So Long, And Thanks For All The Fish

We received our divorce decree today.

Over the last six years I have, understandably, developed a number of strong opinions about marriage, and someday I’ll figure out how to express them. Not surprisingly, a number of them will not be as positive as I might wish.

So today, while I’m thinking about it, and before I loose those on the world, I want to go on record with all the things about my marriage I’ve enjoyed and am grateful for. In no particular order, then:

• Having my very own taste-tester to let me know whether the salsa (etc.) was safe or too spicy for me to eat. And while we’re on the subject:
• Being taught that I enjoy Mexican food (really, I can’t imagine how I ever thought I didn’t). And being introduced to pho, although I wish more places made it as well as the place we went to in Arkansas (go figure). Oh, and frozen yogurt. And street meat. And bourbon!! And discovering that my all-time favorite wine region is… Michigan. Yum.
• Having a husband who’s a better cook than I am, and who has vastly improved my understanding of such subjects as seasoning. (This list isn’t all food, I promise!)
• The best in-laws a girl could have. Their first and last words to me were expressions of love and support, and I am sad that they are no longer family I can look forward to visiting yearly, but I’m happy to have the memories of the time we did have.
• The opportunity to experience different parts of the country in-depth. It was always funny when people tried to sympathize about our criss-crossing moves. No. I was thrilled to go to Maine and Vermont, places I’d always wanted to go but might not have made it to, and certainly wouldn’t have lived in, on my own. And even though Kansas wasn’t a place I would have chosen, I’m glad to have lived here, too.
• Our long at-least-weekly walks in the first couple years. Having someone to walk with me – and distract me by talking about the houses we passed – was the essential component in finally getting my 3-year-long ankle sprain to heal. And also, the opportunity to learn at least a little more about health and fitness… and finally learning how to ride a bike.
• Being introduced to a couple of handfuls of musicians I wouldn’t have discovered on my own, some of whom are already staples of my listening, some who are yet to be fully explored.
• Having a car mechanic, a computer technician, a plumber, an electrician, a general contractor, and all around mechanically handy person in the family. I’m going to miss that.
• Cross-country road trips. I grew up in a very flying-oriented family, so road trips weren’t really part of my vernacular. I found, somewhat to my surprise, that I enjoy the long-haul driving. And that there’s something very meditative about an overnight drive that means I really didn’t mind taking the 3 a.m. shift. And that the real joy is in the back roads.
• Some of the nerdy cultural touchstones I can’t imagine not being familiar with – Lord of the Rings, HP, Eragon – were things I was first exposed to by my husband. When you’re planning to name your (hypothetical future) children after the characters you admire, it’s safe to say those things have made an impact.
• When your sanity depends on proving that you can be loved, you get much better at identifying and cultivating the most likely sources – and cutting out those relationships that are harmful. For both of those reasons, but mostly the former, I will never again be as sad or as lonely as I was before my marriage. I learned that I already had more and better friends than I’d ever realized, and my ability to connect with new friends has increased exponentially. The effect this has had on my life cannot be overstated, and it is something I have not yet ceased to regard with wonder.
• The opportunity to test – and prove – my childish hypothesis that I can survive anything.
• Being forced to focus on and work through my issues, as fast as humanly possible, along with the crash course in how to consider others’ feelings and needs. I’ve said it a dozen times, I’ll say it hundreds more: I feel like I took the 5-year shortcut to 20 years of growth. And I value that enough that if given the chance to go back in time and change history… I might just sit back and let myself go through it anyway.
• And I’m grateful, too, for the vast increase in love and patience that makes that acceptance possible. Don’t think letting yourself suffer sounds like love? I think it is. I think it’s a rare and powerful compassion that says, “I understand you, and I know that although it won’t be easy, you need this. And I know you can handle it, and I wouldn’t dream of holding you back and denying you what you need, just to give you the illusion of comfort.” Because as much as we might think we’d rather do without trials, our Before is never as easy or comfortable or happy as our After. Staying permanently in “Before” isn’t something I would wish on my worst enemy. So I think that perhaps, if you aren’t grateful for the hard times you’ve had, you haven’t yet learned all there is to learn from them.

Considering all of this, there’s one thing that keeps echoing through my head, one thing that seems in a funny way to sum it up best, so I will say it: “So long, and thanks for all the fish.”

Book Review: You are Not Your Brain

George developed OCD in college. He recounts: “I started getting these weird thoughts. I remember the first one: If I did not put something a certain way, someone in my family would die.” As time went on,

he had a growing sense that the… brain messages were false and that the feared outcomes wouldn’t come true, but he couldn’t resist the impulses to check or arrange.

