One Penguin at a Time…

September 30th, 2009 by Sara

Doesn’t this picture make you ANGRY! I mean how dare donkeys go to the police with their problems! Do they even pay taxes?

What?

Oh. What I meant was how dare William Steig portray the police as pigs! That is outrageous.

And this poem… it just really gets under my skin.

Clearly, it’s teaching materialism by advocating shopping as an exciting activity.

What?

Oh. I meant that Shel Silverstein is teaching our children to be disrespectful and downright malicious! This is terrible.

And how about these cute penguins?? They really make my blood boil! Cause they’re cute and they look like they’re smiling and we all know that penguins don’t smile.

And… um… tell me again what was wrong with the cute penguins?

Oh right. I hate it when books show happy families that love each other. Especially when they’re based on true stories. Those are the WORST.

Clearly picture books are tearing apart the fabric of America, one penguin at a time.

Happy Banned Books Week!

Posted in Banned Books, Books, Nifty happenings, Not-so-nifty happenings

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S.W.A.K.

September 23rd, 2009 by Sara

There’s nothing that captures the imagination like hidden surprises lurking in ordinary objects. Wardrobes that lead to secret worlds. Keys tucked into stone walls that open secret gardens. I spent my childhood, (okay, let’s face it… my whole life) looking for the mysteries that are right in front of our noses.

So when I visited a friend in Portland, I was wowed by the antique cabinet she’d just bought. I oohed and ahhed as she showed me the fold down writing desk with rows of little mail cubbies, each of which could hold its own tucked away secret.

Then she turned to me with a sparkle in her eyes and said, “I haven’t even shown you the best part.” She opened the bottom door on the cabinet and pulled out two shoe boxes full of letters.

They looked just like the old boxes in my closet. Like mine, these boxes were stuffed full of cards and notes from friends. And love letters.

My hands immediately reached for a rubber banded stack of envelopes. They were from 1957, a series of love letters from  George to Carmen. Holding my breath, I smoothed out the yellowed paper and began to read.

Evidently, George had taken Carmen to senior prom, but hadn’t gotten up the nerve to kiss her that night. Two years later, he was in the Air Force and posted to Morocco. It was only then, far from everyone and everything familiar, that he realized what she meant to him. He wrote her with the desperate hope that she might feel the same way. That he might be able to see her again when he was on leave. He sent her perfume and questions about her feelings for him.

My friend and I wanted them to get together. When one of George’s letters wrote of dangerous hush-hush things happening around the Air Force base, I wanted Carmen to drop everything and find a way to get to Morocco to be with him. I imagined a passionate scene in the desert, complete with elegant scarves and planes buzzing overhead.

But this was life, not a story. While the shoe boxes didn’t contain Carmen’s replies, there were also letters from George to Carmen’s mother. And my friend and I were able to get a sense of what was happening through them. Carmen was away at college and not very interested in George. While he was writing about his Air Force pay being able to support her and their potential kids, Carmen was busy studying to be a teacher, going skiing with her friends, and generally being a college student.

I don’t think she ended up with George, because though there was a copy of her graduation announcement in the shoebox, there was nothing about a wedding. Six years after George’s letters stop, Carmen was still writing notes home to her mother about her roommates, her job, her record-breaking bowling scores.And then I realized that the story I was reading was more extraordinary than the one I’d hoped for.

Carmen, a girl in the 1950’s, had chosen to go away to college. Had chosen a career over a husband she didn’t love. Had made a life for herself in a new town. At the end of this small, intimate snapshot of these people’s lives, George had my sympathy, but Carmen had my admiration. It turned out that this was her story, and she was going to write it the way she wanted to.

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Laptop Noir: Part Deux

September 18th, 2009 by Sara

One broken hard drive. One stripped screw. One man with a mission…

Laptop Noir: Part Deux 

Tools: Pliers, business card, hammer, screwdriver, drill.

Time: 2 Days, 2 fed-ex packages, and 1 trip to Home Depot.

Who: Previously mentioned Uber-Geek:Wizard of Ingenuity

*No dogs were harmed in the making of this film*

Posted in Nifty happenings, Not-so-nifty happenings

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Technical Tap

September 16th, 2009 by Sara

It was a Sunday, you see.  A day so overcast it would make a raincloud wanna go tanning. Every hunch I ever had told me not to go into the office that morning.  But I had a character stuck in a jam and stories wait for no woman. So, even though my nose was so stuffed it could’ve passed for a carnival prize, I still made the long trek across the house to get to my office.

But hunches never lie.

I heard the noise before I saw the trouble.  A horrible gunk-gunk-gunk-gunk-gunk-gunk-gunk coming from my computer. Then I saw the screen. Frozen like a popsicle in the middle of winter.

Terror struck at my heart. Ice filled my veins. The truth cut at me with a horror so cliche that it would leave you all speechless.

