All posts by fontfolly

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About fontfolly

I've loved reading for as long as I can remember. I write fantasy, science fiction, mystery, and nonfiction. For more than 20 years I edited and published an anthropomorphic sci-fi/space opera literary fanzine. I attend and work on the staff for several anthropormorphics, anime, and science fiction conventions. I live near Seattle with my wonderful husband, still completely amazed that he puts up with me at all.

Growing vegetables in the dirt

life, , ,

“Because I’m an old Southern woman and we’re supposed to wear funny looking hats and ugly clothes and grow vegetables in the dirt. Don’t ask me those questions. I don’t know why, I don’t make the rules!” —Louisa “Ouiser” Boudreaux, Steel Magnolias

I’m not really from the south. The small town where I was born (and where Dad had grown up, and several of my grandparents lived) was in the northwest corner of Colorado, but oil had been discovered there just before the Great Depression. When certain foreign powers suddenly needed to buy a lot of oil during the 1930s, the quickest way to get oil flowing out (and money flowing in) was to hire and move a whole bunch of experienced but out-of-work oil workers from the south. A few decades later, by the time I was born, nearly ever single person who lived in the town was either from the south, or their parents were. Even though my dad’s work caused us to move around between lots of small towns in Colorado, Nebraska, Wyoming, and Utah throughout my grade school years, our attendance of Southern Baptist Churches kept me in a sort of virtual south throughout.

Of course people who grew up in and live in all parts of the world grow vegetables in their yards. Yet, I can’t help but feel that the reason the last few years I have felt the need to at least grow a few tomato plants in containers, is because of the “rule” which the character in Steel Magnolias states. Even when I casually mention it, I don’t say “I’m growing a few tomato plants in containers.” No, what comes out of my mouth, if I don’t stop myself, is a drawl that sounds just like my Dad or Grandpa, “I got a couple tomatuhs growin’.”

When I was a kid, because we moved around a lot, we seldom had a vegetable garden of our own. But I spent at least part of every summer staying with either my grandparents or great-grandparents, and usually got drafted to help with theirs. Living in the city most of my adult life, I haven’t usually had a yard of my own to turn part of it over to growing vegetables. My gardening skills are spotty, at best, therefore.

In our current place, there is a small yard shared with the other households in our building. With the landlady’s permission, I’ve been planting flowers in two small beds in addition to several planters on the porch and a couple of hanging pots.

I started two years ago with one tomato. I had a large plastic pot that I had previously house a rubber tree indoors for many years. At the urging of a friend the previous year I’d tried to grow scallions in it, to no avail. I had a better luck with the tomato, getting about a handful of cherry tomatoes a week for the latter half of the summer and early fall. I spent a lot of time worrying about what the overnight temperatures were in the late spring and summer, moving the pot up against the brick house in the evening if I thought it would be too cool over night, then back out where they could get full sun during the day.

Last year I bought two more containers. I had two different breeds of cherry tomatoes and one grape tomato. I didn’t fret so much about temperatures in the beginning of the growing season. There was one point when we had a lot of sunny days, where I overdid it with the watering—when you over water, tomatoes start splitting open on the plant. I did not get three times as many tomatoes as the previous year. And the least productive plant was the grape tomato.

Just starting to produce!
Just starting to produce!
So this year I’m trying one cherry tomato, an heirloom yellow tomato that is supposed to produce small round 7-ish ounce tomatoes, and another that’s supposed to produce slighty smaller red oblong tomatoes. All three have started to flower, but only the cherry has started to show any fruit.

I’m looking forward to eating some fresh tomatoes. Three plants is probably our limit, since Michael doesn’t like tomatoes. I would have liked to get a few more than I did last year, but don’t want to get to the point where I’m needing to give a lot away.

Of course, I do get a craving for my grandma’s green tomato relish from time to time. Unfortunately I never learned her recipe, so if I did find myself with a bunch of green tomatoes, I’d be trying someone else’s recipe. And I’m not likely to have enough to experiment much if I did. So I probably ought not to think about that.

Of course, you only need a few small green tomatoes to fry up a mess of fried green tomatoes. And I know exactly how to make those.

Now that’s a taste of the south that I could really go for.

Why I hate hay fever, reason #5834

life,

Because even the most ordinary tasks are annoying when your head feels as if it is about to explode. And you’re having sneezing fits that make it worse. And waking up in the middle of the night because you can’t breathe through your nose, your head hurts, and you’re unable to tell whether you’re coming down with a cold, someone has released a noxious chemical into the air, or you’re just having an extra special bad hay fever attack.

