Plus

Other things that it is hard impossible to write about if you are in love with them:

dogs

horses

Though horses I've yet to see evidence that they can be written about AT ALL. And that is coming from a non-sentimental horse owner. I've read one or two amusing dog tales, but horses are for no. Do not try it. Please. PLEASE. There is no reason to encourage that kind of bleh in the younger generations of "i wanna pony" types.

It's just that we don't really like children

Sorry to all grandmother-submitters, and new-mother-submitters, mothers who find it oh-so-interesting that your eleven-year-old does not like Brussels sprouts, and elementary school teachers, but none of you ever seem to submit anything that a child would like to read. You are, it seems, too in love.

So it's not that we don't like ANY children. Some of us (not me, not me) even HAVE one or two of them. But the general concept of "child" makes us far from warm and fuzzy. We despise the sentimental. And you should be glad, because otherwise our magazines would have to come with their own vomitoriums and we don't have that kind of money.

For example, when our slightly coddly copy editor emailed in that a Halloween illustration might be too scary, I heard the response "If the kids find this too scary, they can MAN UP."

For example, when our slightly coddly copy editor complained that the last line of a story about soccer should not mention winning because that would give the kids the WRONG MORALS, we jokingly changed it to say "And if Katie could score that winning goal, she might finally be worth something."

Of course, best of all is the time when I called the kids on the forums "dorks" because they go at each other for mistakes in grammar and spelling, and an AE said "if by 'dorks' you mean that they are mean little snots, then yes." Then she explained that once a kid offended her with his post, and in revenge she did not edit his glaring grammatical errors. She just "let them go at it."

I'm kind of in love with everyone here.

So don't you for a moment think that a children's magazine office has teddy bears and flowered stationary (ew). Luckily the best authors (see my apology above, I refuse to repeat it) are like-minded. Usually.

Bees! Bees!

This past winter, friends, my family suffered a great loss. For the third year in a row, we lost our bees up in Michigan. These wussy buzzers cannot even make it through a measly Michigan winter without dying all over the damn place.

So once again, we contact Phil, our kind of crazy beekeeping guru, and he says what the hell, people, fine, here's another hive. And then, being the disorganized people that we are (that THEY are. I was at school and had no say in the matter) we fail to pick up the bees. So, Phil shoves them in a hive at his place and promises to bring them over just as soon as we procure a pick-up truck.

Right.

So it is now July (you start hives in April/May) and we are noodling around in our meadow and my mother realizes huh, there are some bees going in and out the side of our hive. Freakin scavengers. All stealing our dead-bees' honey.

Finally, my dad and I suited up and went out to take a look. And, you will ALL be pleased to note, WE CAN HAS NEW HIVE! I guess a swarm took it over, what they call a "volunteer" hive. We checked all the boxes and found brood and the queen. (I found the queen. Then I danced, as you can see.)

This is very exciting, so in celebration we dragged out all our old honey-filled supers and got two huge buckets full of harvested honey that we got like a year ago and just never processed, so heart-broken were we to discover our bees dead AGAIN.

Anyway. If anyone wants some home-grown honey, be sure to let me know. I will send some!

(Also home grown pickles. I mean, they were cucumbers first, but then my dad made them into pickles. I hate pickles, so I fight for the lives of the cucumbers.)

Form rejects!

Good noon, ladies and gentlemen! As promised, I have woken up refreshed and ready to write the wittiest of all witties on Form Rejects. Unfortunately, I do not currently have a computer (another rant for another time) and so I am typing on my brother's sticky, duct-taped-together machine that will, any moment, explode.

I mentioned yesterday my intent to enter the Rejectionist's uncontest - a "Happy One-Year Birthday, Rejectionist!" activity. All y'all, if you have any interest in publishing or literature or amusing, should read her blog. I promise it will be more rewarding than mine. (Actually entering this uncontest is, by the way, the scariest thing I've ever done. Though being rejected by the Rejectionist would actually be pretty badass.)

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Form Rejects:

There are two types of form rejects I could tell you about: the ones I hand out and the ones I receive. I receive far fewer than I hand out, because I haven't yet reached the point in my writing where I have anything...oh, what's the word...good to submit. Both of these rejections I've always found ambiguous. There are just so many QUESTIONS you have when you recieve a letter that starts "Dear Author." (Did they read it? Do they hate me? Did they hate it? Who read it? Why didn't they like it? Was it just that I forgot to put a plot? Was it that I wrote a stripper story for a children's magazine? Should I submit elsewhere or chuck this one?) But I can see one major difference between the rejections I give and the ones I get.

Every form reject I have GOTTEN from a literary magazine has told me some variation of the following: "Please understand that we get almost 300/1000/1 million/everyone in Utah's submissions and simply have no time/space/energy/love for the mediocre word vomit of a college crazy." (From "love" on, I may have embellished.) All of these FRs seem to go out of their way to make me feel as though my work wasn't BAD, it was just lost among the many and didn't POP their brains. This may not be exactly how it went down, but it's nice to know I'm one of millions of unexceptional people, right?

We don't do that, and as a result my understanding of FRs I've received has utterly changed. The FRs I send reads (I'm going from memory here): "My editorial staff has reviewed your submission carefully and we regret to inform you that it is not appropriate for our magazine at this time. We wish you luck in placing it elsewhere." First off, this is a total lie most of the time. It should read: "My kind of crazy first reader/Lowly Intern read this and thought it was, you know, really bad. Feel free to try again...but, uh, better, please. Kthxbai."

