Kind of the last one, I guess. I’ve been trudging through a re-read of Patrick Rothfuss’ The Wise Man’s Fear. The trudging is not so much owing to the book itself as to my complete lack of interest in reading anything at all. I hit spurts like this every once in awhile. I wonder if alcoholics ever hit a patch where the have no interest in drink. Maybe a better analogy is a golfer who has no interest in golfing for a couple of weeks; I don’t think my hyperlexia is so much a disease as a lifestyle choice. But anyway, that said, I’ve been spending all my word time just eking my way through this thing. I’m interested in the story but I’m just not interested in the process of reading.

Or I wasn’t, until yesterday morning. Through a random chain of events I ended up reading a Dennis Lehane mystery and finding it unputdownable. Then I realised the problem is not a lack of interest in reading but a need for a switch in my subject matter. I’ve been reading so much epic fantasy lately I feel like I’m choking on the seemingly endless loving descriptions of swords, feats of cunning and sexy faerie sexing with underage boys.

That’s a thing that’s starting to bother me. I keep telling myself “oh, this is fantasy and their cultures are different.” But when you get right down to it there is an awfully high number of teenage people having sex with adults and that is just…

It’s not gross, but it is kind of disturbing. It’s even more disturbing that, if you read a lot of fantasy, you slowly become inured to it. At least, though, in most epic fantasy books I’ve read the sex is of the fade to black variety and the few where the sex is described are with of-age and consenting parties.

There is a lot of complaining about the sex and rape in George RR Martin’s books. The weird thing is that in those books it doesn’t bother me because it feels authentic to the culture and always ALWAYS advances the story and the characters in a direction they need to go. It honestly doesn’t read as “prurient” to me in any way. But now, having re-read LeHane’s Gone, Baby, Gone it occurs to me that the Mystery/Thriller genre is a lot more prurient than Fantasy has ever been.

Mystery/Thrillers were my preferred genre for about twenty-five years, to be honest. It started with Nancy Drew when I was six and Agatha Christie when I was eight. I will always remember finishing And Then There Were None (Which at that time, in 1978, I had a third-hand copy still titled Ten Little Indians). I was in the hammock in my backyard and read that last section where the murderer confesses to everything and explains its rationale and I thought “this? This is the stuff for me.” So from then until I was in my early thirties I was pretty far gone into mysteries. It was really nice when that was the hot genre for awhile there around the whole Silence Of The Lambs craze. A lot of high-quality stuff came out back then.

It got harder to find good mysteries and I had latched onto Harry Potter so since 2000 I’ve been more about fantasy and Epics in general. (Speaking of non-fantasy Epics if you haven’t read Morgan’s Run by Colleen McCullough you need to go ahead and do that ASAP.) Now that I’m revisiting Mystery it’s kind of nice. And I feel like being words again. Speaking of, I’ve gone way over my limit. So we’ll wind up this blog post now.*

*That phrase always makes me think of the episode of Mama’s Family where they go on Family Feud and Mama causes them to lose by insisting that her answer to “Things you wind up” is “A letter”. “I think I will wind up this letter now”. I love idiomatic humour.

So anyway, it’s Friday and that’s my day to write about whatever I want. Sadly I don’t really WANT to write anything because it’s rainy and my head is muzzy from drugs. I do not know how all these writers who were drunk or high all the time did it. Because when I’m in pain or on medication I really don’t think “let’s go be creative!” I think “let’s go watch an Arrested Development marathon.”

