Facebook Freakout, and Snow

Items:

• For the first time in three years, we're getting enough snow to play in. Roads closed, run on the market for bread and milk, school doubtless canceled tomorrow. (Obamas will ridicule!) A has never really seen snow. Lotta squealing going on around here this afternoon. It is beautiful -- the snow, and the delight.
• I dipped my toe into the Facebook puddle and got sucked into an ocean of webby goodness. Overwhelming, and I don't know what I'm doing (who can see what, etc.) and it's really, really cool. Apparently everyone I've ever met beat me to it and checks it incessantly, judging by the mountain of friending that happened in a five hour period. Wow. I wriggled through a wormhole.
• The snow makes me crazy-happy. M and A just came in; A is laughing/crying over her frozen extremities, and giggling with tales of snowballing her friend Gigi's door, and having no proper snow shoes. Poor kid went out in patent leather Mary Janes. M is brewing some chili. Very cozy.
• A just made an announcement ("May I please have everybody's intention?"): Tonight, we are all to wear our pajamas backwards and flush an ice cube down the toilet, in order to bring on the accumulation.

M and Me

Apparently everyone's doing it, though the only ones I've actually read are Bloglily's and Charlotte Otter's. I'm probably way late on the uptake, but what the hell. I don't often write about M, so I'll do it now, by way of this odd little survey.

How long have you been together?

Since January 2006 <-- This is wrong, should read 1996, thanks, Hopie!, during the snow.

How long did you know each other before you began dating?

A couple of months. He'd just quit his job as a newspaper reporter and came to work as a night-time assignment editor at the TV station where I was a news producer.

Who asked whom out?

Hard to say. It was my sister's idea; she came into the newsroom one evening, I introduced her to M, and as she and I were leaving, she whispered to me, "He's cute as shit." Indeed. After that, I think I probably asked him if he wanted to join "us" (the night crew) for a drink after the 11:00 news, and it turned out no one else wanted to go (or maybe I wasn't so expansive with the invitation?), so it was just the two of us, and there was a lot of snow on the ground, so he drove us in his truck, and it turned out it was his 25th birthday, and I bought drinks and afterwards he took me to my house and we stayed up late talking and then he left. That was the beginning.

How old are you?

I'm 47, he's 38.

Whose siblings do you see the most?

Mine, because she and her funny husband live just a few blocks away. We'd see his brother and his wonderful wife and baby if they didn't live 800 miles away, or if we didn't.

Which situation is hardest on you as a couple?

Gosh, this is hard to say, because cancer affects absolutely everything lately. I'd say childrearing is toughest, though we're very much in synch with each other, and with A. What's tough about it is how skewed the balance has become; M has to do pretty much everything, all the day-to-day, all the care. He gets her up, gets her dressed, gets her breakfast, fixes her lunch, gets her to school, brings her home and gets her supper, supervises homework, gets her to bed. On weekends, it's M and A: he takes her to playdates and parties, she goes with him to the grocery store and the butcher and cheese shops, they do laundry together. My role recently is a kind of really lovely combination Jabba the Hutt/Yoda, a blob on the bed and, occasionally, the sofa, who spouts profound truths and allows herself to be served pretend tea. As I've written here somewhere, one of the most difficult aspects of illness is being unable to fully mother (gah - noun/verb) my little girl. Hard on me, hard on her, excruciatingly difficult on M. So, combined with the crushing weight of cancer itself, I'd say the imbalance of everyday duties (and accompanying guilt) exerts the most pressure on us as a couple.

Did you go to the same school?

No, and if we had, we wouldn't have known each other since I'm a thousand years older. We both went to public high schools in different states; we attended different colleges. (I went to Tulane, he to University of Richmond.)

Are you from the same home town?

No. He grew up on Long Island. I grew up in a Quaker village in rural Virginia.

Who is smarter?

He is much quicker on the uptake than I, both intellectually and socially. He has a better memory. (A lizard has a better memory than I.) I'm better than he is at thinking ahead and seeing lots of possibilities (does this account for my outsize ability to worry?); he's more spontaneously creative. We both blow at math.

Who is the most sensitive?

I'm not sure what this question means. We're both humanoid, with all the attendant emotional equipment. It used to be that I "got over" arguments faster, probably because I'm less temperate and usually in the wrong, but lately M has given me, erm, a wider berth. More rope? Anyway, he's extremely patient.