Not always, though! Every now and then (I get maybe three per week) a piece DOES make it through the entire editorial staff before being sent back to Lowly Intern with a post-it that says "plz form reject, thx." (We are full of the English and the grammar. No rly.) Hooray, you say! So there was a chance my work was poured over by many eyes, all going back and forth and back and forth and finally, painfully, they parted with me, a lonely tear rolling down each editorial cheek.

Well, no. If you get through the whole staff only to get a form reject, it's because every single person recommended a "no." If, on the other hand, you were to receive a FR with a handwritten note at the bottom, a) Hi! That was me! Nice to meet you! I probably didn't read your story because it was probably submitted like four months ago but damn it I found something nice to say anyway! and b) THAT means everyone poured over it and is letting it go with tears rolling down the royal cheeks, etc.

So of the two other options, how could you possibly know? Well, hint: if your story was about racist flying man-eating goldfish, that should read "Lowly Intern could not even finish your story WHY ARE YOU CRAZY." If you, a mature adult, wrote 27 pages about how you KNOW your dog can talk, your FR should take the form of Lowly Intern banging her head on her desk. Otherwise, I cannot help you.

So if it makes you feel best to think "Oh whatevs, some pretentious 20-year-old English major didn't like me. So what?" You keep on truckin, writer-friend. If you'd rather think that everyone read it, and Lowly Intern forgot to put your handwritten note on the bottom (LI is, of course, lazy and stupid, being a pretentious 20-year-old English major, remember) then think that, because we deal in ambiguity and you deal in flying goldfish and grandmothers dressed up as Tinkerbell.

I had hoped that my foray into the publishing world, however brief, would do wonders for my ability to understand the intricacies of the form reject. Alas, I say, no luck. If I got a form reject from myself, I would put it in the stack and ask myself all the same questions. Then I would conclude that I am not worth too much worry and bitter regret. After all, I'm only the intern.

One thing you can note, having received a FR from me, your lovely bloggy friend. You certainly were not one of the many. I remember you, fair rejects. I remember you.

We hates it, we hates the white face

One of the most exciting parts about lupus is a totally invisible sensitivity to sun that leads me to break out the Gollum voice. I don't actually burn too easily - I usually get a traditional first-sunny-day-of-spring burn, but I usually avoid the sun when I can.

I tend to resent anything I "have" to do. I don't mind putting sunscreen on in the middle of summer when I go to the beach,* but I am also supposed to wear it on rainy days, snowy days, and under florescent lights. My particular brand of bitterness is difficult to explain. I think it comes from my 9-year-old sense of what's not "fair." (I'll try and explain that better at not-1 a.m.)

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*I...I don't even own a bathing suit. But in a crazy, upside-down world...
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Summer fucks me up in two shifts: an end-of-summer flare, and a winter flare. I do not know why it works this way. It's been suggested that winter flares in lupies could be due to accumulated summer sun coming back to bite our asses in the winter. I feel my best in autumn, but that might also be because it's my favorite season, I go back to school, and I'm generally happier.

Regardless: Summer flare. Hello! Welcome. I've missed you. I have this rash on my elbow that's been there for five (?) years (yet every time I go to the doctor they say "dude what's this rash on your elbow?" "Doc, I've had that for five years." "Really?" "Yes." "Oh, well. Hell if I know what it is.") I'd be tempted to say it's a birthmark or stained skin or something, except that it gets darker the more sun I get, and even moves down my wrist. That's the first sign of the end of summer.* I stop sleeping, not so much because I'm in pain, but just due to killer insomnia coupled with that fatigue that hits you over the head and every time I blink it feels for a second like I am not going to open my eyes again.

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*This year, evidently, the middle of summer
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The oddest symptom I get (and I think it's a factor of fatigue, actually), is this fever-without-a-fever feeling. I am clammy and sweaty but my temperature's normal (a little low, which I guess is what we've considered normal for me. My blood pressure, too.)

This post was actually supposed to be a silly little jabber about form rejects for the lovely Rejectionist's un-contest - but I am worn out with back pain and sleepy. (I am too in love with The Rejectionist to try and write something for her in this state.)

Also, debt collectors are after me again because of a chest x-ray I got in October 2008. This is despite the fact that we settled this with the hospital a year ago. Every once in a while, this kind of thing reminds me of how inept I am at dealing with the practical aspects of being ill. I can't organize my doctor's appointments (things I should have already done this summer: eye doctor, nephrologist, physical therapy), I can't even FATHOM how I'm going to pay for myself later, because none of my life plans involve careers that offer health benefits. Just the thought of all this is enough to keep me up another hour. Eep!

It's estimated that having lupus costs over 20,000$ per year, combining missed pay and medical bills.

And please remember that, technically speaking, I am in remission. I'm not on any medication. Most of my blood work is within range. Others have a whole world of concerns beyond mine, and I remember my days of doctors every three weeks and chemo once a month and collapsing when I tried to get out of bed. It is extra infuriating to be off meds and still be lying here at 1:30 a.m., unable.to.sleep.

Tomorrow: Form rejects!

