the pieces of my life

So, if anyone ever came to our site through our home page, they’d have seen our lovely wedding pictures… and then gotten stuck. But I’ve decided that anyone who wants to find their way to our blogs gets what they deserve, so we’ve thrown up a home page that actually has links to other places on our site. How is that for a novel concept? This may end up like a real Web site yet!

Just a few days to go until Nanowrimo begins in full force. I’m a little stressed about it, because I had all these plans to get things done before it started, and of course, I haven’t. Cleaning, paying bills, outlining my novel, getting some sleep. Well, except for the outlining my novel, that’s what December is for. Although I’m feeling a little gypped that Hanukah starts in November this year. Don’t they know this is my busy month!

Last night we had a get-together at a bar in Harvard Square to meet some of the other people participating in the area. It was so nice to have an evening out without any talk of cases or any CWIT-type comments. They were geeky, insane, writerly types. Just like me. I felt completely in my element. There may be hope for this city yet.

We went to a party on Friday of mostly Dartmouth and HBS people. I was talking with someone and after discussing being married to a b-school student, we had the following exchange:

me: So, do you have a girlfriend?

him: [silence] Um. no.

me: Oh, I’m sorry, do you have a boyfriend?

him: [pause again] No.

me: You paused, so I wasn’t sure.

him: I paused because I was startled by such a direct and personal question.

And I thought I was on best behavior.

Tonight was Oktoberfest at good ol’ HBS. They did it Spangler-style (Spangler, if you recall, is the ostentatious student center). They had an oompah band, which for some reason we sat right in front of. They had two largish busty woman in low-cut frauline dresses dancing around. They had bratwurst, which was pretty darned good. And they had beer. You know. Bud, Corona, Sam Adams. Is that what they really serve at Oktoberfest in Germany? Of course the evening sparked a minor tiff between the boy and me. Kara and I were e-mailing and she said, “Are you going to Oktoberfest?” to which I replied, “Huh?” Adam has this nasty habit of forgetting to tell me when there are things going on socially, so I either a) hear about them at the last minute, b) hear about them from a friend, or c) hear about them after the fact. I think what annoys me most about this is I feel it puts me into the stereotypical “wife” position of “you never tell me anything! Why don’t you talk to me?” which just makes me cringe, because I know Adam is not a social guy and I know that he tells me everything else (I think I could discuss half the cases he studies), but this just irks me. Half the other partners (who are we kidding? I keep calling them partners. Let’s call a spade a spade. The other wives) simply go in and read their husband’s e-mail. You know I won’t go there. I don’t want to snoop. I just want to know everything. You do see the difference, don’t you? Now, he’s started forwarding me every piece of social e-mail, so next week we have the Halloween party and despite the fact that I detest–and that’s with a passion–costume parties, I’ve decided it’s a good idea for us to go. I thought of an extremely low-maintenance costume, so that part won’t be too painful. I’m not sure why I feel I subject myself to this, except that I do feel a little bad that we’ve been neglecting so many of the social events.

My line of work breeds obsessive-compulsive behavior. Scanning text over and over looking for minor typos, stray commas, misplaced modifiers. Makes you batty sometimes. When I’m doing my own writing, it’s just as bad, obsessing over each word, trying to find that perfect combination of letters that’s going to make my piece just leap off the page. But what this does is breed OCD into the rest of my life. I find myself checking the stove to make sure it’s off; checking one more time, because am I really sure I saw that it was off? Sometimes I look at things without really seeing them; and then, just before I walk out of the house, I think, “Did I really see it off?” so I check a final time. Now my coworkers are adding to my neurosis. Adam and I have a new best friend. It’s our crock pot. What a magical machine! Amazing how something that cooks so slowly can be such a huge time-saver. Throw things in the morning. Come home to a yummy dinner. When I mentioned it to my colleagues, they agreed the idea was a great idea, but they’d worry about fire. “Really?” I asked. “You think it could cause a fire?” “I once went home during lunch one day because I forgot to unplug the coffeemaker.” “You unplug your coffeemaker?” “Sure! It could start a fire otherwise.” I’m already paranoid about things touching the radiators and starting a fire when we’re out (our paper bags are by the kitchen radiator). Now I have to start worrying about our appliances? Great. Thanks, guys.