I love flowers. I plant too many. So some of this is self-inflicted.

But I refuse to give up my right to grumble!

Even though one of the first things I did when I woke up this morning was to go outside and water my tomatoes. Then I paused to smell the flowers our friend gave us yesterday for our anniversary. Which made me stop to check the roses I gave Michael for the same reason.

I want my pretty flowers, and I think it is really cosmically unfair that I have to put up with all these other symptoms to get them.

*whine* *whine* *grumble*

Six months ago today…

love, , , ,

…the sweetest man on the planet said, “I do” when asked if he would take me as his husband.

Michael is the handsome devil on the right.
Michael is the handsome devil on the right.
I really don’t quite understand how I got lucky enough to have him in my life. The fact that he’s stuck with me for more than 15 years now is a daily wonder.

Making a big fuss about a six month “anniversary” is a bit silly. For one thing, one of the Latin roots of anniversary means “year”—the literal definition is “returning yearly,” so the phrase “six month anniversary” is nonsensical. If you were to insist on a Latinate word for it you could call it the semi-anniversary, but then someone is going to say, “Don’t you mean semi-annular” at which point you have to explain that semi-annular refers to the shape or form of a half-ring rather than a unit of time and once you’re down that pedantic rabbit hole you might as well give up.

Marking the lesser milestones seems premature when you’re talking about a brand-new relationship, because you’re presumed to still be in the giddy state of having not really gotten to know each other, and where hormones and the novelty of newness makes one more prone to overlook any signs of incompatibility. There is also a fear of jinxing things.

Neither of those would seem to apply to us, having been together for more than 15 years. But that immediately raises the question, shouldn’t we observe the anniversary of the day we met, or our first date, or the day we moved in together, et cetera, rather than the date of this more recent formalization of the existing relationship?

I have several responses to that one.

The less obvious response is that neither of us had the foresight to make a note of the precise date of those other events. We don’t even agree on when we first met. Michael remembers meeting me at an early morning panel on a Friday at NorWesCon (NorthWest Science Fiction Convention). I don’t recall that meeting, but rather remember meeting him at a Saturday room party at the same NorWesCon. Which is why for years Michael said we should just think of NorWesCon as our anniversary. Our first go-out-for-dinner date was in February ’98, a few months after Ray died. I think it was the 7th, but I’m not completely sure. We made plans to move in together, but we were going to wait until after the anniversary of Ray’s death, because it seemed unseemly to do so before that. But a series of bizarre incidents with two of Michael’s roommates made me feel he wasn’t safe there, so we accelerated plans and what with the flurry of events that ensued, we don’t quite agree on which month the actual moving in happened, let alone which day. Our various registrations of domestic partnerships (in different jurisdictions, et al) were dictated by external legal and insurance-requirement reasons, without much planning or fanfare.

My next argument is that the vast majority of married couples have all of those significant dates, too, but the one everyone focuses is on is the date you stand up in front of witnesses and an officiant to say “I do,” even though the emotional commitment happened before that point.

And my biggest argument is that the date for which the even vaster majority of friends, family, and acquaintances of all those married couples consider “real” is the date that one became legally married. That’s when you made things official. That’s when society gave the stamp of approval (or at least recognition). If you’re required to produce proof, that’s the date which will be on the certification you can request from an appropriate agency.

For us, that date didn’t become possible until we had already been together for many years. We did it on the first day it was legal in the state we reside in for several reasons. Yes, one was because we’d been waiting for a long time, goddammit! Another was that it was a date where it was easy to get several of the people we wanted to be there, there (though given how many of them volunteered to stand in line with us at midnight when licenses were first available, if that’s when we wanted to get ours, I realize that easy wasn’t one of their requirements).

But it was also because that day, December 9, 2012, was the first day in America that same-sex couples were allowed to marry as a result of a vote of the people. Yes, three states passed marriage equality on Election Day, 2012, but by pure chance, Michael and I lived in the state of those three whose constitution gave the earliest date such a law became effective. We beat out Maine by 20 days, and Maryland by 22.

