Today is Beloved's and my thirteenth wedding anniversary. Yesterday he was in the shower while I was putting on makeup in the bathroom mirror, squinting at my reflection with annoyance.
Me: "So ... do you still think I'm hot?"
Him: "Sure. But you'd be way hotter if you handed me the new bottle of conditioner."
THAT WAS EASY.
Love you, babe!
Today my interview with my publisher is up on their website, InkSpell Publishing.
My favorite part of the interview is the reveal of THE OBVIOUS GAME playlist. The chapter titles are actually all album titles from the late eighties and early nineties for no reason other than it's my book and I wanted to and the novel is set in 1990 and nobody ever either a) figured out they were album titles or b) told me that was hokey and ridiculous and I had to take it out. I haven't actually pulled this playlist together on iTunes yet, but dammit, I should do that.
The Obvious Game Playlist
Chapter 1: Pride by White Lion (1987) – When the Children Cry
Chapter 2: Appetite for Destruction by Guns N’ Roses (1987) – Welcome to the Jungle
Chapter 3: Scarecrow by John Mellencamp (1985) – Small Town
Chapter 4: True Colors by Cyndi Lauper (1986) – True Colors
Chapter 5: Can’t Hold Back by Eddie Money (1986) – Take Me Home Tonight
Chapter 6: Hysteria by Def Leppard (1987) – Hysteria
Chapter 7: Nothing’s Shocking by Jane’s Addiction (1988) – Jane Says
Chapter 8: Just Like the First Time by Freddie Jackson (1986) – Have You Ever Loved Somebody
Chapter 9: Use Your Illusion by Guns N’Roses (1991) – November Rain
Chapter 10: Bat Out of Hell by Meatloaf (1977) – Bat Out of Hell
Chapter 11: Head Games by Foreigner (1979) – Dirty White Boy
Chapter 12: Faith by George Michael (1987) – Monkey
Chapter 13: Cuts Like a Knife by Bryan Adams (1983) – Straight From the Heart
Chapter 14: Double Vision by Foreigner (1978) – Hot Blooded
Chapter 15: Disintegration by The Cure (1989) – Fascination Street
Chapter 16: Poison by Bell Biv DeVoe (1990) – Poison
Chapter 17: Achtung Baby by U2 (1991) -- Who’s Gonna Ride Your Wild Horses?
Chapter 18: Nevermind by Nirvana (1991) – Smells Like Teen Spirit
Chapter 19: Listen Without Prejudice by George Michael (1990) – Something to Save
Chapter 20: Out of Time by R.E.M. (1991) – Losing My Religion
Chapter 21: The Way It Is by Bruce Hornsby (1986) – Mandolin Rain
Chapter 22: Infected by The The (1986) – Out of the Blue (Into the Fire)
Chapter 23: Strange Fire by Indigo Girls (1989) – Strange Fire
Chapter 24: Little Earthquakes by Tori Amos (1992) -- China
I put a three-book giveaway on Goodreads. If you use Goodreads, go enter! And if you don't use Goodreads, consider using Goodreads, because it's such a great way to discover new authors. And friend me there so I can see what you like. I think my username is Rita Arens.
Giveaway ends February 05, 2013.
See the giveaway detailsat Goodreads.
And, I've been writing a ton on BlogHer and forgetting to tell you about it. I bet you won't spot the theme!
In every marriage, there's a moment in which you get to be the one who is right. My moment came on Saturday night.
On Saturday, a series of events led to my victory.
When I realized the door had been open, I went to look for Petunia. She's never left the garage before, but she has visited it when I've left the kitchen door open, and on the night in question, both doors to the garage were open in an attempt to release the atomic air trapped inside. Since Petunia is terrified of my youngest niece, I assumed she'd be hiding out in the basement.
Halfway down the stairs, I saw something flutter. No, FLAP.
I ran back upstairs and yelled to Beloved there was something with WINGS in the basement.
Beloved: "Wings? Really? Are you sure it's not a cicada?"
I may not be in Mensa, but I know the difference between a cicada and a bird or bat (I wasn't sure which one it was at the time.) There's a slight size differential.
This is a cicada. (image credit: Gardener41 on Flickr)
This is a fucking bat. (image credit: blmurch on Flickr)
Me: IT IS NOT A CICADA.
He dropped whatever he was doing and went downstairs. Seconds later, we heard a loud crash from the basement.
Beloved: JESUS CHRIST! BAT! BAT!