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Can someone please explain to me why “It’s snowing so I need to go back to bed” is not a legitimate excuse to skip work? This is going to be a long winter…

I’ve had at least three thoughts that I wanted to blog about over the past couple of days (including something a coworker said that made me reply, “Oh, that’s definitely going into the blog”) that of course I can’t now remember. I don’t blog at work. Simply bad form. Sometimes, if I have a spare moment, I’ll stick my thoughts in an e-mail and send them to myself at home so I can pop them in later. But that too often doesn’t happen, which means you are probably missing out on some of the most intelligent commentary that you could ever possibly read. Too bad for you.

Bought tickets yesterday for Adam and I to go to New Orleans around Christmas. It will be a late 30th birthday present for him, since his birthday is smack in the middle of finals. Already planning my meals. Mmmm, oysters. After that, we’ll be in London for a weekend in February (Martin, if you’re reading this, we need a top 10 list of things to see in London, preferably that can be done in a single day). And then, the holy grail of trips. Jazz Fest with the gals. Mmmm, more oysters.

All right, so less than meaningful commentary today. But you should have read all the stuff I was going to write, had I not forgotten it. And now, the snow simply isn’t stopping, so I’m off to my first attempt at the wondrous feat known as “driving in snow.” All Bostonians, steer clear of the black Toyota Camry going 20 miles an hour.

This is what you can do with me once I die.

The best part about making your pledge to public radio is hearing your name on the radio. Now I can listen to Morning Edition guilt free for a year.

I’m definitely in the camp of lazy voter. Don’t get me wrong, I do vote. I registered to vote in Massachusetts when I got my driver’s license and I made sure I remembered to cast my ballot for the Democratic primaries in September (an odd system is in place here, which I don’t completely understand: the primary for the governor’s election, which occurs very soon [I don’t want to say when because I’m pretty sure that if I don’t remind Adam–a Republican–to vote, he may forget thereby meaning that for once my vote would count instead of merely canceling out his vote], happened in September, giving the politicians just under two months to campaign. I’m not sure why the Republican candidate had already been selected). What I mean by a lazy voter is in Seattle, I waited until I received my Voter’s Guide to the Candidates, read through it, and made my choices. If in doubt, I called my friend Barb, whose political leanings are quite similar to mine, and ask what she thought. If when I got into the booth, I wasn’t sure, I either voted Democrat or just skipped that one if I couldn’t tell. For the primaries here, I took a “blind test” on the WGBH, which asked my opinion on a bunch of political issues and then told me which candidates held the same views I did. I was in line with two candidates (Shannon O’Brien and Robert Reich), so I did what I always do when in a real political conundrum: I called the Tweedle Twirp (and for those not in the know, Tweeds is currently working toward her Ph.D. in political science), who gave me the wise wisdom of if two candidates are truly equal and you feel they’d both do a good job, vote for the woman. Sage advice.

But now we have the elections coming up, and while my choice for governor has been made, there are other issues that I’m not so clear on. For instance, there’s a referendum on mandating immersion English for ESL students (nothing but English in the schools–if school workers continually use another language with students, parents can sue them) instead of creating bilingual classes. I heard the pros on the case, and they seemed reasonable. When the law was instituted in California, ESL students scores on the standardized test went up significantly. Wow, solid case. But then you hear the other side, which points out that the test is brand new. Yes, ESL student test scores went up. But the test was brand new when they first noted scores and over a couple of years all students tested went up, and the non-ESL students had their scores go up by almost twice what the ESL student scores went up. So the immersion program doesn’t work. Or does it?

