Together we are fierce.

You know how sometimes you put off doing the dishes for so long that your sink is filled to the point that if you turn on the faucet the water just sprays off the plate and splatters watery marinara on your shirt? That is how it starts to feel if you have a blog that you haven't updated in months, not because there was nothing to say, but because all the things there were to say were Very Important and you wanted to do them justice.

So I will not try to do them justice. Instead, I will post pictures of cake.

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My fiancé, Blade, made me a giant cookie to celebrate my upcoming birthday. 

I can't look at it without giggling. He was inspired by this Marc Johns drawing of two people in a monster.

I responded with an ice cream cake to celebrate Blade's birthday, which was earlier this week.

 This is no hamburger cake, but I am proud of it. It was inspired by this drawing of a bear.

 

We ate our cakes with Marty (whose classy cheesecake I didn't manage to photograph due to its lack of icing cartoons). His birthday is also coming up soon. Many of our friends came for the festivities. All the cool kids got themselves born in June. Together we are fierce.

Girlfriends. Also, narwhals.

Somehow, possibly because someone on the women's committee got me confused with one of my friends, I am heading up drama for my church's women's retreat, which will focus on female friendship.

My first thought was to adapt scenes from plays. I spent hours in the library and came up with nothing that passed my modified Bechdel test -- that is, that contained at least two women, {modification: who are not sisters or mother/daughter,} who have names, who speak to one another about something other than men.

Because of the nature of church retreats, improv isn't going to work, so I am supposed to write or adapt scripts for three short scenes.

There are reasons I am not qualified to do this. In outline form, those reasons are:

1. I have never been on a women's retreat. At any church. Ever.
    A) Aren't they for moms?
    B) Or at least grown-ups?
    C) I'm little.

2. I have never written a script.
    A) Remembering words is hard.
    B) Things always seem funnier when everyone discovers them together.
    C) I don't have good ideas when I'm by myself.
       a) A girl who has a theater background is talking out the scripts with me.
          i) It helps.
          ii) But only if she's there.
       b) Seriously, can I just have a couple of solid ensemble members and a suggestion of anything at all?


3. I am not good at female friendship.
    A) My ratio of guy friends to girl friends* is something like 9:2. If we expand that to friends I've had for over three years and still regularly interact with, that ratio is more like 9:1.
         a) I'm better friends with people I play with regularly.
             i) I mostly play with boys.
             ii) Why do girls quit playing?
         b) I do not have a roommate.
             i) My boyfriend has 5 roommates.
             ii) See 3.A.a.i.
             iii) A big part of me would rather spend a weekend being goofy with them than being awkwardly polite to women who I am sure are perfectly lovely and fun but with whom I'm not comfortable because I am shy-ish. Which I should and will just suck up and deal with.
         c) I have tried to put myself in situations to be better friends with women, particularly at church.
            i) They all seem to have a lot of girlfriends already.
            ii) It's hard to tell if there's room for more.
    B) When Blade tried to get me to brainstorm and feel more positive, he said, "Tell me a story about two narwhals. Who are friends. And also are girls."
         a) So I told a story about two narwhals
            i) who were friends
            ii) and also were girls.
         b) They swam around together for awhile, and that was fun.
         c) One day they looked around and realized they had been swimming in different directions for a long time and couldn't remember the last time they floated by each other.
            i) Neither could remember why.
            ii) Neither of them did anything to remedy the lack-of-proximity situation.
            iii) No one ever talked about it. 
            iv) Hey, I wonder where that gal went, I liked her.
            v) Shrug.
         d) The End.

With the generous help of newfriend 2.C.a, I have two scripts and one outline with some wiggle room in it. I feel pretty good about them. Still, it should not have been this angsty to come up with under 10 minutes of material. And my brainstorm story should not have been so sad.


*In this particular case, I am defining friend as "someone with whom I regularly interact, whose life I know and care about, and who knows and cares about my life." There are loads of people, guys and gals, I think fondly of but don't ever see or keep in touch with due to geographical distance or such wildly disparate schedules that when we do see one another we have to start off with something like, "So how was that thing you were doing last year? Where do you work again? Are you still dating that guy? Oh, wait, you moved? When did you move?"

The Elements of Style

This is possibly my favorite book.

My friend Kevin gave me this illustrated edition for my birthday a few years ago.

The Elements of Style is a tiny book, mostly a list of rules about grammar and punctuation. It tells you the difference between further and farther, lie and lay, nauseous and nauseated, and that most crucial distinction between shall and will. It has lists of rules, such as:

12. Choose a suitable design and hold to it.

13. Make the paragraph the unit of composition.

14. Use the active voice.

15. Put statements in positive form.

16. Use definite, specific, concrete language.

17. Omit needless words.

I go back to this book every few months, whether or not I'm writing anything at the time. I tend to pick it up when I'm mired in some kind of unfinishable project, when I am too overwhelmed with life to begin reading a novel or too unfocused to read poetry. (It was the only book I could even pick up after my friend Stephen died, suddenly and far away, over three years ago now. I read it over and over, because it was small and concrete and certain, and life was big and vague and confused.)