A Box Labeled "Explosives"

Evidently, they're shooting Transformers 3 in Chicago and several trailers are right outside our windows. (I do not have a window. But Mighty Editors do!) I, clueless as ever, did not realize this was happening until EA was filling me in on Something Complicated and one of the AEs of a nonfiction magazine came trotting out of her office and said, "Guys, the box labeled 'explosives' is outside my window again, come see!" So we all dashed over, looked at the Box Labeled 'Explosives' and were impressed.

Having received (finally) a packet of first reader checked submissions, and having had to pick fan mail and contest winners for publication, and having been handed several books to find interesting passages from, I all of a sudden am swamped with work. I have, as of today, discovered a flaw in the (my) system.

Basically, once I have read a submission and decide to pass it on, I write up a little Reader Report. It has the FR comments, my rec for which magazine, and some comments, usually along the lines of "if you just let me HELP it, it could be so GOOD!" (Those get sent back to me with the post-it "plz reject!") Okay, so RR is done. Now what? I print out the RR and make a photocopy of the story. The RR is stapled to the photocopy. The original goes in a file folder than I must make and file alphabetically.

Whenever I file things, I get the alphabet song stuck in my head for the rest of the day.

I am that cool.

Regardless, my system is to do five RRs before I file them. If I file every time I decide to pass one on, it would be ridiculously inefficient, but if I did more than five I'd spend all my time singing the alphabet and confusedly filing.

The flaw? Every time I have four RRs done I suddenly get really picky about what I accept because I am...what's the word?...careful? nitpicky? Oh, lazy. That's right. I would say submissions that I read between RRs 4 and 5 have a much greater possibility of getting a form reject straight away.

(Note, please, that I am too much of a fraidy cat to reject anything I think has ANY chance of succeeding. Usually I pass on 20% things I LOVE, 40% poetry that I do not have an opinion on and 40% things I do not like but feel bad about rejecting out of hand. About 60% of all that comes back to me to form reject anyway. ...Also I made all those percentages up. But you know what I mean!)

So then the AE who had explosives outside her window came back and said "They have a fire extinguisher now. I feel much safer."

Bubblewrap! Fantastic!

EA came over to my shoebox mid-day with a large box. "This would be good for first reader submissions," she said (possibly noting that my FR boxes are getting pretty full and that I am just too lazy to send them.) "Also, I brought you bubble wrap. In case, you know, you want to pop it."



A woman discovered that we had printed her story by reading the magazine. (Surprise!) Assuming she had not heard about this because we did not have her change of address (she got married!), she sent us her new name and address. She also included (lest we demand proof) her (original) wedding certificate. She did not include a SASE. But we were kind, and sent it back anyway, with a pink post-it that said "We are updating our records - we thought you might like this back."

My Mind-Body (dis)connect, Part I

I've been thinking about this post for a while now, but it keeps getting pushed off by funny anecdotes from the publishing world or the more acute weirdnesses, which, incidentally, was about to put it off again. I was nearly knocked down by the second worst cramps in the past year or so. I walked the 40 minutes home from work because I couldn't imagine sitting on a train or a bus, but it was 85 degrees and I mentioned before that when the endometriosis attacks, it radiates down to my legs and it was a wobbly, dizzy walk.

But I've spent time here in this shiny little blog talking about my pain and trying to explain it, because I'm thinking it's not fair of me to be frustrated with how misunderstood my disease is if I can't put it out there in plain English. I can't make anyone feel how I feel, but "pain" is so vague and my favorite phrase - "my everything hurts!" - I usually say with a false, self-mocking whine, because while I am trying to be honest about how I feel, when people take me seriously I am very uncomfortable.

Why on earth should it feel like a lie? When I go to the doctor they ask me if I'm in any pain. I almost always say no. It's not true, of course, but I guess I mean that there's no pain I can expect them to fix. Or, perhaps, there's no pain bad enough that I'm willing to put time and energy into fixing it.


I've been to a couple of therapists, one at home my senior year of high school and then briefly at school. The therapists addressed my high school inability to hold onto healthy relationships. Both therapists were diagnosis-happy: they looooved to tell me what disorders I had and why, but (and perhaps this is a product of my being unreceptive) I felt they gave me no suggestions as to how to fix it. Their favorite is my little quirk of smelling and tasting Cytoxan years after my last treatment. They were so excited. They were all going into flashback-mode, giving me trauma disorders.

I found out later that a lot of lupus and cancer patients find that they can't get rid of the smell, that it will sneak up on them. I actually think what sets it of is a combination of sweat and alcohol smell, tinged with something else...urine or vomit, perhaps (yeah you're all running for the hills at this point). It's a smell combination that I'm extremely sensative to, and on weekends at college I hit on it more often that I'd like. I convert that smell somehow into Cytoxan and proceed to feel nauseous for a good 20-30 minutes.

That doesn't interest me, because that is a clear mind-body connect. 22 Cytoxan treatments when I was at a very maleable age (11ish) - it seems natural that I would be prone to this "flashback." I mention often the taste of the stuff, because the first time I had the treatment, my nurse gave me the last dose to take orally by squirting it into the back of my throat, and the second it touched my tongue my whole body rebelled and vomited, though I'd swallowed none of it. That taste works its way into my mouth any time I feel ill, and any time I think about it.

It's been suggested that the actual taste is the sour taste of adrenaline due to my intense fear of vomiting or the fact that I still have remnants of my young self's anxiety when I talk about these things.

