It's Almost Over and....???

Last night, the bog near our house had that Keatsian autumnal look - all misty and spiritual. I had a nice poetic moment of gazing at the bog while the kids stood there very quietly - so peaceful and poetic. That was just moments before I had to pull Mazy away from eating a fresh load of her favorite appetizer - goose poop. With bogs comes geese, and with geese comes...well.

But the end is drawing near. Emma's birthday decorations went up today (from Emma, "My birthday is more of a season than only one day...") True, since we have different birthday events planned from the 23 through the 30. Since she was born the last week of August, it must mean summer is ending. Yikes.

Because I've either been in school or taught school most of my life, September is my secret new year. Forget dull January when I'm working off debt and extra pounds. September always seems like a new beginning. And while the winter seems endless, summer seems about a week long.

I had really, really high expectations for the summer.Out of the three kids' rooms, I got one sort of cleared out, one done, and the other, Philip's, still looks like a DMZ.(He's not too worried - that's him up there during his last beach visit) I don't have my photographs organized, the yard is still spooky looking, and the book I was finishing in June is still languishing on a flash drive.

What I did get done was a revision of an MG, lots of new ideas for stories, one area of the basement cleared, and most of my fall curriculum written. And we found a new, more deserted beach a little south of here. That pales compared to my list, but with the start of the secret new year, I'll just roll them over there. (I'm sort of swiping that from the cell phone company - if they can roll over minutes, I can roll over ambitions since they both represent time in a wobbly way)

I can't be the only sitting here missing summer already and thinking time is speeding up. Did you have plans bigger than two months would allow? What did you get done and what's still waiting?

Slanguage

Was it Confuscius who said, "She who attempts to do three rooms at once will only do one room at a time despite many lists"?


Maybe that was a Russian aphorism, but I am here to say: IT IS VERY TRUE. And because there is stuff all over the place in this house and it's weird, crazy hot and swampishly humid outside, I need to avoid both my writing work and the housework. So I've been keeping a new list: one of words that are new to me but not new to the under 18 set. 


For those of you who are YA writers, take heed. The majority of these were lifted from sentences of the teens who infest my living room. In no particular order, here are the ones I've culled:


TwitLit - a "dumb" book that has no depth - taken from the mind numbing supeficiality of Tweets

Bacne - the appearance of zits on the back and/or shoulders

AFK - Away From Keyboard - as when asked any question as in, "Philip, what is the capital of Delaware?" It is answered, "IDK AFK" because the actual BOOKS are in the other room and he's already on the couch


Butter - a term that has nothing to do with what we once spread on toast; this now means that something is wonderful or the best


In this sentence, the bolded words all mean the same thing: That idiot is such a tool and his friend is like totally 404 (as in the message error 404 for vacant page)


How was the movie? Great, it was intense and riveting (Mom) Same sentence in teen: It was H (for hardcore)


Mouse Potato - replacing the Couch Potato of my generation who sat in awe of cable movies playing on the living room tv, this is a person who engages in much of the same nothingness in front of a computer screen


Swipe Out - when a debit card funded by a 'rent has been ground down to zero dollars


See if you can figure this out: I saw Erin chillaxing and she looked fly. She got new rides.


Answer Key: Erin was not stressed, she looked good and she had new sneakers on. It took me a bit to get rides meant shoes and not boyfriends who drove.


Maybe I was being a wanksta which I'm pretty sure is the dorky version of gangsta, as in a person who is trying to be all cool and fly but is in fact, a mom or a teacher (or in my case, both...)


Then there is this strange one: "So just because I asked for ONE belly piercing, Mom, you don't have to get all salty on me, ok?"


Say what? Am I the only one who thought of old, grizzled sailors cursing into their beers while sitting in seedy, dockside bars? Apparently, salty here only means difficult.


Then there is Christopher, back from his college summer, explaining to me that the girl I thought was lovely at the freshman orientation had, in fact, a tramp stamp visible above her thong. Ok, I thought, do I want to know? I couldn't resist; the rhyme forced me to press onward and ask. A tramp stamp is a tattoo (a tat in teen) right above the rump. I could have gone right on living without ever having known that little nugget.