Where do you eat out most as a couple?

Swear to God, I can't recall the last meal out as a couple. When I'm feeling up to it, the three of us go for sushi in a matchbox of a restaurant (with equally minute servers) a few blocks away. Haven't done that since last summer. A puts the chopsticks to seaweed salad and edamame and noodly things while M and I knock back spicy tuna rolls and saki. 

Where is the furthest (farthest?) you've traveled together as a couple?

We're talking earth orbit, I presume. We were engaged in Rome (he bought my ring in Florence - sigh). A few years later, the two of us followed the sun and the curve of the earth to Changsha, Hunan Provence, PRC, and jetted home two weeks later, a family of three. Best. Thing. Ever.

Who has the craziest exes?

I win that race hands-down.

Who has the worst temper?

Hi. Me again.

Who does the most cooking?

The most? How 'bout the only? That would be M. I can make a mean holiday apple pie. And quiche, I can make quiche, if called upon to serve, which is rare.

Who is the most stubborn?

I am, unless M digs in his heels and becomes angry, in which case I know he's serious and I cave. (Isn't everyone stubborn? What is the definition of stubborn? Determined? Tenacious? Resilient? Jury's out on this one.)

Who hogs the most bed?

I think we're both pretty polite. It's never been an issue; we're a tiny people.

Who does the laundry?

M does 95% of the laundry these days. I do it when I feel up to it. I do my skivvies. Yet another imbalance about which I feel unending guilt. On the bright side, we are fortunate to have a whole huge laundry room on the second floor. No more running to the basement, or the laundromat. Seriously, the second floor laundry changed my life. Make this the first major shopping accident you have after the Not So Great Depression ends: move the washer and dryer upstairs.

Who's better with the computer?

He is. He is.

Who drives when you are together?

He does, unless it's a long trip, in which case we split it. I love to drive (except at night, when I don't see so well), so I don't know how we fell into such traditional roles; probably has something to do with that first snowy night in the truck in January 1996...

One other unsolicited item:

M and I had been dating just over a year when I was first diagnosed, in February 1997. In October 1998, we went to Italy, where he asked me to marry him. How many 26-year-old men do you know who'd stick around through all that cancer nonsense, and then willingly sign on for more?

Crap month

Been a long time. When I started this blog, my intention was to write as honestly as I could, every day or two, about my experience with cancer, writing, mothering, wife-ing, etc. I especially thought that writing about cancer would help... someone... maybe me, maybe someone else. I was inspired by that friend of Ted Koppel's whose name I cannot recall*, who was sick and blogged and then died, just a day or two before I started this journal. Anyway, I figured if he could write something every day up until the end, maybe I could, too. 

Obviously, I can't. Things got so dicey this month that I went head-down. At one point, when I asked Dr. J if we could get more aggressive in treatment, he asked, "What do you want me to do?" To which I responded, in my head, "I want you to save my fucking life again, idiot."

I had my first treatment in a month yesterday. For various, hideous reasons, we had to postpone, and postpone. Today I feel better than I have in a good while, surely because I've psyched myself into thinking that the medicine will be a blockade if not a backhoe. 

Curiously, I got a lot of work done on the novel. And I got a lit paper written and turned in.

My friend Bloglily inspired the next post. Thanks, BL.

*Leroy Sievers is his name. Blogged on NPR.org.

How did I miss this?

Don't want to talk about cancer today, except to give a quick update that Dr. J doesn't know WTF is happening with me.

What I do want to discuss is this fascinating blog called the Book Design Review (a NYT blog? apparently so). How have I missed it? As with many things I stumble upon, this one came via a random read of another favorite blog, VQR, whose January 29th post is a nice rumination by Jacob Silverman on the state of the art of book covers called "Judging Covers." It interests me as a reader, as a writer, as an advertising and marketing professional, and as someone who has worked with a talented designer named Kevin Flores to design a book, cover included, by a fabulous writer named David Maizenberg. It's still available on Amazon, at twice the original cover price. (We're out of print.) The cover graces the top of this post.

Book cover design is of eternal interest to me -- the psychology behind the design (or lack thereof). The last book I bought because of the packaging was Michael Chabon's "Maps and Legends" -- I love Chabon, knew it would be a good read, but the cover was a layered gem, and the heft of the book (attributable to paper stock, not page count) felt substantial and very appealing. It's really a beautiful book, but you have to see it in person to get the full effect. Feels mysterious and layered, like an elaborate pop-up book does when you're six. 