These are still very closely connected, the mind and body, and all of this makes sense. Too much sense. It's almost boring.

What causes problems for me is the knowledge that I have had lupus for pretty much as long as I can remember. I mean, sure, I have memories from pre-age-9 (actually, I have a pretty long memory, my first being from when I was a little over 2 years old, a traumatic experience with a talking parrot). But we are not really people that young and we change so much between the ages of 9 and 20 that I HAVE to accept that being diagnosed must have in some ways defined who I am now. Now, keep in mind that i refused to tell people about my disease until I was 17. Does that sound like I was the type of person who was at all willing to be defined by it? No. I fought that so hard that, I think, it backfired a bit. The only astute thing my first therapist ever said to me was "You're doing okay now, I think, but you're falling a little and eventually you're going to hit the ground, and it's going to hurt." (This she said, perhaps talking out her ass, while I was quitting her. But whether she was blowing smoke or not, I guess she was kind of right.)

I do not want to let this post get too long so we'll call this the Setting the Stage post. The truth is that since Rituxan, which I went on at 14, the pain itself is no longer really my issue, except in the sense that it seems to constatly poke and prod just to remind me that I am just a little bit separate. (Or just to remind me that I have separated myself just a little.) I'm only 20, and I don't pretend to have any idea what I'm talking about, but next time I come back to this, I want to continue the (thrilling!) exploration of what it feels like, mentally, to grow up with a chronic illness.

In which Lopate suddenly wins my dorky heart

...by comparing his sister's cynicism to the Marquise de Merteuil.

This is an unnecessary blog update. But I am at work and having wandered to EA who send me to three AEs, no one has anything for me to do. I've done the mail two days in a row now out of sheer boredom and am resisting doing it again today. BAD SUBMISSIONS, PLZ.

The Way This Works

A few notes, first.

"Dear Publisher: How are you doing? I hope that your doing good [sic, sic, sic]. I am a poet." I'm thinking, okay, this is clearly a child. No. Ladies and gentlemen, not only is this a veritable adult-human, but this adult-human has won poetry awards and has been published. I am losing faith in everything. I make an extraordinary number of allowances! I, too, typo up my life. But "I hope that your doing good" makes my skin crawl! Furthermore, he mixed "your" and "you're" up in one of his poems, too. Sighhhh. Learn your homophones, people. I know that you can be an intelligent person and still not know the difference between their, they're, and there, your and you're, but you cannot, cannot, CANNOT be a successful writer.

Actually, I don't know that that's true. SIGH.

"Daffodils we try to quell...yet they sprout like a golden spell...enclosed find a poem about these flowers...I think it will entertain you for hours...Thank you for considering my submission...I hope it aligns with your magazine's vision..." Cover letters in verse do nothing for me. But thank you for the thought.

Also, get the name of the publisher right on your envelope. I WILL notice if you get it wrong, especially if the word our company becomes suddenly takes on a dismal meaning.

For serious, people, I know I kid around with you, but, as Blackadder would say, "Underneath this playful, boyish exterior beats the heart of a ruthless, sadistic maniac" and you MUST, MUST, MUSTTT stop gluing your envelopes to your submissions. Thank you.


Now it occurs to me that I have never exactly explained what this whole process is (and this occurred to me when my dear friend Emily, who is, in addition to being my dear friend, a loyal reader of this bloggy thing, said 'wait, so what exactly do you DO? what's a first reader? what do they do? huhhhh?').

For this particular magazine, where we get too-many submissions each day and have a Lowly Intern doing the mail, the system is thus!:

Lowly Intern comes in Monday, Thursday. (Also Tuesday and Wednesday but non-mail days are of no interest to us just now). She sees "holy shit that is a big-ass pile of mail." After lunch, when she is bored and caffeinated, she takes on the mail pile which, incidentally, is situated just a bit above her 5'2 head and likes to slide and fall and die. Usually, therefore, she takes the in-tray down before getting the submissions, but since last time this backfired on her, she now takes the mail down bit by bit.

(It is CRUCIAL, dear readers, that you understand this process.)

Lowly Intern then staggers to her desk, where she hones her letter-opening skills (only tore one submission last week!). She checks the contents of each envelope quickly. Makes piles: Biggest (usually) is sumbissions; a few that were supposed to go to accounting; review copies of books for EA; art submissions which go to art department. Sometimes things that are just WEIRD, like, for example, Tinkerbell paraphernalia.

Having gotten rid of non-submissions, Lowly Intern begins the painful process of sorting them. Writers, PLEASE make sure your name is printed CLEARLY on your return address. Otherwise, when Lowly Intern goes to check your name against the VIP list, Lowly Intern has to take out your letter, unfold it, find your name (which is never where she thinks it will be), check it on the list, refold it because you weren't a VIP, battle it back into the envelope, and tear her hair out. True, this process is not the end of LI's life when it only happens once or twice, but in a pile of 100 envelopes, if she has to do that with 60 of them, she wants to die.

VIPs are unclear to LI. She thinks that they are authors who have been published in our mags before, but not ALL authors who have been published in our mags before are VIPs. Very mysterious. Regardless. Though LI checks all names against VIP list, she pulls out only 2 or 3 VIPs each mail day. She also pulls out Humor Submissions.

