Man, I used to think slugs were so cute. Our backyard in Brooklyn was full of them, many of them longer and fatter than a (long fat) man’s thumb, and they were bold as hell. We had a big gap between the kitchen door and the floor that we never did get around to weatherstripping. In winter we’d shove a towel against it. In summer, it was wide open. Every so often one of the bolder slugs would ooze on in across the kitchen floor, those antennae or antlers or eyes on sticks or whatever those protrusions are on their heads sticking way up like they were dazzled by this strange new land of incandescent lights and laminate flooring they’d wandered into. I’d coo over them and then escort them back outside. When Billy would accidentally step on one on the deck I’d get pissed.

Obviously I wasn’t a vegetable gardener yet. Slugs in the front yard, or in other people’s yards? Still totally cute. Slugs in the backyard, where my food grows? Evil slimy very very bad things. Also, doomed. All slug interlopers will be squished on sight. And I use Sluggo. No, I’m not sorry.

Now that we’re well into summer (not that you can tell by the weather recently. The peas, just about done-for last week, think it’s April and have started cropping again. The tomatoes and cucumbers? The squash and eggplants? They’re just pissed off. And forget about the peppers. They’re thinking about packing it in entirely. Moving to Florida or something. But today was warm and sunnyish and tomorrow promises the same, and so I’m holding out hope that my heat-lovers WILL crop this year.)..whew…such a long parenthetical I’ve kind of lost the thread here, yeah? Sorry. So now that it’s allegedly summer, the slugs are (were) slowing down, but the next pest in line has stepped up. Aphids. We’ve got ’em. They’re gross. We’ve taken strong countermeasures.

Ladybugs. That’s right. We called in the ladybug army:

Kiddo unleashing our army

Wouldn't it have been nice if I'd thought to take a photo of the bag before it was almost empty?

Can you see the hardworking, aphid-chomping darlings?

We released a bag full of ladybugs last week. We even sprayed them with diluted root beer to stick their wings together so they wouldn’t be able to fly away for a few days. This is supposed to guarantee they’re in your garden long enough to mate and lay eggs.

A week later? There are a few ladybugs still in attendance, but the aphid population has somehow ballooned. The cabbages are totally encrusted and the one remaining spring collard plant was so gross I just pulled the damn thing. So much for the ladybugs.

We had a bad aphid problem two summers ago (that carried over into our fall and winter plantings), and released ladybugs and it seemed to work…sort of. Even after the ladybugs eat the aphids you’re left with the dry gray shells or husks or whatever those things are and you have to wash each bunch of kale like six times to get all that crap off. Last summer I had a new baby and didn’t want to deal with such involved vegetable washing before each meal, so I decided to simply save the brassicas for fall and winter. See, the aphids only seem to settle on the cole crops like kale, cabbage, brussels sprouts, etc. I didn’t plant any of those last summer, and we had zero aphids. And when it came time to plant the fall and winter crops in mid-July, those remained aphid-free because there weren’t aphids in the yard already. This summer? Didn’t follow that rule. Next summer I’m going back to it. No brassicas in summer. Ever.

HollyJo!

Last call on that copy of Avery 7 that I’m giving away. If you want it, please comment on the post below by Thursday at noon PST. I’ll be letting the Random Number Generator pick a winner after that.

My contributor copies of Avery 7 arrived today! Woot! Okay…so I took the photo with my iPod and it’s a little grainy. You’ll have to take my word for it that my name is on the back there. But it is. Along with Roxane Gay and Joe Meno, no less! (And ten other people whose work I don’t know yet. I’m looking forward to digging in very soon.)

Do you want to read it, too? I’m giving away one of my copies. Just leave a comment here (on the blog, not on Facebook. Having to deal with comments left in more than one place displeases the Random Number Generator).

Or if you prefer a sure thing, you can order a copy here. Do please consider supporting Avery. They do good work.