I’ve been doing that, actually. Watching Arrested Development again, that is, in preperation for the Netflix airing of new episodes. Two things keep occurring to me: one, whenever they say “Gob” on the show it’s really weird now because “Gob” no longer means the doofusy magician as much as it means my dog. Two is the fact that I’m worried it’ll suck. If Pet Semetary taught me anything it’s that often times when something is brought back to life it is discomfiting and creepy; oftentimes it is downright terrifying. I honestly can’t think of a resurrected show that I’ve enjoyed once it came back. Family Guy and Futurama were both weirdly stinking of desperation and (in Family Guy’s case) rank stupidity. Even Cougar Town and Community–shows which weren’t cancelled for long before being resurrected with either a new showrunner or a new network–were just not the thrill in their Second Life that they were in their first. I’ve watched Arrested Development so many times I have the thing memorised. Lines from the show have made their way into our daily lives around here (“That sounds like some mild fun”) and I even named my DOG for one of the characters.* So of course I’m cautiously optimistic about the new episodes. Some days, lately, I’m afraid it’s more “cautious” and less “optimistic”. We’ll see, I suppose.

Oh, look. I wrote something. Go, me.

*Gob isn’t my favourite character on the show. I don’t know that I have one; they all work together. When we brought him home we were casting about for names. I was in the middle of an AD marathon and I said “How about ‘Bluth’?” It didn’t really sound right to either of us. ‘George Michael’ seemed too vague and too long to say. And I hated Wham. As a joke I said “we could call him ‘Gob’”. Never say anything to someone else as a joke because then they will think “that’s awesome! We have to do that!” And from that moment on he was Gob. I can’t really see him as anything else–his names before we got him were “Sammy” and “Butch”. If I had it to do over again I would maybe call him Oscar. But now he’s Gob and he’ll never be anything else.

Also, the Bradford Pear tree in our front yard that never EVER loses all of its leaves is, of course, called “Tobias”.

I also add that I know many MANY transracial and overseas adoptions that have turned out fantastically well. My cousin Matthew Brandenberger; Jason and Cathy Sparks; many others in a list too long to name. I don’t have a problem with adoption in general and don’t want to see all adoption outlawed. Please don’t read any further without that fixed squarely in your mind.

If there is one thing I’m certain of, it’s that I am an individual. I do align with certain philosophies, chosen because I like the philosophy. I’m a Christian, I’m a Mennonite, I’m a libertarian, I’m a feminist, I’m a blogger. There are other groups I’ve been thrown into be default because of a choice I’ve made or one that was made for me by the forces outside. I’m disabled, I’m childfree, I’m fat, I’m a brunette.

Those are all terms I can use to quickly describe my position on one thing or another, but none of them have my utter allegiance. The only two things which have my complete devotion are that I am a Christ-follower* and I am the wife of my husband.

People are too eager to be on teams, I think. I suppose it comes with a different personality type that veers sharply away from my natural introversion. Because I don’t understand the impulse I can’t really say that the desire to belong to a team is a bad thing. I don’t have it myself, but I also don’t have a penis and penises aren’t bad things.

The problem that I’m having with this whole “I’m Team Conservative!” attitude is deftly illustrated by the recent conversations following Kathryn Joyce’s article in a respected national magazine. Joyce is a journalist who covers social trends; her latest book, The Child Catchers is about the social trend of Evangelical Christians adopting from overseas. The magazine article excerpted a portion of that book, telling the story of a family who had adopted a half-dozen children (yes, six. 6) from Liberia. The story didn’t end well; from my perspective it didn’t begin well either, as the children were collected trophies, not well-planned family additions.

I first heard that this was a Team Christian issue on Mike Duran’s blog. It’s been an issue of some concern to me for awhile as I’ve watched people in the revival meeting altar-call emotional high allow their judgment to lapse and bring home multiple children with serious physical and emotional needs. When you’re infertile you tend to have more exposure to the adoption world and the adoption process even when you don’t choose it yourself. You can tell the difference between “we are called to adopt”; “I guess we’ll adopt since we can’t have our own babies**”; “AWWW!!Cute Children need homes!! Let’s take that one!!”