(I may have allowed myself a smile)
I went to get a broom to join my knight in shining armor downstairs. He was crouched in front of the door to the half-finished bathroom, which leads to a half-finished, well, room room that we use as a tornado shelter. Nothing in our basement is finished, so we don't spend a lot of time down there.
Beloved looked back at me, sheer panic in his eyes. I could see the bat flying back and forth between the room-room and the bathroom, looking for all the world like the bat on a string you see on The Muppets.
Beloved: I think he's getting tired.
My BIL came down the stairs and I sent him for a weapon. Then I gave Beloved my broom, because the man was trying to catch a bat with a toy butterfly net. I headed up to re-arm myself when I passed my BIL storming down the basement carrying a shovel. I was pawing through the garage when he reappeared.
BIL: "He says we need something softer."
Me: "Is he worried about the bat?"
BIL: "No, he's worried about the walls."
I handed my BIL two plastic baseball bats and grabbed a bucket. As we re-entered the house, we heard Beloved yelling at the top of his lungs.
Beloved: "WHERE ARE YOU GUYS? A LITTLE HELP HERE???"
We rushed down the stairs, baseball bats swinging, to find Beloved crouched on the floor. Just the tiniest bit of webbed claw showed out from under the broom and butterfly net. BIL and I stared in shock. The bat was chittering away like a pissed-off rat.
Beloved: "GET THE BAG!"
I had no idea what he was talking about, and neither did BIL. Then I noticed a paper bag behind BIL. I tried to hand Beloved the bucket, as it seemed way more useful and user-friendly than a paper bag, but Beloved had gone to a place that doesn't hear reason. He is not fond of bats.
Finally BIL handed Beloved the bag and they got the bat out into the yard, where PETA will be glad to hear it was released. I admit at the point at which I heard it cursing us out in bat language, I wasn't too keen to kill it, but I was also thinking CHILDREN RABIES CHILDREN RABIES CHILDREN RABIES, as mothers are wont to do.
The next morning, the bat was gone, so we believe he lived to tell his story on his own blog.
AND I WAS TOTALLY RIGHT. Not a cicada, honey.
NOT A CICADA.
Because I enjoy a little healthy debate (and also because I've been thinking about it a while), I posted yesterday on BlogHer about marital term limits. I actually don't care for that terminology, because it sounds like you're required to stop being married at some point, which was not what I was arguing for. If you want to be married, you wouldn't have to stop -- you just re-up. I actually like Mexico City's proposal (though two years seems a bit short):
The minimum marriage contract would be for two years and could be renewed if the couple stays happy. The contracts would include provisions on how children and property would be handled if the couple splits.
"The proposal is, when the two-year period is up, if the relationship is not stable or harmonious, the contract simply ends," said Leonel Luna, the Mexico City assemblyman who co-authored the bill.
"You wouldn't have to go through the tortuous process of divorce," said Luna, from the leftist Party of the Democratic Revolution, which has the most seats in the 66-member chamber.
It might seem odd that someone happily married after ten years is a fan of this idea. On Twitter last night I took a lot of heat for banging on "the sanctity of marriage." I don't see it that way at all -- the promise and commitment you make to your spouse can be spiritual, it can be religious, it can be personal -- but it needn't be legal. We all know plenty of people who are deeply in love and committed to each other for life but for whatever reason not legally married. The sanctity part has to do with the relationship, not the legal marriage. I believe in the sanctity of the relationship, not the sanctity of the legal marriage. Give to Caesar what is Caesar's.
Legal marriage is a legal contract and has nothing to do with love. Usually, they go hand-in-hand, but legal marriage as an institution is rooted in property ownership. In Missouri, where I live, it means this:
There are numerous legal benefits to marriage. There are both federal and state laws available only to married people. Other benefits include Social Security benefits, inheritance rights, property rights, the ability to sue third parties for the wrongful death of a spouse or loss of consortium, and the right to make medical decisions on a spouse's behalf.
There is nothing about love or sanctity or eternal commitment in the legal definition of marriage.
In my BlogHer series How to Get a Happier Marriage, I kept coming back to the concept of daily choice. Whether you're legally married or not, if you're in a healthy relationship, you're aware every day that you don't have to be there -- you're there because your life is better with that person than without him or her. You're there because you want to be. You're not enmeshed with the other person or controlled by him or her. I'm not saying it wouldn't be incredibly painful to leave, but if something happened to that person, you could go on putting one foot in front of another. You have to believe that if you don't want the other person to worry themselves to death over you.
