I Can’t Do That!

There are some things I just can’t do or at least am very, very bad at. There are the obvious ones like flapping my arms and flying or walking on water. There are things I just never learned to do like playing the harmonica or doing the hula. But there are also things that I simply can’t do, don’t want to do, or do miserably badly.

The most annoying one is in that last category—singing. Oh, I do sing, mostly alone in my own house at the top of my voice. I’ve tried singing in other places. I was in choir in junior high and was always last chair or next-to-last chair. One other poor singer and I swapped places regularly. (I must mention that taking choir meant that I was part of a heinous concert in which 40 white kids with no rhythm or soul whatsoever performed “Sittin’ on the Dock of the Bay.” But I digress.) I will sing in a large audience where everyone else will drown me out. I once even took singing lessons, which had no effect whatsoever. The problem is that I may start roughly on key, but over the course of the song, I sing flatter and flatter until by the end I’m in some other key altogether. I desperately wish I could sing well, though.

(Once my husband, in an effort to cheer me up, said, “There are people who sing worse than you.” “Name three,” I replied. Long silence. Then he said, “That wheelchair guy.” I was appalled. And I didn’t know whether I was more appalled that he couldn’t name Stephen Hawking or that he couldn’t think of two more people. I mean, he could have mentioned Shel Silverstein or my sister. But I digress again.)

Another thing I’m not reliably capable of is riding carnival rides. I can handle most of them okay, but there are ones that I absolutely refuse to go on. First are roller coasters that flip you upside down. The second are those towers that spin and then drop the floor out from under you as you’re pasted to the walls. I understand the physical principle of centripetal acceleration that keeps you from falling out, but they still look iffy to me. Maybe I’m just not confident in the maintenance and repair of carnival rides.

(For a long time, I was leery of Ferris wheels, because I had nosebleeds as a child and my mother wouldn’t let me go on them because she feared the height would bring one on. This despite the fact that every nosebleed I ever had was when I was lying in bed, which was at a height of only a couple of feet off the ground. (I do admit that the idea of having a nosebleed when the wheel stopped at the top and dripping blood on everyone else below me was pretty appalling.) As an adult, I have ridden the ride and never experienced a nosebleed. But I digress some more.)

And then there’s eating liver and onions. I’m not fond of that many onions in one place, but that’s not the problem. It’s the texture of the liver, grainy as well as meaty. I simply, literally, gagged on it. It wouldn’t get past my uvula. (That’s apparently its only function—guarding against liver.) After several valiant attempts, both my mother and I simply gave up trying. (I can eat other foods with peculiar textures. Octopus. Gizzards. Tongue. Snails. In fact, once when I was going on a business trip, I had a hint that the boss, who used to order dishes for everyone at the table, would present us all with escargot. I went to a local restaurant where no one knew me and ordered some before we went, just to see if my uvula would object. I found that snails go down quite easily. They have the texture of gizzards, which don’t bother me, and taste like scampi since both are served in garlic butter. And yes, the boss did order escargot for all. But I digress yet again.)

That’s all for this week. I’m going to try again to flap my arms and fly. Maybe sing while I’m doing it. But I’m not going up on the roof to experiment. That would be crazy.

Chopped Rules!

I love the Food Network show Chopped. It’s calming. It is a competition show, but there are no hosts or contestants who yell or sound like wrestling announcers. (I’m looking at you, Guy Fieri.) They don’t even provide recipes. (That’s okay with me since I hardly ever have to make dinner with pork bung, stinging nettles, and green bean ice pops.) I do pick up a few tips: When they say “lacks seasoning,” they mean salt. (This is something my husband doesn’t understand.) You can glaze turkey with tangerine juice. (I used orange juice.) You can’t plate the way a normal person does. It has to be piled up like food Jenga. But I digress.)

There are everyday rules that apply to the show…well, every day. If you get blood on your plate, the judges won’t eat it (unless blood is one of the basket ingredients, which is not altogether impossible). Honor the ingredients (no, I’m not sure what that means either—bow to them, maybe?).

But beyond the official rules, there are “rules” that ought to be Rules. These are the things that a contestant should absolutely not do.

