Allison Unfiltered

Sick days

shouldn't be this nice.  Or else I'd be feeding Leah germs every day.

(Taken with my blurry Treo)

Intro to Hippie Writer Door Culture

By the time you read this, I will be headed home to the DC area, my face streaked with mascara tears over leaving Vermont. 

On one of the doors down the hall from my dorm room:

...and on one of the faculty member's office doors. 

Three guesses what it reminds me of instead of whatever the hell it's supposed to be. (I walked past it every day and snickered every single time.)

Until next time, Goddard.

I have nothing to say.

If you ask me if I have any questions or comments one more time, my head will fall off from all the bobbling it's been doing for the last three days.

If you make me listen to one more reading, my eyeballs will crumble into dust a la the Raiders of the Lost Ark.

If you ask me to write down one more list of adjectives to describe my mind during writing or a character or a plot or a setting, my hand will strangle me.  And it will be completely voluntary.

If you ask me to remember one more amazing quote, my brain will explode and slime the people behind me with curdled ashen Jell-O. 

Dude.  Who knew writers talked so damn much?

(At least there's gonna be booze tonight.  I don't usually say this, but this time it's justified: Praise the Lord!)

I've always wondered what "Stupid is as stupid does" meant.

Yesterday at lunch someone I was sitting with asked me in a British accent -- via terp of course, thus the convoluted nature -- "So... Is she speech or hearing or both?" 

I threw the terp such an incredulous face she had to repeat it, Englishified sign for Englishified sign, eyebrows raised to indicate that, yes, she was saying exactly what the hearing person next to her was saying, y'know, kinda-sorta EXACTLY like she's supposed to.

So... am I speech or hearing or both? 

Um. How 'bout suffering from that chronic virus called stupidity?

Just another day at Goddard College.  (And yes, I still want a tattoo of Vermont stamped on my ass.)

First I stay up until 3 am on my first day of the residency doing absolutely nothing good for my writing or my schoolwork even though I know the whole week will zap my energy... although you could argue the dillydallying was good for me. *snorfle*

Then I can barely pay attention to a thing on the second day.  This is really good for me.   Bodes well for all the inspiration I'm gonna get out of this week for writing that amazing Pulitzer-worthy novel:

"Once upon a time there was a princess in a castle in a far, far -- ooh, look at her shoes!  Those are definitely Fuck-me shoes! -- well, anyway, this princess, she wasn't your ordinary sort of princess -- must not forget to write that letter... -- and all the people in the land saw her as a mysterious sort of being..."

Today I manage to get up on time, only when I look at my alarm clock it tells me I have 10 mins to get my ass to class: "Writer's Block and What to Do with it,"  which I desperately, desperately need (so badly I started licking and humping the schedule when I saw it).

Beeline to the showers, rush back to the dorm room, text a terp: "Late!  Coming!"

And then I realize it's really 8 am, not 9 am.  Must've accidentally changed the time when looking for a non-existent snooze button. Crapola.  Meanwhile my terps are whipped into a frenzy, thinking they're an hour late.  Erm... My bad.  Mea Cul-duh. 

It's snowing.  I can barely see the building across the quad -- it looks like I'm getting bad reception on a TV with rabbit-ears. 

Snow, meet stupid Alli.  Stupid Alli, meet snow.

Anyone willing to venture a correlation?

This is what a movie about telepathic people looks like.

Movie with Telepathic Actor from Queen Alpo on Vimeo.

It's now a quarter to 11, and my butt has been thoroughly flattened. I didn't plan it, but throughout that whole ride, I got up once. Scary.  I would have been pretty good in Anne Frank's annex, no?

By the time most of you elves read this, though, I'll be happily flitting around campus with fellow tale-weavers and eating scrambled tofu and turmeric like a genuine Vermont hippie.

When the sitters -- erm... SCHOOLS cancel.

One of Leah's teachers just paged me to let me know Leah would be coming home early because all of the county's schools are closing so I'd know to meet her bus.

That's it.  No explanation.  It was a pager message, after all.  Turns out there's some kind of widespread water outage.

Well, I'm home anyway, so it's not a problem.  But dammit...

Did this have to happen the DAY BEFORE WINTER VACATION? 

And how dare the school system shirk their responsibilities of taking my kid off my hands so I have the time to chill out and remember what it was like to be footloose and fancy-free?  Or to take care of pre-holiday craziness, depending on how responsible I'm feeling?

Don't those people at the schools know their real job isn't actually educating tomorrow's generation, but glorified babysitters?!  You'd think the paycheck and the hours would tip them off.

So, fine.  Leah's coming home in an hour. 

Which means I don't have time to return one gift I bought for her yesterday because I forgot someone already bought it off her amazon wishlist.  And I gotta figure out a way to keep her busy while I bake Amaretto cakes for the neighbors.  And we'll have to wrap gifts late at night instead of sleeping like normal humans.  And I'll have to listen to her constant yelling that she calls "singing," no matter how many times I tell her to STFU.

And that afternoon nap?  Canceled. 

Sob.

Java Economics, First-World Style.

