Blog Archives - Fourth Quarter '07
December 2007
[Saturday December 29] Starve? Me? Nah!
I can't remember the last time I blogged twice in one day, but I had the most wonderful idea that I just have to share with you. I did some proofreading of Rawle's dissertation today, and his brother joked that he should ask me to proof his, too.
Being a bear of very little brain, it was several hours before the idea hit me: I could provide a proofreading service for students doing theses, dissertations and the like.
Really; it's so simple. I do it all the time on the job, and I'm good at it. Why not use my talents? It's a brilliant way to earn some extra cash. I'm going to get cracking on it right away. I could put up posters at the University and the postgrad schools nearby. I could provide a reasonable rate, lower than that of the ad agencies and the like, and Bob's my uncle!
Brilliant!
(Earlier) Almost there
Monday 31st will be my last official day of work before I set off on my wonderful adventure. As a symbolic gesture, I have cleaned out my briefcase and packed away my company-branded shirts until such time as I might need them.
I'm exhausted, nervous and excited, all rolled into a tight little nervous bundle. Maybe I'll make money. Maybe I'll starve. Who knows?
If I start to solicit donations of money, rice and flour in a few months, would you send me any?
[Monday December 24] Christmas Eve
A very wonderful Christmas to everyone, and deepest, most heartfelt wishes from my family to yours for a safe and wonderful holiday.
[Thursday December 20] Unstoppable
Got my royalty statements today. Now, I have to confess that I'm not all that good at reading royalty statements (who is?) but it seems pretty clear that I won't be buying that Benz this Christmas.
But rather than being plunged into a depression like I usually do twice a year when that damn thing comes out, I was humming and singing. Why? Because I'm less than 2 weeks away from being home, where I will be free to write, write, write to my heart's delight, to learn and improve, to grow my writing and my market, and I know in my heart that I'm going to make it.
Yes, I'm unstoppable!
[Monday December 17] My kids are nuts!
This baking thing is really working out for me. I'm exhausted, my arm hurts, but I'm more relaxed than I have been in weeks. And then, there's the kids. For so long they've been begging to come home in the daylight, as opposed to suffering through all those hours of traffic to come home at dusk. Now I'm moseying in before 4 every afternoon to bake. Cool!
This afternoon I was working in the kitchen and listening to my kids playing with their little ball, feeling all warm and fuzzy and maternal, thinking how wonderful it is that we will soon be able to do this every day.
Then my two year old walks in and informs me that her brother has taken a crap on the lawn, and that the dog has eaten it. Then he walks in, smiling proudly, confirming her statement, and further explaining that it was all right, because he has wiped his bottom. But I didn't see you walk past me, I tell him. You never went to the bathroom.
I wiped it on the wall, he replied, as if it was the most rational thing in the world.
Gotta love them.
[Sunday December 16] Shoulda thought of this sooner.
I'm looking back at my blog entry of just ten days ago, where I was feeling so aimless, tense and almost disembodied, waiting, waiting, for the month to be over.
Then for some unfathomable reason, I volunteered at work to bake some 250 dozen cookies to give away for a project at work. That's right; I'm baking 3,000 cookies all on my lonesome.
It's not as bad as you think. First, it requires that I leave the office at one every day to come home to bake. Second, as I already mentioned, baking helps me mellow out. It's my version of a long drag on a nice, fat joint. It's made my work stress melt away, and it's helped make the days go faster. Shoulda thought of this sooner.
[Monday December 10] Letting go
I did something scary tonight: I did a toy cull. I attempt it maybe twice a year, but I have to say I'm not all that good at it. Every now and then I feel the desperate urge to crawl out from under the mountain of toys my children don't play with, and give some of them to kids who might.
And with Christmas on the horizon, and with me the only one of my siblings loony enough to procreate, the only set of grandchildren in my branch of the clan are going to make out like bandits in the presents department. My mother has already threatened to give them a piano. And no, not a toy one. It's insane. Sometimes I look at my living room and pray God we never have a fire. We'd never make it through the rubble to the door.
So I went through their junk with a bulldozer, filled the sink with a bunch of plastic toys and the washing machine with a load of stuffed ones, and have started getting them presentable enough to give away as part of our company charity drive. (And in case you're curious, yes, I did donate new stuff too, thanks for asking.)
