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NaNoWriMyFuHeOuMo

Tuesday, November 22, 2011

I’ve been writing a lot, although not here I’m afraid. I’m actually digging into my shark Thing I’m Doing for NaNoWriMo. Oh, I think I’ve raged against NaNo in the past (in fact, I know damn well that I have) and I still have rage issues, but I’m working through them. More specifically, it has caused me to write far more words than the words I wrote this summer on the other Thing I’m Doing (working title: The Next Harry Potter–Stop Laughing I’m Serious. Watch for it in whatever passes for a bookstore near you in the next decade or so) in far less time, which is exactly the point, I guess. Yes, I’m being begrudging about this crap, but you know what? It really has helped.

You know what has actually helped? Esteban is also writing a No for NaWriMo. Yes, apparently my motivation involves statistics and numbers, but it also goes on overload when there’s a freaking competition. My cred is at stake here and nothing burns my ass more than when he announces that he’s 2K words ahead of me.

Also contributing to the busyness: my little sister is getting married, to a guy she fell in love with at Weetacon. It shouldn’t be a surprise that an event that started with a marriage proposal should be racking up love matches left and right, but so it seems to be. Come to Weetacon, single people! We’ll find you a mate! Or something!

(Seriously, though, registration for Weetacon is open, and there’s currently one spot left, so if you are so inclined, head on over to the website and check it out. We won’t bite and I promise we won’t even try to set you up with someone until at least your second ‘Con.)

So things have been a little crazy busy, and I totally forgot to post here that we’re doing our mumble somethingth annual Holiday Card Exchange! That’s right, if you are interested in getting lots and lots of holiday greeting cards from all over the country, continent and the world, you can sign up once more using this handy dandy little form. Since I got such a late start, I’ll give you until this Friday, November 25th at Midnight CST (although I’ll probably let you slide, PSTers, and as long as it’s there when I wake up on Saturday, you’ll be good) to sign yourself up.

Not sure how the Holiday Card Exchange works? Here’s the FAQ, and as always, the comments are ready to take any additional questions you may have.

What are you waiting for? Sign up already!

 

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The roof. The roof. The roof is on fire.

Monday, November 7, 2011

Wood and more wood

Did you guys know that things break on houses? It’s absolutely true. But did you know that they all conspire to break at the same damned time? Also completely true. Case in point: Casa Bix tried to pretty much mutiny over the past several weeks.

We were feeling pretty good about ourselves, actually, so we were really to blame. The house felt our hubris and decided to teach us a lesson, undoubtedly. You see, after more than a decade of dissembling our horrible refrigerator every three months (I don’t mean cleaning it out, I mean we had to actually empty the freezer, remove the back panel and the defrosting unit — using wrenches and stuff — and chip away the ice that had built up inside the mechanism, causing rot water to drain into the fridge part and onto all of our food), we had found a fix for the design flaw and haven’t had to fight the fridge funk since. Victory!

Except…

First, the dryer stopped working. Well, it kind of stopped working. You see, when we bought the house, the dryer was the only appliance we could afford to buy new (and only because Esteban was still working for a big blue box store and had a crazy pants great discount) and while we’ve since replaced the other appliances with varying degrees of success, our Maytag has lived up to that brand’s storied dependability.

Until it didn’t. Except when it did.

And we weren’t sure if it was just time to buy a new dryer (after all, we’re talking 14 years here… man I’m old) or what. It was very very frustrating, because you’d run the dryer and then find an entire dryer full of still mostly wet clothing. Most of the time, it all needed to be rewashed because by the time we realized it hadn’t dried properly, it was permeated with the funk. You know the funk, right? You put on clothes that are saturated with the funk and blammo, you smell like a cross between a bum and a drowned rat that washed up under the pier.  Bum rat soaked mold clothes, you do not make for sexy times, let me tell you.

Esteban tried replacing the whosits and the whatsits, and it would seem like that was it, but it wasn’t, and we were starting to look at the mate for our ridiculous hippy washing machine, which was going to cost fourteen million dollars. But then, during one of our many poolapalooza sessions this summer, Ward took sympathy on our state and decided to look into the matter. He found out that the thingy that the whoosit was attached to was ALSO a problem for this dryer. So he replaced it. Problem solved, right?

Wrong. The VERY SAME NIGHT, the hippy washing machine threw a code. Yes, a code, because while our dryer is circa 1996 and uses the same technology was 1970 dryers, our washing machine has the pants of fancyness. It has CODES, people. Codes that tell you nothing.  We basically will do anything to avoid another visit from the Hippy Washing Machine Repair Guy, if only because his Mercedes-Benz makes my Murano feel ashamed of itself. Again, to the internet, where the root cause was either a Faboozle or a Schlamozzle, but to get to those things, Ward actually had to build wooden stands so that they could tip the washing machine on its side. I am not making this up. The man built temporary wooden STANDS to fix our washing machine.

Thankfully, that should have been the end of it. Except not less than a week later, as we did our preparations for autumn, it became very apparent that both our chimney was about to fall down and also, the roof was going to pour great flumes of water into our bedroom until the entire bedroom ceiling let loose on our heads some evening in the very near future.

Here’s a secret: We’ve redone almost our entire house, but our bedroom still looks exactly like it did when we bought the house in 1996 (this December 6th is our 15 year anniversary in Casa Bix… have I mentioned that I’m old?) with yellowed and stained staple-up ceiling tiles and warped, badly installed 70’s rec room paneling. I hate it in there. No, I LOATHE it in there. However, until we got it to stop leaking, it wasn’t worth fixing it. And believe me, we’ve tried everything, shy of a new roof. So, yeah.