I can pretty much guarantee you after twenty years of watching just how each family group will turn out. It’s one of the reasons I’m adamant that this nonsense about asking people to donate to your adoption fund as if they were donating to your mission trip needs to stop. One of the tests for parenting is whether or not you are prepared for the responsibility. If you can’t handle the basic start-up costs that says you can’t handle the long-term grind. Take out a loan. Sell your second car. Stop eating in restaurants. Whatever…just pay for it yourself. I don’t care that some popular Christian singer has adopted 15 kids and tells everyone that Adoption Is the responsibility of all Christians. That’s a popular singer with his own agenda, he’s not God. And yes, the kids are really cute. Just like puppies and kittens–and you can’t take every one of those home either.

I’ve watched kids get sent back to their “real countries”. I’ve watched kids get sent to jail by their adoptive parents for stealing. I’ve watched kids be brought into homes because their special needs entitle the adoptive parents to benefit checks from SSI and they like the extra income, using it for clothes and cars and not the additional medical help the child’s health requires. I know of one family who murdered their adoptive child by trying to pray for a cure for the serious health problem because they couldn’t pay for a cure. The least of these is exactly how these children are treated. They are not viewed as humans but as trophies, and receive about as much care.

Further is the problem that the legalities of the adoption process aren’t always entirely clear to the parents (yes, many of the adoptees HAVE parents) of the adopted kids. There are many parents in foreign countries who think this is a new version of Child Sponsoring and that their children are on a sort of scholarship to the US and remain THEIR CHILDREN.

I was delighted to see Kathryn Joyce’s article because I thought to myself “now maybe people will pay closer attention to this.” It has seemed over the last 10 years like the children weren’t on the radar of anyone with the ability to affect change to the system.

Apparently I thought wrong. Because that respected national magazine I mentioned earlier isn’t respected by everyone. Mother Jones is a publication taken seriously by those on the Left, reviled by those on the right.

So are people reading the story and becoming horrified that these shady adoptions and child abuses are not only allowed to continue but allowed to continue in the name of Jesus?

No. People are pulling on the shoulder pads and the numbered jerseys (that all say “1″) and deciding that The Left Hates Christians and Mother Jones is trying to make Christians look bad.

Not one tear for the actual children who were brought to this country as slaves, whipped with pieces of pipe and sent back to Liberia when they became inconvenient.

No. It’s all about Joyce’s agenda, Mother Jones‘ agenda.

Me? I want to know three things:
1. Why does it matter that someone on the Left pointed this out?
2. Why does no one seem to care about the giant mass of muck so many of these “evangelistic” adoptions have turned into?
3. Why wasn’t this article in Christianity Today five years ago?

Gang, the problem is NOT with the fact that “the other side is making us look bad.” We can do that on our own.

The problem is with the fact that we aren’t doing better, that we are allowing Team Allegiance to have superiority over following Christ.

*Christ-follower is different than Christian.
**Anyone who frames adoption like this–like a consolation prize–gets special irritation from me. These are human beings. If you aren’t prepared to treat the child as YOUR OWN BABY then just walk away.

Even now, however, that song first makes me think of Jesus and Lazarus instead of its obviously creepy sexual meaning. Whenever someone mentions resurrection of anybody other than Jesus I think of this song. And so it was that upon listening to Mike Duran‘s videoblog on Sunday evening I got Start Me Up playing in my brain.

Mike wants to know why Christians don’t pray for resurrection since God is obviously capable of it.

Why would we pray for resurrection of the dead? Seriously. I was at my beloved grandmother’s funeral six months ago. It never once occurred to me to ask God to send her back here. That would be like asking God to burn down Chicago again. My grandmother’s journey sent her through that door. She went to be with her beloved husband of more than half a century, with the parents she missed every day and most of all she went to see face-to-face the Jesus Christ she’d served her entire life. Why would I ask to have her come back from that to the world where she was blind, unable to walk, couldn’t remember what day it was? Sure it’d be a neat trick to say “look here at what God can do” but there is no kindness in it for the departed.