Anything else goes in a Box. Boxes fill slowly. Oh. So. Slowly. In perhaps two weeks (or two days. It really depends on the size of the box and how much mail LI gets), she seals the box up, battles with the UPS website which does not agree with her ancient computer, and sends the box to a first reader.

First Readers are freelance somethingorothers who take our Big Box o' Crazies (sorry, writers, but most of our submissions are from Crazies) and read through them. We send them, in addition to ~100+ submissions, 100+ form rejects.

FR form reject (whoaaaaaa....FR...FR....coincidence? I think not.) MOST of what we send them. And then they send US a packet of the rest of them. This packet gets "INTERN" written on it, even though they swear they know LI's name.

Lowly Intern then reads through these ~50 or so submissions. She rejects most of them. She is a fraidy cat, though, so she sends perhaps 10-13 of them on to EA.

EA rejects most of them. In fact, most of them she gives back to LI to form reject. LI then feels silly for passing on something Form Rejectable.

The ones that we pass on, we write Reading Reports (RRs) on. They are mostly "Yes" "no" "Maybe", or in the case of one of our AEs, "if only this was better..." Then we suggest which magazine...and some comments i.e. "Ew, no, get it away." or "Writing was okay but plot fell flat here, here, and here..." RRs are saved on the same server, it goes from LI to EA to AE*s of various magazines, to the MAIN EDITOR.

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*still Associate Editor, if we've forgotten.
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One of my favorite things to do when I'm bored is to go through old RR's and see where the stories I've passed on are at. It's nice to see that two or three of them have gotten resounding "yes!"s ... And one I passed on half as a joke got really positive responses, too. It was a silly little fairy-tale that was goofily told and I was SURE it was going to get sent straight back to me to form reject, but no! It was liked!

Anyway, now that I've bored you all to death, I am off. I, you will be jealous to hear, am watching Hell's Kitchen. I am also finishing up Philip Lopate's "Getting Personal" which I semi-recommend. It is quite good. Just also quite long. And he has that intellectual's way of writing essays which is way more long-winded than, say, my lover Eula Biss. He sticks on one topic for aaaaages without bringing in any other random facts, then moves on logically from point to point to make his argument, sometimes backtracking and parentheticalling in a kind of confusing way. (Wow I'm making this sound terrible. It's a really good book! Great essays! It's a tiny bit dense for me. I tend to like essays that meander about, weaving lots of bite-sized tidbits into something big and fascinating. Like Hell's Kitchen. I'm kidding, I'm kidding. Or am I?)

Things That Are Badass.

1. PUBLISHING is BADASS. And the REASON it's badass is because of the three paper towels covered with blood that are now in the waste bin under my desk. Obviously, badassery is judged based on the opportunity for injury. I always suspected publishing was more than just soul-numbingly dumb mail. This mail was feisty. (EA's in-tray got me. It skimmed off a fat-grain-of-rice-sized bit of skin from my right middle finger. It then refused to stop bleeding for twenty minutes, just to mock me. I was too embarrassed to ask for a band-aide.)

2. CHILDREN are BADASS. I did fan mail today, and they made me laugh more than humor submissions. 60% of kids end their letters with "P.S. blah blah blah. P.P.S. what does P.S. mean?"

3. CRAZY PEOPLE are BADASS (I suppose.) This one woman, who I get submissions from every single mail day (twice a week) submitted SIX envelopes worth of stuff today. Not only that, but she managed to seal EVERY SINGLE envelope TO her submission. At first I thought she must have been really dumb but I've decided that six times must be deliberate. I therefore choose to believe that she has a secret and BADASS plan to take over the world, one incorrectly sealed envelope at a time.

4. ENTS are BADASS. There was a woman who submitted something today whose last name was Entwise. (It actually wasn't. But it began with "Ent" and so my point stands). So I am now watching Lord of the Rings, after which I will read Lord of the Rings and then I will hug an Ent.

I am going to tell you a fascinating story. My little brother, as a young child, had terrible dyslexia and ADHD, and he didn't learn to read until he was almost twelve. (Now, incidentally, he is both more intelligent and a better reader than I am. I, however, get better grades. So. So. So...um. Whatever. We'll leave my inferiority complex towards my little brother for another time.) In a way, this was a nice thing because my being sick led my brother to HATE me with every fiber of his being. Neither of us knew why this was - my mom thinks that worry turned into anger, because he didn't understand what was going on, he just knew that I wasn't fun and my parents weren't around. The fact that he couldn't read meant that my family read books aloud until I was ~12 or 13, carving out an hour or so every night where we weren't fighting.

The book we were reading when I was eleven was Lord of the Rings, which we got from my grandparents. The day after we finished The Fellowship of the Ring, we went out and saw the movie. (A bit of an issue, actually, since they went and tacked on the beginning of TT to FotR which meant that I was like WTF why is Boromir dead?) When the movie came out, it was one of maybe four videos that we owned and I watched it quite a bit.

Skippppp forward. When I was...twelve? Oh who knows. When I was a little older I got put on Cytoxan which is a DISGUSTING chemotherapy. It's a twelve hour treatment, so I was in the hospital all day long. I started bringing LotR to the hospital with me. By the time I ended the treatments I was watching all three DVDs in a day once a month. (I was on Cytoxan for the absolute maximum number of treatments you're allowed to give a person.)