I think it's actually detrimental to love to think to yourself, well, we're married, so this other person has to put up with me no matter how I behave. I wrote in April 2010:
The fact is that I can't see the future. I learned a long time ago that you don't just say "I do" and it's done. I'm a different person than I was when I got married eight years ago, and so is my husband. We have to wake up every single morning and -- without so much as coffee -- choose each other again. And when I choose him, I'm not choosing the man I married when we were 28. I'm choosing the man he is now.
If you keep choosing that other person with your eyes wide open over years of good times and bad, that love deepens. While bagging on Twilight, I wrote:
Diana's romance illustrates what I know to be true about many happy couples -- they met when they were young. Maybe they even fell in love when they were young. But, as she writes, true love -- the kind that lasts fifty years -- is something that brews over time spent bailing each other out from crises, from facing real life and sometimes mundane challenges and achievements.
I realize my opinion in favor of marital term limits won't be a popular one, even with members of my family. I do hope it's clear that I'm not talking about spiritual or religious marriage -- I'm talking about the legal documents that make separating in the case of two people falling out of love something that requires lawyering up and involving the family court system. Falling out of love with someone is bad enough -- to have to be financially devastated and prolong the experience just adds legal insult to emotional injury.
I do think people should be very sure before they get married. I do think people should commit to working things out if at all possible.
According to the U.S. Census Bureau, the U.S. has the highest divorce rate out of us, Denmark, Canada, Japan, France, Germany, Ireland, Italy, the Netherlands, Spain, Sweden and the U.K.
I have some other arguments for term limits in my BlogHer post. I hate to divide the conversation, so I'm going to close comments here and ask that if you'd like to respond that you do it there.
I'm not anti-love. I'm not anti-commitment. I think it's incredibly romantic to choose the other person every day for the rest of your life, as I do every day with Beloved. I don't see how separating the legal from the spiritual hurts my bond with him in any way. I'm actually surprised people are unwilling to see the difference between the legal bond and the spiritual or romantic one. Am I insane?
Today is Beloved's birthday. And today a crew of twenty or so men showed up at our house at seven in the morning to begin replacing our roof.
The roof is wood shake, which is the worst kind of roof ever. It's expensive, it's flammable and it rots. Ours is crumbling to bits and got slammed by the hail earlier this summer to the point that we were getting water stains on the ceilings. The first insurance inspector who came said it wasn't bad enough to replace. Beloved was livid, so was the roofer, a readjustment was arranged, and lo and behold, the second adjustor agreed: New roof! Paid for by the insurance company!
I've been in a half stage of shock since Beloved told me we were getting a new roof. We've been through a lot of money and broken house issues in our ten years of home ownership, and really, I've stopped expecting insurance companies to replace anything. I'm all GET OFF MY LAWN about it in a way I never thought I'd grow -- so jaded, just like my father when he talks about parking in Omaha. I'd accepted when the sweating man huffed his way up my stairs and examined the water stains located right above my winter sweaters (is there anything so vulnerability producing as having a stranger perspiring all over your wardrobe?) that we were screwed, there would be no insurance money and we'd probably have to take out some sort of horrific loan we don't qualify for or have buckets in every bedroom to catch the water when it rained. This is my best talent: catastrophizing. I don't even stop for the mid-level crises; I go straight to the bone splitters.
The longer we've been together, the more I've ostriched about money and house-related problems. After a while, I -- feminist still -- relinqueshed the checkbook and all the balancing and math that goes with it -- to Beloved. Every time I see him sit down with a stack of bills I half-heartedly offer to help and pray he says no, which he always does, whether he wants to or not (I'll never know). When I see those numbers fluctuate, I am suddenly incapable of seeing the big picture and become positive we will be living in a van down by the river in forty days. I don't know why. I just do.
Beloved taking over the checkbook and bill balancing put a roof over my head, a layer between me and the harsh outside world. I'm fine with shouldering all things parenting, with scheduling haircuts and dentist appointments for my daughter, with knowing her shoe size at all times and exactly how many minutes it takes to pick her up from wherever, where all her friends live and with whom she's allowed to go past the end of the cul-de-sac. I can be a big girl about my career and my health and my extended family. But that one thing for which I really do need a roof is money.