Don’t try to make risotto or polenta. Most of the time there’s not enough time (the rest of the time, there’s too much). If there’s not enough time, risotto will come out so al dente that the dente means tooth of the chipped variety. If there’s not enough time for polenta, you’ll have grits. Also, they both require a lot of attention—adding liquid and stirring—so if you want to make anything else (you do), it won’t come out right either.

Don’t try to make panna cotta. There just isn’t enough time for it to set up, even in the blast chiller. You might as well just put some strawberries in and say you’re serving cold fruit soup for dessert. Cold fruit soup is a thing and a yummy one at that.

Don’t use truffle oil. You may be tempted. After all, truffles are a high-end ingredient. But truffle oil overwhelms anything it touches. (Another common trap is using extracts. Almond. Amaretto. Anise. Rose water (which will make your dish smell and taste like soap). You should probably take the hint when you learn that rose water is used for make-your-own lip gloss (if you’re into that kind of thing). But I digress some more.)

Beware of garnishes. In the world of Chopped, NFG means Non-Functional Garnish. (Never mind what it means in the rest of the world.) Basically, it means any garnish you can’t eat or wouldn’t want to. They’re put on a dish just to make it look pretty. Think parsley, which used to garnish everything and now simply isn’t seen. Whole ghost peppers added for color. Even the little mint leaves that, like parsley on dinner plates, used to decorate any dessert are now out of vogue.

Beware of the oven. Ovens are tricky. They will never (I repeat, never) cook that puff pastry in time. Or the phyllo dough. Or the croissants. Probably not even the cookies, and definitely not the cupcakes. (The cupcakes will also not release from the pan, which means you have to dig out the tops and call the result “deconstructed.”) On the other hand, if you put streusel in the oven, it will burn. And if you keep opening the door and peeking in the oven, you’re toast, so to speak, though your bruschetta won’t be.

How do I avoid these pitfalls in my own daily life? That’s easy. I make peanut butter and jelly or bologna and cheese sandwiches, or microwave some soup. (If you’re thinking Dan would object to this, he doesn’t. My efforts are for lunch. He does the dinners. Except when I have to make the cornbread to go with the cowboy beans. But I digress yet again. I guess I’ve digressed a lot this week if you’re keeping score. I just can’t help myself. Just like I can’t help myself when a cooking competition comes on. I’ll even turn off InkMaster to watch Chopped.)

It’s a Bird! It’s a Hat! It’s a …

What it is, is a fascinator. Better known as that silly thing the women in the British Royal Family wear on the side of their heads.

They’re almost the only ones who wear fascinators anymore, and theirs are so large that they’re often mistaken for hats. And like hats, they often include elements such as netting, veiling, organdy, beads, flowers, and even feathers (hence the bird reference).

They’re different from hats, although. In general, they’re worn on the side of the head, though again the British Royal Family’s fascinators are so large that they perch on the side and spill over to the top of the head, or vice versa. They look like they want to grow up to be the hats that women wear to the Kentucky Derby but still have a ways to go.

You sometimes see fascinators on brides who don’t want to do the whole veil routine. Or you see them on the kinds of ladies who go to high tea and try to impress each other. (You don’t see them on me, largely because there’s this stupid rule that you don’t wear a fascinator with glasses (unless you’re the Queen of England (or Queen Consort, I suppose, if she wears glasses, which I don’t know, not being a Royal follower, though I’ve never seen a picture of her wearing glasses)), and I’m not willing to sacrifice sight for fashion. Or comfort for fashion, for that matter. I’m pretty sure there’s also a rule about not wearing a fascinator with pajamas. There’s also a rule that the escort of a woman wearing a fascinator should stand to her left, as the fascinator is worn on the right side of the head and this would impede conversation. That’s a lot of rules for a piece of headgear or an accessory or whatever. But I digress. At length.)

Fascinators impinged themselves on my consciousness recently because there’s a writer’s conference here in town this week. People have been posting on Facebook about rides to and from the airport and what to pack due to the weather in Dayton (layers was the best suggestion).

The writer’s conference is held in honor of Dayton native Erma Bombeck, and focuses on humorous and human-interest writing. There are sessions and seminars featuring noted writers and comedians, speed-pitch sessions with agents, a stand-up comedy contest, and a writing contest, as well as decadent chocolate cake and killer brownies. (There is a lot of chocolate around here. Some of the presenters even pass out M&Ms. It’s thought to spark creativity, and, as we learned in the Harry Potter books, chocolate really does help. I don’t think there are any studies on the effects of chocolate on creativity. All the evidence is bound to be anecdotal. But I digress again.)

