Writer Dame

Story-A-Day May: Carried Away

1 Comment

I feel like this is actually part of a longer piece but it is its own story for now:

Shelby had always said that that a Irish man would be able to convince her to do anything. It must have been true because that was the only explanation as to why my height-phobic friend would be currently floating up off the ground in a hot air balloon that was only just getting to its cruising height.

She must have been terrified, maybe too terrified to text and definitely too terrified to say anything to the smooth guy with the lovely accent that we had met in the pub a few hours earlier. Sure, it seemed funny when he suggested that she go up in the balloon with him, after all, who actually has a hot air balloon? So she agreed to go after her next beer and she thought she was just playing along with the joke as they walked out through the door and down the street to reach the meadow down the street. It was no joke though because there, on the grass, was a hot air balloon. Multicoloured stripes, tiny basket, sandbags, everything. We hardly knew what to say about it.

Shelby had already said that she wanted to go for a ride in his balloon, I think she thought it was a metaphor when she said it but now it was way too late and she was actually going to have to go up in a balloon. I know what you’re thinking, you’re thinking that she could have backed out that she didn’t actually have to go, especially with someone she doesn’t actually know. That’s all true, in a literal sense, but it tells me that you have never actually gotten in over your head when talking to someone that you were interested in. And that makes you a hell of lot less interesting to me.

I want to know people who get in over their heads, people who lose their grip on the situation, people who go up in hot air balloons even though they are afraid of heights. Shelby looked down over the edge of the basket at me, looking like the poster girl for a change of heart. Her face was the colour of the milk at the bottom of a cereal bowl, white but slightly tinged with yellow. Her hands, clamped on to the basket rim were much the same colour, and the expression on her face suggested that she had been condemned.

I wanted to call out some comfort but I didn’t want to blow her cool-girl cover, so I just stood there, looking up and holding our purses and the souvenirs we bought that afternoon. I hoped the Irish guy turned out to be worth it.

Story-A-Day May: Vengeance

Now that I’ve finished the A-Z Challenge, I’m on to the Story-A-Day May Challenge. Here’s my first piece of fiction for the month. It is largely unedited, so please be kind.

Lorene stood at the dining room table, a ball peen hammer in her hand. It wasn’t the right tool for the job, but sometime a girl just has to work with what she has.

Jesse usually kept this hammer in the garage, on the table next to the Corvette he was working on. She guessed it had something to do with flattening out the dents in the metal but she never spent any time out there when he was working so she only heard the noises he made. He poured so much of himself into that car, he didn’t have time for anything else. Well, that wasn’t strictly true. He seemed to have made time for Shelly.

Lorene wouldn’t have thought that Shelly was his type. She was a bookish sort of girl, given to wearing skirts and sweaters and giggling behind her hand. Jesse usually went for a tougher type, a bit like Lorene herself, jeans, leather jackets and attitude.

The thing is, if you hook up with someone with attitude, you have to expect some push back if you start treating them badly. And he had been very, very bad lately. He was ignoring Lorene’s calls, he didn’t come home until very late and he didn’t slide in close to her in bed anymore. She had known something was up and then the breathy phone call from Shelly had confirmed it.

Once she hung up the phone, she had gone to shelf in their dining room and taken down his precious collection of collectible glasses. He had The Beatles, Elvis, The Stones and a bunch of old bands that she didn’t recognize, she took each one and put it in a line along the table edge.

The hammer might not have been the best tool for the job but it smashed the glasses just fine and she started walking through the house looking for more things to smash. The glass front of the stereo cabinet went shattered with one blow, shards of tinted glass raining on the carpet. The mirrored front of their closet door splintered but didn’t fall apart.

The door to the garage accepted a nice dent but didn’t break, it just swung open to reveal Jesse standing there by the Corvette. The expression on his face was at once puzzled and dumb – in the movie of their lives, the costume designer would have dressed him like a yokel for this scene, just to highlight the look on his face. He wasn’t dressed like a yokel though, no suspenders, no tank top, no weather beaten hat, instead, he was there in his jeans and his Imagine Dragons tshirt, his mouth hanging open like he was waiting for the dentist to give him the all clear.

“What are you doing with that hammer, Lorene?”

“I’m smashing things, Jesse. I think it’s best if you get out of my way.”

It might have been the hammer or maybe it was the look in her eyes, but either way, he stepped to the side giving her access to the Corvette. He looked pained at the thought that she was going to take the hammer to it, but he didn’t stop her.