Also in college, there is the dreaded, rushed paper called a Wikidemia which is writing solely researched on Wikipedia.org that a student submits hoping/praying that the professor will not check sources


College kids also run off to check their vitals, which means they run to the nearest electronic device to check their Facebook page (myspace has gone the so yesterday route of "emo" and voice mail), their texts and emails.


In the car today, Emma said breezily that she couldn't wait to see her bra back at school. After much confusion and a sense of surrealness that I had lost track of time, my children, and the motions of the planets, Emma explained that a brah is the female equivalent of a bro, or a best friend. 


Right. Got it. Or rather, I'm down with it.

Revisions

Right now, because I am almost entirely crazy, I promised all three of my kids that I would help them re-do their rooms - at the same time. In fairness to my sanity, when we moved here, it was a DIY job, with chairs and bureaus shoved into corners at 2 am so we could unearth the box storing the clean underwear. Things have sort of remained that way, and now the kids are pretty much due actual furniture that remotely matches and  they can fit into.

Rooms are really important to teenagers. I'm trying to recall when writers show that emphasis, but I'm not coming up with any titles. They come home exclaiming how "cool" someone's room is, how amazing the colors/posters/speaker system/flat screen is and how much fun being in that kid's room was.

Chances are, you can remember your room as a teen. I know I spent a fair amount of time organizing it, finding spots to hide my diaries (I kept two; one my friends read at sleepovers and one that I wrote "the truth" in - )

I'm also working on revisions to a middle grade novel and what I'm finding is the prevailing sense that everything takes longer than I thought. And also the feeling that I am never going to finish anything. Here are a few notes from my recent undertakings:

Emma is doing her room in hot pumpkin, fuschia and zebra stripe. I kid you not.

She can't believe how beautiful this combination is. Her 'tween friends are all in OMG agreement that this is going to be THE room. No wonder they're a difficult age to write for...

Christopher believes that his fourth grade spelling folder, his last two hundred candy bar wrappers and his wet bathing suit create a force field around his bed that will keep the dark forces away. I can't think of any other explanation for some of the things I am finding as I strip his room down to the carpet and paint.

Philip can't part with a three foot high plastic penguin that blew onto our lawn during a snowstorm. It wears a Darth Vadar Halloween mask. Above that is a large, plastic hand puppet of Godzilla's head that Philip has given lip rings to and a few other piercings. Let's just say it's not a room Martha Stewart wants to die in.

I go back and forth between the mess of laundry baskets, bookshelves and paint cans and the mess of my WIP. In both revisions, I keep adding and deleting as I go along. The one wonderful aspect of revising a manuscript instead of a room is there is no one saying, "Mom, are you KIDDING? Why are you putting THAT into the donate pile? It's not like it has an odor..." I can sort of do what I want with the story which, at this point of the summer, is starting to look better and better.

After a few days of revising the kids' rooms, I've changed my mind that the rooms would be easier to tackle. If you had a choice, which would you prefer to strip down and redo - a room or a manuscript?

Of Bums and Blogs

Many thanks to Tiffany J., who created a website for Light Beneath Ferns. She's a really talented, artistic teen who has much more patience and timeliness than I do - not to mention technical ability. More on Tiffany when she gets her own website up and going (sorry T.J.J. -just a slight push there)

And here's another kitten picture I really like. We should probably stop calling them "the kittens" at this point, since they just turned a year, but they may be stuck with that name in the way BabyCat is now two or three years old and still BabyCat. (She was feral so the shelter couldn't be exactly sure of her age)

I have been a total blog bum, sort of like the kitten picture, and a bum in many other ways for the past couple of weeks. I went down to Long Island for a few days and left Dad in charge of the kids. I left food in the fridge, the kind made with simmering and vegetables and seasonings, but they ordered pizza both nights.

The rest of the time I've been cleaning out a scarily crowded basement, working in the herb garden and figuring out what I want to write/work on next. I haven't been around the Internet at all, but I'm sort of back now in the way anyone can be back on a computer during nice weather.