Where was I? Oh, yes, fascinators. Well, people who attend this conference—the women at least (I think)—sometimes wear tiaras. And feather boas. And bunny slippers. Sometimes all at once, I suppose, at least for the overachievers.

Several first-timers noted the suggestion of such accouterments and wondered if they were seriously proposed. One anxious newbie asked if they were required, as she had been viewing “How to Wear a Tiara” videos on YouTube (which I didn’t know is a thing) and decided she couldn’t make the requisite bobby pins (are they still called that?) work with her short hair. I suggested she try a fascinator. She wasn’t sure whether that was a fashion tip or not. But, she said, she is fascinating, so it probably would be appropriate.

(Where she’d find one is a different matter. I don’t know where the Ladies Who Lunch (or Take High Tea) shop. And I suppose a bridal salon would be too pricey as well. I think I’d start in secondhand shops or antiques stores. I think I’ve seen one at such a shop and even tried it on, though it of course looked stupid with my glasses. But I digress for the last time this week. I promise.)

At any rate, I find the subject (cue Mr. Spock)…fascinating.

(And I hope you’re impressed by the number of parens I opened and closed in this discussion.)

What We Deserve

I saw a mattress commercial once that said something like, “You’ll get the good night’s sleep you deserve.” Or maybe it was good dreams. I was taken aback. Do we really deserve a good night’s sleep? The ad appears to not have taken into account new babies and new puppies, known destroyers of a good night’s sleep and neither one a problem solvable with a new mattress. If you’ve recently acquired either a baby or a puppy, a good night’s sleep is not so much something you deserve as something that you desire.

Especially in commercials, there seem to be many things that folks apparently deserve. The most recent one I’ve heard is toilet paper that tears off neatly in pretty scalloped lines. I don’t know about you, but I’ve never desired—or deserved—ass-wipe that made pretty patterns on the roll. I’m satisfied if there is a roll and not just a brown paper tube on the holder. After being stranded once or twice, I won’t even insist on it facing the right way (over the front) as long as it’s there when I need it.

When it comes to what we deserve, I generally think of the very basics. We all deserve to have shelter and food and physical safety. Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs has these physiological needs as the foundation of its levels of development. Maslow’s theory is that we can’t move on to higher levels of the pyramid until we have completed the ones below. So, until we have our basic needs met, we can’t move on to higher needs like love and belonging, esteem, and self-actualization.

But apart from our basic needs, what do we deserve? Singer-songwriter Mary Chapin Carpenter has some thoughts (or rather Lucinda Williams, who wrote the lyrics). In her song “Passionate Kisses,” she lists “a comfortable bed that won’t hurt my back”—so maybe that mattress is something we deserve after all. Other needs she wants fulfilled are “pens that won’t run out of ink and cool quiet and time to think.” And of course, those passionate kisses. “Shouldn’t I have all of this?” she asks. Yes. Yes, you should, I find myself thinking. Especially the pens. (Those don’t appear on Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs and neither do passionate kisses, except as a part of the love and belonging tier. But I digress.)

Williams was really onto something. While the comfortable bed and the pens cost money, the cool quiet and the time to think don’t, and neither do the passionate kisses.

I can think of a few other things we deserve as well. Healthcare that won’t bankrupt us. Enough food to stave off hunger, especially for children. Low-cost housing that the working poor can afford. Just to name a few. You know, stuff on the lowest level of Maslow’s Hierarchy.

Unfortunately, those do cost money, which really needs to be provided by social programs that require government funding, either national or local. Charitable organizations can help too, but they can’t shoulder the entire burden. And in the current political climate, funding for social programs is increasingly on the chopping block.

(And no, I’m not suggesting that there should be social programs that would offer funding for pens that don’t run out of ink or passionate kisses. That would be crazy. Maybe there should be a research effort to work on the pen thing, though. But I digress some more.)

For me personally, I think I deserve a mouse and keyboard that won’t run out of juice, a refrigerator that won’t run out of juice, and passionate kisses that won’t run out of juice. My old mattress works just fine.

Yes, No, and OMG NO!