Starbucks 5x a week at $3.71 for a tall Pumpkin Spice Latte (I already forgot how much the ventis cost) = $74.20 for 20 drinks a month

Home-crafted coffee at home 10x a week... all the refills I can drink!
 - $27.84 for a 6-pack of 16-pod bags via Amazon prime ($0.29 per cup!)
 - $9 for a 3-pack of French Vanilla coffee creamer at Costco - lasts 2 months or so
 - $5 for a generic 14 oz. canister of whipped cream for that fake-barista touch at the grocery store

*sound of calculator buttons screaming*

$21.10 for 40 drinks a month.

Per drink, that's a $3.18 difference.

The monthly difference is... let's see, $74.20 - $21.10 = part of the reason we've made it thus far through this recession and the loss of my regular paycheck earlier this year, rendering us a single-income family (that is, if you consider a teacher's paycheck an actual "income."  I prefer to call it "slave labor").

Holeee... shit.

Who knew borderline-agoraphobia had its pros?

Momentum, where art thou?

My semester has been over for a week now.

I didn't get a report card; I got an evaluation full of phrases like "focus more on revision next semester," "excellent ideas about characters and situations" and an X in a box next to "The student DID satisfactorily complete the work of the semester."

Usually at the end of a semester it's the most delicious feeling to flip off the world of academe and read whatever the hell I feel like reading, trashy and formulaic as it may be.  But I get to pick my own books for school anyway, so that's kinda anticlimactic.

So... no GPA to crow over, no reading to sinfully indulge in... what's a girl to do?  Or, better, what's a "writer" *koff koff* to do?

Write? 

*insert whiney voice*  But that's something I doooo for schooool!

Crap.  MFA in what used to be my favorite thing to do?  Not such a brilliant idea.

The Captions Just Write Themselves

It's called "overkill." And I'm squatting in a big, stinky, pile of it.

My mother-in-law bought me a copy of The Story of Edgar Sawtelle, which I had actually blacklisted after finding out Oprah had just picked it for that corporate publishing brainwashing machine she calls her bookclub.  

But dear MIL begged and begged for the chance to send it to me and even pointed me at reviews written by fellow Oprah-eschewers who said it was sooo good, good enough to ignore the Oprah sticker.

That's when I had a conversation with the bitch that lives in the left hemisphere of my brain, and said, "Hey, yo?  Free book?  And it's one you were going to read before Oprah picked it?"

"Yeah, but it'll probably have Oprah's name on it?!"

"So we can ask her to get a copy without her name on it?  Hello?  Selective mutism?  One of your obsessions because of the connection you think it has to deaf studies?  And, hey, she said it has DOGS in it!"

"Dogs?"

"Yeah, dogs!  The cute, furry kind!  Three of them."

"Er..."

"'C'mon.  It's free.  You're not pimping yourself out to Oprah by doing this, I promise."

"Dammit. Fine.  Let her send you the effing book.  One condition."

"What?"

"You deal with CK when he complains about how we have too many books and there's no room left in the bed for him."

"Nah, that won't be a problem.  I'll just sic his mom on him if he does."

"Ah.  I knew I liked being your bitch."

So I got the book a couple days later... and lo and behold, glory hallelujah -- the Oprah sticker peeled off quite painlessly.

And then I put it on top of the card stack that is currently my bookshelf, where it's sat untouched for a week now.

Blasphemy.  Treason. 

But geez.  Not only do I read three or four books every three weeks for school, I've just joined one book club that met last Sunday, but I didn't go because Leah was sick, which really sucked because I personally sacrificed exactly four iotas of my personal sanity after Colin chewed up the library's copy of the book and I had to replace it with the last few dollars in my bank account. 

And I thought the book was boring as heck, but I read every last word for a book club meeting I never attended.  Yeah.  Who knew I was a masochist?

And now it looks like I've decided to join The Next Chapter: Soul Coaching.  Which I think is kinda cool, because not only will I get to work through a book with a group of other neat strangers, but the book itself looks right up my alley, since I've been going through a really introspective phase this year and also wanting to deepen my study of paganism.  (This book isn't pagan, nor is the group pagan, not that I know of, but it certainly looks like it's pagan-friendly.) 

I could use some structure to this navel-gazing I'm becoming fond of doing, so I'm jumping in.  Interested?  Feel free to jump in too.

And next month is... NaNoWriMo.  Yep, the annual slapdash race toward a novel of 50,000 words in 30 days, in which the only prize is self-satisfaction and a nifty web badge.  And, if you've written anything good, the chance to whip it into shape and get it published, which, apparently Sara Gruen did with the awesome, fabulous, amazing novel Water for Elephants. 

So, yeah, November is NaNoWriMo.  I've never done it, just drooled over it from the land of virtual-afar.  I'd join, but since I'm already kinda-sorta working on juggling with writing three books -- two novels and one memoir -- at the moment, I think it's kinda dumb to add this to my "but, but, but... I wanna!" list. 

How about you? Taking the pill?  Corrinne Kenner has some tips to make the trip easier.

And... did I dream it, or did Hortense, the awesome new weekend blogger over at Jezebel say something about a Jezebel Book Club?  A google search says yes, but click through and Jezebel redirects you back to the front page.  If this was a tease, Tayari Jones got duped too - she linked to it on her blog as well. 

Aw, woman.  And I was so excited.  Humph. 

Would it be stupid to complain of having blue ovaries now?