I don’t know whether this is real or not. Probably both real and not real, depending on the situation. But assuming for a moment that it is true that families have certain shared traits (be they genetic or otherwise), I have come up with a list of reasons why I might, then, be adopted.

1. My dad is building an airplane. Not a model airplane. A real fly-through-the-sky airplane. He’s been working on it for a few years and it should be finished sometime in July. I once tried to build a cheap DVD case. There were approximately four steps. I got bored with reading the directions and, consequently, screwed up.

2. My mom doesn’t mind cooking so long as someone tells her what it is she should be making. She hates having (or being invited) to select the dinner menu. I prefer baking, from scratch (no bread machine here!), and one of the best parts of the process is, for me, deciding what to make.

3. My sister is an amazing singer. She has made certain members of my family cry from the beauty of her voice. She walks around the house singing, sometimes all day. The best anyone would say about me is that I’m not tone deaf, though I do have the unfortunate habit of changing keys in the middle of songs.

4. My dad is neat and tidy (though he does have doctor handwriting). He has been known to put away the milk while someone is still using it and to arrange all the shoes in a closet. A single paper left on the banister at our house is enough to spike his blood pressure. I hate dirtiness (you won’t, for instance, find things growing in my fridge, and I do vacuum once a week), but I like things organized in piles. I like the term “organized chaos,” and believe such a thing does exist. On the other hand, I clean my cats’ liter box every day, whereas my dad seems to think liter boxes clean themselves.

5. My mom has no problem talking to complete strangers if she feels some sort of connection with them. This connection is usually sports-related. If she sees someone wearing MSU paraphernalia, she can’t help herself from striking up a conversation. If she sees someone wearing something from a team MSU plays, she has to say something. I sometimes pretend I don’t see people I know, because I don’t know what to say.

6. My sister has spent the last year learning ancient Greek and the last semester learning Latin. She is already better at both these languages than I am at French—which I spent four years of school on and have been studying on and off since then. She wants to go back to Greece. I want to go back to France. She is taking steps to see that it happens, where I make plans and then cancel them whenever anything the least bit inconvenient arises.

Of course, the evidence for the contrary may be stronger, for the possibility that we’re all shades of the same thing, the same person. My sister and I enjoy the same types of books. Though I can’t sing, I can harmonize to someone else fairly well, a skill I learned from my dad during church as a child. My mom gave me her love of all kinds of puzzles—jigsaw puzzles, crossword puzzles, number puzzles, logic problems, etc. I’m trying to learn to play the guitar, like my father. I’ve taken up cross stitch, like my mother. Neither my sister nor I like any of the following: salad, mushrooms, onions, seafood, celery, cottage cheese, sour cream, ketchup, or chili. My dad and I, the only two wine drinkers in my family, both dislike the same kinds of wine (chiefly Chardonnay). My whole family has the same general lack of allergies. My sister gets the same types of tension headaches and migraines I do. We all prefer Coke to Pepsi.

The team I coach is fifth grade girls. Most of them are eleven now, but a few are still ten. We have one sixth grader. Our league has tryouts, but we cut only two girls this year. It’s really a rec league. I work hard to make sure the girls get equal playing time, and while I usually let them play the positions they like, I make them try out new ones as well.

We were in first place and undefeated before our game today. My girls may be ten, but they aren’t stupid. They know that the score matters, no matter how much I sometimes wish it didn’t. They were ashamed and sad, and each goal made it worse. After the game, after we shook hands, the other team made a tunnel for my girls to run through, and they chanted B-R-A-V-O bravo! at them. My girls couldn’t meet their eyes. They were embarrassed. Not just because they lost, but because the other team pretended like it didn’t matter, when they all knew it did. If it didn’t, the other coach wouldn’t have screamed at the ref when one of my girls got too free with her elbows (and we got scored on anyway). If it didn’t matter, he wouldn’t have kept his star player in for all but five minutes of the hour-long game.

After the game, I didn’t know what to say to my team. I wanted them to leave with some message that would make them feel better, knowing full well that even the best message can’t stem the emotions you feel after a loss. I wanted to give them back some pride while still using the loss as a teaching moment. I don’t remember exactly what I said, but I do remember feeling so silly as I said it. I was trying to make meaning where there wasn’t any. I thought, if this were a story, we would have had some come from behind victory (unless the story was about a Jamaican bobsled team, but even then, there was something good in the end—or so we’re led to believe). Even without a victory, of learning a life-lesson, there would have been some purpose there, some bigger meaning, some sense.

