning him for life. They use him, sometimes openly and sometimes less so, as a kind of pivot point for their self-esteem. However bad they may have it, however difficult the curse may be to bear, nobody has it as bad as the cat.

Notice that it wasn't enough to let the cat just be what he was, to just have this revolting alternate form. They had to make a point of making his life hell, even incarcerating him for nothing more than being the cat.

I was thinking about this, both in terms of being disabled and being a sexual abuse survivor. In both cases, it hasn't been considered enough to simply let me be. The process of getting SSD is humiliating, and the amount is enough to live on only if you're ruthlessly frugal or have a second income source. Not too much second income! Or you won't get any benefits at all. The most common approach to a second income is the Department of Health and Human Services, and they're worse than the Social Security office in terms of making you feel like feces.

Being a sexual abuse survivor brings us into the Damaged Goods issue. What's essentially PSTD gets you labeled a psycho chick, good for nothing but easy sex, or even too crazy for sex at all. Healthy relationships? Don't make me laugh! Anything can be done to you without penalty, because you're no longer human, not because of any crime you've committed, but because of a crime committed against you. You're considered somehow damaged inside, that this even happened to you at all.

It's really not the crime itself, it's the idea that really bad things only happen to really bad people.

Either one, disability for sexual abuse, is like having an alternate form, one that repulses people, but the fact that there's more to it than that leads me to consider what it means to feel good about oneself.

There's a scene in Fruits Basket in which the man possessed by the spirit of the dog explains to the heroine just what the cat is to the rest of them, and how their relationship with the cat simultaneously lifts them up and drags them down. It's good, if you're going to be possessed, to not be the cat. That fact makes the possession maybe a little easier to take. After all, it could be worse. You could be him, shunned, scorned, and locked up for life.

But in order for the other twelve to see themselves as better, they have to make the cat worse beyond the simple fact of the alternate form, and that drags them down in ways that more than one character in the manga has to face up to.

It isn't just a manga phenomenon, though. I actually fall into three "cat" categories: disabled, sexual abuse survivor, and single mother, so I have a clear view from the inside. Mostly, I'm thankful that there are no legal penalties. I can live pretty much as I choose, within the limits of my means. I'm grateful for that, daily.

I've had to think about the self-esteem issue a lot, for obvious reasons, and while the "at least I'm not X" route is incredibly tempting, it's also dangerous. What happens if X suddenly rises above you?

For an example, I look once again to Oprah Winfrey, who takes enormous crap simply because she's the kind of person everybody is supposed to be able to look down on in this way. A fat black woman who was raped as a child? Come on! Under no circumstances is such a thing supposed to be a multi-billionaire in charge of one of the world's biggest media empires. So what do people do? Tear her down. She may be one of the most philanthropic celebrities we have, but she's not giving enough, or to the right causes. Her show sucks. Her magazine sucks. Her book recommendations suck. Whatever it is, no matter how well it does, it isn't really good enough, not because of the merits of the outcome but because of what she is.

The legal barriers are down, but the social barriers remain because when we look to build ourselves up, we look for those who are worse off than we are.

It's my objection, really, to Pollyanna, whose father said of crutches found in a Christmas barrel, "Well, at least we don't need those!" Or words to that affect. So what, you're supposed to feel good about yourself because you're not disabled or injured? Conversely, if you're disabled or injured, are you supposed to feel like crap about yourself? Or are you supposed to look for someone even lower on the totem pole than you are?

And then make an effort to see to it that they stay good and low, so that you can continue to feel good?

It's one of those things that, on the surface, seems beneficial but has unpleasant consequences down the line that can far outweigh the short-term advantages. It's an insecure place to be, for starters, since your up-ness is entirely dependent on someone else's down-ness. It puts you in a position of persistently being an ass to someone, just to show that you can, whether it's in the obvious form of physical abuse of someone not in a position to fight back, or in the more subtle form of passive discrimination, like avoiding someone from a different culture because you believe that the entire culture is beneath you.

There's also the fact that once you start playing this game, you become somebody else's one-down, and there's always the risk of them taking active steps to keep you down. This can range from verbal sneering to full-on violence, depending on the situation, but the unfortunate bottom line is that you'll never really be on top.

To return for a moment to Fruits Basket, they may have been better off than the cat, but those possessed by the twelve zodiac animals are still possessed. Hating and abusing the cat doesn't improve their lives in any material way, something figured out early on by about the last character you'd expect. Then again, he wants something very badly that hating the cat won't get him.