One of the most troubling aspects about Christianity is the snake-handling. We humans get excited about the ideas of what limitless things God can accomplish but then it so often turns down the cul-de-sac of ill-advised things done in the name of Christ for the actual purpose of self-satisfaction. I see it happening whenever trends hit the Church. Right now one of the more alarming trends is the fervor for international adoption. It’s a life-changing action with serious consequences for numerous people, yet there are several who get caught up in the God-sounding of it and jump without thinking things through. Then they get bitten and the venom courses through the body. I’m not against adoption across the board. In many cases I think it is a wonderful solution for many individuals. But I do see a difference between the prayerful consideration of devoting your life to a specific course of action and the Jesus-Cool-Take-Up-The-Snake me-tooism that ends up with people getting hurt.

We can ask God for anything but to me the real question is “why would you want to?” That’s the question that I asked myself when I finally realised the real meaning behind that Stones lyric and it’s the question I think a lot of people need to be asking themselves about other requests they place before God.

That’s the fun part about being sick for me. (I mean that in actuality, not sarcastically.) I enjoy pondering how the various breakages that occur in my system provide information on how the system functions. Ninety percent of the time a new pain is kind of like a new puzzle in some sort of video game. How did that start happening and what does it mean?

Now that I type this out I realise it makes me sound seriously hypchondriacal. That’s an accusation that bothers me deeply, but I hear it often; I’ve even heard it from people who say they’re my friends.* People who aren’t often ill or troubled by physical problems often think that those who are must be faking it or exaggerating for effect; malingering their way through life to avoid problems. It’s a common misperception, but one that bothers me a great deal–perhaps a great deal more than it should.

When my husband was in China for ten days I rose to the occasion to the best of my ability. We had friends come in to help, but there are just some things that a person with a not-entirely-housebroken-yet puppy and an elderly, incontinent dog just doesn’t feel comfortable asking other people to do. I suppose I maybe should have done; babysitters change diapers on human babies. I just felt like the dogs were my responsibility. I took them on and it’s not right to bail once it becomes icky or the slightest bit difficult. So I gutted it out for a week and a half. I’m glad I did because it reassured me that I’m not the malingerer I sometimes worry folks may think I am.

Still and all, as fun as this whole exercise in therapeutic writing has been, I still have a wasp-y kidney and it’s getting on my nerves.

*One of these days I’m going to have to write a blog entry focusing on the reasons why some people see “friendship” as an open door to abuse you emotionally.

In high school it was fun to mock movies. My friends and I did that for a pastime. “No, you stupid cheerleader! Don’t go into the garage alone! That’s where the killer is!” Then MST3K came along and made a living out of making fun of stupid movies. The jokes were often highly intelligent and had a bemused tone. But all in all when you got right down to it the humour was essentially just laughing at the stupidity of movie characters.

Nowadays, though, blog articles such as this one are common place.

When you’re a couple and you make the choice not to have kids, you don’t get it. You’re a DINK (pardon the double entendre).

“Funny” Articles like this one have made the rounds so often it’s shown up on my Facebook News Feed more than ten times in the last two years.

[10 Worst People You See At Every Summer Music Festival] 7. Girls in leggings. We can only imagine what kind of swamp-ass nightmare is festering beneath that Spandex cameltoe.

And of course there are websites I won’t even link to which mock the people who shop at Wal-Mart (Oh, Look at how fat they are! Look at how weird their clothes are! Poverty is hysterical!), endless conversations mocking the Honey Boo-Boo family for being fat and poor (I’m sensing a trend) and entire blogs devoted to mocking whatever person the blogger needs to feel superior to. Sometimes the victims are sorority girls, sometimes Fundamental Christians… pick one. If I list them all I’ll burn through my 500 words without even touching on the thesis of this post.