Meantime, having logged in fifty books for my MFA program's annual First Novelist Award, I can report that, while it's apparent I can and do judge a book by its cover, I'm even quicker to judge -- and abandon -- a book with a goofy title. Holy mother of God, what were these publishers thinking? It would probably be untoward of me to list the worst offenders here; I'll wait until this year's award has been decided before nailing them semi-publicly. 

Book covers and titles... two mightily important elements authors rarely have much control over. Too bad.

Chemo tomorrow, then off for two weeks. A dream. 

About that novel

Obama in the Oval notwithstanding, it's been a shit month.

Just posted this to my novel workshop discussion board:

Dear Novelists,

Despite my best efforts, my novel insists on becoming a fucking bleak but spirited meditation on illness -- not at all what I wanted to write, the opposite, in fact.

Some of you know that my own health has been unsteady for many years, and has frankly tanked in the last few months. The smoky scrim affects the attitude, you see, darkening both the writer's world view (a.k.a. the H*** Doctrine) and the characters' moods, abilities, and personalities. Whereas a protagonist was sharply complex, occasionally witty, perhaps endearing if exasperating in Chapter 2, by Chapter 8 he comes off as caustic and cynical, and nothing if not self-involved. Another character, initially in possession of some semblance of humor, now finds herself altogether bereft of charm. Wit is eclipsed by a withering tongue; anything and anyone in her orbit is a black gnat to be swatted away efficiently, inelegantly. Nor can I seem to write minor characters who might elicit empathy or interest; even the children are hateful.

It sucks to be sick. It does. I wish I could write a novel about people rising to an impossible occasion, but the truth is that some people don't rise at all. The power of positive thinking is crap, I assure you. (I've lived twelve years in fear and loathing. Twelve years!) Yes, optimistic people beat odds all the time. So do cynics. And yes, sunny dispositions "lose long battles fought heroically," while many, many more frightened, confused, grim and hopeless souls slip without note into the great hereafter. It's an obscene fallacy that you can think and act your way out of cancer, and while it's my nature to appear upbeat -- some say naive -- I'm bone-tired of putting on the show.

Writing this novel was to be, for me, a way of spinning beauty of the transcendent sort out into the universe. Human heart conquering and all that. What I've learned is that the only beauty I have to offer is the godforsaken Keatsian kind: the truth as I know it at this moment, ugly and unvarnished, spare, splintered, seething and practically impossible to manage.

Writing the first sixty-five pages of "Control Theory" has been, aptly, not only a reflection of but an exercise in the theme of the novel itself: mustering the illusion of control in an uncontrollable circumstance. The prose is precious, careful, cold. It's pretty in places, but passionless. (Passion being the willful release of control.) Just look at how ridiculously crafted, how cloying, this first-draft synopsis is -- I wrote it in early December, before the most recent shitstorm shook me awake:

"Coco Fine and her family have lived next door to neighborhood eccentrics Victor and Anna Gibbles for four months, and they’ve never tried to be friendly. But when Anna collapses one rainy afternoon, her daughter appeals to Coco for help, initiating Coco’s reluctant involvement in the Gibbles’ lives.

Anna, a successful painter, is a diabetic and alcoholic whose declining health has gradually thrust Victor into the role of fulltime caregiver. As their relationship succumbs to the pressures of illnesss and Victor forges a friendship with Coco, Anna decides to end her life.

Hilarity ensues.

Not really. Coco and her husband Charles, rattled by the death of a neighbor they never took the time to know, resolve to assuage their guilt by “adopting” Victor—checking in on him, inviting him to holiday meals, having their young children, Eleanor and Gus, spend time with him. Each relationship deepens and differentiates, revealing the complexities of Victor’s and Anna’s marriage, the mutable dynamics of the younger Fine family, and the sacrifices people make for those they love."

...Really, aside from the aside, you can almost sing along with the jacket flap copy, can't you? HORK.

Screwing up my courage: where to go from here? Well, I think what I turn in next will necessarily be a hot mess. Coco a bad mother? Yes, indeed, I believe she is. Victor an acerbic old miscreant lusting after the neighbor as his wife -- herself a real peach -- lies dying upstairs? Absolutely, yes. Crap kids? Fuck yeah.