I probably had a point. I think I was considering myself as a Creature of Habit. For the longest time, i had a hard time watching new movies or reading new books, probably because I so desperately needed stability. So when I, now a TOTALLY SANE (pause for laughter) human, curl up to watch Lord of the Rings I can feel my entire being relax. Another advantage of 11 years...I know, for the most part, what works for me.

Next time: I avenge myself upon the Devilish In-Tray.

The Wolf

The actual reason it's called lupus is because of the malar rash, which is odd, because we actually call that, colloquially, the "butterfly rash." One of the first people I ever told about my lupus (when, by the way, I was fourteen, so we're talking five years in and 3 people knew besides my family) joked that maybe it was called lupus because it feels like a wolf attack.

I have never tried to write while actively in pain and as a consequence it's been very hard for me to describe how it feels. To quote the pain scale, eh, again, "My nerves cannot, or will not, imagine past pain - and this, I think, is for the best. Nerves simply register, they do not invent. ...I have discovered that the pain I am in is always the worst pain imaginable."

But at this very moment I write to you in not the worst pain imaginable. Even though I cannot, perhaps, exactly remember what worse pain feels like, I know that this is not the worst. But it is something more than "usual" - I can't sleep, and thinking this post out is hard. But I am so used to writing abstractly about my disease and I want to try and write something in the moment. The description will be crude, most likely.

My wrists have sharp pains that feel like they're going inward, towards the center. They feel warm but don't look swollen. My fingers are tight and they shake when I try and straighten them. I'm holding my shoulders even higher than usual and I can't really tell why, except that my left ear has a cold pain deep down and perhaps it is a reaction to that. My lower back is sore, probably from my mattress. I finally put my mattress pad from school on one half of my full sized bed, and hopefully that will help. My back pain radiates to my abdomen, and I have had "cramps" for three weeks, though my period ended two weeks ago. This is a warm pain and it's not new tonight. My hips have a sharp pain, mostly going outwards, like a spike but smaller, and I can't seem to satisfy them. My knees and ankles have shooting pains going down. My right knee, on the outside, feels like I've knelt on something lego-shaped, but there's no mark. I also have a headache and my eyelids are clicking when I blink, which my mom says is because I'm dehydrated.

I don't know how much of this is normal. It may all be from my mattress, from exhaustion, from the kid I babysat for who coughed on my face multiple times: it could be a virus. My wrists and fingers and elbows could easily be from how much typing I've done for internship lately (once they found out that I'm a pretty freakishly fast typer when I need to be they started giving me long-ass transcriptions) because the keyboard is a little high up for my wrists and the keys need to be pressed just a little too hard.

I once got up the courage to be pathetic and I asked a friend if he ever felt 100% comfortable, and he told me no. So I'm not sure where I can get off whining about "chronic" pain when most of the time it is no more than a heaviness in my body. Even when I go to the doctor, unless something is bad enough that I need medicine for it (and I do not take painkillers unless I HAVE to), when they ask if I've got any pain I say "no." Sometimes I'll try - "my fingers hurt" "rate that" "5" always five, the middle. They've never offered much of a solution, so I mostly don't do it.

Anyway, that's a little window into the Here and Now of this crazy condition. Even though I started telling people about my illness once I started college (ages 9 - 18 very VERY few people were told; I was embarrassed) I still have trouble talking about it when it is acute. I don't mind people knowing the abstract, but I dislike the particulars. I find them slightly tedious and endlessly obnoxious. But hey, it's the internet, and it's hard for people to understand a disease when what it feels like is never explained.

But again, this isn't a terribly bad night. I will fall asleep eventually. It's just a matter of knowing how to make yourself tired enough to drift off before the wolf bites.

(that was very artsy and dramatic, eh?)

Examining another couple of situations in which I am less than bright

Friends, it has been hot as BALLS here the past few days. I understand the east coast has it worse, but for serious, when one is sitting in stopped traffic and it is 97 degrees and one gets a sunburn just in the crook of one arm...To be honest, I totally had no plan for that sentence. So let's bury it and move on.

My dad brought a bag back from Frankfurt for me, where he was stuck for a week because of the volcano. While he was stuck there he was also quite ill from having eaten some "funky cabbage" in India. Obvious solution: buy daughter a bag, then forget about it until three months later. Anyway, the bag is lovely. Dad thinks it's Turkish. It is blue. And other colors. But the strap is blue. Recall that it was hot as balls the past few days. It turns out that when my, uh, cleavage sweats, the blue bleeds onto my white shirt. Of course, saying cleavage is generous to the point of being an utter lie. Like, if my mom launched an investigation as to how I ruined one of the four Non-Frumpy articles of clothing that I own, and I used the word "cleavage" while being deposed, I'd be thrown in jail for perjury. (Are jails air conditioned?) Regardless, that part of me that would be cleavage were I more buxom, now has blue all over it. I mean, that part of my shirt. This story is getting out of hand. Out. Of. Hand.

I would suggest being very sympathetic for my poor white shirt, only I noticed this problem three days ago on a crappy tee shirt, then used the bag anyway for two more days. Also, my books are all slightly blue-tinged now. It's actually kind of cool - like when you use tea to age paper? Only instead of age, it's aqua!

That is one situation in which I am not so bright.