If I’d really wanted to be historical, we should have tried to be one of the couples married after midnight by the county judge who came in to do those. Admittedly, it would have been very cool to have our official marriage certificate signed by Judge Mary Yu—isn’t that the coolest name for a judge? Regardless, I’m proud that a majority of our state citizens were willing to recognize the basic humanity and fairness issues involved. Do I think it should have happened years ago? Of course we wish the culture had been less intolerant long ago. But that doesn’t mean we can’t celebrate the fact that a lot of people have reached that conclusion—so having our anniversary on the historic day lets us commemorate that event, too.

And I can’t help being a product of my culture. I grew up with everything from fairy tales, television, family, and the community at large saying that the milestone worth marking is the wedding day. Not the day you signed civil union papers. Not the day you realized that his smile was something you would go out of your way to make reappear. Not the day you first signed a lease together. Not the day you caught yourself changing a favorite recipe because he doesn’t like tomatoes. Not the night you bought a major kitchen appliance together. Not the day that you first realized that you never wanted a morning to dawn without him at your side. Not even the day you picked up your marriage license.

No, the date you’re supposed to remember, the date that matters, is the day you got married.

So, yeah, even though I’m a bit of an old man, and we’ve been together for as long as we have, I’m going to keep being a bit of a silly, giddy newlywed. I’m probably going to keep saying “Happy Anniversary” on the 9th of every month for the rest of the year. I’m going to keep getting a silly grin on my face and a tear in my eye when I realize it’s been another month since I stood there, holding flowers and trying not to cry too hard to repeat my vows.

Because six months ago today, the sweetest man in the world married me. And don’t you forget it!

Is that your car?

life, ,

My sleepy little residential neighborhood is occasionally the site of dramas.

Our building has four units. The building next door is a mirror image of ours, also with four units. Eighteen years ago, when I moved in, the buildings were owned by one family. About fourteen years ago the buildings were sold, separately. There are a couple of shared facilities: a driveway, a tiny parking lot that has fewer spaces than there are units. Each building has its own laundry room and small yards, which are shared, but only between the people in each respective building.

So we have eight households who live close together and have reasons to try to get along besides just happening to be living on the same street. And then, of course, there are other houses and small apartment buildings up and down the block.

There’s one neighbor in the next-door building who is drunk all the time. He’s been in that state for years, and he just doesn’t have many brain cells left. Since his significant other passed away (turns out they weren’t married, which is something we only learned after she died, and her family did everything in their power to keep him away from the funeral, et al), he’s been through a series of increasingly dysfunctional roommates. The latest one seems to be drunk even more often than he is.

When I see them, you’re never sure when one of them is going to be grumpy and snarling, or happy and gregarious. So I limit my interactions mostly to smiling and nodding.

Fairly late last night there was a knock on our door.

A couple of young guys moved into a downstairs unit in our building last week. Until last night, I had only met one of them. They had just witnessed a hit and run involving a car parked on the street in front of our buildings, and weren’t sure whose car was whose.

The weather was warm and muggy yesterday, so they had been standing outside with another neighbor, chatting in the cool air, when a van pulled into the driveway between our building and the building next door. The aforementioned new roommate of the drunk in the other building stumbled out, apparently even more extremely drunk than usual. The van backed up out of the driveway, slammed into a parked car, and then zoomed away.

By the time I had shoes on and was outside, the extremely drunk neighbor was insisting she didn’t know who had dropped her off, another neighbor was on the phone with police trying to describe the runaway car, while the neighbor who owned the damaged car was trying to figure out how bad said damage was.

After ascertaining that no one had been hurt, I wasn’t sure what help I could be. If police came to take a statement, since I had neither seen nor heard the crash, I figured me standing around outside would just add to the confusion.

And it was a little awkward listening to one of the owners of the damaged car trying to get the extremely drunk person to admit to remembering anything useful.

I should be out there dealing with some weeds and doing some pruning of the one rose bush that is going a bit bananas. Or at least take the trash out.

But I keep finding excuses to stay inside, because I anticipate awkward conversations or something.

Which is silly. Because the awkwardness isn’t even mine. I’m not even a witness. I’m barely a bystander.

But you feel bad for people who are in awkward situations. And you wish, somehow, that you could fix things.

It feels wrong to just say, “It’s nothing to do with me.” Because while the current situation doesn’t directly involve me, the ongoing difficulties of having the two clueless drunks living next to everyone—and the string of odd, annoying, and occasionally more serious issues that keep happening around them—are shared by all of us.

Even more surely than the shared driveway.