She raised the hammer overhead in two hands but thought better of it. Instead, she opened the door and slid behind the wheel. She gave him the nod and he scrabbled on the table behind him for the garage door opener. He raised it and she slowly backed out and drove away.

She also kept the hammer.

Z is for Zoink!

1 Comment

You know about how I like to find the fun in everything I do?* Well, we have a rule in our house that if you are taking something off a table that someone else is sitting at – say if you are eating french fries in the living room and you need the ketchup off the kitchen table where your parents are sitting – you must say zoink when you snatch the ketchup from the table. It is also advisable to do the snatching quite quickly for added comedic effect.

Now this isn’t a situation where politeness would be required. It’s not like when we are all at the table and the kids are asking one of us to pass the ketchup. This is when no one is using the bottle and it doesn’t need to be passed and they don’t need permission to retrieve it. It’s just a fun and funny way to acknowledge that they are taking it.

I’m using the kids as an example in this case, but we all do it (and several of our friends do too) and we are likely to remind anyone who forgets their zoink. In fact, I have made a jokingly big production to at least one of the kids’ friends:

‘Excuse me, T, but did you just take the Pepsi off the table?’

‘Oh, yes, sorry. Is it okay?’

‘Well, it’s okay, you can have all the Pepsi you like, it’s just that you forgot to zoink.’

‘Oh!’ T places Pepsi back on the table, then removes it again while saying ‘Zoink!’

‘Carry on!’ I say and return to my book.**

 

There’s a lot of fun to be had when both parties are pretending to be deadly serious about something that you are goofing around about. And I do love it when people play along with my goofiness or indulge my nonsense. Luckily, I have surrounded myself with people like that and I keep finding more.

Turns out that silly people are everywhere, as long as you keep your eyes open for them. I have a lot of luck with little kids that way, they love to be silly with a grown-up*** especially if they then get to turn around and be the sensible one and tell you that marshmallow cars won’t actually work because they would be too sticky (to pick some a recent example of intelligence I have gathered).

So, my question for you at Zero hour, at the Zenith of the A-Z challenge, when you have no more Zest for writing about the alphabet: Do you zoink your ketchup off the table like a proper goofball or do you just carry it off like a regular person?

Zut,alors! I certainly hope you are answering with ZOINK!

*Fun is one of the ruling principles of my life. I highly recommend it. Check out my F post for more details.
** Yes, my kids’ friends indulge my nonsense. I don’t know if they enjoy it or if they have just given up. I like to pretend it is enjoyment. 🙂
***For the record, I always make sure to meet the eyes of the parent so they know that I am just being goofy. I don’t want them to think that I am trying to befriend their kid for nefarious purposes.

Y is for YouTube and Yammering

One of the places that I see the biggest generational divide between me and my kids is when they load something up on YouTube. Now this isn’t going to be one of those ‘back in my day’ posts, nor is it going to be a ‘kids today!’ posts, but there’s an intriguing difference in what they consider interesting to watch and what I consider interesting to watch.

For starters, I don’t generally like taking information in via video, I prefer to read, or if necessary, to just listen, to any information I want to take in. My sons, however, love to watch videos of things. Left to their own devices, they would consume a steady diet of people playing videogames and commenting on the gameplay.

This makes no sense to me. I already find videogames to be a strange way to spend your time* but to remove yourself even further and watch people play games – and to have them yap and yammer at you while they do it? That’s enough to drive me right to the edge.

Sometimes when I am trying to work at the kitchen table, the kids will want to sit in the living room and watch some of these videos and I find it nearly impossible to concentrate. I find the commentator-style chatter works itself deeply into my brain and shakes up my thought patterns.** I don’t find the same thing if they are watching a TV show or a movie because that isn’t constant chatter, that’s a conversation (and one that has nothing to do with me) and I can tune that out. Also the conversation includes breaks and music and all kinds of other breaks in the sound but the monologue of the video commentators? Not so much.***

I feel lucky that I am not one of those people who is uncomfortable with their kids enjoying something that they themselves don’t enjoy. I’m fine with the fact that my kids are different than me and I’m happy to give them room for their own tastes, even if those tastes drive me batty.

What I can’t deal with, though, is the fact that the commentator style of speaking is leaking out into the real world. The boys have several friends who commentate the world around them instead of having conversations. They riff on what their friends say, they comment on everyone around them, and they talk about their own lives in a kind of presentation-style rather than in a sharing-with-friends-style. It is not a dialogue, it’s a monologue and it is really bizarre to witness. It feels alienating, in a way.

