Blah

I did not win ScriptFrenzy, though I am almost finished with my original sitcom and I have a good outline (except for the end) for a Modern Family spec. Things got accomplished, just not all the things I wanted. I try to do too much because I think I can and when I don't, I feel as if I've failed. But if I hadn't had the goal I had, I wouldn't have gotten as much done as I did. Thanks to everyone who wrote or called and encouraged me.

I'm not feeling very good today. As if I'm aging right before my eyes, I'm beset with a series of complaints. The muscles around my sciatic nerve contract at least once weekly in the past few weeks to make me nearly lame, my shoulder hurts so bad sometimes it makes me want to throw up, my lower back gives me problems all the time. My advice: Don't be in car accidents after the age of 30. Well, I'm still alive and for that I'm grateful. This is the accident that happened in December of 08, so don't get too worried.

I have a book idea in mind. Not necessarily a good one, but an idea nonetheless. I never thought about writing a book (this one would be sort of non-fiction, though creative non-fiction - and no, not a memoir). I've always only wanted to either do short stories or write for television. Frankly, the idea of writing long fiction frightens me. I've done it. I won NaNoWriMo one year with a completely horrible 57,000 word piece of crap. I'm proud I completed, but not proud it exists.

Right now, I'm tired. I wish I weren't. This is when I feel old age, when I would rather just sit around than do the things I know I want to do. Maybe when I start my book idea, it will bolster my other efforts because working on the book will also give me stories for my articles and maybe the interesting characters I meet will provide comedic fodder for my other ventures.

I know I complain a lot (as the Honey says, I'm the Queen of Complaining), but I do know that I have a goal and I will achieve it, whether I do it in inches or in miles.

Trivia Nerd

I have a friend who comes down from Alabama to visit his family and when he does, we make plans to meet on Wednesday for Trivia. The last two times he was in town, we won overall, which is a $20 bar tab.

So I head to the bar and run into a couple of friends on the way, one of which decides that she will join me for trivia. I expected my friend to be late, so the two of us are answering the questions by ourselves until he arrives.

The first round of questions ends with us winning. The winner of each round gets a pitcher of beer, which is a nice, free way to get your drinking done when you are as poor as we are right now. Of course, 2 glasses of beer later, we find ourselves the surprise winners of round 2. We guessed on at least 3 questions and didn't think we got the 30pt questions correct, but we did. Total guessing. That's another pitcher of beer for us and my friend has yet to show. Because we are so anal about not looking as if we're cheating, we usually leave our phones alone, but I check to see if he's left a text. He has. He's going to be much later. It's the final round, how much later is he gonna be?

He got there for the final jeopardy style question, well after the 3rd round. We got it wrong, but if we'd listened to him, we would have won it all! I only had one more free drink after that because that was all I needed, but it turned into a hell of a party, even with the dj being as lame as he always is.

I like drinking beer and having fun with my friends, but I have the most fun when I'm playing trivia. Maybe it's because it reminds me of being in college, when we would go to the Red Dog Pub in Cambridge and play NTN trivia. A bunch of us would walk over from Boston, grab a booth and a drink and we would try to outnerd all the other nerds in the place. The trivia I play now is similar, but we've all developed a camaraderie that is nice. Friendly and competitive, we talk smack but are okay if the other person wins. It's almost a family in a way. We expect to see each other every week, we complain about the questions, but we always enjoy getting together every week and trying to be the biggest nerds in the room.

Catch Up

I'm about to head to the A to visit a friend and while talking on the phone with said friend last night, I realize that I had not really met my obligations for writing, obligations I'd promised myself and in turn you guys - since you're the ones that are supposed to be holding me accountable. If I don't do this every day, it won't become the habit I want and need it to become. I've been out of practice of everyday writing. I need to get back in practice... so I practice...

Today's prompt:
"What do you take? You have ten minutes to evacuate your house forever! All family and pets have already escaped. Write about what you'd imagine yourself taking with you with only the limited time you have."