I'm not sure that's the only way out, though. It's certainly one way out, to want something that no position on the one-up/one-down ladder will get you, but I don't think it's the only way out. I think it's also possible to be honest-to-God happy about some parts of your life, like, even if your life were happening in a status vacuum, you'd be thrilled with this.

This is true of me. It's one reason why I'm taking the blasted meds. Parts of my life simply rock, and I want to be there for them as much as possible. I also want to find some way to work with the not-so-rockin' parts as best I can.

Some of you are probably thinking that the meditation practice I took up a few years ago has addled my brain. You would probably be right. That can have even stranger effects than the meds. But I've considered, from several angles, the possibility that one of my biggest barriers over the years is the idea that my cat-related issues disqualify me from really enjoying my life. By "enjoying my life", I do not mean in a getting everything I want sense, but in being okay with what happens, whatever that might be.

It's not karma when things go bad. It's not what we deserve when things go well, either. Life happens, the way the weather happens, without our agency because it's too big of a thing for us to control, and we cause pain when we try. Our attempts to force the natural course of events don't end well.

As I look around me, I wonder if being okay with that is one of the more perverse things you can come up with. I mean, be happy? With whatever's happening? When you're a disabled, meds-addled single mother who's sitting in what her son calls a "steroidal lawn chair" writing at 3:00 am with a dusty parrot preening itself on her left boob (since it's the highest available perch)?

Are you insane?

Fruits Basket: or How to Succeed in Publishing in Two Countries while Breaking Several Cardinal Rules of American Writing

Several months ago, I had a conversation over coffee with Margaret Yang, in which I was wondering idly why manga was kicking our collective butts with readers, especially young readers.

My audience being Margaret, she said something to the effect of, "Why don't you read some and find out?"

I wanted to, but the shelf at the library was formidably large and I didn't know where to start. Enter, months later, fate in the form of Helen E. H. Madden, a manga fan who suggested Fruits Basket, a series that is changing the way I look at writing, possibly for good.

Fruits Basket is, very simply, an epic about acceptance, of both self and others. The stakes are small and personal. The story is both hilarious and sad, so sad that if you get through it dry-eyed, you should probably seek help, or maybe eye drops. I am, in short, hooked in a way I have not been hooked since before I worked for Gale Group.

I've had the feeling for a while that something was wrong with fiction. Working for Gale gave me an unpleasant ability to predict plot movement within the first few chapters, which rendered reading fiction a waste of time. Going through the process of getting published and understanding myself as a writer taught me the formulas, the structure that made things so easy for me to predict. It doesn't matter which genre you're looking at. It really is all the same stuff, and much of it is geared toward the kind of jaded you get when you have to wade through a mountain of books, most of them bad.

The thing about manga is that it's coming out of a completely different culture, one that doesn't operate by the same rules, and it's not just that the rules are different, it's how they're different. Manga is like any other genre. Some of it is better than others. I'm even reading one series that is, in my mind, much too short in part because it's following American conventions. I'm reading another series that degenerates at one point into a period of ever-stranger slapstick. But since Fruits Basket is generally considered outstanding, I'm going to use it as a kind of guide to create a set of anti-rules for writing. These are, in other words, reasons why it's kicking our rear.

1. Begin at the beginning. Forget about this in media res stuff, start when the story starts, and drag the beginning out as long as possible. Let the heroine and her friends just play around a little, with a few scenes that do almost nothing but elicit laughs. Don't introduce the villain directly until vol. 4. Do create an unusual situation or two, but don't present anything so serious that the stakes appear to be especially high.

2. Don't be afraid of a cliche or two. Maybe you'll turn them on their heads. Maybe you won't. Who cares? Because let's face it: bishounen princes are very sexy, and Cinderella is a cross-cultural story for a reason.

3. Include scenes that don't go anywhere in particular as well as subplots that have little or nothing to do with the main plot arc. Continue playing things for laughs.

4. Add characters. Lots of characters, to the point where there's a who's-who at the beginning of each book. After all, there are 12 animals in the Chinese Zodiac. Would be a shame to leave anyone out just because they don't do much! And they have friends, right? And family, too. And teachers, co-workers...