But the scary part was letting go. Every toy has a history. There's Riley's first truck and Megan's first doll. There's the Eeyore she's always ignored but which I love because I've always loved Christopher Robin. But I sucked it in this time and threw most of them into the mix, although I had to admit I did go back and retrieve Riley's first Spiderman, which he demanded from his father on his second birthday. But I think I'm doing okay. Giving away the caterpillar he got on his first Christmas, and a lovely little bee with spinning wings that came all the way from New Zealand. Maybe in a few years I'll find the strength to part with some other precious toys, when my living room becomes non-navigable once again.
Sort of makes me wonder what it will be like to one day let them go...
[Saturday December 8] Floating, weightless
I have a character in Candy Don't Come in Gray, Mattie, who suffers from the sensation of flickering and blinking out of existence. I've been feeling like that recently, an odd, floaty sensation, as if my head is a balloon. As if I can't be me, truly be me, until a certain set of conditions can be met. And until then, I'm just waiting.
I'm waiting for December to be over and done with. Not to sound like a Grinch or anything, but December just isn't my favourite month. I like Christmas all right, especially now that I have kids. But I like Christmas Day, you know, December 25th? For the life of me I can't understand why anyone would want to stretch a perfectly good family event into a six-week affair of stultifyingly repetitive (and jarringly loud) Parang music, turkey and ham, parties, shopping, and traffic, traffic, traffic. And the supermarkets, my god! Do we really need that much food for Christmas? The parking lots are full from the last weekend in November. I ran out of diapers this week and actually found myself lying in bed strategizing my entry and exit (with 2 children in tow) at the supermarket, given that I only needed one item and was facing an hour of fighting for parking space and lining up just to get it.
Nope. Not a Christmsa person at all.
I'm waiting for Rawle to finish his damn dissertation once and for all (It's been 2 years in the making) so we can finally be a family once again, and I won't have to be making all these allowances and shouldering all these extra responsibilities just to allow him time to work on it. Although the upside of all this has been that it has brought me closer to the kids and made me a more patient person, I would like to have a modicum of alone time once again.
And, most importantly, I'm waiting for January to arrive so I can finally, after so many years of planning and waiting, have some time away from corporate life. I've got so much planned, I'll probably never be able to do it all. Here's just a few items on my list:
-
Write a few romances
-
Try my hand at another literary novel
-
Plant a vegetable garden
-
Paint the living room
-
Start playing computer games again (I have Sims 2 and Longest Journey, Dreamfall on order, and I can't wait.) Yeah, I used to be a gamer.
-
Sew something
-
Sleep
-
Read
-
Bake cookies
-
30 minutes a day on the treadmill
-
Redesign my web page from scratch
-
Get a haircut
Like I said, I'll probably never be able to squeeze it all in, but I sure as hell am going to try!
[Monday December 3] Earthquake!
I guess by now the earthquake that shook the Caribbean last week must be old news. I was at work, on the second floor, in a storeroom with floor-to-ceiling shelves laden with junk. They started shaking. I hunkered under the table and rode it out trying not to throw up. I always get nauseated during an earthquake.
Anyway, a day later I'm listening to the news, and this government official, I can't remember who, is saying that it was a 7.3, one of the largest in the region in 200 years. Her comment? It's a sign that the nation needs to pray harder.
Excuse me? Is this the official state position? We're led by a Prime Minister who has declared himself God's Chosen One, and who consults a spiritualist before making state decisions. We're being run by a bunch of people who actually believe that an earthquake is the warning sign of a wrathful God, and we wonder why we as a nation are still unable to clamber up out of the primordial 3rd world muck in which we're still mired? Why not throw virgins into the mouth of a volcano and be done with it?
I'm all for freedom of belief and religion, and I'm all for the rights of everyone, including elected or appointed officials to worship whomever they choose, including the angry Vulcan. But come on, people, let's draw the line between our personal and professional lives, shall we? We didn't vote for shamans and rain dancers.
November 2007
[Sunday November 25] Now, ain't that a poke in the eye!
Right. So we've all got it straight just how big an idiot I am when it comes to make-up, have we? And we're all clear on the fact that for the past couple of weeks I've been trying in my own tiny, not-too-significant way, to try to halt the ravages of time, while in the process putting a little colour into my drab, dreary, pallid little face.
So there I am on mornings before work, diligently applying the stuff the chick at the makeup counter gave me. (BTW, that whole experience was a classic. I was a salesgirl's wet dream. I walk up to the counter and announce "I need a whole bunch of makeup but I don't know anything about it so I'll just take whatever you suggest." Whereupon she enquires discreetly if I had any particular (i.e. cheap or expensive) brands in mind. When I shrugged and said "whatever", you should have seen the little commission lights go on in her eyes. Which is how I ended up dropping $600-plus on makeup.