The other situation in which I am not so bright is that I have no sense of direction. And so, even though I go the same routes to and from work every single day, I manage to get lost one way or the other every day. The thing is, I am apparently under the impression that the best way for me to stay on Lake Street, once I am already walking down it, is to arbitrarily turn onto Wabash and only notice this three blocks later. Seriously. My inability to remain on Lake Street ASTOUNDS me.

I am also having one of those days where everything I try to say just comes out penis. Seriously, everything I said today was also what she said. Only I was saying it to somewhat mature people and I couldn't tell if they were judging me.


Moving on, some news from the office:

I found in the kitchen a can of coffee with the note, "Hey guys, it's my turn to bring in coffee, so here it is! It's intended as a beverage, but I will not stand in anyone's way, AE*, if they want to eat it by the spoonful." *(an) Associate Editor.

You are totally thinking I'm not going to be able to make a clever segue out of that story, but I am. See, as I chuckled away (because, really, that AE is EXACTLY the sort of fantastically odd man who WOULD eat coffee grounds by the spoonful) I realized the great and terrible thing about this particular publishing house (I don't want to get ahead of myself and say 'the publishing industry' but I have a hunch it may hold true elsewhere). I'm working in an office of people very much like me. Really strange quirks, laugh awkwardly after every sentence, try to sneak past everyone without saying hello or goodbye in the mornings and evenings, enjoy reading and the internet, and, above all, are generally young, fun, but reclusive. Which is fine for those of us who have established outside friends and stuff, but I am at hoooome, friends, hoooome, where I sadly know no one and am thus going totally stir crazy from lack of any sort of social interaction, ever. Except with my brother, parents, and (lovely!) friends on the interweb.

See, here I'd planned to go into part I of my 4 billion part series about my Mind-Body (dis)connect, but I think instead I will tell you more about envelopes. First off, I'd like to say that I am now a fanfuckingtastic letter opener. I hardly ever rip submissions, SASEs or original pictures of the author's baby (I made that one up, but it will happen one of these days.)

Furthermore, some of you have really interesting ideas about how to handle your submissions. I am going to go from least interesting (but probably most actually helpful) to most interesting (and probably least helpful, unless you are CRAZY like these people.)
1. If you include a SASE that is too small for your whole manuscript, you need to say in your cover letter "don't return manuscript" or when Lowly Intern rejects you (because, you know, your submission was a little nuts) she has a mini panic attack because WHAT IF YOU CALL AND SAY YOU WANTED YOUR MANUSCRIPT AND LOWLY INTERN GETS FIRED EVEN THOUGH SHE DOES NOT EVEN GET PAID ANYWAY?
2. Don't write your cover letter in MASSIVE letters or ridiculous font. We are not 90 and we're also not in junior high.
3. If your nickname (please tell me it was your nickname) is "Spanky"...maybe do not use that as your author name? I just keep thinking what if you are really good and get published and it says "By Spanky" right under it? And then I giggle. Because I'm really not mature enough for this job.
4. If you are a nun, and you are using one of those cardboard envelopes with the tabby thing to open them, PLEASE do not DUCT TAPE over the tabby thing. And if you choose to do that anyway, please make your submission readable. Because after all that...you know. I mean, this holds true if you are not a nun, as well. But I was really excited that it was a nun, and then I couldn't open it.
5. It's probably a little unprofessional to use approximately 12 of your customized return address stickers to tape your envelope shut. That said, it made me laugh. Good-naturedly. Not in the same way I laugh at Spanky.

Okay, that's all I've got today, folks. Tomorrow, once I've done it, I will talk about the upside to having been sick so long: people ask for help, and I can give it. For now: nap.

Oh, P.S.

And remember how I have an unhealthy obsession with Eula Biss and her writing?

You can watch her read from Notes from No Man's Land here.

Once upon a time...

...I read de Sade's The Crimes of Love over 4th of July weekend. Let me tell you, people, I am so glad to have wandered back into the 18th century.

I had a terrible moment of panic when I tried to read Defoe's Moll Flanders, and I'll tell you why (because I'm sure, as with every time I go off into the 18th century, you are all FASCINATED). I read Robinson Crusoe for class last year and it was right after we read Les Liaisons Dangereuses which is just SO FUCKING FANTASTIC. Robinson Crusoe, on the other hand...borrrrringggg. It's just...I understand the vague interest of it, conceptually. And I think I decided it was historically significant at the time that I was reading about it. But Robinson Crusoe was stuck on that island for, what, twenty years? Was there any reason we had to live through that in REAL TIME? Especially when you get to page 60 and you're torn between "YES I made it 60 pages in" and "holy shit I have that long to go?"...and that is the time Defoe chooses to say "Hey remember the last 60 pages? I just found my DIARY. It describes everything that happened in the last 60 pages. I think I will put it in now, so you can re-read every event you just read about, only this time with MORE LISTS of MUNDANE THINGS." ...then you get all excited because Crusoe's all building a ship out of a tree and you spend eight years of your life reading about this ship made out of a tree and Crusoe's like "holy shit guys, this is fantastic. It's a boat, but it's made out of a TREE." and then...he can't drag it to the water. So you're like, okay. SOMETHING has to happen soon, right? Oh, look, a FOOTPRINT! There are CANNIBALS! THIS is going to be exciting. And then the cannibals come all the way ONTO THE ISLAND. And...nothing happens.