A few hours later, I got an email from one of them asking me if I thought she could have saved any of the goals. Some of the girls—maybe most—went home and forgot about it. They did their homework, or watched some television. Maybe they thought about our practice tomorrow, but maybe not. But this girl was bothered enough to ask me about it, but I have no answers.

What I said: Don’t worry about it. We play as a team, and no one person’s mistake will make or break us. You did a good job when you stopped their break away. I thought you played with heart. You made me proud.

What I didn’t say was the thing that makes me most proud is how she handles herself, how the pain eats at her, like it always did me, but how, unlike me, she owns up to it. I’ve always been one for making excuses because I want so desperately to believe that my shortcomings are things I can’t help, like being too short. I went home after the game, and I didn’t spend time analyzing my coaching performance, considering what I could have done better because it’s too easy for me to make those excuses. And I’d like to say now that I’m learning the lesson from this, that I’ll be a better coach/role model/human, but the truth is that most likely none of that will happen.

You did well, I told her, and for now, that’s good enough.

This week the NYC Municipal Archives released over 800,000 photos from its collection of 20th century NYC photos. I’d post some of them here, but there’s a license fee, so click through to enjoy.

Note: Of course I’m not the only one to discover this awesomeness. The online archive is currently down due to overwhelming demand. In the meantime, here’s a site with a bunch of the images.

I’ve been paying attention to place since that last post—almost a year now—trying to recognize it in places I never before believed it existed. Haslett, Michigan, I still contend, is the antithesis of place, or perhaps the place place goes to die—it exists, but not in our hearts or souls. I spent an evening at my old high school lately for a talent show my dad helped orchestrate, and though I sat at the same tables I ate lunch at for four years, in the same chairs, though I found a plaque on the wall with my name on it, I couldn’t envision myself ever existing there. It wasn’t a negative thought, exactly, but more of a lack of thought. Surely high school is some memory someone has planted in me.

I gave up on the possibility of my hometown speaking to me and turned my attentions instead to East Lansing, the place where I work, where I went to college. When I was in Spokane, I missed the flowering campus of MSU more than my hometown, which my parents had vacated some years before. When I set myself a list of goals shortly before moving back to Michigan, I made a point of adding an entry for eating my lunch on the banks of the Red Cedar River—a river that students joke is more piss and beer than water but that I’ve always sort of liked. I did this, a few weeks ago, on a rare 80 degree spring day. I found a spot on the grass, kicked off my shoes, and worked on a crossword puzzle as I ate my bagel and a bag of chips. I haven’t been back since, but some days, when I cross the bridge on my way to teach, I stop and stare out over the river, watching people toss pieces of bread to the ducks.

But since returning, I’ve found MSU’s campus to be more than just a picturesque place. I must always remind myself it’s an agricultural school, though when they fertilize the endless acres of fields, I can’t seem to forget it. On my drive home, depending on which way I take, I can take or pass streets named Farm Lane, Cattle Drive, and College Road. In the space of three minutes I leave campus proper, I pass cows (the beef cow-calf teaching and research building), sheep, and horses, and the stench of all-natural fertilizer remains thick in my nose as I drive by a golf course. I wonder who would play there, some holes only across the street from the fertilized fields? But it’s a smell you can’t escape in this area. When the wind is right, you can smell it miles away. When I lived with my parents, I could smell it there.

I’ve moved now, to a small town twenty minutes away from campus. I say small town but then wonder if that’s accurate. It’s bigger than Haslett, though my hometown has always felt bigger—perhaps because it’s richer. Mason has an old-fashioned downtown area, complete with deli and ice cream parlor. Across the street is a looming courthouse. There’s even a model cannon set up out front that children climb on. There are more local than chain restaurants if you don’t count fast food, and the best place for breakfast holds farmer’s hours and isn’t open on Sunday. There’s a five-road intersection with only four stop signs, but I’ve never seen anyone get confused (besides me). There’s a sheriff’s office rather than a police station, and the county jail is here. There’s a non-commercial airport near the high school, and I can’t get my favorite kind of pizza delivered. This, I think, could be place. This, I think, could be something I write about. This, I think, could be something I want to recreate.

Naturally, I reminded her that she should keep such thoughts to herself until the time I am no longer grading her.