There’s some profound point in all of this, I’m sure. Something about unchosen communities and why we can’t go through life saying, “nothing to do with me.” And something about that weird spectrum with meddling in other people’s lives on one end and not caring what happens to them at the other, and how do we find an acceptable position in the middle.

If I think of it, I’ll let you know.

What men do…

society, , ,

I was on my third date with Glenn when I made some comment about something in the news being particularly disturbing for gay guys like us.

“Hey, man, I’m not gay,” Glenn said, with a grin and a chuckle.

I was dumbstruck for a moment. This was our third date, and me being (at the time) a very recently out guy, and it being the nineties, we had had sex with each other more than once by this point. His night job was bouncer at a gay bar, where he was a well-known flirt. (That wasn’t where we met, btw; he had seen me sitting in a coffee shop reading a book, and had chatted me up in part because he didn’t recognize me as a regular from the bar and he had a thing for “brainy shy guys.”)

Then I realized what he must have meant, and I said something like, “Oh, sorry! I didn’t realize you were bi. Sorry for jumping to conclusions.”

All signs of a sense of humor left his face. “I’m not bi, either,” he growled. “I’m straight.”

I apologized, and then asked him to explain, since we had had sex several times, and there isn’t any part of my hairy body that anyone in their right mind would describe as feminine. I did not add that he had a rather large number of stereotypical gay mannerisms and speech patterns, so no stranger who met him would have described him as straight-acting.

He explained. There was one certain sex act he didn’t do, because only gay guys did that. He did all sorts of things with men, including a few acts whose crude names are common insults thrown at non-gender-conforming men. But this one thing he did not do. So even though he had sex with men, specifically had sex with gay men, he wasn’t gay.

That was another part of his self-definition: he didn’t have sex with men that fit his description of “straight,” he only had sex with men who met his definition of gay. Not obviously effeminate men (in fact, having met a couple of exs, and being friends with a guy who he dated after me, I know he had a particular thing for hairy chested guys with beards), but men who did the thing he wouldn’t do.

I tried to circle back to the bisexual topic, and he dismissed that because he didn’t like having sex with women. He had dated a few girls in high school, and had had sex with two of them on an on-going basis. But he hadn’t enjoyed it. He did it, he said, because it was expected. He tried, when things started getting serious, to convince them he was a good Christian boy who didn’t want to pressure them, because of course being good girls they wanted to wait. But they didn’t want to wait, and he was afraid they might start rumors that he was gay, so he had sex with them.

He knew he wouldn’t enjoy it—just as he hadn’t really enjoyed dating the girls—because he’d been having sex with other guys his age as early as junior high.

“So, you don’t like dating or having sex with women, the only people you’ve had sex with or dated since high school have been men—a lot of men—and the only people you enjoy having sex with are men,” I summed up, “But you’re not gay?”

“No, I’m not, obviously,” he replied, “I’m a man. I do what men do.”

“So what you’re saying is,” I replied slowly, “that I’m not a man?”

The conversation just went downhill from there. Need I mention that it was also our last date?

I was reminded of this conversation by the comments a couple weeks ago by a particularly slimy television preacher in which he told a woman whose husband was cheating that it was her fault. “Men wander,” he said, “that’s what men do.” And then he told her it was her job to make the home and herself so appealing that her husband would rather not wander.

“What men do” is used as an excuse for everything from denying husbands equal child custody in divorce proceedings to excusing infidelities, verbal bullying, and violence. Its inverse, “things men don’t do” is the rationalization for bullying boys and young men who fail to act manly enough, as well as bashing gays or suspected gays of all ages.

It’s crazy, and it’s wrong.

It’s not that men wander—people wander. You can quote studies that say men report more sexual partners than women, and that more men admit to infidelity on confidential surveys than women. But you’re ignoring more recent studies, where respondents were hooked up to what they were told were lie detectors, which show that there is almost no gap at all between the number of men and women who admit to cheating on a spouse or significant other. The numbers of partners reported are more equal, as well.

Monogamy isn’t natural, that’s just a fact. That doesn’t mean that people can’t strive for it and achieve it, it just means that it’s hard work. Perhaps if more people understood that, instead of believing the myth that if you really love someone you will never be tempted to wander, a lot of relationships would be healthier and happier.

Some extremely masculine men date, have sex with, and fall in love with men. Some not terribly masculine men date, have sex with, and fall in love with women.