We went through the entire process of getting roofing estimates and many learned opinions and then we handed over another four million dollars and a bunch of guys (many of whom did not have teeth and made me feel very awkward when I bought them doughnuts) tore off our roof and then put a new one on. Woo! I did a sigh of relief, because at that point, we had now replaced or dealt with everything in our house that could possibly be a nightmare, right?

Within minutes of the roofing trucks departure, Esteban noticed that the toilet had departed this earthly plane. Yes, that would be this 1949 bungalow’s sole toilet, and he discovered this while getting ready to take a shower. Why does Esteban end up doing plumbing while naked? Apparently the universe has decreed that it should be so. I would take the time to enjoy it, but usually he’s not in a fantastic mood while doing his naked plumbing, so I try to keep my sarcastic and/or bawdy comments to a minimum and decided to be nice and hook up the dishwasher for him. I even stroked the appliance and assured it that it was very pretty and wonderful and I loved it very much. I really didn’t want the 9-year-old dishwasher to shit the bed too. I think Esteban would leave me if we had to slog through manual handwashing all of our dishes. I am truly a messy cook, and if I haven’t used every single surface and every utensil, then I don’t really feel like it’s a worthwhile endeavor.

Finally, he managed to get the toilet to stop hemorrhaging water and took his shower. However, when I detached the hose for the portable dishwasher (reason #5748 not to buy an old house) I noticed that while it normally burned me slightly, the water was ice cold.

Uh oh.

“Hey hon, did you have hot water for your shower?”

“Well, now that you mention it… it was pretty unimpressive toward the end there. I figured that the dishwasher just used all of it up.”

Except no. No.

Bye hot water heater. We hardly knew ye.

You know what’s awesome? Living like an Amish person for the weekend. Luckily we had the washing machine fixed… except we couldn’t wash any clothes! Or any dishes! It’s like a fortune cookie saying or something. I felt bad about my missing roof until I met a toilet that couldn’t flush. Or something.

Esteban fixed the toilet, and then four days later, we got a new water heater.  And now I am very poor. Very very ridiculously poor. On the bright side, I’m pretty sure that there’s nothing left to break in our house.

At least until we crank up the original central air unit next May, that is.

No whammies, no whammies, no whammies!

Whenever I start feeling bad for myself, I think about this dog, whose owner dressed it up like a chicken. And then I laugh because my god. A chicken pug. It will never stop being funny.

Seriously. What are you laughing at?

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Weetabix’s life improvement in just 68,493 easy steps

Wednesday, August 17, 2011

 

So, I’ve been working on this project. A writing project. Ever since I went to Writer Camp, I’ve been little Pollyanna with keeping my internal demons at bay and have trucked through 18K words of new fiction in two months.

Ok, I know Nanowrimo people poop that out before lunch, but for me, that’s a huge freaking deal.

You want to know my secret? A freaking Google document. Yes, I know, I preach about SMART goals all the time, but it never occurred to me to apply it against writing, which is such a hippy dippy, scarf and feathers kind of experience that the left brain kind of goes to sleep so as to not scare the muse or some crazy shit. Anyway, one Google spreadsheet and a mapped set of benchmarks later and I’m on a freaking roll. I expect to be looking at a mostly complete first draft of an N word by the end of 2011, amazingly enough.

(And to give you a peek inside my fucked up brain, you should also know that I’m about 5K behind my own schedule right now, so instead of being happy that I’ve written about 17K more words than I would have during the summer, I’m tsk tsking about how I’m behind fucking schedule. Ok, still progress to be made on the internal demon thing. (Someone smack me.))

I’m also doing a lot of careful reading of fiction novels. I love reading, but I tend to read not as a reader but as a writer. It’s possible that my creative writing graduate program broke me or maybe I just need to get my head out of my ass.

However, to that end, I’m starting up the That’s My Bix book club again, just in time for Back to School! No need for number 2 pencils or even a book bag (although if you want an excuse to buy those things for yourself, be my guest), we do it all via email discussions.

Last time, we read Liam Callanan’s All Saints (brilliant brilliant BRILLIANT book) and this time I have similar high hopes for Susanna Daniel’s Stiltsville. She is a first time novelist, a graduate of the writer factory that is Iowa Writer’s Workshop and she is also on twitter as @SusannaDaniel surprisingly enough. The book was named one of Amazon’s Top 10 debut novels of 2010 and it also earned won the Robert Bingham PEN American award last week. She also debuted at the One Story Debutante Ball this past spring and they published a very cool interview with her. I chose this book because she lives in Wisconsin and then it won the Bingham, so I’m now actually going to do it.

Want in? Simple!

How this book club will work: read the book by Sept 15 and then participate in the discussion on this email list. Simple, right? So, some people like to write long responses and some people just get a lot of enjoyment out of reading those responses and saying “Yes, me too” which is fine as well. There is no pressure, this is supposed to be fun! Leave a comment on this entry and I’ll add you to the super secret book club mailing list. You’ll need to leave the email address you want to use for the discussion list, but don’t worry, I’m the only one who can see your email address and I promise the spam bots can’t get at it.

Also, there are already 20 or so participants signed up from previous book club participants and also, I mentioned it on Twitter and Facebook, so the number of comments on this post are not indicative of the number of participants.

 

 

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Winner of the Wendy Bix Photo giveaway!

Wednesday, August 17, 2011

We have a winner in the Wendy Bix photo giveaway!