Will these people be likable? I doubt it. Despicable with a dash of funny, more likely. Will they be interesting? They interest me. Will their actions and motivations be true? Utterly.

Tired of being sick. Tired of writing what other people want to read, of saying what other people want to hear.

Gloves off.

***

So... I experienced the sudden onset of new symptoms on Friday afternoon, just after I got home from chemo. Awful, terrible mess. I'm to call Dr. J's office tomorrow to check in, and will go get checked out on Tuesday. Meanwhile, a ton of crap to do for school -- meetings, papers, so many pages to read. I like reading, of course, but feel overwhelmed and unable to concentrate. I've apparently dropped the ball on the novel award I administer for my teaching assistantship; got the faculty adviser, who is also my novel workshop instructor and my thesis adviser, a bit worked up. The worst. It'll be a stone miracle if I pull off finishing this semester.

Worse than cancer

     Cancer is nothing but sucky, let's establish that off the top. When I was first diagnosed twelve years ago, I had surgery and started chemo almost immediately after, and for a while there, I went into that "survivor's euphoria" -- experiencing an outsize joy of everyday things, all that shit. It was nice while it lasted, maybe about three months. In due time, as I started to recover, the glow wore off and I went back to being myself; that is, my "worldview" (my Bush Doctrine, as it were) snapped back into place and I became appropriately grumpy over little irritations, argued with M, made humor from cynicism, etc. When the shitstorm started again four years ago, I was quite bereft of the smell-the-roses impulse, and it was all fear and sadness. The poorer my health, the lower I feel, the darker my moods, but even during the in-between upsides, I stabilize at my normal true self: optimistic, but looking over my shoulder. 

     None of this has to do with how much I love or appreciate my family. I am keenly aware of time passing, as any parent is when a tiny six year old starts spitting out teeth like she's George Foreman. My heart races when I think about my daughter, and it's literally tough to keep my hands off her when she's with me. I know we have maybe three or four more months of this utter innocence, this enchantment with fairies before -- poof! -- it gives way to something a little more grounded, mature, and "real," and I know this not because I have some enhanced sense of time brought about by illness, but because I'm a mother.

      I don't need euphoria, because normal is so good. I adore my husband and daughter, love my family and friends, love school, love where we live. We are the luckiest people in captivity. 

     It's easy to imagine people not so lucky. I don't even have to imagine them; some of my friends are not so lucky. I think of the heartbreak, the complete despair, of friends whose marriages are in flux and I hurt for them. To me, probably because of my rock-solid base with M and A, it would feel as though I'd been catapulted into another universe if my family life came undone. I cannot fathom anything worse. 

     Then there are the people I see in the infusion center every week who're in worse shape than I am, or appear to be. Some of them have cancer, some diabetes or kidney disease or immune suppressions that require perhaps daily professional care. Some of them have no family or friends to lean on. There is the hunched man who goes around our neighborhood with a mostly-empty shopping cart. There are people who hate their jobs, their circumstances, their lives. People who're stretched too thin, barely getting by on a few hours of sleep and taking care of small children and aging parents. People who are losing their homes. People who are unemployed and have no health insurance. (Jesus God, protect M's job and preserve our health insurance.) People who're losing or have lost loved ones. People whose child is desperately sick; who've lost a child. (The worst of the worst. I'd lose my fucking mind.) People who are dispirited for whatever reasons, and find the world too much, just too much. I don't have to look beyond the confines of my own little orbit to find these people -- they're right here, in the neighborhood, in the local newspaper, at school, friends, friends of friends... never mind political upheaval and wars and famine and disease and unrest around the globe.

     All these situations are, to me, worse, much worse, than cancer.

     

Cheever, school, and teeth

     Have read several articles on and one interview with Cheever (Paris Review) in the last several days, as I turn around in my head the effects of his last, slim novel Oh What A Paradise It Seems. One tenet that consistently arises: keep moving forward, don't look back. He did not, for example, like to give interviews because he didn't like to discuss his work (looking back), and he found reading his own books as distasteful as "listening to a recording of my own conversations" -- he didn't do it. Sharklike; always thinking about the next thing. That's good advice for me to cotton to, considering my awful obsession with submitting (and collecting rejections for) my short fictions. If I could just concentrate on the novel to the exclusion of everything else... Publication is like love in that respect: happens when you least expect it, if it happens at all.