Each of Strunk and White's rules is followed by examples of good writing that follows the rules and bad writing that doesn't. Sometimes, though, our heroes deviate from the plain examples to explain why the rule is important to the world. Here is one of my favorite passages in the entire book:

Muddiness is not merely a disturber of prose, it is also a destroyer of life, of hope: death on the highway caused by a badly worded road sign, heartbreak among lovers caused by a misplaced phrase in a well-intentioned letter, anguish of a traveler expected to be met at a railway station and not being met because of a slipshod telegram. Think of the tragedies that are rooted in ambiguity, and be clear! When you say something, make sure you have said it. The chances of your having said it are only fair.

The illustrator of the most beautiful edition of The Elements of Style is Maira Kalman, who is proof that I am not the only one fixated on this book. She has also made a short film based on her illustrations, which I stumbled upon via The Kitchn:





And here is Maira Kalman talking about her life and art. She talks about The Elements of Style about 8 minutes into the talk.



















Her illustrations look like the inside of my brain.

A new plan

The hunt for a full-time job continues, and I would like to switch strategies.

Do you have a job you would like to offer me? If so, email me a job description, including hours, starting salary, and why I won't feel like I'm wasting my time and energy and bachelor's degree at your workplace. Then I will interview you, and I will expect you to impress me despite your nerves.

If I am not impressed, I may or may not give you the courtesy of a rejection letter. I might just string you along for awhile, just to see you jump every time your phone rings during business hours.

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Also, The Pub, a Wheaton College magazine I wrote for a time or two, has a blog now.

On this blog is an essay I wrote about Shakespeare and liturgy and an article I helped a friend edit and revise.

And I didn't know it.

As is customary for a self-respecting writing major, I entered Wheaton's Lowell-Grabel creative writing contest. This year's judge was Wheaton alumna and religion journalist Cathleen Falsani, whose book Sin Boldly I read recently and whose blog I have found well worth stalking. She was beyond encouraging at the awards ceremony.

Duke was awarded first place in creative nonfiction and third place in fiction. I was awarded second place in creative nonfiction and -- get this -- first place in poetry.

Yeah. Poetry. I know.

The poem is about when my family joined Highland Terrace when I was 14 and sulky.

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One Baptism: A Sestina

I was baptized in the name
of the Father, Son and Holy Spirit
with my father, mother and brother
by a preacher dressed like a fisherman
to keep himself from getting wet.
I was dunked into the heated baptistery

lit by a stained glass dove glowing neon above the baptistery.
The preacher, the Brother, often forgot my name
and, whether because we were related by Spirit
or just out of habit, called me Brother,
forgetting not every Baptist is a man.
He himself refused to get wet,

guarded against getting wet
by wearing rubber pants in the baptistery
under the neon stained glass dove named
(or just symbolic of) the Holy Spirit.
I do not remember how my brother
felt about this preacher, this man

who wanted my dad baptized as a man
because getting his baby head sprinkled wet
by Methodists didn’t count. The chlorinated baptistery,
heated from below and lit from above, named
us as church-members. The spirit
of the thing was lost on my soggy little brother

and my skeptical self. I acknowledge one brother
(who now is grown, practically a man)
as mine, not this preacher, wet
with sweat and sermon spit -- not baptistery
water -- from getting carried away in the Lord’s name,
and I am certainly not his brother, even in spirit.

Was it the same neon stained dove Spirit
shining over my parents and brother
and me who hovered over God-made-Man,
the Man who volunteered to get wet
in his cousin’s muddy makeshift baptistery,
cold with slime and fish, and heard his name?

This brother-man in the baptistery would not get wet, even in the name of the spirit.



*Blade and Steve should be given some of this credit, since they have endured more than their share of Duke's and my rough drafts.

Healing

An excerpt from an essay I'm working on concerning the seven sacraments.

-------

Your new dentist asked you how long your mouth had been full of ulcers.

Oh, always.

She diagnosed you with an allergy to a chemical found in most regular and whitening toothpastes. She did not need to write a prescription, but she did recommend that you switch to toothpaste for sensitive teeth.

That’s all?

That’s all.

After a few days, it no longer hurt to eat. Within a week, you were able to drink orange juice or salt your eggs without so much as a wince.

Your new dentist warned you never to use the old toothpaste again, not even a little, not even if it’s the only convenient toothpaste around. That would be like touching only a little poison ivy.

You didn’t need to be told twice.

You couldn’t believe you’d never thought to ask your old dentist why your mouth hurt all the time. You assumed it was supposed to hurt. Was all healing that simple? Were you really not supposed to hurt all the time? Was asking all it took?

Icicles falling in the dark

Yesterday, the thermometer showed almost forty degrees. I felt like I should be in shorts or a dress.

Last night I stayed up trying to tell the difference between a draft of a poem and an outline of an essay. According to my poet-friends, the line break is what distinguishes poetry from prose, but outlines have line breaks, too.

While I tried to puzzle this out, there was a crash. Then another. Then another. It sounded like the house was being shelled, like I should wake up the girls and sandbag us all into the basement.

It was the icicles falling off the roof. Huge icicles, as big around as my arm, and sharp at the ends in the way that icicles typically are. They had time to get that big and terrifying during the coldest week I can ever remember.

So, the Sun, thanks for coming. I really appreciate it. But you pissed off Winter, and now someone could get impaled. Really, we should coordinate this better.

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But it's so hard to dance that way
When it's cold and there's no music
Well, your old hometown's so far away
But inside your head there's a record that's playing
A song called hold on.