And it is Lorraine, who said that the barissta entries were her favorite. Ah Sbux, how pedestrian it has become, and yet how it filled my heart with joy back when it was still a novelty and a paean to conspicuous consumerism. I kind of miss those innocent days of being excited about Sbux too. We now save our Sbux runs as a treat on the weekends, since we have purchased a super-automatic espresso unit of our very own and can make fancy and delicious coffees for pennies. Our barisstas still give us crap about how we’re no longer their best customer. Ah well, what are you going to do? We all grow up eventually.

I’ve sent Lorraine an email and anxiously await her choice. Will it be City Girl, the single most popular item in my entire Etsy store (and to be honest, the screen saver on my iPhone as well)? Or will she go off book entirely and request something custom that isn’t in the store but is something she remembers from a blog entry long ago? It’s anyone’s guess!

Congratulations Lorraine!

 

 

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Chucked

Tuesday, July 12, 2011

One of the side benefits of my new (well, six months old) job is that the hour or so that I used to spend commuting to and from the office is the make or break hour for planning ambitious meals. Not that we’ve been ambitious, mind you, but we certainly do more eating at home now and there are far fewer “I don’t want to cook, let’s order a pizza” nights than there used to be.

(Also, in case you’re the nosy type, I along with a few of my fellow Double Income No Kids friends are tracking all of our nightly dinner adventures on the Twitter feed DINKdinners.)

It’s also prime Farmer’s Market season, so every Saturday, Esteban and I are waking up early and scurrying down to the big market where we scope out the produce, and then we typically head out to what I call “the good meat place” to get some kind of animal protein for the week.

This week, I was in the mood for skirt steak. Oooh, marinated with cilantro and garlic and lime and maybe a little Vulcan Fire Salt for the hell of it? Yeah, that was just about perfect. Unfortunately, skirt steak isn’t terribly popular here in the land of Hamburger Helper and cream o’mushroom soup chuck roasts in the crock pot, so we headed over to one of the other meat counters that is reputable and doesn’t give me the vapors. They were out of skirt steak, but of course the almighty chuck roast was on sale and actually looked pretty good.

You should know that I’ve been fooled by chuck roasts before, so many times, and yet, I keep going back for more. Come on, baby, look at all of this marbling! they call out to me. They are like that ex-boyfriend who you know is a cheating asshole but you keep taking him back because he smells so nice and looks so adorable when he smiles and shows those dimples. I know better and yet, I just keep setting myself up for disappointment.

I had random delusions of turning it into burrito filling, but of course, didn’t follow through and ended up making your run-of-the-mill boring ass pot roast. And even after putting extra effort into it, applying all manner of flavor-building spices and aromatics, it STILL tasted super pedestrian. I mean, it was tasty, but tasty in a Swanson’s dinner kind of way.

Why do I do this? No, the question is why do I keep doing it? Even as pot roasts go, the chuck roast will never be as good as other cuts of meat in the same application. As far as I can tell, chuck roast exists for one purpose only: to be ground up and turned into meatloaf or braised with a bunch of cumin and chiles to later become an ingredient in burritos.  I even once followed Thomas Keller’s pot roast recipe to the letter which involved wine and a mirepoix and kitchen twine and a slow braise in my French oven — even after all of that, it was so underwhelming that I think I actually heard snoring coming from the carrots on the plate.

So tell me, commenters, what are your no fail super exciting and oh-so-delicious chuck roast recipes? Save me from another boring dinner! Tell me what I’m missing because generations of housewives and church lady cooks before me cannot possibly be wrong!

Also, you have until July 15th to enter to win a Wendy Bix 16×20 photo print! Details over on this post!

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Make my blog pretty and historically accurate!

Sunday, July 10, 2011

Many of you started reading my Diaryland blog back in the day. I have actually owned Thatsmybix.com for years (YEARS) while still updating at Diaryland because A)I had no idea how to physically maneuver 8 years of blog entries over onto WordPress B) I didn’t want to deal with the extra work… let’s face it, Diaryland is limited but it’s EASY and it never changes and C) Mimi Smartypants once told me that she was proud that she and I were still rocking the old school Diaryland blog updating and not caring about having a Diaryland URL for our blogs even after the giant exodus in the early 2000s. Then my Conde Nast work dried up with the economy and I decided that it was a good time to go legit and stop paying for two different websites.

One of the things that happened when I flipped the switch is that I had to set up a redirect on Weetabix.diaryland.com, which essentially, hid all of my archives from view. Sure, I could get at them, but I couldn’t link back to something and also, I felt a little bit like a poser saying that I’ve been blogging since before they were called blawwwgs, but my archives at That’s My Bix Dot Com only went back to 2008. I started copy/pasting my archives and had gotten about three years done when… blammo, the stupid Russian hackers hit in 2009. I really didn’t want to do all of that copy/pasting a second time. I knew there had to be a way to get everything back automatically, but I just didn’t know how. There was an old script at one time, but the download was invalid now and everyone who might have cared about importing Diaryland to Word Press did it so long ago that their method didn’t really work well with later versions of WP. So instead, sometimes when I was bored, I’d sit there and copy/paste my entries, fixing links and adding categories and tags, cursing my fate with every entry. It was unbelievably tedious and even after a year of concentrated copy/pasting, I had only done maybe 100 entries. At that rate, I’d be finished in 10 years. UGH!

I mentioned my conundrum to Jennette, one of my very smart friends who happens to have her own business fixing people’s websites. And wouldn’t you know it, Jennette figured out a way to upload all of my Diaryland entries into my Word Press website without affecting the existing (new) entries and comments! Easy peasy!

There you go, long time Weetabix readers who missed your Dumber Than A Box archives. They’re back. Every last loving one of them.