Steve had a reputation for being the “answer man” at his company. Over time, he came to feel that nobody ever solved anything for themselves. He lost respect for their neediness and felt overwhelmed. When he went home, his family’s demands began to seem like more neediness. One relaxing drink became two became, eventually, full-fledged alcoholism.

Yet both, according to the authors of You Are Not Your Brain: The 4-Step Solution for Changing Bad Habits, Ending Unhealthy Thinking, and Taking Control of Your Life, were able to overcome these formidable challenges by applying the Four Steps contained in the book.

Friends & Family

I’ve been thinking a lot about friendship lately: what a blessing it is to have true friends, and what a long journey it is sometimes to find out who they are.

My current definition of a real friend:

Dialogue Rules

(This blog is about fiction-writing techniques and is a departure from my usual subject-matter. If this isn’t of interest, feel free to skip until next time!)

One of the things I particularly struggle with in fiction writing is dialogue. Considering how much of our lives we spend blabbing to each other, it doesn’t seem like it should be hard to create realistic dialogue on the page… but it is.

The Rapey Boy of 21st St

He wants it intensely. No matter how many times you say “no” or try to push him away, he keeps coming back, holding your leg, pressing himself against you. He has needs. How can you be so cruel as to deny them?

Readers may be relieved to know at this point that I am not describing a human assailant or an even slightly traumatic experience. Rather, I am talking about my puppy’s desire to get on the couch with me.

Book Review: Lucia: A Venetian Life in the Age of Napoleon

I have the terrible wonderful habit of browsing the books for sale whenever I’m in a thrift store or library; I like inviting serendipity. I don’t remember where or when I found this biography, but it was definitely serendipity; my taste for personal histories, especially of women, would have been enough to pick it up, but the ability to justify it as a possible source for research – and, better still, a source for the sort of details of everyday life in historic Europe that are so hard to come by – made it an easy sale.

Any reservations I had came from the fact that Andrea di Robilant is Lucia’s descendant. On the one hand, there’s romance in the “long-lost story discovered in family archives,” but on the other – mightn’t it be vanity publishing, making a book out of nothing very much? It was, however, cool that the portrait on the cover is indeed of her – a portrait that was deemed lost until he tracked it down. (This would be a bit too much National Treasure if it did not become apparent in the telling of the story that, because it was not a major work, nobody had ever bothered to go looking before.)

But, anyhow, I bought it and read it and enjoyed every minute of it, and it vastly exceeded anything I hoped it would be. I also found myself confronting a number of common myths about the past and even discovering a few surprising facts we don’t often consider at all. Here are a few:

Throwback Thursday: Knowledge of Good and Evil

When I made the goal of posting once per month this year, part of the intention was to blow through some of the backlog of abandoned post ideas. Accordingly, a few months ago I read through the over 50 pieces sitting in the Blog folder. A majority were fragmentary, things I didn’t have any really developed thoughts about at the time and which, on review, I still don’t have much to say about; those were discarded. A handful were worthy of further development. And one or two were more or less completed but, for whatever reason, never quite satisfactory and never posted.

This is one of them.

It’s a bit odd to reread something I had no memory of and which is completely, absolutely out of date. Nearly 6 years after writing it, neither of the relationships written about in it still exist, or exist in the form written about. The questions asked are not ones I would ask now. Or rather – it is not the way I would ask them. And I think that is progress, which is about the only reason I’m mustering the courage to toss this out into the world at last.

With Liberty and Justice For All

I had a vague idea I might do something about Independence Day for my July post, but we were busily on vacation and there wasn’t anything I particularly wanted to say, anyway, so I let it slide. In fact, my muse didn’t show up until a few days before the end of the month (right around the time a client requested that I do three months’ worth of work in the space of two weeks, which I take as more than excuse enough for this post being late), and when she did, she wasn’t bearing tidy platitudes. But she sure had something to say about Freedom.

Never a Good Time

The book club I’m part of has one very convenient feature: two of our members are Topeka and Shawnee County Public Library librarians. They label and check out our books for us, and when book club is over, they gather them up and return them. So last month, when it happened that neither librarian could attend, we all looked at each other blankly and asked ourselves, “How will the books get back?” Lisa volunteered to take them.

There was no particular reason that Lisa should have been the one to do it.

Letter to No One

Dear Friend,

It has been far too long since we’ve talked – or rather written. I miss our old exchange of ideas, the conversation, the flow of words, the surprising revelations that only written thoughts make possible.

Oh, Facebook can be very charming. I appreciate the news of babies I would not have heard of, job successes and health problems and hilarious videos and pictures. I enjoy all of this. The trouble is,