Sometimes I’m like a toddler who turns up her nose at any new food. Sometimes I’m like a teenager who will eat anything that doesn’t move. But I have my rules.

“Yes” foods. I will eat (and have eaten) sushi, octopus, eel, snails, and goat. (I first ate sushi when it was impossible to refuse, hand-made by my martial arts instructor’s wife.) I even once ate a raw oyster, though it just tasted briny. Now that I’ve at least tried it, I have no desire to do it again. It was the texture I objected to, and raw oysters pretty much have only one texture—slimy. (You may say that octopus, eel, and snails all have a slimy texture, but not if they’re prepared correctly. Octopus can be gelatinous or rubbery if you under- or overcook it, but is tender and toothsome if cooked for the right length of time. Eel is great when barbecued. Snails have the texture of chicken gizzards, which I learned to eat as a child, and have a flavor just like scampi because they’re served in garlic butter. But I digress. At length.)

“No” foods. My husband trained himself to like okra just so he could say he’ll eat anything. Except veal. He has humanitarian concerns about veal. I say good for him! But not good for me. I won’t eat okra no matter how it’s cooked. I just can’t get over the combination of slimy and hairy textures of okra.

Mustard is another of my nos. I had to tell my husband a reason I didn’t like it so he would stop bugging me to “just try it.” I told him that it tasted metallic. I did manage honey mustard dressing that I couldn’t avoid on a salad, but I didn’t enjoy it. (I once had dinner at a sushi restaurant with a group of people. The high point of the evening was when a husband asked his wife, “Do you really want me to tell the kids you wouldn’t even try it?” Her glare was positively poisonous. But I digress some more.)

Brussels sprouts were a big no for me until I had them in Slovenia. I didn’t know enough Slovenian (none, that is) to ask for the recipe, but they were delicious. We’ve tried roasting them and sprinkling them with parmesan cheese, and they’re tolerable that way, but I still long for the Slovenian version, whatever it was.

Most of my aversions are governed by texture. For instance, I never cared for egg salad because it’s too often mushy. (One time I ate mushy egg salad because it was impossible not to. My sister’s MIL served the sandwiches to us as we were passing through the area. My husband finally made it agreeable by the simple technique of making it chunky rather than pureeing it with an immersion blender or, as we refer to it, a motor boat. But I digress again.)

“OMG NO!” food. Liver-and-onions is the one food I can’t eat no matter how it’s prepared or how I try. And boy, have I tried. My mother used to serve it pretty regularly when I was a kid. She finally gave up on trying to get me to eat it when I literally (not figuratively) gagged on it, which upset the rest of the family’s dining pleasure. I feel that since I actually did try it in childhood, I’m under no obligation to try it again. I know tastes can change with age, but gagging isn’t likely to. I just hope I never get into a situation where the only polite thing to do is to try it.

Good Ol’ St. Pat

By some bizarre circumstance, I’m able to post this on both Sunday, as I usually do, and St. Patrick’s Day. Here’s a list of what I’m not going to write about: green beer, four-leaf clovers, or shamrocks (those were practically the only visuals I saw when I was looking for an image to go with this post.) I will not be writing about St. Patrick and how he was really a Roman and chased the snakes out of Ireland. I’m not going to write about the Fighting Irish of Notre Dame.

No, I’m going to talk about Irish food. The picture you see here is shepherd’s pie, meat and vegetables and gravy topped with mashed potatoes. It’s so good that it’s made its way into our food repertoire. Except that traditional shepherd’s pie is made with lamb. We make it with beef, which technically makes it a cottage pie, and often with mushrooms. Then we sprinkle cheese on top and run it under the broiler because cheese.

(Actually, I had shepherd’s pie a number of years ago in a restaurant in Michigan. They didn’t serve it in the traditional way. They made three scoops of it on a plate, which looked disturbingly like triple breasts. But I digress.)

When Dan and I went to Ireland a couple of years ago, I told him not to expect the lousy cuisine that Ireland and England are said to produce. I knew better. Ireland, after all, is surrounded by water and has lakes and many a river running through it as well. I knew we were in for some good seafood.

We had fish and chips pretty often, supplemented with beautiful, succulent pink salmon, either fresh or smoked (which is also called lox around here). But the best seafood I had was a luscious, juicy, huge bowl of mussels I had in a small place in the seaside town of Dingle.