Now, if you too are a former Diaryland user who has a bunch of entries sitting in Andrew’s lazy little hands, you can also have Jennette rescue your archives and import them into your existing Word Press website at the low low rate of 10 cents a diary entry (seriously, that is so crazy cheap).

Here’s what you have to do:

  1. Log into the Diaryland account that you want archived.
  2. Look at your Profile. That will tell you exactly how many entries that account has posted.
  3. If you’re no longer a Gold member, then pay for a 3 month Gold membership (it’s $12) which is the cheapest tier, and then wait an eternity for Andrew to flip the switch on your account and send you the email that you’re Gold again.
  4. Go to the Gold Member resources.
  5. Select Download Diaryland Backup or something like that. That will trigger a giant file that may take a very long time to build. When it finishes, save that file as an .html on your harddrive. It might be helpful to rename it (YOUR NAME) Diaryland Backup.html.
  6. Send it to Jennette along with your Word Press admin address and log in information. She’ll send you an invoice for half of what she expects the work to cost and she’ll also let you know when she’ll have it done by.

It’s just that easy but if you don’t believe me, check out her details. And if you have a Diaryland account, chances are that you remember the general HORROR around the blogosphere when Stephen Dekken killed Diary-X back in the mid-2000’s and lost every Diary-X user’s archives with zero warning. Do you really want to wake up one day and realize that Diaryland is gone and with it, a huge chunk of your online writing history? I sure didn’t.

As far as I know, Jennette is the only person offering this service (believe me, I’ve been figuring out a way to port my archives since 2008 and I’ve never seen it) and honestly, her rate is so reasonable that you really can’t afford NOT to do this.

And of course, if you want your Diaryland archives off of Diaryland but don’t have a Word Press blog, Jennette can help you with that too.

To celebrate the return of my archives, I’m giving away a free 16×20 Wendy Bix print to one random lucky commenter on this entry. That includes any photo that may have appeared on the blog in any of its incarnations too, even if it’s not in the Etsy shop, just let me know. All you have to do is tell me your favorite Weetabix/That’s My Bix entry of all time. (Offer good to US and Canada only, sorry out-of-towners!)

The comments do not need a prop!

 

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You could be anyone

Monday, June 20, 2011

Oh you guys, Writer Camp was so awesome.

I can’t even begin to tell you how awesome it was. Everyone was awesome. Awesome. It’s an overused word, but I mean it in the truest sense: I am full of awe.

Every day, I took a tiny little cranky elevator down to the Writer Camp headquarters and then sat in a classroom where we talked about the process and wrote some words and then wrote some more words and then Lynda Barry would make us laugh and then we’d all evacuate when the screenwriting lady came in, and I’d go sit in the cafeteria and try to find something edible (true fact: nothing served at the Indiana Memorial Union is actually edible unless it’s a naked scotcheroo pile (You know how delicious scotcheroos are? How normal people make the scotcheroo filling and then press it into a pan and cover it up with melted chocolate chips? Yeah, well, the geniuses at the University of Indiana skipped that there step and just dumped the filling into a pile to be served as an “no bake cookie” or whatever they called it but I’m here to tell you: it was a pile of scotcheroo guts and it was delicious and totally worth catching the diabetes) or a gingerbread man with red hot eyes (apparently these are famous or something because everyone was talking about them. I don’t know why the scotcheroo piles aren’t famous but the gingerbread men WERE pretty good) and read tons of short stories and write cogent and thoughtful critiques (at least I tried) and then eventually wandered across the campus, through oh my god unbelievable heat and humidity (look, I spent most of May in Las Vegas and I’m telling you, this was some egregious heat) into a scarcely cool classroom building to discuss character intent with a bunch of other word nerds. And it was bliss.

Bliss with scotcheroo pile cookie things.

This conference totally made up for the last two conferences I went to, the one where Amy Hempel couldn’t be arsed to show up and the other one where everyone seemed like they spent more time talking about writing than actually writing. I’ll admit: I’m in danger of falling into that camp and I recognize that those people are INSUFFERABLE to be around. You know who is awesome to be around? Lynda Barry. No lie. I have a crush. I’m not even joking that I’m placing her up on a pedestal next to Mr. Rogers and you KNOW how much I adore Mr. Rogers.

I may have cried on her a little bit on the second to last day, but then she made up for it for being a dirty rotten cheat at drinking games that night. Oh yeah, I may have gone out drinking with Dan Chaon and Lynda Barry. Just a little bit.**

I also made new writing friends. They are awesome and made me happy and also, gave me hope for writing conferences of the future (also, weirdly a lot of my new writing friends are blonde! And beautiful. Writers are pretty sometimes. It’s true!) Fantastic stories in my fiction workshop! Ones that didn’t start with alarm clocks going off. Brilliant discussions and also, writer dinners at weird ethnic places, filled with laughing and gossip and then readings EVERY blessed night. This is pretty much my idea of heaven, right there. Plus, free wine (although I rarely had any because it was so fucking hot that I drove the 11 blocks to the reading every night. Also, the readings happened right in the middle of the two block Bermuda Triangle where Lauren Spierer disappeared and everyone was kind of freaked out about walking alone at night.)

I have but one regret and it is that I was not able to get my phone out fast enough to record Dan Chaon saying “Wendy (Bix) is beautiful.”** And then when I DID have it out, he refused to say it again. He’s wily, that Dan Chaon. Brilliant and more than a little wily.

I also regret that I still don’t know how to style my new short haircut. But I’ll figure it out eventually. Or continue to walk around looking like Rosie O’Donnell in that movie where she’s playing a mentally handicapped person. Or just Rosie O’Donnell in general.

