L: You look like a happy camper.
M: L, Believe it or not I'm not often described as a chipper guy. In fact, I was talking to my wife the other day about being unhappy. She said,
S: I don't think since I've known you that you've ever been happy. It's just not your personality type.
L: That must have made you happy.
M: It did cheer me up a little bit.
She remembered, as she wiped the sweat from behind her knees with a wad of toilet paper, why she didn’t take naps in the middle of the day. When she awoke, she felt as though someone had dropped a piano on her head, and she had miraculously survived, much to her disappointment.
Never begin a story in which the main character is just waking from sleep something about it seems artificial. In the grand scheme of things we spend very little time actually waking from sleep. We pretty much only get the opportunity once a day.
She swam through fathoms of blankets to reach out from sleep. When she reaches the crest of the wave, she hangs there, looking down upon the sand. She can see each individual grain, she tries to fathom the thousands upon thousands of years that it has taken to be worn away into this fine dust.
Writers are always doing this. Imbuing mundane moments like waking from sleep as though it was something mystical. Today, as I was lifting weight, I watched a plane fly across an open blue sky through a rectangular window. It occurred to me as I watched the plane disappear how silly individual human beings are, how like ants.
See that's precisely the sort of thing that fiction writers are always doing. Why can't I have just been lifting weights?
What a shame, she thought, that she would turn to dust so much more quickly. Perhaps she could leave note indicating her desire to be spread upon the sand.
One could of course argue that artifice, the willing suspension of disbelief is at the heart of writing any narrative. If you believe in the character, if you can see her red gold hair, and the slight dimpling of her cheeks in a smile, than you can certainly believe that she began this whole story just waking from sleep. It wouldn't bother you in the slightest if someone looked out the window and thought that perhaps the whole human project civilization et al, was a bit of silly striving. But then again, that is my story and not hers.
She was thinking about dying in an abstract sort of way. She ran her hands across the smooth rails of her bed frame. Naps were hell, she concluded, rising from bed and standing at the window. The glass was warm, and she pressed her face against it. In the red sky of late summer a plane skirted the tops of buildings. She could not attach any meaning to it. Post-nap her IQ dropped by at least thirty percent.
I mean, really, when an author is writing something aren't they really just fictionalizing their own life? You can't really write about something that you don't know. I mean, isn't the writer saying that the woman is in fact thinking that her life is silly, and by extension his. You can't just have a plane flying by a window. It has to mean something.
A simple guide to marrying someone who is type A:
S: I went upstairs to get some hand lotion, but I would up organizing all of my toiletries.
The same situation if it had been me:
M: I went upstairs to get some lotion, forgot why I was up there, lost the lotion, checked ESPN.com and then took a nap.
She loved the heat island of Los Angeles, loved the way that the smog obscured the mountains and turned every sunset into something that rivaled the northern lights.
Okay, I'll grant that someone could actually love the colors of a Los Angeles smog. But obscuring the mountains? Pure fiction.
Training Day Conversation:
Trainer: You might have someone on the chat who is typing inappropriate sorts of things. It's only happened a time or two. You don't have to answer them.
M: OK.
Trainer: You don't have to keep reading it. You can just say, I consider what you're saying to be harassment. If they type something else you can just reply to them and say, "I'm getting off now" and leave the chat.
M: Mentally (Unintentional comedy is probably the greatest kind). Mentally: Wouldn't that sort of encourage the behavior?).
M: Externally (Shaking head in confirmation of her statement and even inserting the occasional mmmmm. mmmhhhmmmmm to indicate a heightened degree of both understanding of the situational dynamics, and how inappropriate any sort of joke might be. It's times like that, as I'm smiling along with the trainer that I wish that I worked at SNL or something, and that we could acknowledge that saying things like "I'm getting off" to a potential weirdo might not be the best idea. Oh well, maybe in another life.
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