Moving on. I then discovered, while spending far too much money at Bargain Books, where I do my retail therapy (this being a trip where I was particularly in need of it, too), that Defoe wrote two other novels, Roxana and Moll Flanders, which are about whores and sex and stuff and I was like, okay, it's going to be didactic and probably more than a little obnoxious, but at least it's WHORES and do you know how much I love whores in the 18th century? I told myself that it's just because of the particular content that Robinson Crusoe didn't float my boat (or his, for that matter. Pause for groan.) Even Defoe can't make whores TOO boring.

Yes, he can.

I got ~150 pages in, but it was so boring that I was moving slowly and painfully and taking lots of breaks to watch lots of West Wing...and I thought to myself, "have I stopped loving the 18th century? Am I losing that bizarre love that makes me me?" Insert further life-crisis-y remarks.

I took a step back, read Eula Biss, and started anew, with de Sade. Oh, lovely readers, I do still love the 18th century. (I also sort of consider 18th century literature to go until aboutttt 1820s, maybe a little later. Though I am seriously not an expert on the subject, my general understanding, not gleaned from a reliable source but merely the tiny spark of a theory from my own mis-matched head, is that 18th century literature ends with industrialization, ish.) I could sit down and write a paper on The Crimes of Love and I would be wrong seven times over because it was so complex while managing to be totally readable and fun!

And who doesn't love a story that is thus:
Man wants to marry. Man asks for wife 30-35 ish years old. His friend says, "I got one! This one. She is 34 and she has a fantastic character. Problems: No one knows about her birth, because she was set on this guy's doorstep as a baby. However, guy will vouch for her character. Also, she had this little thing with a guy when she was 16, had a baby, baby and dad are both gone. Other than that, she's perfect."
Man: "Lovely! Will you marry me?"
Lady: "Okay, but, see, I don't deserve to marry."
Man: "Awha? I know about your little indiscretion as a teenager. If I'm asking for a 30-year-old wife, it'd be totally unreasonable for me to demand that she also be a virgin. No worries."
Lady: "Wait, wait, wait. But there's more. Let me tell you my story. Then you'll never want to marry me."
Begin Lady's story:
"So, I went to stay with Depraved Guardian, who encouraged my inappropriate liaison with this guy who got my preggers and then left me. Lots of sad. When he left me, I went back to Paris and stayed with Moral Guardian, who got me back on the right path. Then we took this trip. A 17-year-old fell in love with me. He told me he loved me. I told him to GTFO and that I was too old for him. So then he tried to rape me. I grabbed scissors to try and stab his arm, but accidentally I killed him. I'm a murderess!"
Guy: Um, okay, I get why you are feeling bad, but that was totes self defense. Still want to marry you!
Lady: No, no. So I went back to Depraved Guardian for a change of scene. Only she died. Also, she was unsaved so I tried to convert her on her death bed because I am Moral. [insert only touching scene in pretty much entire collection of stories, of "Depraved" lady dying.] So since she was all dead, I went to this inn. And I saw a woman kill another woman. Then they made me be a witness and it was on my testimony that they sent her to death. I hate myself, because I also killed, but I got away with it.
Guy: I am sorry. Let us to wed!
[wedding.]
3 months later:
Knock, knock.
Man: Who is this guy?
Plot Twist: I am your son, remember me? I ran off with your Depraved Wife, who was a whore and took me with her. I was a Problematic Youth, but I must tell you something important, the tragedy of our family, which can no longer be hidden from you. Hi, New Mommy - I'm sorry the first time I meet you is at a time of crisis
Lady: Oh, that's fine, proceed.
Plot Twist: Okay, so, you remember that I left with your Depraved Wife? Well, I was also depraved. And when I was seventeen, I had this affair with a 16-year-old who had a baby. I took the baby and left her. I then left my son with a guardian and went to war. When I got back, I found out my son was dead. He tried to rape this older lady he was besotted with, and she accidentally stabbed him with scissors. So I went to see my mother, to seek her advice, and I found she was imprisoned and sentenced to death. Apparently, she stabbed a rival, but she would never have been caught if the testimony of some woman had not been procured. Anyway, I was talking to her the day before her death and she told me I had to come tell you that she gave birth to a daughter! She left the daughter on a doorstep of this guy [insert Lady's first guardian's name].
Lady: Shit son. So you are telling me that I have slept with my brother, my son, and my father? And also have sent my mother to her death? Methinks 'tis time to shoot myself in the head.
Men: Yes, and we will go live piously in a cave.
End scene.

Well, I enjoyed it. I'm not sure my little summary really captures the sentiments so well. However, in addition to that gem there is a fantastic trip into hell, a really gross incest story with the censored bits put back in, de Sade's attempt to convince us that he knows a lot about Sweden, and lots of very strange philosophies that are hard to decode. Like, it's really REALLY hard to tell where de Sade stands on anything. For me. And I know nothing about him or his work except for this one book. I need to sit down with my adviser (who is the one who got me into this whack-job of a century) and make her explain.

For palate cleanser before moving on to Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure (come now, THAT is going to be fantastic) I am reading Philip Lopate's collection of personal essays called Getting Personal. Thus far, quite good! (Thus far = page 8).



Back to work tomorrow. Perhaps I will have fun anecdotes, because Monday is MAIL DAY and since I haven't done mail since last Wednesday it might be a pretty hefty bunch.