It’s a good thing I didn’t also mention that I had a specially ordered t-shirt bearing my district logo (district 2) and ID number.

I loved the movie, though this isn’t a movie review (and Cathie already has a great post on why she loves the Hunger Games). Instead, this is really a discussion of the rhetoric I’ve seen used around the Hunger Games. There’s the Battle Royale discussion, of course, though the people hating on the Hunger Games mostly seem to not have read it, and the people dismissing Battle Royale seem to have not seen or read that either. What concerns me is that whenever you have something so well-loved by so many, you can’t avoid the people who seem to want to be contrary for the sake of being contrary.

This past week, I have seen a handful of people I like and respect publicly insult not only the book/movie, but also all the people who enjoy either. “Let me sum it up for you,” says one of my friends: “blah, blah, blah.” “How can anyone enjoy this tripe?” says another. My personal favorite was when someone told me, a writer, to my face, that it was awful writing. Which, okay. I get it. You didn’t like it. That’s fine, you don’t have to, no story will please everyone, etc. But let’s leave off the insults. My mom didn’t like it either, but she didn’t feel the need to imply that I’m somehow an idiot for feeling differently.

Of course, there’s the opposite end of the spectrum, too. There are fans of the books who will turn on anyone who didn’t like the boos and call them stupid, idiots, for not recognizing what is surely the best book ever written (not my words, obviously). These tend to be the same people who will detest the movie version of any book because it isn’t 100% true to the original story (case in point: there was a girl online who said the movie was so awful, it destroyed the book, etc.; her reasoning for this was that at one point a backpack in the movie is a different size and color than described in the book).

Yesterday, I accompanied my mom to my aunt’s house where we went through some of my recently deceased grandmother’s old things. At the bottom of one dresser drawer, we found a stack of love letters my grandfather had written to her when they first met. My grandfather never know she had saved them. He read through the letters (and the poetry), and then talked about throwing them away. They were sentimental crap, he said (which made me realize that sentimentality isn’t always bad). Before I left, he recited a poem he had written years and years ago that my grandmother called the suicide poem (I still have no idea why). My uncle responded, very seriously, that we should always remember that words have real power, that we should always use them carefully.

It’s a wonderful thought during what was a beautiful moment. I wish I were more careful with my words. I wish more people thought about their words as well, and their actions. I wish we could all take a few steps back sometimes and realize that we don’t always need to push others’ buttons. I wish people could talk about something as small as a book without venom or malice. I wish the students at Michigan State University had all been sitting in the movie theater with me Thursday night, watching (fictional) people riot for a (real) reason, rather than on the streets of East Lansing burning couches because our basketball team lost. I wish the President could talk about Trayvon Martin without being accused of simply pushing a political agenda. I wish I could read the comments on news articles without seeing every other one resort to some type of name calling or other form of cruelty. And yeah. I wish I could read a book—any book—without others deciding it makes me stupid or simplistic, but beside everything else, that wish feels fairly silly. Still, perhaps it’s somewhere to start.

1. A Thousand Sisters, by Lisa Shannon; a gift from my dad that I was very excited to get, but as I was currently reading a similar type book (Half the Sky), and so I set it aside.

2. The Stranger, by Albert Camus; I keep putting this one off, hoping I can read it in its original French—something that will probably never happen.

3. The Sound and the Fury, by William Faulkner; this book was originally on my thesis list, but it intimidated me to the point where I ended up replacing it.

4. Cronopios and Famas, by Julio Cortazar; this was assigned in my one pre-grad school fiction workshop, and while I meant to finish it after class (only portions of it were assigned), it’s still sitting on my shelf.

5. The Feminine Mystique, by Betty Friedan; I’ve even started this one—there’s really no excuse except that it’s really long.

6. The Bonesetter’s Daughter, by Amy Tan; this book has probably been in four or five apartment with me.

7. A Death in the Family, by James Agee; this book was given to me during my visit to Eastern Washington, and as it’s the first book, alphabetically speaking, on my bookshelf, I should really pick it up.

8. I’m Sorry You Feel that Way, by Diana Joseph; this is a book I started right after buying, but then something came up, and something else, and now I want to start again from the beginning.

What books do you want to read but somehow never seem to get around to?