Irish breakfasts are amazing, too. They feature bacon, sausage, eggs, potatoes, beans, soda bread or toast, broiled tomatoes, mushrooms, and white or black pudding. Sometimes scones with jam and clotted cream (which I always thought sounded gross, but is really like Irish cream churned to near but not quite butter. But I digress again).

Nor do the drinks suck. There’s Irish breakfast tea (which I forgot to mention when I described breakfast), darker and heartier than English breakfast tea. Then there’s beer. Dan drank Guinness, which is served warm. I don’t care much for warm beer, so I learned that if you want cold beer, you have to ask for a pint of lager, which is what I did.

There’s also Irish coffee made in the traditional manner, with Irish whiskey, sugar, and real whipped cream on top. (I’ve found that if you ask for Irish coffee in an American bar, what you sometimes get is coffee with Bailey’s Irish Cream in it, which is not the same at all. (If I can get a real Irish coffee in a restaurant (I’ve learned to ask first how they make it), I sometimes have one for dessert. But I digress some more.) When we toured the Tullamore Dew distillery, we had the real thing.

So, what are we doing for St. Patrick’s Day (besides avoiding Irish bars where college students end up vomiting green beer in the gutter, I mean). Well, I think I’ll ask Dan to make a shepherd’s pie, then kick back with some Guinness for him and Harp Lager for me and listen to some Irish music or watch The Commitments. Wear Guinness and Sean’s Bar t-shirts. Maybe look at the photos from our trip.

We’ll do it just for the craic, as they say in Ireland.

Do Something Funny!

Finding something funny to write about can be frustrating, especially when no one is cooperating with me. Generally, I rely on my pets, my husband, and sometimes myself to supply me with humorous antics, frivolous quotes, and amusing situations. But right now, they’re not putting out. (So to speak. At least I know I’m not. But I digress.)

Anyway, since the universe isn’t conveniently providing me with comedy, I’ve decided to resurrect some of the hilarious things they’ve done in the past.

Here’s a cat story I filed under Stupid Cat Tricks. Shaker was a tuxedo cat of vast and lofty dignity. But once we found a shed whisker, put it on her head and went “boop, boop, boop.” She was mortally offended. We could actually see her disapproving of us. (It only works for dignified cats, and we haven’t had many of those. But I digress again.)

One day Dan and I were sitting on the sofa, doing something with toothpicks. (What were we doing with the toothpicks? Making canapės? Probably not. Building a model of the Eiffel Tower? Definitely not. Picking our teeth? The explanation is lost in the mists of time. But I digress yet again.) I had a small bundle of toothpicks in my hand. Shaker jumped on the couch and delicately plucked a single toothpick from the cluster with her teeth, then whipped her head around and flung it across the room. Then she did it again. And again. We never did figure out why, but sometimes we held toothpicks out to her just to see her do it.

Dan is also good for a lot of laughs. My favorite memory of something he said was when we were watching TV and the movie Gunga Din, one of his favorites, came on. He innocently asked, “Honey, do you like Kipling?” That’s right—he opened the door and walked right in. For the first, and most likely last, time in my life, I was able to say it. “I don’t know,” I choked, barely able to speak through my snorts of laughter. “I’ve never kipled.” That was the moment I knew he was a keeper.

I even admit to doing some humorous if embarrassing things from time to time.

At my age, gravity takes my least little misstep and turns it into a trauma. Just the other week, I wiped out on a short flight of concrete steps, despite using a cane at the time, and bruised my leg, skinned my scalp (which bled like an SOB), and produced a massive goose egg on my forearm. The goose egg ebbed eventually, but it left a hideous bruise that had still not resolved to a proper skin tone. I glanced down and thought, “Wait! I don’t have a huge birthmark there!” And even if I did, it likely would not be turning entertaining but appalling shades of dried ketchup, soot, teen hair color, and pea soup as I wait for it to dissipate. It resembles either a tornado sky or a very overripe, much-abused eggplant.

Another time, I was breakfasting with some friends and one of them remarked that it was taking a long time for her eggs Benedict to arrive. Innocently, I replied, “Maybe they had to go out and steal some hubcaps.”

“I know I’m going to regret asking,” she said, “But why?”