The first stop is the bedroom where I will scoop up my stuffed animals. They are all unique little animals that have a story behind them. Bear, my big stuffed brown teddy bear, has been with me since I was a senior in high school and has traveled with me everywhere (though he didn't make it to Africa because I was afraid I might lose him), Bayer, my little brown stuffed Teddy Bear that I got as a gift from a pen pal, Bunkey, who is a monkey dressed in a bunny suit that my husband bought me for Easter the year I demanded the Easter Basket my parents never gave me. It also included bubbles and chocolates, which has already been blown and eaten, as well as Porkchop, a pink pig that somehow has an expression when I take pictures of it.

The second stop would be my hard drive, which has ever episode from Doctor Who that has been released since 1963. Every episode from 63- now. I couldn't bear to have to try to get them all again.

While I'm in the office, where the hard drive resides, I will also try to find the David Bowie, Ella Fitzgerald, Miles Davis, Beatles and John Schneider albums. I will give myself to the count of 15 to put my hands on these. In fact, I'm going to go organize the pile of records so that the pile on the right are the albums I want to keep.

Next, I will stop by my bar area to get the glasses Little Sister bought from me, then run to the living room. In the hallway is a photo of my husband and myself with the date of our wedding. I will pull that picture from the wall. I would grab every elephant from my mantle piece (there happens to be a lot, even though I don't collect them), the small box of photos that are also on the mantle piece, the wedding photos on the coffee table and the art that is hanging on the living room wall, a wedding gift from my husband's best friend to us.

If I had to leave anything off the list, it would be elephants.

The thing that has bothered me for most of my life is that I don't have photos. Our photographic memories were lost in a fire nearly 15 years ago. It is not one of my happiest thoughts. To know that there is no photographic reference to myself before the age of 19 is a bit depressing, although my grandparents have one of me giving Santa the decidedly evil eye and a little pendant picture of me as a child in overalls, flashing nip. I like taking that walk though the life of the people you know, seeing them as they were then, maybe coming to understand a bit about who they were and how that plays into how they are. It's an interesting tale, something that shines a light and obscures at the same time. So pictures are precious to me and would be the main thing worth saving.

Writing Prompt #2
"Who told you that you couldn't, and you really wanted to prove them wrong? Write about it."
I am not a bad student. Some people might actually say I'm a very good student. I don't go that far because learning once came very easy to me. I don't have a photographic memory, but I had a very good reference memory. If I could remember the clues, I could always find the answer. And the writing I had to do in high school... well, let's just say I was good enough that I could write a paper in homeroom for my first period class and get an A.

But math, that was another story.

I wouldn't have disliked math so much if it hadn't made me cry. Math made me cry huge, angry tears of frustration and represented the first C grade I was every presented with. Well, let me take that back. It's not math's fault. It's Algebra 2/Trig's fault. Algebra 2/Trig and my math teacher who hated me.

Now, when a student says a teacher hated them, they usually are instigators who have angered the authority figure in the classroom. I was not that person. I said yessir and yesma'am with a contriteness that would make my mother's traditional heart swell with pride. I turned in my school work, I asked questions, I tried to understand, I worked into the wee hours of the night and I never gave up. Yet at every turn, my teacher would ridicule my inability to understand the numbers because they were so different from the words I'd grown to know and love.

I remember one time in particular when we learned to do three dimensional graphing. I was working out the problem, graphing the solution and I saw that it formed a box. From that point on, I would plot the answer and if it didn't form a box, I would know that one of my equations was incorrect. It was my eureka moment! Filled with the enthusiasm of someone who knows something without any doubt, I walked around the class saying, "It forms a box! It forms a box!" Of course, my classmates did not pick up on this, nor did they understand what the hell I was talking about. So I picked the guy who eventually became our co-valedictorian and showed him what I was talking about. Suddenly, the light was in his eyes. We both went around the class bringing our fellow students into the light and our teacher came up to D and asked him how he'd figured it out. He pointed at me. She turned to look at me with more surprise than should have been in her face and said, "M figured it out? Well would you look at that!" (M is my maiden name). I could feel my face turning red, but I stood my ground. "Well, why don't you explain it to the whole class then," she said. I did. Everyone got it. It made me feel awesome.

Yeah, that was the only time.

At the end of the school year, when she was advising me on my classes for the next year, she recommended I take Statistics. I asked what she recommended for the other students. Pre-Calculus.