I have to thank Jemi for the The Versatile Blogger Award which she awarded me back in...maybe June? It's been awhile. In any event, the rules are:

1. Thank the folks and link them
2. Share 7 things about yourself
3. Pass along to 15 bloggers
4. Comment on their blogs to tell them of the award

But since it's summer, and half of the bloggers I read regularly are on a temporary hiatus, if you read this blog, consider yourself nominated. That's the great thing about blogs; you can bend the rules into circles. Ok, so seven things about myself:

1. I almost never watch t.v. It makes me a total misfit (that's right, just that, and nothing else) I don't know anything about those sexual selection shows or any of the plots of the medical dramas. It just bores me.

2. When I do watch tv, the kids run from the room because I like to watch weirdomentraries like: The Boy With Three Ears or The Woman With the Ninety Pound Tumor. It's kind of a weapon: "Ew, Mom's watching TV!!!! It's another of those medical nightmares!"

3. I could be a bum. Very easily. I have no work ethic. Maybe that's why I like cats so much. Their occupation is preening between naps. That sounds pretty much ok to me. And a little bit, it describes a fair amount of my adolescence.

4. Speaking of cats, I get really scared when I think about the kids leaving and look around at the amount of books and cats I already have in my middle age. My fear is turning into one of those grotesques in Charles Dickens who lives with too much dust, too many memories and way, way too many cats. I mean, I'm sort of there now...

5. I can't stand writers who take themselves oh so seriously. You know, the kind who meet you and give you an autographed bookmark five seconds after saying their names and launch into a long explanation of their latest plot struggles. They seem so angsty and pained by writing it makes me wonder why they do it at all.

6. When I can't sleep, I look at real estate on the Internet. Not local real estate or anything I could buy. I go on tons of virtual tours. Last night, I was all over Rhode Island.

7. When I write, I have at least two full time stories going. I work on one or the other depending on my mood and my latest ideas. Other writers tell me this is a very, very strange way of getting anything done. So I never tell them that I often choose between three simultaneous stories. There have to be others who write like this.

And that's it, for now. If you've read this, you have my nomination to do one of these. Since mostly writerly types stop by here, I can vouch for their versatility.

Post Graduation

That's Coco, one of the kittens Emma got last year. She's a lot bigger now, but I still think she is one of the world's cutest cat sleepers. Maybe her posture is a metaphor for the end of the school year. Kids seem so exhausted by the end of June.

 Christopher didn't get much of a chance to relax. He graduated and at eight o'clock the morning after his graduation, he began a college summer program. Remember I'm the mom who always told the kids they could sleep over OUR house; I never really let them sleep over or go to camp or do any of that normal stuff. So I just paid the price when I dropped him off.

He made me swear not to cry or embarrass him in any way in front of his new roommates, so I cried before and on the ride and in the parking lot. Then I was cool. Really cool. We organized his room and took a walk around campus and went to the orientation barbeque. Still cool. So what if it felt like someone was ripping my lungs out? I acted like Christopher was going for one of the sleepovers finally at someone else's house.

It was almost time to leave and the counselor suggested I show him the laundry room. I was explaining how to work the machines when he looked at me, then at his I Touch. He had been looking at that device all through the orientation and all through my advice lectures and all through the long, boring introductions to things like the bursar representative and the tutoring center hours. I finally said,  

 "Christopher, you have to pay attention. I'm not driving down here just so you can do wash."

He looked back at his I Touch and said, "I was just thinking how great it would be to have a Mom app on my phone." Okay, so corny. But it did me in. I got to that line, then I started crying. Fast forward: he's doing fine, and he brought home a huge load of dirty laundry. I have him until tomorrow, but I'll be cool when I drop him off this time, Mom apps and all.

And in other good news, one of Philip's friends is in the process of making a website for Light Beneath Ferns. I haven't seen it yet, but I will later on tonight and I'll post a link to it here. They may not want to learn how to do their own laundry, but teenagers come in handy in a lot of other ways.

It's a little harder to get to the computer with everyone home, so I'm a little more behind than usual, I wanted to wish everyone a Happy Fourth!

Nothing

I have been doing a whole lot of nothing for the past few days, and I don't even feel guilty about it. Well, maybe not nothing.