But I digress. all week, I've been cursing my eyeliner for being too hard. I mean, this stuff has got to be tugging at my eyelids, which in turn will only bring on more wrinkles. Cursing the pencil, cursing the salesgirl, and cursing myself for not insisting on something softer.
Then yesterday I actually take the time to read the label and discover I have been poking myself in the eye with my lip definer.
Move along, folks. Nothing to see here.
[Thursday 22 November] Pieces of me
Well, with less than 6 weeks to go before my hiatus, I've started to get my ducks in a row. I've started rummaging through the cardboard boxes that have sat in a corner of my cube for years, accumulating the various bits and pieces that you tend to when you have a job like mine.
Magazines I've written, articles about people now retired or dead, photos I've taken, Thank You cards from people I don't remember, and from people I do.
Now, you know me; I'm a packrat. My imaginary dream house has a whole room set aside just for crates of stuff I can't bear to throw out, for fear that the memory of them will be lost with them. But I've decided that I am NOT hauling a whole freaking pile of stuff back to my house to create more of the clutter I so despise.
And so I've begun sorting, destroying what I don't want to keep (according to company policy, it's all got to be shredded before it goes out). Years of executive diaries and notebooks. Out of date business cards. All those pretty little thank you cards....
It hurts a whole awful bunch, but it's like slaughtering a cow. If you wanna eat the beef, it's got to be done.
[Tuesday November 20] Must...get...contract
Finally, after much dillying and dallying, I have completed a fairly satisfactory 3-book proposal and shipped (well, e-mailed) it off to my agent. So now I sit back and try not to let my stomach acid eat a hole through my jeans while I wait to see if I get a contract that will allow me to feed my children over the next few months.
Meanwhile (back at the ranch) I'm busy editing down The Lying Game from 82,000 words for Arabesque to 70,000 for Kimani. It's like deja vu all over again.
[Tuesday 13 November] A walking before and after photo
Ladies,
I am a living, breathing before and after photo, and I can't decide whether I
should be demoralized about it or not. I went to take a photo for my new
passport yesterday. Click, click, in and out in 5. Said photo
is the one you see on the right.
Now, in Trinidad, you need someone with a University degree to endorse your photo as a true likeness of you. Why they think people with degrees are any less likely to participate in passport fraud is beyond me. Anyway, I asked my acting Head to sign my photo and she refused, scandalized, saying she certainly does not recognize that photo as me. She said I looked like I got caught shoplifting, and advised me to "go put on some lipstick and take another photo."
Taking
into consideration the sheer hideousness of the picture, I can't blame her.
Problem was, I don't own any makeup. (And this is where the story really
starts). I dutifully trotted out to the store and bought about $100 US
worth of make-up, tarted myself up and took this photo, which is satisfactory
enough, given what I gave them to work with.
But I've been thinking about me and the whole make-up thing. Back in my 20s, when my theme song was "I'm Going on a Manhunt" from Flashdance, I wore the stuff. The more garish the better. Then somewhere along there, I stopped.
Maybe it was a dash of laziness, but it was mostly lack of confidence. I call it Ugly Girl Syndrome, the kind you get when you're told repeatedly while growing up just how ugly you are and just how unlikely it is that you'll ever get a man. UGS is what keeps me from buying pretty clothes. It's what has kept me from buying a mirror for my house 9 years after buying it.
I've developed the attitude that make-up if for silly twats who hang around bathrooms obsessively touching up the crap on their faces. I even justified my abhorrence of the stuff by working out how many months of my life I'd spend putting on and taking off makeup if I spend half an hour on my face every working day over the course of my life. (Don't ask how many. I forgot.) I even wrote a column once about the dishonesty of dyeing your hair.
But now that I'm getting (feeling, looking) older, I am able to look back at my neuroses and have a good (if a little rueful) laugh. I kind of liked the me from yesterday, with the makeup on. It put a bounce in my step, if only for an hour. I think I'll wear it again. Doesn't make me a silly twat, does it?
[Sunday November 11] Just a bakin' fool
I was standing in the kitchen at around 10:30 the other night, dead on my feet, but relentlessly whipping up a batch of cookies when Rawle came in and asked me, "If you're so tired, why are you baking?"