I think I’ve figured out what’s been bothering me this whole time. I’ve met a number of CWITs who definitely fall under the stereotype of the CWITs. But I’ve met a number of partners whom I really like: they’re smart, they’re working, they’re fun and friendly. One’s a chemical engineer, one’s a nuclear engineer, one’s an M.D. And then it hit me. My whole problem–not just with the CWITs, but with Boston as a whole–this place is conservative! And I don’t mean politically. This is a “proper” place, and truly, I’m not a proper gal. A woman at my office was telling a story about a bad date and she mentioned that he made a crude remark. After much cajoling, she finally said, “Well, I can give the initials. He made a reference to a b.j.” Can you imagine any of the KAG back home not tossing “blow job” out as if they were talking about their new shoes or why their manager sucks (which is probably when the phrase “blow job” would come up)? Then, last night on Friends, there was a story line that had to do with porn and masturbation, but nothing that couldn’t be said on network TV. One woman said, “Can you believe that that kind of stuff is on at 7 p.m. in parts of the country” and another concurred, “That’s why my kids aren’t going to watch TV when I have them.” Now, this is not a critique on these women, who are absolutely in their right on this. It’s just a comment on the cultural disconnect I feel out here. I’ve been trying to monitor myself. Now, I don’t have a particularly foul mouth (my mother gets credit for the most f-bombs in a single sentence at any given time), but plenty of “hell”s and “oh my god”s have slipped from my mouth. And if I get particularly going on a subject, a few other words might slip. But I’ve become a “heck” and “oh my gosh” person, because it’s so easy to offend people here.

I’m thinking back to my own grad school days, at the University of Washington. There were no married couples. No talk of people wanting bigger rings (truly someone said that when her husband graduated, she wanted a bigger ring from her husband, not that the one she has is small–no one I’m hanging out with, though). No talk of trips abroad or formals. We sat around in divey bars drinking beer and dishing, sometimes about literature and writing and sometimes just about life. And the cursing? It was rampant. And it was good.

Why Sandra doesn’t like the changes in my page:

“perhaps…change is hard…there is very little that is consistent and familiar in our worlds…constancy gives us a sense of security that although people change, they move, they evolve, they take on new interests and new friends, there is a sense that there are fragments that will always be what we know and can rely on while we get used to the new…i.e. Mrs.Adam Medros going to an Ann Taylor fashion show.”

My weblog seems to be generating complaints these days. Both in the form of “Go back to the old format” (which is fine, but tell me why) and the “Why didn’t you write about what we did together?” First of all, I don’t always feel like writing everything I do. Second of all, maybe you weren’t all that interesting. Third of all, this weblog is a privilege, not a right, so deal.

As long as I’m on the weblog topic, I’ve tried to make text a little more readable by making it wider on the page. Does anyone know how to make my icons appear just between the days and not between each entry?

I turned in two writing assignments yesterday. Talk about nerve-wracking. I’m a writer. I’ve been working as a writer for a while now (since, what, 1998?) and I have a master’s degree in creative writing. Yet, it doesn’t help. Whenever I turn in a piece for a new editor, there’s that gut-wrenching feeling of “What if they hate it?” Getting used to a new style, a new way of doing things is difficult, and waiting for that initial feedback is torture. Every editor employs a different style of editing and each one takes adjusting to. This invariably passes. Once you know what to expect it’s easier–although turning in assignments is never actually easy. But in the meantime, it’s just a lot of deep breaths.

Speaking of deep breaths, I find that when I’m doing yoga at home, instead of being of aware of the alignment of the body and of the flow of breath through my body, all I can think about is how much more dirt is on the floor compared to the last time I did yoga. And since I never clean, I always have that thought.

There’s a whole community of them! Boston Blogs. I found it out when the woman who runs it e-mailed me to help out with Boston Nanowrimo stuff. I am not alone in my geekdom!

The fashion show was last night. I had a lovely dinner with Kara beforehand, and since that’s the kindest thing I can say about the evening, I’ll just end that there.

I’ve started getting bits and pieces of ideas for this year’s novel. I should make an outline (from the FAQ: “Outlines are encouraged. Notes are encouraged. Partially written chapters are punishable by death”), but I don’t seem to be. Mainly because my ideas are too amorphous. I don’t actually have a beginning or a middle or an end. I am jotting notes here and there–the trick is to then find them when I’m ready to start writing. But I’m eager to start. Which is a good sign. I just need to make sure the house is properly stocked with bourbon before I start. Because who can write at 3 a.m. without a glass of bourbon nearby (preferably Knob Creek or Maker’s Mark)?

Happy Birthday, Claire Bear! I’d say go out and hunt salmon and pick berries on your special day, but I’m not sure there’s much of either in NY.