(I’m not trashing on looks, but lady could benefit from a good bra and some eye cream. Well, to be honest, who among us can’t benefit from a good bra and eye cream?)

There were so many fantastic moments, like when Lynda* mooned me or when I recognized a fellow bloggers work being cited in the blogging session being referred to as a Mommy blogger (and is, in fact, a dude and would likely be very upset or conversely turned on by the confusion) or skipping the Mexican Mennonite movie to go watch XMen at the local cinema with Esteban like a fucking bad ass (and finding out later that it was probably the smartest decision I made all week) or trying a voodoo spell to help the ancient hotel room’s thermostat dip below 73 degrees or when Dan* walked into workshop, sat down and said “Wendy… darlin… Mommy’s not feeling so good right now”.  There are too many choice moments to pick from and I couldn’t possibly do any of them justice to describe them, especially when the only words that float into my brain are “Again! Again! Again!”

But perhaps it is this one that was the truest to the reason I went.

One night before dinner, I was waiting for my writing posse to check out a Turkish restaurant for dinner and Dan Chaon was reading the newspaper, probably waiting for HIS posse, so he called me over to chat while we waited.

At one point, after telling him about how I defended his honor during my master’s thesis committee, I said “Ok, so I’m here to learn how to write a novel… so, how do you do that?” and I googled my eyes at him, because even though my last blog post promised that I wouldn’t get too tongue-tied around Mr. Chaon, I still acted like a class one dork half of the time (Note to famous writers: I’m actually quite reserved and normal, despite appearances(I’m probably lying right now)) and he shrugged and said “You just do it.”

And then I whined about outlines and snowflake methods and might have said “I don’t know how to DOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO IIIIIITTTTTTTTTT” like I was eight and someone just asked me to do something I resented like picking up dog vomit or running a marathon or climbing the wall on an obstacle course — or all of those things combined.

He waved me off and said “Nah, forget all of that stuff. Just write it. Just dive in from chapter one page one. You can fix it later.”

It’s some powerful faith, for those of us who are so worried about mucking things up with our clumsiness that we are frozen. Those ideas inside our head are so perfect right now, just as they are, and we’re absolutely certain that we’re just going to fuck everything up. But apparently the trick is in just closing your eyes and diving in.

So here we go.

*I’m trying to be cool here, but in my head, I still think of them as “Dan Chaon” and “Lynda Barry”. How do you just call him “Dan” like we tried to during our workshop, but some of us couldn’t do it without a little smirk tickling the corner of our mouths, because seriously, it’s DAN CHAON! LYNDA BARRY! Are we clear on that?

**So totally better than France. No question.

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Righter conference

Saturday, May 28, 2011

I got home from what had to have been the worst West Coast flight of my life: for some reason, the pitch of the seats on this particular Delta plane seemed really really shorter than usual. Like, there was more legroom on the tiny puddle jumper jet from MSP to GRB than the big plane from Las Vegas. What’s more, the guy in front of me dumped his seat back before we even finished takeoff and then kept it that way until he was scolded by the flight attendant when we were landing, plus he kept giving me the irritated shuffle motions when I’d accidentally touch his seatback.

I’m sorry, sir, but when your head is six inches from my nipples, I might just touch your seat back when I try to look at SkyMall!

Happily, my run of fifteen flights in three weeks is over and I’m home for the next nine days, when I leave for a writer conference.  As you know, I have been making an effort to go to at least one writer’s thingy a year, as I miss the snobby no-pointedness of graduate school. This year, the two I was most interested in were either studying with Robert Olen Butler in Brittany, France or with Dan Chaon in Indiana. Esteban suggested that if I couldn’t decide, I should do both (because hey, we’re crazy that way) but also just assumed I’d be going to France and needed to be convinced to take the Indiana one, because holy crap, it’s FRANCE. And Robert Olen Butler wrote one of what I consider the only two perfect short stories in the universe, and since the author of the other one died tragically at a very young age, he’s really my only shot at glimpsing perfection. And also, hello, FRANCE.

So obviously, I chose to go to Indiana.

Here’s the thing (and also, the Greek Chorus is clearing its throat right about now): I do love Robert Olen Butler very much, but the man LIVES in the United States. It’s not like he’s Nicolas Sarkozy. There’s no reason to work with him in France, other than the fact that he happens to be leading a workshop in France this summer. Similarly, I adore Dan Chaon’s work. “Adore” might be too casual a word, actually. I called him out specifically during my master’s thesis defense as being a critical author in whatever it is that we’re publishing today (Post-post-post-modernism?) and as a writer, he’s a genius. I don’t think I’d be reduced to stammering nonsense talk in the presence of Chaon that I know I would with Irving, Boyle or Atwood, but, you know, it just might happen.

While I love Butler’s parrot story more than just about anything ever written, that story is more than a decade old. I love what Chaon is doing RIGHT NOW, which means… he’s brilliant right this minute. Not to say that Butler’s not brilliant right now (he is) but using that workshop as a touchpoint, would working with Robert Olen Butler be worth paying several thousands of dollars (not to mention, spending many many hours seething at my fellow passengers in coach or blow some bazillion number of my hoarded frequent flier miles to upgrade to first class) more than Dan Chaon’s thing? No. Not even with the France thing. France will always be there. Robert Olen Butler will (shhh) teach other workshops on US soil and I will participate in one of them. Can the France talk, I’m going to Indiana.

Then the Indiana people told me that they were giving me a scholarship to cover the conference fee. I’m so glad that I had chosen to go to Indiana BEFORE I found that out, because otherwise I would probably be beating myself up for years over that dilemma.