One of the men with the most masculine personality I ever knew is someone I met when he was a woman, a few years before identifying as transgender and entering into transition.

A straight friend I’ve known for more than twenty years exhibits a lot of stereotypical conservative masculine personality traits—but he’s not afraid to sit with his five-year-old daughter and play with her dolls when she asks. And he’ll tell strangers when he takes said daughter to My Little Pony conferences that it’s for her, but that only explains the third day of last summer’s convention, not the two days before while he was there by himself.

What men do… is whatever a man does. If it would be wrong when someone other than a man does it, then it’s just as wrong when it’s a man doing it. And, if it is all right when a man does it, than there’s nothing wrong when anyone doing it.

Because we’re all people.

Theory and practice

writing, ,

I’ve described before how I hear conversations in my head between various fictitious characters, and that’s where a lot of my story ideas come from. The other night, while listening to a friend’s band playing at their album release party, I suddenly heard one of my characters, the Mathemagician, explaining to someone:

“Zombies can be manifest in several different ways, though almost all of the spells or rituals that create them call upon the same principles of magic: Induced Cognition, the Principle of Correspondence, Induced Thaumaturgic Recapitulation–”

Then he was interrupted by his partner, Mier of the Tam Clan: “Oh, you’re over complicating it. All you need to make a zombie is: a corpse, a bell, a fresh egg, a pinch of tea, and most importantly, a drummer who can keep a beat.”

I’m not sure what caused that to pop into my head. It’s possible that a band member (or someone in the crowd near me) had made a comment about the drummer. Or not. Who knows how anyone’s subconscious works?

The exchange itself was interesting to me on several levels. First, it’s perfectly in character. The Mathemagician approaches magic from the perspective of rules and patterns. He’s big on futzing with theory, and he will tinker and fiddle with the theory until he needs to apply it. He’s an academic-style wizard. Meir is a shaman. He thinks in terms of analogy and intuition. He’s more concerned with getting things done than worrying too much about why things work.

Those two modes of thinking apply to all sorts of things, not just the world of fictional wizards. When I try to explain about the craft of writing, sometimes I feel as if I’m being the Mathemagician: what I’m explaining is true, but it might only be understood by people who already know it.

On the other hand, Mier’s style of explanation seems simpler and more practical. Yet one realizes, after a moment, that all he’s given is a list of ingredients. The recipe—instructions for how to use those things to create your very own unliving servant—has been left as an exercise for the reader.

Storytelling is more than a bit of a mysterious process. It isn’t a matter of following a simple recipe. But it’s more than understanding theory.

My third observation is, that I have no idea who they were explaining this to, nor do I know whether this scene belongs in any story which I’m currently working on that includes these characters. Yes, there is an evil necromancer and an army of undead in the novel I’m currently working on, but I’m not sure there is any reason, within the story, for these two characters to explain to someone else how zombies are made.

But I typed it up and saved it, just in case. You never know when it might come in handy.

Presence (stage, screen, or otherwise)

literature, movies, , , , ,

I’ve recently read two different proposals for a gay version of the Bechdel Test. The Bechdel Test is described in a comic strip by Allison Bechdel back in 1985. It is usually described as a simple way to gauge the active presence of female characters in Hollywood films and just how well rounded and complete those roles are. The test is in three steps, 1) There must be at least two named women, who 2) talk to each other, about 3) something besides a man.

It is frightening how many movies and TV shows fail the test. Having just watched, over the course of a month, the first five seasons of Supernatural, for instance, I can report that not a single episode out of those 65 episodes passes the test. To be fair, since I’ve also watched a few later episodes out of order, I can report that one recent episode in which Felicia Day reprises the role of a lesbian hacker played in an earlier season very nearly passes the test. Nearly.

While the results of applying the Bechdel Test to your favorite shows can be depressing, it is even worse if you try to apply a similar test about gay characters. If you transliterate the Bechdel Test into a test of how gays are treated in storytelling, it might look like this proposal:

  1. Are there at least two gay/lesbian/transgender people?
  2. Do they talk to each other? Or even do more than shock horror kiss?
  3. Do they talk about anything other than sex/being gay/shopping/cats?

With extremely rare exceptions, only movies made by queer writers/directors and explicitly aimed at a gay audience pass the test. Most fail at item number one. And most of the few who pass would fail if you changed it to say “is there one out gay/lesbian/transgender character.”