     Speaking of the novel, school starts tomorrow, and novel workshop has moved from Wednesdays to Monday evenings. I'll also be taking a lit class (Magical Realism) that meets twice a week, and thesis hours. The Program of Strengthening and Conditioning has worked well over the last week, and I think I will have enough stamina at least to get my ass to campus tomorrow evening. I have a chemo next Friday, and no class the following Monday (MLK Day), so it'll be a few weeks before I can discern whether treatment is going to impede me. In any case, I haven't driven a car in six weeks. Should work out well, I think.

     The Big Story around here is that A lost not one but TWO teeth (center, bottom) in the last two days. The Tooth Fairy came last night to our house for the first time, and back she'll come tonight. This morning, A pretended to believe with all her heart that a fairy had visited her, but her six-year-old cynicism kicked in this afternoon, and she announced she thought it was probably Mama and Papa who'd swiped the tooth and left the loot. 

     The teeth themselves are impossibly tiny, and I will keep them in a special box forever.

Little victories

     My campaign to regain stamina, now in its third day, progresses apace. It's as though I've broken the seal on Roo's Strengthening Medicine and am enjoying exponential results. Last week this time I had to follow a fifteen minute shower with an hour's nap; yesterday I did four loads of laundry. Urrah!

     I finished the last page of Revolutionary Road, closed the book, switched on the teevee, and saw Leo and Kate in a trailer for the upcoming film. Glad I didn't catch it while in the thick of the novel, 'cause that Hollywood set's not at all what I'd imagined the Wheelers' kitchen to look like. The novel now tops my list of favorites, and gives me all kinds of ideas about how to structure my own novel. I could gush for hours about the writing (really, I could; see "Strengthening Medicine" above) but the upshot is: I want to write like Richard Yates.

     I also want to write like John Cheever, whose last novel, Oh What A Paradise It Seems, I am reading this morning. It's slim, spare, and devastating, and has as much to teach about what to leave out as what to put on the page. Makes me want to take a weed whacker to my work.

     I read Chapter 1 of Ruby the Red Fairy to A last night. It felt great; she snuggled close. It's a Big Girl Chapter Book, you see, so intensely interesting. Tonight we discover if Rachel and her new friend Kirstey find anything cool in that black pot at one end of the rainbow.

     Second day in a row we've awoken to driving rain outside, and a pitch-black house. A is a trooper. It takes her a while to wake up, but once she does, she's laughing. What an agreeable little being. There is nothing I don't love about my child.

     Now: more Cheever, then a bit of fictioneering.

One week to build up strength

     After four weeks spent mostly in bed, I am suddenly feeling better -- feeling like being downstairs, looking forward to going someplace -- anyplace -- other than the hospital. Relieved that the advice the infusion nurse gave me (blame discomfort on the medication, not on the cancer) seems to be apt: the side effects of the last chemo I had, on Dec. 26, apparently are dissipating. It's not the fentanyl that's had me down, or even the tumor. Now that I have causality, I can plan around it and not worry (so much) about it. 

     What's different is hard to quantify. I am still terribly weak, from being in bed and not eating well. (Lost a couple more pounds in the last four weeks, which made Dr. J frown.) But my stomach does not feel knotted up and I can eat two scrambled eggs without a terrible gurgling, full sensation. Yesterday I ate breakfast; took a shower without feeling lightheaded; tidied up the front parlor; got dressed (including earrings and lipstick); hosted my lifelong friend KK and her sweetheart, who stopped through town on their way somewhere else; ate some salmon M had smoked; played with A; ate a normal amount of salad; had ice cream for dessert; watched a movie with M; and didn't go back upstairs until a reasonable adult time (11:00). In other words, if you discount the two-hour nap after breakfast, pretty fucking close to normal. 

     Classes start a week from tomorrow. My goals are to write fiction every day, and to build up my strength enough to get my ass to campus, park, walk, and be in class from 5:15 - 9:40 (two classes back-to-back on Mondays). 

     Me me me. Yawn. M just walked in sans A (who went to lunch at a friend's house) and with the Sunday NYT. There's a nice afternoon unfolding in front of us, and perhaps I'll have something to say about a subject besides my own damn self in the next post. 

     Here's to 2009.