5. Make those characters go on long bouts of introspection, pages and pages where there's no action or dialogue, just an internal monologue, or possibly cryptic verbal monologues that cannot possibly be making any sense to the listener. Also give them plenty of room to interact in ways that stall the storyline for a good five or ten minutes worth of reading.

6. Create a sort of false end point. Solve the obvious problem at vol. 6, even though there are 17 more volumes to go.

To give you some idea how much of an end point this is, the anime ends here and it works.

Keep doing this. Repeatedly.

7. Make a big deal out of small things. No, the world will not end if the Sohma curse isn't lifted. Nothing in particular will happen. Most people would never know the difference, since one of the Sohmas has memory wiping abilities. Even the reader won't know the difference for quite a while, as things have been humming along dysfunctionally for a few hundred years. Write passionately about it anyway. Screw global issues, let's just go with the fate of a handful of people no one has ever heard of or ever will.

8. Drag the ending out. Waaaaay out. Like several chapters worth of ending dragging. Make sure we know the precise impact of the ending on every single character, even though the list is considerable.

Sounds great, huh? So what would you say if I said that I was riveted, that I fought through the mental confusion involved in reading right to left/top to bottom to get get the most out of those long monologues, that I have been laughing so hard I've startled my son, and that the floor next to my bed is still covered in books because there isn't enough room on the shelf?

I've had a theory for a while that between certain aspects of the publishing industry plus word processors that we might be editing out things that are necessary.

It goes back to what I said earlier about a jaded eye not being a true eye. A jaded eye isn't interested in simple, human interaction. It's interested in increasing stimulation. Random playfulness, lots of characters, slow-building stories, these things don't stimulate. A jaded ear will become impatient with them, and reject them.

Being an erotica writer has its problems, but it has an advantage built into it: eventually you figure out that there's a limit to what you can write about. Sex is, when boiled down to the essentials, pretty simple, even dull. There's tab A. There are slots B, C, and D, but what else is there? Not much, so unless you're willing to write about increasing levels of kink, you're going to run into a wall. That's the danger of becoming jaded. After a while, that kink increases to the point where it becomes a disconnection from reality.

Remaining connected or reconnecting means risking everything on a single card: talent. In order to write about something so old and obscure as the Sohma curse, in order to create a character like Tohru Honda and have her be a viable protagonist, in order to drag out the story in this fashion, there must be a ton of raw talent driving the work.

The rather humbling bottom line here is that there is no formula. You just have to be damned good at what you do, and that's intimidating, because I think every artist knows that while we can control our craft, we can't control our talent. We don't know how good we are until we try, so we scour through books and seminars trying to find some reassurance, some method or formula that will spin our straw into gold. Agents and editors, tired of sifting through piles of stuff that might or might not sell also look for formulas. On the writer end, we want to be assured of writing something that will get published. Agents and editors want to acquire something that will sell. Nobody wants to fail, not even once.

In other words, you write or acquire the non-erotic version of kink, playing things for maximum impact while stripping them of everything human.

And then something like Fruits Basket comes along, with all its apparent flaws, and reminds us that it's not that simple. Humanity is flawed. We laugh at stupid crap. We do nothing in particular, and yet look over those moment with joy later. We have to do things that have nothing to do with other things we've been doing. We reach out, fail, then reach out again. We do not save the world.

I'm so glad I ran into this story, even though I haven't cleaned my house in over a week. I haven't written much of anything. I've neglected Mabinogi. However, I've been reminded of what fiction can do. It can entertain, yes, and it can protest. I've mostly been writing protest. But it can do a lot more than that. It can remind us of why we're alive and what we're capable of, even when the world isn't ending.

A few years ago, I wrote a story called The Virgin Mary Cried Tears of Blood. In it, I put the last thing I could think of to write about in terms of the kinds of imperfections I specialized in. I've written a few things since, but not much because I realized at the time that there was really nowhere else sensible to go. I had exhausted that vein.

Would be nice if I could write that I'm all fired up to start again, but I'm not. I hate gambling. Relying on talent strikes me as another form of gambling.

But as I read Fruits Basket, I caught myself wondering, can I do this? Especially given that I don't have any drawing talent at all. But there are ways around that, or ways to get the point across using words alone. It's been done. Even the structures of sentences and paragraphs, the choice of words and how they're placed, these are all tools.

I'm just afraid that my muse sucks.