I insist on the “out” part because, I’m sorry, characters such as Dumbledore in the Harry Potter stories don’t count. He is never identified within the books or the movie as being gay. It isn’t even really hinted at in a meaningful way within the story. Having the author tell people during a book tour (and then only after having been confronted umpteen million times about the lack of gay characters), that one character who is portrayed as completely asexual throughout the books doesn’t count. Because this is about recognizing the existence of gay people, not compounding the closet.

Of course, Brokeback Mountain fails this test, because the only gay characters who appear are all deeply and tragically closeted. Which was true to the historical period, but also integral to the fundamental point of the story. Because of that historical reality, I find this other version I found a bit more useful:

  1. The movie includes two gay characters who interact in some way,
  2. Do not offer sassy advice to the protagonist,
  3. And are not dead by the end credits

At least with this test, Brokeback Mountain doesn’t fail until the third bullet.

The point of the original Bechdel Test wasn’t to assess whether a movie treats female characters equally, or whether there are stereotypes, or even whether or not it is misogynist. All it does is establish a baseline that the writers have actually imagined the women in the story as being full-fledged human beings, with lives and feelings and interests of their own. It’s useful not so much as a way to judge a specific movie or story, but to make us think about the presumptions of story telling.

Movies and books and stories are full of a variety of fully realized male characters, who range from good to nasty, from important to silly. And even most of the throw-away male characters have hints of a life and personality of their own that isn’t defined by the protagonists or their family. Where as the default position for female characters are to be the sister, wife, ex-girlfriend, or mother of one of the characters who is actually doing something in the story.

And let me just say, it’s disturbing, as a writer, to go apply the Bechdel Test to your own work and discover just how many of your own stories fail it!

So, the two versions of the Gay Bechdel Test aren’t quite the same as the original. Both have at least one step that focuses solely on clichés rather than just establishing whether the writer has actually developed a personality and backstory for the characters. So I think I prefer this version:

  1. The movie/story contains one identified gay, lesbian, or transgender character,
  2. Who has a conversation with any other character,
  3. About something other than sexuality*.

With the corollary that under sexuality we include topics that are typically (and lazily) considered a subset of “queerness.” So if all they talk about is gay rights legislation, or AIDS prevention, or who uses which bathroom, those count as a failure, too.

Not that we need to be the stars, or that we need to appear in every story, but we’re part of reality, and there are far more of us than there are people capable of dodging dozens of machine gun bullets while driving a car at very high speed through a crowded place without hurting anything other than a single vegetable cart, while reloading their gun and explaining the intricacies of a multinational conspiracy.

And we see thousands of them in movies all the time.

Starting your day right

life, , ,

A few weeks ago I found myself trying to explain to a good friend precisely why it is I forget to eat breakfast on weekends, and more specifically, why “You just need to get into the habit” isn’t helpful to hear. While I agree that it’s never too late to learn knew things, it’s important to recognize that when one has failed for decades to undo a bad habit, it is going to take more than a pep talk to change it.

Which isn’t to say that I’m not still trying. It’s not the only habit I fight with. When I was in my 30s, for instance, was when I first realized that I was no longer capable of staying up to all hours a few nights every week and still put in a full, productive work week. I had to get out of the habit of staying up really late and sleeping in on weekends. And as I started doing a better job of getting up on weekends only a little later than weekdays, I found Mondays no longer felt like such a drudge and disaster.

It’s not easy. I’m not a morning person, and that isn’t just a preference. If given a chance, my natural body clock switches to almost a nocturnal schedule. Some of us are wired that way. So pursuing a career involving a more or less traditional office job is a constant fight.

After my late hubby went through his first round of chemotherapy, he had a very hard time sleeping more than a couple of hours at a time. One of the things we tried was melatonin, which is a natural hormone involved in regulating the sleep cycle. Melatonin tablets are very useful for people who work rotating shifts, or otherwise can’t sleep at the same time each day. It didn’t really help Ray.

Since I’d done a lot of research on it before Ray tried it, it occurred to me that I could use it when my sleep schedule got out of whack. Since it’s the same hormone that causes drowsiness naturally, taking the tablets don’t “dope you up” like other kinds of sleeping pills. Though research indicates we can’t build up much of a tolerance for it (it’s a hormone, after all), there is some concern that over-using might cause your body to produce less of it naturally. The upshot is that it’s advised only to use it the first night or two when you need to change your schedule.