So in nine days, I’m driving to southern Indiana in the much maligned Murano. Originally the plan was to fly to Indiana and then jump to San Francisco for a week to meet my friends’ new baby and also celebrate someone’s upcoming birthday, but Ward and June are now taking some kind of extended road trip and won’t be available for petsitting duties, and while we could board both of the animals, it would probably be cheaper to buy San Francisco and have it shipped FedEx overnight to Wisconsin. So now we’re postponing the baby-meeting and birthday trip and, hopefully, the birthday too, and thus, it becomes a little more silly to fly. I need some mental distance before I am trapped breathing a stranger’s male pattern baldness for several hours and last week Esteban offered to come along and keep me company in Indiana. Or maybe to make sure that I don’t run off and have an affair with Dan Chaon*.

So I get teeny tiny little fangirl crushes on my workshop leaders. That is not my fault when the people who lead my workshops are clearly geniuses. And also, Janet Burroway is one sexy beast.

I’ve decided to workshop the body image story, which was the story I sent to get accepted into the conference, which leaves me feeling all weird and fuzzy, because a) when writing the story several years ago, I pictured it happening in my grandmother’s house, so I’m afraid I’ll get emotional when it’s being workshopped; b) the narrator is fat and the author is fat and everyone will picture me as the narrator, which I hate so much; c) writing workshops make me crazy–I hate the stupid pack games that are being played, I hate the sizing up that happens and I hate the mental bullshit, and I worry that I’m revealing too much of my own vulnerability in this particular story, which was inspired by the decline of my great-grandmother into Alzheimer’s Disease when I’m still upset about my grandmother’s death; and d) what if Dan Chaon thinks I’m annoying and stupid?

Also, I cut off all of my hair and worry that my hair was my secret writing strength and now some kid with cancer is going to have a magic writing wig (which is a shitty consolation prize to getting cancer, let’s be real).  And then I tell myself to stop being stupid** because that lunatic thought assumes that there was any magic writing ability in the first place.

As if you needed more of a glimpse into crazy stupid writers’ heads, I saw a list of all the names in my workshop and I quickly scoured it, to see if I recognized anyone. And then realized that I think I was worried that I’d recognize someone. You know, it’s one thing to be in a workshop with Dan Chaon, but if your fellow combatants participants are, oh, I don’t know, a Blake Butler and a Matt Bell? Kill me now, please, and save me from spending the fossil fuels to drive to Bloomington.

In other news, Esteban has been trying to talk me into making some short stories available on the Kindle. I’m kind of weirded out by the prospect of that, but it’s something to consider. Unless the logistics of formatting become too annoying and then, oh look, something shiny. Clearly my ability to pay attention to that is questionable, since this blog has been rocking a generic “temporary” design since the great crash of Aught Nine. Ahem.

(I should probably bring back the Chubby Tink. I think I miss her. I notice that my urge to keep this updated went away about the same time that she did. Maybe I’ve been wrong all this time and she is actually my true muse. )

Until then, I have nine glorious days at Casa Bix and nothing at all planned. It’s a bit hedonistic, actually, until I realize that oh yeah, I’ve been gone for three weeks pretty much straight, so those nine days? Will be spent doing the (fucking) laundry.

Of course.

*Disclaimer: Dan Chaon is happily married, as am I. Also, he’s way too cool for me. I follow his Twitter stream and have confirmed this statement as fact.

**See, I have a real reason to worry that he’ll think I’m stupid! Because I am!


 

 

 

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I miss her already

Wednesday, April 20, 2011

A dog collar. Another owner at the doggie daycare. The Jeep at Sbux that didn’t pull up far enough (despite having plenty of room) to allow me to get close enough to the speaker to order. The rabbits that want to have yet another batch of babies in our backyard. The motherfucking weather.

These are a few of the things that have pissed me off in the last few days.

Not just pissed me off. The word “pissed” isn’t strong enough. These things should be mildly annoying and yet, in the past few weeks, I have literally envisioned violence against the object of my ire. Violence! I honestly took a few moments and envisioned loading up a rocket launcher, hoisting it daintily onto my shoulder and aiming it at our refrigerator and then smiling as I lit that fucker up and watched it burn. I also may or may not have ranted at least four times about a crappy operating system to the point where there were hand gestures.

It’s not just violence: I fantasized about explaining to another owner (and constant offender) that the doggie daycare dropoff lane unwritten rule is that you can fit four cars under the canopy if the first two cars pull up, but if the owner is a selfish ass and insists on parking their car completely under the canopy then only two or maybe even one car get to enjoy the sheltered drop off area. It’s probably a good thing that my car does not have a public address system or I would have certainly given some cigarette butt litterers something to think about the next time they unloaded their filthy carcinogens into our ground water (no they do NOT disintegrate when it rains… quit fooling yourselves with the convenient denial). It was all I could do to refrain from giving my septuagenarian great uncle a lecture on the importance of being on time.

You should also know that Esteban has been putting up with my uncensored editorializing and thus, his spot in heaven is assured in spite of his atheist beliefs. It’s been that bad.

I understand the convenient psychological mechanism at play here. It’s a lot easier for me to be incensed by a slipping dog collar (including imagining some kind of conspiracy by which Ave’s caregivers have been loosening it behind my back, which is just…just… wow) because it’s a problem that I could potentially solve, something within my control. Even if it means going all Mr. Gower and the verbal equivalent of giving George Bailey a cauliflower ear.