I'm sitting here listening to those twenty men ripping the house apart -- literally -- and trying not to think of them punching a hole in something or falling off and landing on the cement or dying of heatstroke or smashing my tomato plants. Beloved told me to go work at Panera or the library today because it would be so loud. I'm sure he understood that I wouldn't leave because I have a sick need to think it'll all be all right as long as I'm here while it's happening. But the truth is I wouldn't know what to do if something went wrong.
There are things in life that I know how to handle and things he knows how to handle, and I hope that I am his roof sometimes. My family always told me to marry someone I secretly think is better than I am, and I did.
Happy birthday, Beloved. Thank you for being my roof.
From my BlogHer Book Club review of The Kid: Read, then, so we will make better choices than the characters in The Kid. That we will pause and consider what a person might have been through before we judge. That we, at least, will not see the world in black and white, because it is never, ever black and white -- which is the message I took away from The Kid, a story in which the main character never really even knew his name, never knew if he was crazy or sane, never knew who his father was, never knew who was related to him, never knew anything for sure except that pancakes tasted good and dancing was a release and that he could teach himself to do the splits with practice and discipline. Read the rest.
Dear Beloved,
I had this great plan. Well, my first plan was that we would go back to the beach where we got married and, you know, renew vows and eat cake and drink champagne. Only that sort of didn't happen.
Then I told all my girlfriends I was going to have someone take a picture of me in my wedding dress, you know, sort of arty snapshot thing, that I could give you, only I would look okay in it, not totally thrown together. I had it lined up and planned for the day you were going to be working, but then you didn't work. Oops.
So then I started trying to think of back-up ideas, and the pressure of the ten-year anniversary gift started to freak me out every time I thought about it. You know how much I like ritual. I wanted something kind of formal and fantastic.
Then, just now, as I was getting out of the shower at 3, which I know is an extremely endearing quality about me, much like my inability to get out of bed and the fact that my feet stink, I decided to just take it. I didn't even wait for my hair to dry.
Only I forgot I got sunscreen on the lens of the phone camera at Worlds of Fun and didn't realize how heinously blurry these were until I emailed them to myself and opened them up, and dammit, I have a conference call in a half hour and then I have to go get the little angel, and you know this is how it is, this life thing that keeps happening while I'm planning the fabulous things I'm going to do for you.
But the carpet almost looks like the sand we stood on.
And the little beads still remind me of stars.
I couldn't get the whole dress no matter how I stretched and thus gave myself double chins. Another endearing quality: I have really freakishly short arms.
Maybe if I leaned over? Nope. Not going to happen.
Baby, I love you. I really wanted to get you something amazing, something heartfelt, but I realized I do have this blog, and maybe telling the Internet how lucky I am, how amazing you are, how astonished I am that our lives turned out so perfectly after these ten years, how much more comfortable I am in that dress than I was that day when I was so worried about the details and the sand and our relatives and friends, that today when I put on that dress all I thought about was us, and you, and how there's no one I'd rather see at the end of every day and when I first wake up and when something bad happens and when something good happens and when nothing happens at all.
I love you. Happy anniversary.
My friend AV blogs about sex. She's a sex blogger. SEX SEX SEX SEX SEX SEX
It doesn't seem like a job for the faint of heart, and fortunately, she isn't. She mentioned to me once that her family had asked her to adopt a pseudonym for writing because her writing embarrassed them. This week, AV wrote about it on BlogHer.
She wrote:
And if one thing I write makes one person feel less isolated, then my mission is complete.
Know, too, that I don't write about these things because I think it's safe or because I live with my head in the clouds and think it's perfectly acceptable to do so, but because I know it's not safe and it's not acceptable in this or any other society. This isn't a popularity contest -- it's a call to arms. This is the resistance.
In telling my stories I am liberating others to do the same, whether privately with me in my inbox, or in their own lives.
She wrote this and a lot more on her Facebook wall, in response to family members telling her they were embarrassed by her actions, telling her they felt sorry for her parents.
Then her mom responded:
Having said all this -- what do we think about our daughter? Allow me to express with pride that my husband and I find ourselves extremely satisfied in how she shares her own experiences and thoughts. You think we should feel ashamed but we fail to find reason to do so. We raised a daughter who stands firmly on her beliefs and values despite strong opposition. There is no shame in that.
Writing and family -- it's always a tightrope that every writer walks, and maybe more so every blogger. In telling our own stories, it's very difficult to not share someone else's. But AV is only writing stories of her own experiences -- if anyone should be upset, it should be the other individuals who were in the room, not her family.
I've had disagreements with my family over whose stories were whose, over whether or not I curse too much or have unpopular politics. I've often wondered if I embarrass my family on a regular basis with my words.