“Because there’s no plate like chrome for the hollandaise,” I said. She almost defenestrated me. (It would have been worth it if only to shatter one of the large panes of plate glass that made up the hotel solarium we were dining in. But I digress some more.)

Coming next week—new funny stories. Get busy, Toby, Dan, and me!

What I Love About Election Season

I’m tempted to say “Nothing,” but that would be too obvious.

I’m tempted to say “Watching the debates,” but that would be a lie. (I do enjoy the Bad Lip Reading versions, which are truly hysterical. But I digress.)

I’m not tempted to say “The engaging political discourse and the spirited exchange of ideas,” because that would be a big, fat lie.

However, if there’s a woman candidate, I do like to watch and see how many times the media comments on her fashion sense and grooming and calls her voice shrill and her personality unlikeable. I can keep score and see which outlets do the best and worst jobs. But that seems somewhat unlikely this year, though there may, of course, be female VP nominees—most likely will be unless Joe decides to ditch Kamala, which he shows no sign of doing.

No, what I love about the election season is the opportunity to view rhetorical fallacies in the wild. Slippery slope? Got it. Moving the goalposts? You bet. False equivalence? You know it. Appeal to the common man? All over the place. The places to see them are the debates and the TV commercials. Again, it’s fun to keep score. Keep a checklist handy. It’ll keep you distracted from your outrage.

(One year during election season I was teaching freshman English at a university, and I had a grand time introducing rhetorical fallacies through the above-mentioned method. It wasn’t around at that time, but now there’s a card game called Fallacy, which would have been a dandy teaching aid. But I digress again.)

Of course, there are classic political ads. (Some would say notorious.) The king of them all was Ronald Reagan’s “Morning in America” ad. It starts with a daisy and ends with a mushroom cloud. It was a classic slippery slope fallacy (also called the camel’s nose). The subtext was “Give the Soviets an inch and they’ll scorch the earth.” (This was back when Russia was our enemy.) It was also a notable campaign because it introduced the phrase, “Let’s Make America Great Again,” though no one wore hats that said that. And for a little more nostalgia, let’s remember that Reagan was 69 when he was elected. Back then, we thought that was old. (An underground slogan was “Reagan in ’80. Bush in ’81.” But I digress some more.)

Speaking of Bush (H.W., in this case), he took a vivid and vicious swipe at Michael Dukakis with his “revolving door prison” ad. This was the heyday of attack ads, which I think we’ll see a resurgence of this year. It could be both entertaining and appalling, as well as full of rhetorical flaws. (Also, Dukakis didn’t help himself with a commercial showing him driving a tank, which was supposed to be patriotic, but just looked silly. It was described as “The Photo Op That Tanked,” which I have to admit was a clever headline, unlike so many others that try to be witty. But I digress even more.)

I also love seeing how many times the candidates use the words “patriotic” and “freedom” without ever defining them and whether they refrain from talking about re-education camps or death panels. What I really love about election season, though, is one when there’s no violence. May it be so.

The Edible Elephant

When you think about therapists and elephants, you probably think of family therapy and the “elephant in the room.” As you may know, it refers to a not-so-secret secret—something everyone in the family knows but won’t talk about, like a family member’s alcoholism. But what if the room the elephant’s in is the kitchen? And what if the necessary thing to do isn’t to talk about the elephant but to cook it up and eat it?

There’s another saying among therapists, “Eat the elephant one bite at a time.” (Yes, I’m in therapy—have been for decades. (I can hear you saying, “Well, that explains a lot.” Don’t deny it.) But I digress.)

What it means, essentially, is “You’re going to be in therapy a long time. Maybe decades. Like Janet.” Thanks to insurance companies (or no thanks to them), therapy that takes six weeks or fewer is preferred. But there you are, some of us take just a tad longer. “Eating the elephant one bite at a time” is like “baby steps” (only much more vivid).

(I don’t know what sauces or side dishes would go with roasted elephant—or, more likely, pressure-cooked elephant. Maybe a peanut sauce. (Sorry not sorry.) But I digress again.)

My father also had an animal metaphor he used on me more often than I’d like to say: “You don’t have to go at it like killin’ snakes.” It’s related to the one about the elephant. It was advice that I didn’t have to do whatever it was I was doing (like filling out college applications) in a desperate hurry. I could take my time.