My grandmother, laying on a hospital bed where the couch used to be, non-responsive, breathing in a way that indicates that she’s dying. Not “dying” in the indeterminate future. It’s not measured in months or even weeks, but really in days or maybe even hours.

I can’t do anything about that.

So instead, my frantic brain latches onto the driver of a Chrysler Pacifica or a cashier at IKEA didn’t put two purchases back on my cart and I didn’t realize it until I had drive 100 miles toward home and how even now, it’s making me furious, even though the items cost less than it cost us to go see a matinee showing of Paul.

Two weeks ago, I was sitting in the hospital on her last stay, and realized that the reason my purse smelled so nice when I opened it was that an entire bottle of CB I Hate Perfume’s Walk in the Air perfume had been left open in my purse and spilled everywhere. The bottle–the stupidly expensive tiny bottle– had been not properly closed when I put it away. The bottle is a perfume that I absolutely love and had been a gift from Esteban for Christmas because I’m too cheap to buy it for myself and now it was gone. All my fault. It’s one of my bad habits that Esteban is constantly reminding me to fix and yet, I just keep doing it and now… all my fault. I was so mad at myself, I wanted to cry. I’m lying. I did cry. Not over the lady sleeping in the hospital bed but over fucking perfume.

She’s home now, where she wanted to be. She worked hard to buy her house on her own and she said she’d be damned if she was going to leave it before she was ready. You can’t argue with Mafia Grandma. Her middle daughter, my nice aunt, has gone on leave from work and is staying at the house, as she can’t be left alone. That was more important when she could still get up and light cigarettes, but now it’s less about being there to steady her and more just being there.

It’s one of the things that they don’t really prepare you for: as you get older, you have seen more and more bodies you love shut down and become something that is far less than you knew before. The signs of imminent departure–as the hospice booklet calls it– are uncomfortably familiar.

One of the things I’ve been doing when I go visit (to give my aunt a few hours to go home and deal with her own life) is scanning her photos. It’s one of those things that you always mean to do and it seems especially important right now, this act of preservation. Maybe it’s just something to occupy the hours. Below, she always said that she could remember exactly how long she’s owned her house because she bought it in the first few months of my life. This was taken only a month after they moved into the house that she bought as a single mother on a below poverty level salary.

Her hospital bed is in the same spot she’s sitting in below. Now we sit together there again. It hardly seems enough.

 

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Bix Beauty Blow By Blows: A Quest for Rosacea Skin Care Perfection

Monday, April 18, 2011

A few months ago, I tried a new aesthetician. She’s Russian and beautiful in an ageless ballerina kind of way. Her skin glows. She might be 34. She might be 27. She might be 59. I don’t know. But she is amazing.

The first time I went to her, she sold me on simply her waxing and extraction prowess: with my eyes closed, I could have sworn that the waxing was done by a very strategic hummingbird. It didn’t hurt! I have had facials from no fewer than two dozen different specialists but Svetlana is the Pore Whisperer.

And I’m not making that up: her name is actually Svetlana.

Let us ignore for a moment how infinitely satisfying it is to lay in a dark room and have your face slathered while a lady with a Russian accent is whispering to you about your skin care regime (sidebar: when I am extremely wealthy through some brilliant invention or perhaps Potter-esque novel, my Town Car driver will be Russian and also, licensed to carry a concealed weapon. In the fantasy of Bix Perfection, in fact, people with assorted accents will run my life. I will be the Angelina Jolie of hired help), the woman has gotten RESULTS.

Two weeks after my second appointment, I had already decided that I would follow Svetlana wherever she went, including but not limited to my monthly appointments in Milwaukee or Chicago if needed. She cemented my devotion by telling me that the problem was NOT in failing to clean my face enough (something that every other aesthetician has been telling me would help my rosacea) but rather that I was cleaning my face TOO much. She warned me not to use my Clarisonic on my cheeks or maybe even at all and also, ditch all soap products. Even The Soap! I had been afraid of moisturizing too much, lest the zits cry VIVA LA REVOLUTION on my face, but Svetlana said that I should be using moisturizer both before bed AND when I got up in the morning, on top of my usual sunscreen (which I thought was enough). Also, while I thought I was doing a pretty good job of dabbing on eye cream about three times a week (per advice of a lady’s magazine for my age bracket), she said that for my skin type, I should actually be doing it twice a day!

Basically, I was doing it all wrong. And yes, I DID actually cover skin care for years. Remember that the next time you read advice in Marie Claire and Cosmo.

So, over the last three months, I’ve been devoted entirely to figuring out my rosacea demon. I’ve learned that when I eat too much sugar or had too high of a carb to protein balance, my skin looks like absolute crap and that when I drink wine, the next morning will be redder than normal.

I’ve also been running through a host of sensitive skin moisturizers, treatments and cleansers, giving each no less than a week’s window of use. I have the winners, the losers and the next possible heirs to the throne.