I hadn’t backed up my new story.

“Help!” I screamed.

The door burst open and in strode my technically-adept husband, a man so geeky that Velociraptors mongoliensis run in fear. But it turns out, even the good guys have their kryptonite.

“Hard drives…” he gasped. “My only weakness.”

“Keep it together man!” I said, giving his handsome mug a smack.

He shook off the panic and glared down at that computer like it was a gunslinger a second after high noon. “Maybe I should teach it a lesson it won’t soon forget.”

And without flinching, he gave my computer a technical tap.

Wham!

Gunk-gunk-gunk-gunk-gunk-gunk-gunk.

My husband shook his head, turned his back on the sound, and ordered a new hard drive at the first stop off the information superhighway.

Sometimes the bad guys get thrown in the slammer. Sometimes the guy does get the girl. Sometimes the good guys do win the good fight.

But today wasn’t one of those days.

I sighed, slumped in my chair, and pulled out a pen. It was time to take matters into my own hands.

Posted in Not-so-nifty happenings, Writing

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Cobwebs

September 9th, 2009 by Sara

I went away for a long weekend full of rain, cupcakes, bookstores, and farmers’ markets. The Pacific Northwest was a perfect remedy for smoky, hot L.A. It was also the change of scenery I needed for the new story I’m working on, which is full of pesky questions like… What happens next? and What does this character really want?

After recently working on detailed revisions, these questions seem unnerving and my writing feels raw and unkempt. Train trips and Seattle coffee shops gave me a new door to enter the wilds of my story, letting me bushwhack through my first draft stage.

But like always, when I got back, those questions were still there waiting for me. So I avoided my office for another day. And another.

Finally, this morning, I hesitantly tip-toed into my office, trying not to wake up any of the lions lurking in my new manuscript. And I found a clear sign that it was time to start writing again.

So today, I’m literally brushing cobwebs off my words and getting back to work. After all, if it’s a choice between questions and spiders, I’ll choose questions every time.

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No One May Ever Have the Same Knowledge Again

September 2nd, 2009 by Sara

As I write this, the historic Mt. Wilson Observatory is in danger of being overtaken by fire. The “Station fire” has been burning for more than a week in southern California and it’s been an exceptionally terrible fire, consuming houses, leading to the death of firefighters, and turning the afternoon light a very wrong color of orange.

Through all this, the Mt. Wilson Observatory has been a focus, partly because, until yesterday, it had a webcam that updated every 2 minutes, giving you a kind of real time stop-motion animation of the fire. But while most people have been talking about the communication towers that are at risk on the mountain and what a fire might mean to television stations, radios, and cell phones, my mind keeps going back to a strange little exhibit I saw at the Museum of Jurassic Technology.

Now for those of you who have never been there, the Museum of Jurassic Technology is one of the weirdest place perhaps anywhere. Squeezed in between a run-down rug store and an office building is the museum’s ornately gated doorway with a little fountain decorating the wall. When you step inside, the line between reality and fantasy instantly blurs. Most of the museum has a slightly turn-of-the-century, occultish feel to it.  The exhibits, while factual in nature, are designed in a way that make you question the meaning and realness behind them.

For example, one exhibit chronicles, in detail, the life of two people who never met but who, at a  one pivotal moment in their lives, were at the same place at the same time. An operatic concert performed at the Igassu Falls in Argentina.

Another exhibit shows micromosaics by Henry Dalton, created entirely out of butterfly scales, which you can only view using a microscope.

But the exhibit I’m thinking of is in a small, closet-like room. Its walls are covered with letters sent to the Mt. Wilson Observatory between 1915 and 1935. They are strange rambling notes from different people, all who had discovered the secrets of the universe and felt compelled to share them with the scientists at the observatory.

It sounds crazy, but there’s a conviction, and often a poetry, to the letters that makes them cling to your mind. For example, in one letter, a man, Edward, writes, “Etholeum – The base of all existance – it is One with Electricity and There is no place where It does not exist. It is the conduit of The Light between all of the planets and thru the telephone and the radio and without it There would be no Earth Because there would be No sound. to be transferred between”

In another letter, Mrs. Alice May Williams urgently writes, “I want to tell you I am not after money & I am not a fraud. I believe I have some knowledge which you gentlemen should have. If I die my knowledge may die with me, & no one may ever have the same knowledge again.”

The writer in me wants to know what this woman knew, who she was.

Did she hold some secret that is now gone forever? Is the world a lesser place without it? A lump of a sadness forms inside me for the possibilities that have been lost.

As the fire rages here in the hills outside of Los Angeles, consuming buildings and lives, that sadness becomes a tangible pall over the city. Ash drifts down on us and an amber moon holds vigil. Homes and forests and people are gone that should not be gone. And no one may ever have the same knowledge again.

Posted in Not-so-nifty happenings, Writing

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