(I think if they were actual snakes, though, like the tomb full of ones in Raiders of the Lost Ark, I would want to kill as many of them as I could as soon as possible. The saying only applies to metaphoric snakes, I guess. But I also guess that the elephant is metaphoric, too. But I digress some more.)

Once when I was editing educational magazines for a living, I had a writer I liked very much. He had good ideas, wrote them to the right length, and turned them in on time—he was very reliable, and I used him a lot. But one day he sent me an article about not letting paperwork pile up. It was full of animal metaphors, though not, as I recall, elephants or snakes. But when he got to the point of describing a huge stack of overdue papers on one’s desk, he compared it to a rotting water buffalo. It was certainly vivid. And memorable. And, much as I hate to admit it, apropos. But I gently let him know that it was a little too vivid. I told him he could keep the other animals but the water buffalo had to go. (He was not in the least upset. That’s another thing I liked about him. He never kicked about being edited. But I digress yet again. (I just typed “digest” instead of “digress.” I need to wrap up this post.))

The end. Or, rather: You may think that this is the end. Well, it is, but there is another ending. This is it. (Just to get a duck in here with all the other animals.)

What I’ve Learned About My Writing From Writing

I’ve been writing since I was in second grade. Back then, and through college, I wrote poetry, most of it pretty terrible. (Pretty depressing, actually. I was bipolar but undiagnosed. Thus begin my day’s digressions.) Gradually, my poetry turned into prose and I went where my muse took me. Maybe it was all those papers I had to write for college English that reinforced my love of prose. (I still write some poetry, but mostly to experiment with different forms like haiku, sonnets, and villanelles. I’m on my second digression already.)

But on to lessons learned.

• My ability to handle distractions has increased. It used to be that I had to write in complete silence, which helped me concentrate. But, as writing became more routine and natural, I experimented with music for writing. Instrumental music was okay with me, but anything with lyrics took me out of the zone. Now I prefer to write with the TV on in the background. I’m not really listening to it. It’s just ambient noise and I tune it out. (My mother used to put on baseball games, which she was not really interested in, just to have some noise in the house. But I digress again.)

• I can keep a schedule. The ghostwriting company I work for bases its deadlines on writers producing 1,500 words a day. I’ve fallen into a routine. I write 750 words for about two hours in the morning and another 750 for around two hours in the afternoon. If I don’t make my 1,500 because of an appointment or something, I write 1,000 words, morning and afternoon, until I’m caught up. (If only I had had this kind of discipline when I was writing my failed mystery novel! Of course, for ghostwriting, I work from an outline, which I didn’t have for my fiction. But I digress some more.) I have to work my two weekly blog posts in there somewhere, but I’ve given myself a deadline for them as well. I post them every Sunday at 10:00 a.m.

• I seem to be specializing in self-help books. I gave up on reading self-help decades ago, but now it’s about all I write. (I did ghostwrite one short piece of fiction, but it was pure smut. So I guess I learned that I can write smut as well as self-help. But I digress yet again.)

• Ghostwriting suits me. Yes, it’s playing in someone else’s sandbox. And no, I don’t get a byline or royalties. But it’s steady work and keeps me from stealing hubcaps. Also, it supplements my Social Security nicely—not bountifully, but nicely. I don’t know what I’d do all day if I didn’t write. Become even more sedentary than I already am, no doubt. Or steal hubcaps.

• I can pivot. I write humor. I write about social issues. I write about mental illness. I write about language. I write about writing (you may have noticed). I’ve written about flesh-eating diseases, pandemics, and baseball heroes. I’ve written prayer services and stories about nuns. I’ve written about poverty in Jamaica. I’ve written about playgrounds and childcare. I’ve written lesson plans for textbooks. (My nickname is 1,000-words-on-anything. I suppose I’ll have to change that to 1,500-words-on-anything. But I digress even more.)

• I can call on my husband to help me brainstorm topics. He also keeps an eye (and ear) for news stories he thinks might interest or inspire me. And he has plenty of quirks that are fun to write about.

• And I’ve learned that cats are no help at all when it comes to writing (especially one named Ow-Toby), except as subjects. Which I’m sure will come as no surprise to you, but I put it out there anyway.