That thesis is, simply, as stated in the title, being mean isn’t humourous. Yes, people say stupid things out of ignorance or lazy mental habit. People wear odd looking clothes for reasons often known only to them. But I’m just so tired of this school of thought reigning supreme now, this idea that casual cruelty is clever. Why do we think highlighting the frailties or even simple differences of other human beings is an okay thing? Is it because on the Internet we have become so used to going to “real people” for entertainment that we forget that the folks in YouTube videos and shopping at thrift stores are not characters in a movie called Everyday Life?

For whatever reason I’m just over it. I really am. I’m ready for humour to be something I can laugh at without hurting another person. Because even if they don’t know you’re laughing at them, that spirit of cruelty hangs in the air. It hardens you, callouses your soul. I’d like for us all to stop being casual bullies for the purposes of our own amusement.

Taylor Swift once wrote a heart breaking song about the awkward age of fifteen. Interestingly enough, it included lyrics that told the story of her best friend giving “everything she had to a boy that changed his mind…and we both cried.” Am I naive? Is fifteen that risque now? Is it just lyrics in a song or is this happening at an alarming rate?

You _are_ naive. Incredibly so.

Fifteen is how old girls are when they’ve heard and seen little else beyond the sexualisation of girls and women. Look at some of the clothes in “normal family stores” like Target that are designed for girls as young as four.

Fifteen is the age when you feel like no one loves you and no one will ever love you because you look awkward and feel even more awkward. And society–even the “good shows” like High School Musical and the wretched things on the Disney channel–is all about the message that prettiness is what it takes to be loved. There aren’t really many girls who feel pretty at 15.

And so they have sex, a lot of times just to hear someone say–no matter how fleeting the moment–that they are loved. Or just to imagine that they are loved because otherwise why would the boy want to do these things? Even if you don’t have sex at 15 you consider it. Because after being laughed at for having the wrong clothes or hair or living in the wrong part of town there is a part of you that knows you have this very valuable currency and in the darkest of your nights you consider using it to buy something that may feel for a few seconds like someone actually cares.

That’s what 15 is like for a girl. That’s what it will be like for your girls, no matter how much you love them.

Now imagine 15 for a girl whose father is in jail, whose mother works three jobs to keep food on the table and bus passes in everyone’s pocket. That girl whose family can’t afford cable, can’t get to the library. What is she going to do for fun? Sex is free (for the moment) entertainment where you get to feel a little love in the process.

I’ve seen girls as young as 11 have sex for all of these reasons. Boredom, insecurity, fear, societal pressure. That’s what it’s like for young girls.

And no, I don’t approve of this pill. It’s just making it easier for us to not talk to girls about these things.

But you’re naive if you think 15 is a time of innocence and carefree living.

I declared all through my childhood that asparagus was nasty, that it was evil and that it should be banned. Then I went to my mother-in-law’s farm where I was served a meal of roast beef, other stuff I can’t remember and asparagus plucked fresh from the field and dropped into the pot. From that moment on I was an avowed asparagus lover to the place where I now consider it my favourite food, outpacing former top treats like pizza, lasagna and Rolos.

With that in mind I’ve decided that there are a few things to which I should probably apply the Asparagus Principle. These are things I’ve written off and in some cases loudly decried; things I now think deserve a second glance.

(You can always tell, by the way, when my brain isn’t fully switched on by the fact that I write in list form. Lists are my brain’s way of taking a segue break.)