I think -- at least in American culture -- someone who writes about sex, not pornography, not erotica, but the actual act of sex as a physical, emotional, spiritual or not experience -- is literally and figuratively getting naked in a way few other writers do. Parenting bloggers write about guilt and walls streaked with poop. Food writers describe burning things, falling souffles, embarrassing mistakes. The ability to feel and express sexual desire is almost caricatured in modern society -- it often feels like there is only porn or tantric soul rocking -- nothing in between, but it is in the between that the rest of us live. Are we loved? Do we love properly? Is there a properly? If we don't have sex often enough, are we undesirable? Is sex as important as we thought it was? Is it more important than we thought it was? What is sex past twenty, past thirty, past when you look hot doing it? What is sexiness after the body starts to decay? What is sexiness when you're young and not yet comfortable with yourself?
I don't write about sex, other than the How to Get a Happier Marriage posts I did for BlogHer last year. It's not something I'm comfortable blogging about. But I did write about it a little in my novel, and in doing so, I started asking myself all those questions above. Sex is more and less than what we think it is. Perhaps it's the most vulnerable we can be.
I think as a people we're afraid to talk about actual sex for all of these reasons. We're comfortable with hinting at it, commoditizing it, using it to sell beer, acting as though we get it all the time, pretending we don't need it or we live for it, but heaven forbid we ever talk about it as the inherent part of the human experience it actually is.
I had this post all composed yesterday, but then a bunch of stuff happened, and I ended up having to shut down my computer without saving it. I'm kind of bummed, because that post was better than this one, or at least more sappy. It wasn't done, though, and there is no fast way to write a post about seven years of marriage.
Yesterday was my anniversary. Today is my parent's anniversary. Happy anniversary, Ma and Pa!
Seven years ago, my husband and I stood on a white sand beach in St. Pete Beach, Florida, and exchanged vows. We were 27. At the time, that seemed old to be getting married. (I live in the Midwest, remember.) Now, I can't believe anyone let me DRIVE at age 27, let alone get married. My generation gets married older, has babies older. My parents got married when they were near the same age, but for their generation, they were OLD. Funny how times change. Maybe by the time the little angel grows up, kids'll be getting married right out of high school again - why not, when you can download your college degree onto your iPod?
I remember when we first got married, after a weekend spent driving to Iowa and back (there were many more of them then than there are now), we'd have to each go our separate ways for a few hours on Sunday night. Too much togetherness. We got on each other's nerves. That doesn't really happen as often now, and I think it's because we've had to learn not to annoy each other, because with the little angel around, we have to be together more often. There is no more running off to the gym or sinking into an entire afternoon of napping and sports on TV when we're feeling pissy. There is no more avoidance. We've learned to make adjustments so coexisting is easier. We've learned to step out of the way in the bathroom proactively instead of bumping into each other and swearing.
There have definitely been some hard times, recent hard times, but the hard times overcome make the relationship sweeter. I knew when I married my husband that he was funny and smart and strong and kind, but I didn't realize he would be so resilient, so handy, and so comforting.
Yesterday I had a bad day. There was a bad conversation, followed by a big dose of stress and a bunch of things left unaccomplished. I started leaking tears on the way out of work. S. and The Editor Across the Aisle sent me home instead of to a birthday happy hour that I wasn't supposed to attend anyway, because I was supposed to go home for my anniversary dinner, but I was feeling guilty about missing the birthday and feeling guilty about the bad conversation and not getting my beloved a fabulous anniversary gift even though we said we weren't going to and did I mention I'm always a little upset about things during the ides of the month?
So I drove home. Made a few calls. Cut off my beloved to take a call from my best friend, who I know is better at listening to me vent than Beloved is (he is great, but he IS a man). By the time I got home, I thought he'd be pissed, because instead of being in a great and loving mood on our anniversary, I was strung out and stressed. I pulled in to see him and the little angel getting out of the car, carrying roses.
Seven years ago, he would've been pissed. Yesterday, he recognized that I was just having a bad day and in need of a little pick-me-up. Of course, I melted, and felt bad that I hadn't gotten him anything.
"Ha ha," he said. "I won." And he walked outside to light the grill.
Seven years. Some itchy, some not. Getting better all the time.
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Julie won the Build-a-Bear gift card giveaway and you can enter to win free Lee Jeans capris or pedal pushers at Surrender, Dorothy: Reviews.