First Real Week of Summer

Which means headless chicken behavior. My son is with me this time, and he has piano lessons and is an assistant swim instructor. I still have to schedule Japanese lessons, and starting next week, we'll be having a friend of his over regularly. No, he does not have a drivers license! He's still too young. So I'm a little busy.

I'm also a proud mama. He practiced on his own initiative today, and did very well with the little kids.

Fruits Basket and the Weeping Buddha

No, I didn't spell that wrong. It's Fruits Basket, not Fruit Basket, and it's a manga series, or maybe a manga epic, as it goes to 23 volumes and shows sign of serious organization. I checked back in the earlier volumes, and found that she did, indeed, set some crucial things up from the beginning, and did it well, too.

I've been reading the way I did when I was in my teens, at the expense of everything absolutely non-essential. I've been reading in the car wash, reading while playing Mabinogi, even reading while walking down the street.

The difference is that I haven't been reading to escape. That hasn't worked for me lately. I can't even write to escape, which is a problem because that's a lot of why I write. A lot of my stories are best-case scenarios, things I wish would happen instead of what usually does, and that hasn't been working well for me lately.

Fruits Basket is reminding me of something that pretty much everyone who explores the question of happiness likes to forget: pain isn't the opposite of happiness. It's not even grief or sadness. The opposite of happiness is the inability to accept what's happening and what has happened. Combine that with a sort of mental self-flagellation, and you get the opposite of happiness.

Others have written at length about the "problem" of pain, as if pain is, indeed, a problem. It's not. Pain tells us that we're sick and need to rest, that we've got our foot stuck in something, that we've hit ourselves with the hammer and need to be more careful. Pain is the body's warning signal that something is wrong.

Does it work the same way with the mind?

How many times does depression boil down to chronic rejection and self-flagellation?

For me, at least, that's the definition of it. It boils down to me insisting that I should be hurting over something, or not hurting that bad, or whatever, anything but what's actually going on, and trying to punish myself out of it.

Around the time my husband and I separated for good, I went into what would be the last round of serious therapy. I got a lot done, which meant in part that I got a lot of crying done. I've compared divorce to pulling an abscessed tooth using a pair of pliers, a bathroom mirror, and a pint of Jim Beam. It's messy and hurts like hell, a situation that warranted crying even by my warped standards.

It's a lot harder when the situation falls into a category that my internal judge declares inadequate.

Enter the Weeping Buddha.

The stories behind the Weeping Buddha vary, but the sculpture doesn't, not by much anyway. It's a carving of a man curled up on himself with pain, weeping into his hands.

It's an interesting phenomenon, especially to those whose exposure to Buddhism is such that they think of enlightenment as a state of perpetual bliss, or even just composure. The concept of an enlightened being sobbing is strange.

But why should it be? Isn't pain part of the human condition? Aren't we supposed to hurt when we fall, so that we can learn to be more careful next time? Why should our minds be any different?

Which brings me back to Fruits Basket. There's a lot in there that reminds the reader of how painful life can be, and how cruel the usual platitudes are. Being yourself doesn't help much if you're not the sort of self most people like. Some people are cruel, getting their self-esteem from how much better they are than someone else, and defending that position by whatever means possible. The world, in other words, isn't a place that can be fixed by believing in yourself and being cheerful all the time.

And yet this series is one of the funniest things I've ever read. It's also one of the most loving, because the love isn't a matter of denial or pity.

Which sort of brings me to the Cat. I can relate to the Cat. My disability is very much like his dreaded true form, hideous and foul. People react to it in the same way they react to him, with pity, fear or disgust.

If you want to know what I'm talking about there, go read the books! Even if you don't normally read manga, it's worth picking this one up.

I've been running for a long time, trying to be someone I might have been had things been different. I'm exhausted, and I'm not any different.

I guess between Fruits Basket and the Weeping Buddha, I'm wondering if it's okay to face down the genuine God-awfulness of what people are capable of, plus my own general helplessness, and let myself go to the point of tears, even if I don't really have something to cry about. Because there's a lot in my life that's good, but when I'm fighting with myself over the right to feel sad or scared, I don't have a lot of space left to appreciate it.

Happy Birthday, Me!

I'm 42 today.

Yes, I am celebrating, but as my mother put it when I talked to her yesterday, you can age and like it or age and not like it, but nothing will stop you from aging.

Paraphrased, but the gist is there and as far as I can tell, it's right on target.