Until recently, I’ve never had a problem with rereading. I like studying new aspects of books. I like noticing things I didn’t before. I like trying to figure out how the author built tension and suspense, like being to see how the pieces fit together. But then I started rereading my declared favorite book of all time: Wicked.

First, a story.

On the first day of my second workshop in grad school, the one taught by Bark’s own Sam Ligon, I was asked to name the best book from the last twenty years. I asked for a minute to think of a book, and so the rest of the class answered first (each getting a nod of I-can-see-how-you’d-say-that-even-if-I-disagree), and then it came back to me.

Of course, I still had no answer. The trouble, you see, is that I had done next-to-no reading of books from the past twenty years. I was fairly well read in the classics, and I read a fair bit of fantasy and young adult books, but somehow I knew that wasn’t the question. So I said Wicked. Instead of the yes-I-see look, I got the you-have-got-to-be-shitting-me look.

But back then I really did love the book. I did think it had literary merit. (Can you see where I’m going with this?) It was my favorite book, I said. I could read it over and over, I said. Except I wasn’t reading it, and I had no real plans to. Grad school was quickly changing the way I viewed and critiqued literature, and one of the things I was learning about myself is that, despite once writing this way, I no longer had any appreciation of quirk for quirk’s sake. Even in my glowing mind-review of Wicked, I knew that was something the story suffered from.

The final book in the Wicked Years series came out a few months ago, and I bought it. I wasn’t impressed by the other books in the series, but I hate leaving things unfinished. By this point, however, I was feeling very nervous. Not liking anything else I’d ever read by Maguire, really feeling disinterested in the other two Wicked Years book, knowing how much I’d changed as a reader and writer—I was understandably nervous about jumping back into this series.

A few weeks ago, I finally did it. I picked up Wicked and decided to give it a go.

My copy is heavily marked. I’ve highlighted and written in the margins. Apparently one of the times I read the book was soon after discovering the loveliness of the serial comma, because I spent pages circling the little curlycues before and and or. What is most evident in my notes, however, is that, back then, I was more concerned with theme and symbolism than I was with storytelling. These days, that idea has been turned completely on its head.

And Wicked, my favorite book, is, well, bad.

Okay, it’s not bad. It’s highly successful, and I’m uncomfortable writing off any piece of success so easily. What I mean to say is I think it’s bad. It’s littered with quirks, lines and events that seem to be winks at the reader: “Did you see what I did there?” Maguire seems to say. “Can you believe my editor didn’t make me cut that?” And my god, I’m not squeamish or anything, but I really don’t need any more descriptions of bodily functions, nipples, crazed sex acts, and phallic objects. In moderation any of these elements can work, but when you get multiple on each page? It’s like seventh-grade locker room humor.

I’m going to finish the book, and I still plan on reading the new one I bought (Out of Oz), but while some books keep me up at night because I don’t want to stop reading them, I can’t put this one down because I can’t wait to be finished with it—forever.

But really, I’m just wondering—pre-conference—about who I’ll be seeing this year, and what events/tables/panels/readings my fellow attendees are planning on, well, attending.

Myself, I’ll be trying to snag a signed copy of Cataclysm Baby (by Matt Bell), listening to Sam Ligon and Jason Sommer (and a host of others) at the Propaganda reading, and attending Gregory Spatz’s signing. I’ll also be on a panel Friday afternoon. What are your AWP plans?

Sitting in the hospital waiting room, I’ve only recently decided to apply to graduate school. I start my writing sample there with the words My grandmother is dying. Later, when she didn’t die, against all odds, the guilt I felt from making a type of prediction. My own gain from others’ grief.

Five years of close calls, five years of bad days, of oxygen levels insanely low, and a piece of me begins to truly believe that she’ll beat every odd, that she’ll live forever.

Last week, Valentine’s Day, my aunts and cousins singing hymns I have long since forgotten. I listen, and watch as my grandfather holds her hand and struggles to sing through his grief.

Five minutes after, there is laughter again, because my family can laugh about anything, and it helps us through. She would have wanted it that way.

A half-eaten sandwich on the table, mayonnaise leaking out the side. It’s been cut in half, but now it lies forgotten.

The company delivering the hospital bed arrives twenty minutes too late. We joke that she really must not have wanted to switch to that bed.

Sitting around the table, listening to person after person say how they still expect her to get out of bed, to ask why we stopped singing.

Family members on the phone, calling loved ones to break the news. The worst is a phone call to a mother on a cruise in the Caribbean.