Again, this isn’t me complaining about ‘kids today’, it isn’t age-related per se, it’s just something that I find odd and I wonder where the whole thing came from. I wonder if perhaps a certain critical mass of us have gotten out of the habit of conversation and this is what has stepped into the space that’s remaining. Of course, there’s the chance that this style has always existed and I just didn’t encounter it until now or that the YouTube yammering has made me more sensitive to something that wouldn’t have bothered me before.

I don’t have any kind of solution and I’m not even sure that one is needed. It could be that the issue is me or that I’m just not into this style of speaking.  And, mostly, I’m just observing this odd quirk in the space between my sons’ view of the world and mine.****

Do you find the same thing with YouTube videos? What about with Talk Radio? Is there a style of presenter that drives you batty?

*I’m not anti-game, I’m just not drawn to them in any way. My husband and sons, and most of my friends, are big gamers but aside from Rock Band, I have never been pulled in. I have tried to play Minecraft a couple of times because the boys like it so much but there is way too much going on at once and the controller confounds me, so I didn’t get very far. The boys gave me points for trying though. 🙂
**For the record, I usually dig out my headphones to counter this. I don’t want to deny the boys the chance to watch something they love so much.
***I also find talk radio to be a bit like this as well. That, however, is easier to avoid.
****Note: When we pointed out to our oldest son that one of his friends has this style of speaking, it was like a light had come on. ‘Oh, THAT’S why he gets on my nerves after a while.’

X is for Xanthippe (!)

2 Comments

What’s an xanthippe?
I didn’t know either but I found this fabulous word when searching for words starting with X* and I came across Phrontistery.

Apparently, an xanthippe is an ill-tempered woman.

My youngest son was recently protesting that he was being forced to smile during his school concert. I told him to bare his teeth and no one would know the difference. ;)

My youngest son was recently protesting that he was being forced to smile during his school concert. I told him to bare his teeth and no one would know the difference. 😉

That definition immediately intrigued and annoyed me. On the one hand, I love that the English language has such bizarrely specific words and I love that it is so cool-looking. I will be using it in the future, for sure – to refer to myself. (But I’ll be using it in a celebratory fashion because I kind of like to OWN things that are supposed to be insults. Sidenote: Now, I kind of want to rename my blog.)

On the other hand, how annoying is it that there is a specific word for an ill-tempered woman? The word ill-tempered is not sufficient? Or does that only cover men? Or is it that men’s ill-temperedness makes sense but we need a specific word to describe how ridiculous an ill-tempered woman is?

And once you have a word for that specific case, it becomes a bit of a label doesn’t it? It’s not that she is ill-tempered for a reason, it’s that she is an xanthippe! It’s all on her. That way, you don’t have to worry about anything you did, you don’t need to concern yourself with being reasonable or acting like an adult, she’s the problem.

This opens a big can of worms in my brain. We have this cultural stereotype that women are more emotional than men, and while that is true on the surface, there’s more to it than that. It comes down to the emotional range that various genders are allowed and the emotional skills that we are taught, and the tools we are given for navigating social situations. If women are put in charge of keeping social situations running smoothly (and we often are) then we need a full emotional range to handle that task.

Of course, then some people will turn around and blame women for being ‘too emotional’ as if that is all on the women themselves, as if that happens outside of a social context. We all have times when our emotions don’t match the situation we are in, but that’s not a X-linked characteristic** it happens to everyone. Men are limited in the emotions that that are socially acceptable for them to express but they can still be inappropriate for the situation(anger is usually okay though, that’s ‘manly’)***

Now, I’m not saying that there is no such thing as an ill-tempered woman, there obviously is. I’m ill-tempered myself sometimes, occasionally for no real reason. What I’m interested in, though, is unpacking words that we throw at each other. What’s the context? Are there any mitigating factors? Are we reacting to the individual or some stereotype about them?

I think it is way too easy to decide someone is an xanthippe (or that they are unreasonable, or angry or whatever) and put the blame solely on them. When we scope back a bit and get the bigger picture (the situation at hand, their background, or if we consider a cultural context), we get the kind of information that helps us treat a cause instead of a symptom.

Of course, sometimes when we get all that information, we discover that the person is just a xanthippe. So keep that word in your back pocket and use it wisely.

*Spoiler, a lot of longer words that start with X seem to have to do with either the colour yellow or with strangers. Makes for interesting reading.
**Interesting, the X-link is another connection to the letter X.
***Doesn’t that make you think that men are missing out? How terrible is that our society has developed in a way to deny huge chunks of the range of human existence to each gender.