I've been cleaning up the house and baking and planning for Christopher's graduation party, potting plants and planting squash and tomatoes, and building a fire pit in the back yard. So I have been doing stuff, but not the usual, frantic grading of papers and running around that I normally do. I have to say it's wonderful. I finally got to the library, the dentist, and the post office, and I might even have figured out the opening of the novel that has been daunting me for almost a year now. This is the same one that I wrote the opening two pages 17 times (an actual, counted number) I'm pretty sure I'm sticking to this opening. And I wrote notes on an MG I'm halfway through.

I like vacancy. Even though, by many people standards, this is a nut house with the half dozen animals, the kids and their friends, graduation, packing for the college summer program, and all the rest, there is nothing I actually HAVE to do for the next few days. I guess nothing for me is deciding when I do tasks and not feeling that ever present clock.

I also think down time is essential for writing. I manage to think about writing for short times during the school year, but usually when I'm driving to work, or buying broccoli at the green grocer. It sort of goes like this:

Character is...why is she so...what's that word? The kids would say emo, but she wouldn't. Maybe I could sneak that organic cabbage into the soup - would Philip detect it? Oh no, there's that PTA woman and she's coming toward me. Thank God, she turned. Did she see me? That character needs a name. Something with no snootiness, no Ashleys or Courtneys. Did Emma hand in that permission slip? Maybe an old fashioned name. Oh great, here comes the PTA mom headed right toward me and I think she just recognized me. Laura? Except I think of the Glass Menagerie with that name...bok choy? that's not as pronounced a taste as cabbage....

Once his party is over on Friday, and he's safely at the college summer program that begins on Saturday, I'll have even more nothing. At least for about three weeks or so. Then things start to pick up again around here.

Probably the best thing that's come out of the past few days is that I realized how much I like writing, and how I would be perfectly content to spend all of my time with my hair in a messy pony tail,working on novels. I used to think I needed to go out, to connect with other people, to have a job that forced me to find the mascara tube and shave my legs. Now, I'm thinking more along the Emily Dickinson framework of having a room and some ideas.

Of course the danger of Dickinson's way is that I would wind up spending too much time talking to the cats and probably develop some vague form of agoraphobia about going to the grocery store.

But I think that's okay. I'd rather suffer a little agoraphobia than not have my novel completed. I'm looking at the next few weeks as kind of a rough draft for how I want to shape my life, and I think the first thing I am going to do is make some cuts in a few areas I thought were essential. This time has taught me that what's essential is having time to do "nothing" ---

New Seasons

The second prom is now over and done with and Christopher and I discovered a new species here in South Jersey. It's possible that this species inhabits more high schools, but since his first prom was just attended by us saying goodbye, it was a relatively calm process. No new species.

The second prom introduced us to the group goodbye, and the new species of person: a prom mom. The first picture here is not actually one of those moms, and yes, it's exaggerated, but the overall look, the general impression of that overly accessorized personality is pretty much representative of the prom mom. Maybe shows like Jerseylicious and The Jersey Shore have made this species more normalized so they came out, especially at an occasion like the group goodbye at the senior prom. Since this was not his high school, I didn't know anyone, but after a few minutes, I realized that I had seen them briefly on those idle, rich housewife shows.

They loved the limo: it was one of those superstretch ones that could house a small village. When it drove up and swallowed the kids, it seemed really apropos. I waved to Christopher. He was sitting there in tux number two with his eyes very, very wide. Of course, it could have been optical distress from the glare of the many sequins and sparkles on the dresses which looked something like this:

Tiaras are really, really big in these parts. So are gloves and boas. Wow.

Anyway, once the proms are over and I'm on line buying graduation decorations, it can mean only one thing: summer is nearly here! And that means plans. Tomorrow is my last day of work for six weeks. Now, a friend of mine pointed out that taking care of a house, keeping track of and feeding three kids and half a dozen animals and finishing two novels is not exactly "off" - but in my world, no lesson plans and no students is off. I usually ask my students to have three writing goals a semester, so here are my three summer goals:

1. to finish YA book and MG book (in other words, butt in chair time)

2. to have a yard people can walk through without checking themselves for ticks

3. it's possible that, after nearly four years of living here, I actually might buy curtains. Well, I HAVE bought curtains, ones that looked like they would fit. You really do have to measure first. So it's possible that we will have more than KMart blinds on our windows.

 You can bet those prom moms had some pretty amazing curtains.

So what are your goals for the summer?