So I tried it one Sunday evening, taking it about an hour before I needed to be asleep to get ready for work, and I laid down with a book. I conked out about a half hour later, and as the cliché says, slept like a baby.

I woke up the next morning about a half hour before my alarm went off, feeling better that I ever remembered having felt on a Monday morning. And the weird thing was, without taking any more pills, I reliably started getting drowsy for the next three or four days right about the time I’d taken the pill on Sunday. My personal natural cycle of not feeling drowsy until well after midnight did start to assert itself after a number of days, but for most of the week, it was great.

So, I decided that I should make it a regular thing to take one tablet every Sunday. And it works great.

When I remember to do it.

The problem is, if I don’t pay close attention to the time on a Sunday evening, it’s easy to miss the time. If you take it later, that defeats the purpose, because you’re setting the sleep cycle wrong.

I first tried it 18 years ago. I go through phases where I get good at remembering to do it, week after week, and it’s easy to get up and get into work on time without doing a lot of rushing, or feeling discombobulated at the beginning of the week.

But then I’ll miss a Sunday. And then I miss another, and pretty soon months have gone by without me remembering.

No amount of setting computer reminders or giving myself pep talks will work. Because no matter how determined I may be when I set the reminder to go do it as soon as the reminder happens, if by chance I’m in the middle of writing something that I’ve been trying to finish for a long time, or working on some other thing, I’ll think, “Yes, I’ll do that in just a minute…” and the next thing I know, it’s 45 minutes later.

But man, when I do remember, those Mondays are awesome!

All in the (video) family

life, ,

My dad didn’t like All in the Family. I think he and Archie had way too much in common, and seeing his own opinions laughed at rubbed him the wrong way. So we only watched it occasionally in the first season, or so. Usually when Dad wasn’t around.

I had mixed feelings about the show overall, and about some of the characters. Except, of course, Edith. As portrayed by Jean Stapleton, Edith Bunker was the sweet, ditzy, long-suffering wife of the unapologetic racist, conservative, and working class Archie. Edith was adorable. She was the favorite aunt everyone wished they had in their family.

By the time my folks divorced, All in the Family had been the highest rated network show for a few seasons, and the network had started broadcasting reruns of early seasons on weekday afternoons (it didn’t enter syndication for a few more years). I was able to see a lot more of the show, sometimes watching episodes with my grandmother, who loved Edith as much as I did.

Although the show was a licensed Americanization of the British series, Til Death Do Us Part, Stapleton played Edith much more naive and happy than the character from the British series. I’ve heard some people disparage the show in comparison to the British original, referring to Edith as an example of “typical American dumbing-down.”

They may be right about the show over all, but they’re wrong about Edith. Edith was ditzy, naïve, gullible, and clearly not a rocket scientist, but she wasn’t stupid. Ms Stapleton played her as warm, loving, and trusting. She was gullible because she saw the best in people, assuming that they were trustworthy until shown otherwise.

This was probably best demonstrated in an episode that a lot of people hate, “Edith’s 50th Birthday,” in which Edith is taken captive in her own home, and nearly raped in front of the audience. Edith eventually fights off the attack with a flaming birthday cake (seriously, and it wasn’t in a funny way). All the ways Edith tried to talk her attacker out of it, how she reacted to his threats, his gun, and finally, as the the birthday cake in the oven burns and fills the house with smoke, convincing the rapist to let her pull the cake from the oven, which allows her the smash the thing into his face and chase him out.

I saw the actor who played the rapist, David Dukes, on a talk show some years later, where he described the episode. The show was filmed before a live studio audience, at the time, and he said that the audience was clearly shocked when his character took Edith hostage, but they were still thinking that, since the show was a comedy, things were going to turn to slapstick at any moment. There was a point, when he had Edith up against a piece of furniture and he was pulling some of his clothes off, that the audience realized that this was serious. “There was a collective gasp,” he said, “which immediately changed into a growling. And I thought they might storm the stage and try to kill me.”

The birthday cake smoke appeared at that point, and moments later the audience was cheering very wildly as Edith scalded his face. He said he hadn’t really understood that Edith Bunker was “everyone’s favorite aunt” in the collective imagination before that moment.

And the problem was, he said, that because they filmed before a live audience, they also recorded every episode twice, each time in front of a different audience. “So, after genuinely fearing for my life, I had to turn around and do it again.”

He said he still occasionally received hate mail, “some of it with rather serious-sounding threats” years afterward.