The first thing out of my mouth was, "I bake when I'm under stress." And it was only then I realized that it was true; I really do bake when I'm under stress. And if that's the case, my friends, I am one good scare away from a coronary.
In the past ten days or so, I have made batches of oatmeal raisin, peanut butter M&M, chocolate chocolate chip and coffee & sprinkles cookies, not to mention the pizza scones I made this morning and the jammy scones, sausage rolls and orange poppyseed muffins I knocked out this afternoon in about 2 hours.
I've baked pizza, cheese sticks, quiche and Shepherd's pie. I've worked my way through 3 pounds of butter and I am on my second bag of flour. I've made cookies I don't even eat, and then found myself desperately pushing them onto my coworkers the next day. It's a good thing I have a metabolism like a blast furnace, or I'd weigh in at about a thousand pounds, give or take.
I won't even bother to enumerate the stresses; you probably have them yourself. Let's just say that the luxury of a nervous breakdown is looking mighty tempting right now...
[Friday November 9] Divali
Well, it's Divali today (or Diwali, depending on which neck of the woods you come from.) It's the Hindu festival of lights. They get a Holy day and everyone else gets a holiday.
About 30% of the population of Trinidad is Hindu, so that's an awful lot of lights. I plan on taking the kids out later to see the lights and eat loads of curry.
But in the mean time I plan on finishing my second book proposal. One more step closer to that multi-book contract I've been angling for.
Carrington, your plans are coming along swimmingly.
[Tuesday November 6] Nutten to say
Okay, I'm supposed to blog something, but I got nutten. I do have a new
author photo, though, thanks to my brother in law in London. (Thanks, Jem.)
Although I had the shock of my life when I first looked at them and noticed I
have...wait for it...WRINKLES!
How'd that happen?
October 2007
[Tuesday October 30] Hiatus
Since you guys have been so nice and understanding about all my bitching and
moaning about how tired I always am and how I never have any time to write,
yadda yada blah blah blah, I'll let you in on a little secret. A secret on
the 'net. Right.
Starting January 2, I'm going on a 6 month hiatus from my job. Unpaid, hiatus, mind you, but a hiatus all the same. I figured, I have been working for 20 years, why not take a break and regroup.
What do I plan to do? Write novels, plant a herb garden, and take care of my kids. How's that grab ya? Naturally, I'll be blogging my way through the countdown to it, and, if I'm not lying around in a stunned stupor when it finally happens, I guess I'll be blogging that, too.
I've started counting down the Mondays until Hiatus Time (or Hi-Time, as I choose to call it, as in "It's high time you got off your butt and did something with your life." I'll keep a running tally in the little brown box on my main page.
I need you guys to cheer me on with this. Can I hear a rah-rah-rah?
[Sunday October 21] One down, two to go
Finished the first draft of my book proposal this week, and damned if I'm not sitting here at the dinner table, at 10:05 p.m. on a Sunday, about to leap into the second. I've decided to do three full proposals for my editor, something I've never done before (I usually just do one proposal and get a 2 book contract off that) in the hopes of getting a better contract.
Glad the ideas keep on coming. Sweeet.
[Wednesday October 17] No Excuse
Awright, awright. Apart from a numbing bout of abject laziness and a series of domestic crises that involve snotty noses and stinky bottoms, I have absolutely no excuse for neglecting my blog for two whole weeks, so I'm not even going to make any.
Glad to be back with ya, though. Pretty much finished painting my esteemed study, although I still have to actually furnish it and all that. I'll post a picture of it, if I ever find my camera.
Back at work from my "Aah Moment" vacation, in which I wrote pretty much nothing and am now knocking myself out trying to work on the proposal I promised my agent 6 weeks ago.
Way to go, Carrington.
[Tuesday October 2nd] Painting
Proud
of myself. I've begin painting my room, and doing a pretty good job of it,
if you don't look too hard at the messy edges. But that's not really what
I'm proud of. I'm more proud of the fact that I have been standing on
scaffolding, despite my notorious fear of heights. Oh yes, my friends.
That's me, standing up.
I did 3 of the walls in Benjamin Moore Mannequin Cream, which is a nice rosy cream. So I decided to do the accent wall in a nice deep, foresty green....or what I thought would be a nice, deep, foresty green. Benjamin Moore's Alligator Alley turned out to look like duckshit. I hate it!
So
tomorrow I'm gonna have to go back to the store, and not only pick a different
shade of green, but also get a whole mess of white to cover up the green before
I paint more green over it.
This is getting tiresome.