• Steampunk  My first exposure to steampunk was in a videogame I played several years ago.  I found it to be incredibly unappealing  and thought it was unique to the game itself.  (I’m kicking myself that I can’t remember which game it was, because now I’m in the mood to play it again.  Is Rise Of Nations a game? Note to self: Google this…)  Steampunk then began showing up in movies that sucked (Wild Wild West; League of Extraordinary Gentlemen; Sherlock Holmes) and countless novels that also seem as though they would suck too.   Then yesterday my friend Mandi reviewed Boneshaker for our book review blog and all of a sudden I find myself inching closer to giving Steampunk another go.   
• George Jones Now that he’s passed beyond the veil and everyone is recounting their George Jones Memories I feel as if perhaps I should look further into his catalog beyond He Stopped Loving Her Today.   As a night owl who came up in the 80s and 90s I saw a lot of those commercials for Time Life album compilations.   For those of you who have no idea what I’m talking about, they’d have these three-minute ads on late at night for mail-order record albums (later, CDs) that had all the hits on there.  The titles of the songs would scroll by in a chyron.  You, the viewer, would see favourites and think “Oh, I really love that song!”  Keep in mind this was well before iPods and MP3s.  Music was something you had to actively seek out–either on the radio or in the record shop.  Unless you made mixed tapes–one of my favourite hobbies–by hovering over the radio and collecting whatever song struck your fancy you really only heard a song when it was played by forces you couldn’t control.  These record compilations were some of the most tempting fruits ever to dangle from the tree of television advertising.      The worm in the apple, however, was that every third or fourth song would have just one tiny snippet played.   Instant earworms were born this way.  To this day there are a good thirty or forty songs to which I only know one line, thanks to these commercials.    For years–until I moved to Tennessee–one of those songs was He Stopped Loving Her Today.   The only part I knew was, well, “He stopped loving her today”.   That stuck in my brain alongside “Daddy sang bass, Mama sang Tenor”, selections from Zamfir, Master Of The Pan Flute and the egregious Red Sovine.  ”Red Sovine’s as much a part of truckin’ as CB-in’ an’ hot cawfeee!”    Needless to say I’ve born a grudge against George Jones for years, for something that isn’t his fault, really.   

There are other things I should put on this list, especially since any bulleted list should really have at least three points.   But I got so carried away thinking about those compilation ads that I’ve run out of words.   Maybe I should do a whole blog series on Remembrances Of Things Past. (Or is it passed?  I can never remember, ironically.)

Celia felt the cold wind on her skin. She saw the vague outline of a deer creep through the distance.

Gold Star Approved

The cold wind stung the skin. A deer was just visible in the distance.

As a person who has read novels that are hundreds of years old as well as novels that just came out on Tuesday, I understand the concept behind the condemnation of filter words. I truly do. But to me I think that each story is different. Some stories, like folk tales, have that essential remove as part of the nature of their telling. Having filter words in the story is to me somewhat like writing a mazurka instead of a minuet.

I was thinking on it this morning after re-reading Jill Domschot’s post about removing the filter words from her own novel. I suddenly realised what it reminded me of.

When we bought our house back in 1999, wall-to-wall carpet had been the rage for years, as had white cabinets. We had our house built by a turn-key builder and those options were the more expensive, top of the line ones. When we’d lived here about three or four years all those shows about house-flipping suddenly became popular and I had a near-steady diet of them on the TiVo. You’d watch people go into an older home and try to ready it for resale. Suddenly hardwood and cherry cabinets were all the rage. And of course you had to have stainless steel appliances. I’d watch those shows and suddenly feel a rank discontent with my beautiful home–the home I had designed with my husband to reflect our tastes and enjoyments. For instance, neither of us likes stainless appliances. We prefer the sleek look of black; to us stainless appliances are a reminder of the industrial kitchens where we washed dishes in our impoverished college years.

Back then all the house flippers were putting in granite countertops. There wasn’t a house flipped without a seriously costly granite countertop, everyone repeating the conventional wisdom that “it will pay for itself with what it adds to the retail value.” If I were a more insecure person I would have pried up our wholly satisfactory plain counters just to feel better about myself. Now, not a decade later it turns out that granite is not the star anymore. Now there’s glass, steel,and other material you can actually cook on. (Granite, it turns out, isn’t so fantastic in a working kitchen.)

That’s exactly how I see these new types of rules. Like granite and stainless they have a place. They may be wonderful in your novel. But more and more I’m realising that the story trumps the remodeling trends in the writing world.

Hop on over to Book In The Bag to read my take on Rosamund Pilcher’s The Shell Seekers.