After portraying “everyone’s favorite aunt” for over 200 episodes spanning nine seasons of All in the Family and one season of the spin-off, Archie Bunker’s Place, winning three Emmys and two Golden Globes, Stapleton thought Edith’s potential had been reached, and felt there was no story left to tell of her. When Stapleton asked Norman Lear, the creator and producer of the series, to kill Edith off, Lear was noticeably upset. Stapleton is said to have said, “Norm, she’s just a fictional character.” Lear responded, it is said with a tear in his eye, “No, she’s not.”

Before playing Edith, Stapleton played numerous roles in Broadway musicals and plays, appeared in several movies, and play dozens of guest starring roles in television. She continued to appear on TV and in movies for years afterward. But for many of us, she will always be Edith, the person we all wished we knew.

After news of Jean Stapleton’s death at the age of 90 on Friday, I noticed a sudden spike of traffic on this blog, all going to a post from last August called, “Maybe it was the heavy syrup?” I was referencing an episode of the series. I suspect people were looking for a clip. So, here’s one from the episode in question, “Edith’s Accident”:

You’ll feel different when…

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When I was in my late teens, I once got into a peculiar argument with a slightly older friend. I had made a comment to the effect that I could never see myself being happy living in a city. It had taken me a few years to get used to living in a town that was big enough to require more than one high school, after spending most of my life living in very small towns.

He was attending college in a nearby city at the time. He said he had felt the same way just a few years before. “You haven’t actually lived in a city,” he pointed out. “You’ll feel differently after you do.”

At least, that’s what I heard. It is quite possible that he actually said, “You may feel differently,” but I heard the firm assertion that he knew exactly how I would feel, and it activated my obstinate streak. I pointed out that I had been visiting a couple of cities fairly regularly, and I had a pretty good idea what they were like. Except I probably said it a bit meaner. I know I made a lot of disparaging observations about cities during the course of it.

A year or so later, I was attending college in a city. By the time I finished college, I had some good job prospects, and I had become quite enamored with several aspects of city life. So I stayed. And the longer I stayed, the more I liked living here. When I visit my mom in the town where I went to high school, I find I feel a lot differently about several aspects of living there which I used to think of as advantages.

My friend was right, and I was wrong.

Another time another friend and I had gotten into a discussion about my dismal love life. Most of the time there had been no love life at all. The few exceptions had failed spectacularly, though each in a different way. I trusted this friend more than I had ever trusted anyone, so I told him that I suspected I was bisexual, and I thought that perhaps that might be playing into my difficulties.

He immediately asserted that 1) I could not possibly be bi, and 2) once I stop doubting myself I would find the perfect girl for me. He argued his point with such emphatic certainty, that I doubted my own feelings and experiences.

Of course, I wasn’t being entirely honest. I didn’t merely suspect that I was not heterosexual. I had quite incontrovertible evidence. My friend was also operating under the same societal brainwashing that was responsible for the megaton of internalized homophobia I was carrying around at the time.

Eventually, I worked through that baggage (though it got more than a bit messy) and came to understand that my friend was wrong. I had only been half-right in understanding myself and my future, but the half I was wrong about was part and parcel of the parts he was wrong about.

Of course, one could argue that my friend was partially correct. Because eventually I did find the right person for me—a guy who made me so happy, who I couldn’t imagine living without, and who made me brave enough to stop living the lie of being closeted.

Our fairytale ending didn’t last as long as I hoped—Ray died a bit over six years after we moved in together. I had to figure out how to have a life that no longer had him in it. I have since been lucky enough to fall in love with another wonderful man, who has stuck with me for 15 years, so far, and even said “I do” when we finally could do so, legally, a few months ago.

The two friends who were adamantly convinced that I would feel differently one day were correct that my perspective changed, but their certainty about the way my perspective would change was at best guess work. It was also a bit of projection. Like people who insist that another person saying they don’t want to have kids “will feel different when you have your own,” they’re unable to conceive of anyone being happy and fulfilled living differently than themselves.

Just like I was when arguing with my first friend that I’d never be happy in the city.

Because we all do it. At one time or another everyone has either offered advice along that line. Or we’ve complained to a mutual friend, wondering why the person doesn’t see the obvious solution and do things this way. We may be right that there’s a better way, but it isn’t our life. No matter how smart or sympathetic we think we are, we don’t know what it’s like to be them.