I’ve been feeling unsettled lately. Been feeling that way since that damn scene in Rabbit, Run, actually, but I think my reaction to that scene was partly a symptom of the state of my head rather than the cause of it. It’s not an entirely unpleasant feeling…just feels like something’s getting ready to shift one way or another. For the better, hopefully. But I can’t settle down, can’t stick with one book or even two, or three. Nothing I’m reading right now is quite doing it for me. I’ve been picking up and putting down You Must Remember This for months now, and I’ve been reading Say Her Name only in the bath, which means I read it in little bites once or twice a week when I’m lucky enough to hand both kids over to Billy and sneak up to the tub. I was reading Rabbit, Run after the baby fell asleep but before she was asleep deeply enough for me and my nipples to get out of bed. (Yes, I was nursing the baby when I read that baby-drowning scene. I don’t know if it was easier or harder to read it with her asleep beside me.) Her bedtime and naptime nursing is Kindle-reading time, for the most part, so from there I turned to my collection of “free classics” because there’s no room in the budget for new books to feed the Kindle just now. I got a little ways into The House of Mirth, but that didn’t take so I started rereading Middlemarch, then drifted away from that and started rereading Women in Love, then clicked away from that, thought I should read something for the first time and started to read A Tale of Two Cities because I’ve never gotten around to that one. That didn’t grab me and…well, you see my dilemma. The books aren’t the problem. It’s this shifty, slippery brain of mine. Right now the kids and Billy are asleep and I don’t have any freelance jobs on my plate and so this is prime writing time, and here I am blogging about not reading instead of writing.

Yeah. That’s exactly the right reaction to my severely limited work time. Instead of working on the novel revision, I talk to myself in public.

No mystery there. I’m avoiding the scene I’m supposed to be working on right now because it’s not going well. Adding three additional points of view means I’m writing many new scenes in this draft. For the most part it’s going great and definitely feels like the right choice (good thing, because it’s seriously heavy lifting), but there’s one character in particular who’s fighting me. Can’t quite get her voice, can’t quite get her story. It’s there, kind of…I mean…I see the basic shape of it, but it’s not coming easily to the page. Not like the other two new povs. Those guys snapped right into place, like they’d been waiting since I started the first draft (October 2005, for those of you playing along at home) to get to tell their sides of things.

Though maybe it’s more a matter of the fact that the characters coming easily to me are male and the one I can’t pin down is female. I usually struggle with my female characters; my tendency is to stay too surface with them. Part of that is my reluctance to look too deeply into my own shit, no doubt, but plenty of my own shit turns up in the male characters, too. They’re as much me (and as much not me) as the female characters. Mostly I think it’s because my inner editor is always aware that the reader is going to look for me in the female characters, and perhaps jump to all kinds of conclusions about who I am and what I really think and feel and what evil dark very bad things I’ve done and/or thought about doing. Which wouldn’t be a big deal except that sometimes they’d be right. And then there’s all that vulnerability and exposure and so there I am in the corner, tugging the towel back down over my ass and muttering about how “it’s fiction.”

Of course it’s all 100% fiction, and none of my characters’ thoughts, actions, fears, etc are mine or ever possibly could have been mine. Pay no attention to the woman behind the curtain.

Alright. Back to it. I’m going to set MacFreedom for another 45-minute sprint and hope the baby sleeps until I come out the other side.

Wish me luck.

And reading suggestions.

Self-portrait Series with PB&J Face

Happy birthday to my sweet jellyfaced boy!

and because my brain is everywhere at once today, and because if I don’t go with the random I may well never blog here again, because I do seem to be losing the blog habit.

1. Rabbit, Run by John Updike. It’s a rather well-known book, yeah? A million and three people have read it before me, and I know at least ten of them, probably more. I picked it up because I somehow got the feeling I should read the Rabbit series. You know how well those “should reads” often work out. How could I have lived 37 years surrounded by readers and not have known that a baby gets drowned in this book? How did that never come up in bookish conversations before? Or better yet, “Jesus, Cari, do NOT read that book if you can’t handle a baby getting drowned and I know you so I know you CAN NOT HANDLE A BABY GETTING DROWNED.” I was reading Rabbit, Run. Then a baby got drowned. I am no longer reading Rabbit, Run. This is not to fault the book in any way. And bonus points to Updike for being able to fill me with such absolute grief and horror. But also, fuck him. There are things I can’t handle. That scene is one of them. Looking forward to the day when it leaks out of my brain and is gone.

2. Kiddo turns five tomorrow. FIVE! He rides a two-wheeler bike now. He does little pop wheelies on it and can stand up to pedal. He can hit a pitched baseball really well. He can throw a frisbee like a teenager. He can write his friend Atticus’s name. Where did my baby go?! Here he is at his school’s May Day celebration. Teenager, right?

Okay…so maybe not a teenager yet. How much longer will he be willing to wear flowers in his hair?