First, what doesn’t work:

  • Origins Night-a-mins Holy crap, this stuff is heavy, not to mention, kind of expensive for the teeny tiny tub. I was too nervous to put it on my T-zone, so I limited it to my cheeks and forehead and promptly got three clogged pores on my CHEEK. Ladies, who among us who are kissing forty get blocked cheek pores? Way too heavy, even in the middle of harsh Wisconsin winter. Also, annoying name!
  • Clinique Moisture Surge Extended : You know how you think you love a product but when you actually get scientific about it, you realize that you had beer goggles on? That’s how it was with me and Moisture Surge! I love the light feeling, the absorption and the way it makes my little “character lines” get blurry, but after my rosacea had been toned down so awesomely by one of the Winners, I popped open my old favorite Moisture Surge and blammo: gigantic red face that lasted all day. It pained me to put this in my Free For All bag that my friends get to dig through when they come over, but ah well.
  • Prescriptives Super Line Preventer Serum Like the Moisture Surge, I used to think this stuff was the shit, and maybe at one time, it balanced out my oil-overproduction but now? Did someone order a giant red face? Because I got one right here.
  • Aveda Enbrightenment Brightening Correcting Serum Oh, it smells so nice! And it absorbs really lovely! And the word Serum makes me feel all science-y and stuff! And then it made me red and itchy after two days. Expensive lesson to learn, into the Free For All sack it goes.
  • Eucerin Redness Relief Daily Perfecting Lotion Oh my god, this is the biggest bucket of crap. It’s Herman Munster green, smells like ass and made me dry and SCALY, which is not quite a sexy look. Does it improve redness? Maybe on my cheeks but the corners of my nose were bright bright red and sore. Maybe that stinging feeling means it’s working? I was too annoyed to stick out the whole week with this one.
  • Murad Redness Therapy Recovery Treatment Gel*: No. NO. Doesn’t moisturize, doesn’t seem to do really anything. Glad I didn’t pay for it.

Onto the winners!

  • Caudalie Cleansing Water It is exactly as it sounds: a soapless cleanser that removes dirt and makeup. No need to use a toner and no harsh chemicals on your skin. It works because it has teeny tiny little particles (called a micellar solution) that grab dirt and oil out of your pores. Lancome and Clarins each have a similar product and I’m sure they are roughly the same thing but I like Caudalie because I’ve never had a reaction to it, so I use it. Plus, I think it’s cheaper than the other micellars on the market.
  • Desert Essence Organic Jojoba Oil, 4-Ounce Bottle: I originally bought this to stow in my locker at the pottery studio to combat my post-wheel mummy hands, but then I read that people were cleaning their faces with it instead of soap, so I tried it on my face. Surprisingly lovely! The cheapest contender on the list, because it takes like four drops for my entire face and the little 2 oz bottle I got from Trader Joe’s for $5 seems like it’s going to last forever.  It did not cause a rosacea reaction nor seem to create sebum problems (I’m looking at you, Night-A-Mins) which was my biggest concern but also seemed to make me less shiny than usual in the afternoon. Huh. No real smell, totally no frills. While I think this is going to be too robust in the summer, this is a totally viable moisturizer during the drier months. This is totally going in my pack when I go to Vegas and bonus, you can use it on your entire body and the 2 ounce bottle can fit in the TSA-mandated baggie.
  • Aveda All Sensitive Moisturizer This is loaded with oat extract and chamomile that’s supposed to be soothing to irritated skin, but while my friend jojoba oil is an ingredient, I do get a little nervous about the olive oil. When I bought it, I swore the salesperson told me that it was oil free, and no, it was clearly not when I read the ingredients at home. I think that’s why the post-moisturizing feeling is kind of gross. Despite all of these minuses, Aveda All Sensitive managed to turn my complexion into a creamy dewy perfect glow that has me skipping foundation for the first time since I was 17. For reals. Proof is in the pudding: this one seems to be the big all time winner product in my Rosacea Showdown. Flip side: I think I might be mildly allergic to it.
  • Aveda Outer Peace Cooling Masque Kind of a “fooled ya!” moment though when you remove the masque because the pressure of washing it off (you have to use a soft cloth, as it’s tenacious) makes you MORE red temporarily. Kind of a ridiculous green treatment like the Eucerin Redness stuff in the Loser pile but used probably twice a month in combination with the All Sensitive Moisturizer, I definitely had a reduction in redness the next day after application. Not advised for every day use but a must the morning of a party to reduce the wine flushes.

Things I want to try next:

  • Dermalogica Ultra Calming Serum: I have never met a Dermalogica product that I didn’t like, and Svetlana has been using some pro stuff during our appointments to fantastic results. I can’t get my hands on that stuff, sans beauty license, but this stuff seems to be the closest thing to what she’s using and I WANT IT. I don’t know if I want it badly enough to gamble 50 bones on it though.
  • Murad Complete Reform Anti-Aging*: The folks at Murad are trying to woo me back after the Redness disaster so they sent me this product in ADORABLE back to school packaging complete with branded retro metal lunch box and theme notebook. I’m a sucker for being wooed, but I have to run this one past Svetlana before I slap it on my face. The list of ingredients makes me crazy.
  • Yes To Cucumbers Hydrating Facial Lotion: One of my eye creams is a gigantic super cheapie Yes to Carrots eye cream and I feel like it performs better than Origins and close enough to Kinerase to make me love the drugstore price. Cucumbers are a no brainer when it comes to soothing and for $15 (and the promise of it going on sale at Wags sometime soon, as it does) I want to get in on this action. I might grab the blueberry one too.
  • Kiehl’s Rosa Artica Cream My skin care insiders are whispering that this one can’t claim it’s rosacea-happy but the underground is abuzz. It’s $60 a pop, though, so I’ll probably wait for a generous sample from a Kiehl’s counter person.

To be clear, I should be satisfied with the action I’m getting from the Aveda All Sensitive and the occasional masquing but as I mentioned above, I think I’m mildly allergic to it, as I’ve been noticing some itchiness along my jaw and neckline. Despite the great results, I think I am pushing my luck and will hive out in a bad way as soon as I have any exposure to some serious sunlight this summer (which is always when it happens).

So tell me, my pretties, what are you using to hold off Father Time? And particularly those of you with picky princess skin, what should I be trying next?

 

*Received free products from company for review purposes.

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