Damn. Pre-Calculus. I had to swallow hard on that one because I knew that Algebra 2/Trig had basically kicked my ass, but I wasn't going to be the only AP/Honor student not in Pre-Calculus.

So I told her I was going to take Pre-Calculus. She basically said, "It's your funeral." I passed Algebra 2/Trig with a C. I passed Pre-Calculus with an A and got a B in Calculus my 12th grad year. If any of you have ever taken calculus, you know they rely on letters and words much more than any other math. That, a pretty stellar teacher and someone behind me not believing in me pushed me to achieve more than I ever thought I would.

Sometimes I want to thank her for not liking me so much. I don't give her credit for pushing me in a reverse psychology kind of way. I don't have that kind of faith in her.

Pondering

I visited my grandmother tonight. My father's mother, who is not my grandmother, but is. I wanted to talk to her about searching for my family, but the same thing that stopped me telling my dad that I knew he wasn't my biological dad stopped me from mentioning anything to her.

I just wasn't sure if she wouldn't see it as an insult.

It wouldn't be an insult, of course, but it could easily be misconstrued as such. I know that my grandmother knows that she is not my grandmother, even though she is. I can't spend 34 years with her and her not feel something for me. I wonder if, since I've pulled away from her and my family (my fault, not there's - other than the vague feeling I've always, that I don't belong with them, even before my knowledge was complete), she believes that I've discovered the truth and she has begun the process of anticipating my rejection.

I've always felt a lot different from my family. I wonder if it was noticeable even then. Yes, I get picked on by my white husband that I enjoy more things from Stuff White People Like than he does, what with me not being white and all, but stick that in the ghetto and you get someone not only different from their family, but also from the community they were brought up in. That must come from somewhere. I've never let myself wonder where because what if I didn't find out the answers? What if I asked the questions and never got the answers? The questions (maybe even the answers) would be floating in the nether forever. It's been nearly 10 years since the death of my bio-dad. I've never seen a picture. I've been forced to subtract my mother's features from my face (and I am very like my mother) and try to put a face to the remaining features. What if I get unanswerable questions? What then?

I'm just gonna stop promising you things. You really do hold me accountable when I don't complete them.

Marriage

Today, I'm going to teach my students about marriage. To that end, I'm going to watch a Tyler Perry movie called, "Why Did I Get Married", which I know my students have seen. I want to be able to pull from that.

So, yes, I'm watching a movie at work. On days like today, I like my job.

I will do a writing prompt later on today. Comments about previous writing prompts (especially since you know what I'm trying to accomplish) would be welcome. Constructive criticism as well. I will try not to take it personally :)

I have a little more than half the number of pages I need to have and by the end of the day, if I haven't written, it will be less than half. Anyway, I'm writing and working. I will finish my scripts and you all will be responsible for helping me change dreck into gold.

Because you love me.

Weekend Blogging

I'm rubbish at it.

Writing Prompt:

Write about the fastest ride you ever had, but describe only a few seconds of it...as though it was happening to slow motion."

I could feel my insides shifting and the soft hair of my pigtails moving across my neck. I could feel myself lifted from my seat on the soft cushion of the back seat of the ancient cadillac. I was too young to know to lift my hands as we careened down the steep hill. It was a once a year pleasure, a street my mother had found long ago, like a roller coaster, with hardly any life on it. It was a road, absent of homes, that lead to somewhere, but the where was not important.

We felt a bit like daredevils, my brother and I, as we raged down the road. If I were to remind my mother of this now, she would say it never happened. She's not the reckless kind anymore. As we came to the end of the dip and made our way up, my insides came crashing down, our bodies pushed down into the ugly green felt, our fingers gripping the edge of the seat. There were no true g-forces, but I could feel my face shifting ever so slightly on the upward momentum. My mom did not look back to see our fun. Our squeals of joy spoke for us.

Ooops!

Dear Everybody,

I'm not in my right frame of mind today. We got to leave work early today and when I got home, I fell right to sleep. And now i'm about to go out to First Friday. I will owe you two posts tomorrow as well as two writing prompts. Do you forgive me internets?

Love,

ThisGirlTV