3. The baby is now 14.5 months. She can say Mama, Dadda, Kiddo’s name (minus the final consonant), cat, ball, ne ne (nursing), hi, bye, yes, eat, nana (banana), this, and that. She can feed herself with a spoon. But she absolutely refuses to walk. Why should she walk? With a face like this, she gets carried wherever she wants to go:

4. The weather has been weird, so the garden is grumpy. Photos when it perks up a bit.

5. The standing desk has worked out really well. I often have to work until one a.m. or later, since I can’t get to work until the kids are asleep. With my traditional desk, I’d wake up with the kids the next morning feeling achy and exhausted. With the stand-up desk I still feel underslept the next morning, but it’s not nearly as bad, and my overall energy is way better.

Yesterday Billy took the kids so I could sneak out to a cafe to work on the novel revisions. I worked for four hours. Four hours! It was bliss. And then I stood up to walk home. Ugh! I’m not used to that much sitting anymore! My legs were stiff and tight, my back hurt… It took the whole 30-minute walk home to loosen up. I think I need to find a cafe with a bar or counter I can stand at, because I don’t want to feel that way again if I can avoid it.

Zazen by Vanessa Veselka

I finished Zazen two days ago (devoured it in two days) and I can’t stop thinking about it. I won’t call it perfect, because what’s a perfect novel and really who would want to read such a thing. What it is is that rare work of art that is completely, precisely itself.

This is where I reveal myself as a lousy book reviewer because I can’t explain it better than that. What is it, exactly, that makes Zazen such a remarkable book for me? I mean, yeah it’s super smart and the prose is gorgeous and the dialogue pitch perfect, the characters fully realized and complex, the plot compelling, the universal truths revealed all true-ringing etc. All that good stuff. But it’s more than that. (Forgive the gushing. I get this way about fiction done so very right.) It’s that thing that makes (in my opinion) Astral Weeks the best album ever. Why is it the best ever? I have no fucking clue. It just is. It’s that feeling. That rightness. That magic. Zazen’s got it.

On April 13th, the New York Times published an article about the dangers of sugar. The next day, they published an article about the dangers of sitting down.

Both articles got me thinking. Seriously thinking. Life altering kind of thinking. (Yes, this is happening a lot recently. I’m doing some serious thinking about THAT as well.) I didn’t previously think sugar was health food or anything, and was mostly careful that Kiddo didn’t eat a ton of it. (Ladybug eats little or none of it, lucky baby. It’s easier before they know what a cookie is.) I was less careful with my own sugar consumption. Which is to say, I was very, very good about it when things were going well, but would eat my weight in oatmeal cookie dough after a particularly bad day. But, well…you know how I’m afraid of dying and all, and this article pushed all the right buttons. So I’ve cut way back. I’m going for seriously reduced sugar consumption rather than no sugar at all. I’m not worrying about the sugar in the bit of jam I spread on my peanut butter toast or the drizzle of honey on my oatmeal, but I’m otherwise avoiding the stuff. I’ve had ice cream twice since reading that article and that seems about right. Moderation, leaning toward the low-consumption end of the spectrum. That’s something new for me right there. I’ve always been more of a wild-pendulum-swing type of girl.

The sitting article? That one really got me going. And such a simple, appealing solution in a stand-up desk! (Yes, I’m standing up right now.) Rushing out to buy new furniture wasn’t really an option, nor did I want to completely get rid of my traditional sit-down desk. It was my father’s, for one thing, and also in this new spirit of moderation it seemed prudent to keep the option of occasionally plunking my ass down in a chair to work.

Years ago I bought a vintage TV cabinet, pulled the original TV guts out, and stuck my TV inside. In 2003 we kicked the cable habit, and when we moved to Portland we didn’t bother to get a TV antennae, and when the DVD player died we didn’t replace it (because our laptops play DVDs just fine, thanks) and so the poor TV was sitting all dusty and neglected. I wanted to get rid of it but I LOVE this TV cabinet. And then I got to thinking…the TV cabinet is the perfect height for a stand-up desk for me (I’m 5’4″.) Tonight we chucked the TV and moved the cabinet into my office. Now there’s even a place for the printer! Check it out:

Bonus: A nice clear workspace, because all the necessary clutter of reference books, pencil holders, paperwork etc can live at the sit-down desk:

The only possible problem is the fact that I can’t put my feet underneath this desk to get right up against the work surface while standing up straight. So far that feels fine. We’ll see how it goes.

There was a lot of talk on Twitter about both Times articles since they came out. Seems I’m not the only one they made an impression on. How about you?