At the funeral home, I’m scared to see her lying there. As a child, seeing the dead person terrified me, but I soon learn that at twenty-seven, it’s somehow easier. I no longer see my own death painted on her face.

Promised flower deliveries don’t show up, and a phone call to the local florist reveals that they’ve run out of flowers. It’s two days after Valentine’s day, and there are already dozens of arrangements surrounding the coffin, hundreds of flowers, lining the walls of the room. My sister-in-law says, “I think I know where all the flowers went.”

I sit in the back room with my father and three cousins while the rest of my family prays the rosary. I know she would have wanted me in there, but from true belief. To sit there and pretend would feel only like a mockery. Instead, I take notes on my thoughts, on the things I see and the things I hear.

It’s so hard to see your parents cry.

At the church, we sit crammed into a row, everyone wanting to be close to one another. It’s been eight years since I’ve attended a Catholic mass. I think of how I once wanted to be a nun. I note the changes to the mass, how one prayer says “many” will have salvation when it used to say “all.” I don’t remember the kneelers being so uncomfortable.

I have no memory of going to the cemetery during previous funerals and so am surprised when it takes only a few minutes. I look down into the hole and feel a strange sense of vertigo. I pull a daisy from a flower arrangement. My mother takes two and lays one on the grave of her sister, only a few rows away. My aunt died when I was two, but I don’t think I’ve ever seen her headstone before.

Now, days later, things feel back to normal—but a normal that doesn’t exist. There’s a hole in my reality now, and though I know it, even feel it, I still don’t quite believe it. They say these things take time, take time, but time, like everything else, is finite, is running out.

We’ve all had those moments, I’m sure. The moment after someone else reads your work, or reads a story you love, and he looks up, hesitates, and you can just see him searching for the best way to pose his question, can see him wondering. When you write a depressing story, some people wonder what you’re trying to tell them—not about life, but about yourself.

To be fair to my family and friends however, I am someone who has suffered from depression and other related problems in the past. This, combined with some readers’ habit to project, is one reason I’ve developed a strong resistance against letting those close to me read my work. They can’t see the art and the artist as separate, and after twenty-some-odd years of hearing the depressed writer stereotype, sometimes I wonder myself.

But the question of whether or not our negative feelings can help our art is not nearly as important to me as another related question: Are depressed people more likely to become writers or are writers more likely to develop depression? I wonder sometimes if my writing, my submitting (and everything that goes along with it) are risky behaviors. When I can’t find the right words, or when I get a particularly rough rejection—sometimes I start to feel like my old self, just a bit. And I wonder.

There’s nothing to say, of course, that it’s the act of creating something artistic that does this. There’s nothing to say that as a chemical engineer—my original career goal was to become a chemical engineer with a specialization in food science who would design ice cream flavors; but after two years of writing instead of doing my homework, I figured it was time to make a switch (to microbiology, of all things; I’m a slow learner)—there’s nothing to say that I wouldn’t have had these moments then, too, but no one thinks of depression and ice cream as being related (except, perhaps, that one is a cure for the other). Evidence: the Wikipedia page for writers who committed suicide is perhaps ten times longer than the page for all engineering professionals.

It all comes back to that horrible stereotype, and now I wonder which is more damaging: the fact that writers are more depressed or just the belief that they are. Health.com lists writers and artists as one of the ten careers with the highest rates of depression (though I think their info is a bit dubious). Whether or not it’s true, it doesn’t help. I wonder when this stereotype started, how long it’s been around. Did people tell Woolf her depression and writing went hand in hand? Did Plath ever connect her poetry to her inner emptiness?

Personally, I’ve decided it’s all a bunch of crap—at least for me. I’m not a better writer because of this disease in my past. In fact, if you ignored all other possible causalities, you could argue that getting better helped my writing, though I’m much more inclined to credit time and practice for my improving skill. I don’t write about my depression, though elements of what I experienced will sometimes appear in my characters. I don’t keep a journal, I don’t write bad poetry about it (I’m apparently incapable of writing good poetry, but give me ten minutes and I will give you a bad poem—or something resembling a poem), I don’t write essays about it (my one attempt five years ago was a complete disaster and made the rest of my workshop walk small around me for the rest of the semester). Usually, I don’t even talk about it, because what does it matter now? I’m still writing, telling the stories I want to tell. Thinking about it for too long could make anyone depressed.