Dithering

I’ve been reading a blog called “Cup Runneth Over,” or something like that. Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar, but a blog name is never just a blog name if the blogger is a literary author. With these guys, every damn thing in life must be delved or chewed or spun out ad infinitum. So there's a little box on the blog explaining the name, something about how reading and writing and loved ones fill the Cup of Life or something.

(Actually, the title and explanation are something different, but while I like to poke fun at literary authors, I do admire them and don't care to use their real blog title and mess up their fun.)

Anyway, this Cup Runneth Over blog has a neat feature that asks writers to detail how they spend a typical day. One day followed this short story writer who's published a book "to international acclaim." She helps get her daughter to school, then spends the day in her nightgown, typing on her laptop, which I think is cool. She admitted to spending a lot of time just messing around with her writing, puzzling out what to do next. She spoke of the process as a conversation between her and her story, back and forth, until both satisfied.

I like that, because I can get so impatient sometimes. (Who, me?) I start thinking that if I really knew what I was doing with a project, I wouldn’t have to change my mind every two seconds about what to do next. (Should I start the next chapter with the medieval legend, or a description of my new apartment's dirty floor? Maybe I should talk about the San Francisco commercial real estate market. Or the sounds of the city waking up, or a paragraph about eating a breakfast orange: "The sweet rind of my old life peeled away...)

Hmmm ... let's try to focus here.

Anyway, I liked how that writer described her process. It helps me give myself permission to dither. Dithering is important. This society doesn’t really support dithering: We’re supposed to be decisive, confident, able to make immediate, well-grounded decisions. I can do that if I have to, but if given the option, I'd rather dither.

The definition of dither is “to be uncertain or indecisive” in Britain and “to be in an agitated state” in the U.S. It kind of means both to me. The word actually comes from the 1640s, where it meant “to quake, tremble” and was a variant of the Middle English word didderen (late 14th-century). The vacillating, anxious connotation comes from the 1800s.

It’s a good word, and it has another connotation for me: I see dithering as a luxury, and you could even argue that it denotes status. After all, dithering takes time, and time is a resource increasingly rare these days. Only upper-class parents, for example, have time to dither over the best playdates, summer camps, tennis leagues or summer camps for their children. Only salaried professionals can dither over the best day to take off for a day trip or whether to visit the gym before or after work.

Hmmm, I’m starting to sound like one of those literary writers, taking a perfectly clear word and beating it half to death. But it’s okay to be little literary — I mean, isn’t the purpose here to write well? There are all kinds of ways to write well — sometimes you’re fast and careless and slapdash, and sometimes you dither and the next thing you know, you’re looking up medieval roots of words. It’s an occupational hazard.

Anyway, it’s time for this lady to end her typical day, and for me to end this post. So she put away the laptop and watched the Daily Show until she fell asleep. And now I'm thinking about how I’d like to spend my days, starting next week when my Robot Kid starts 3rd grade and I hope to begin writing in earnest.

But that’s for another post. I need time to dither.

Reliving That Year

So when you write a memoir about one of the most difficult years of your life, you find yourself — and I can't be the first one to have noticed this — reliving that difficult year in your life. That means I'm reliving March 2007 to March 2008, and let me tell you, it's not doing much for my equilibrium.

Thankfully, of course, I'm writing a financial memoir. There's no childhood trauma, no wartime struggle, no drug use, only a smattering of alcohol use. I didn't live on the streets or sell my body or hike the Mojave ... gosh, now I'm starting to wonder ... will anyone even read this book?

But even though that year's struggles might seem trivial to some, they certainly don't feel trivial to me. When I look back at that year, the strongest emotion I remember is the fear. I spent that year walking on a precipice, convinced that the smallest slip would cast us into financial failure. I choked on that emotion, walking around every day with my chest constricted. It was often an effort just to put a pleasant look on my face, since I often considered other people — even my own family — as unwelcome distractions from my single-minded focus on Getting Us Out of This.

Now, when I sit down at my laptop and fire up the next chapter (I just finished Chapter Five) I must drop myself into that cauldron of swirling feelings again. Every so often I have to come up for air, remind myself that we don't own a house anymore, we're not in debt anymore, we have money in the bank. Not the Suze Orman six-months-of-expenses money in the bank, but a tidy sum. Enough to help me sleep at night, when I'm not freaking out about our credit card APRs in July 2007. Actually, we don't even have any of those credit cards now. Nope, not even one. We had nine cards at the height of our debt in 2008 and now we have two. And neither one carries a balance.

I had to keep reminding myself of that when I wrote a difficult chapter, a chapter with a fight between Mr. Killer Robot and me about our biggest credit card. In July 2007 we went over-limit on that card — a card with a $25,000 balance. And $18,000 on the second-biggest card! It takes my breath away. Exceeding the limit on the bigger card triggered an APR hike from 9 percent to 29 percent. It nearly sunk us.

I hate writing about that month. I hate reliving those days. But I have to because, well, that's the whole point of the book, how we navigated a volatile economy and the consequences of our own choices. How our mistakes made us vulnerable, while the housing crisis and investment banking mess and December 2007 recession almost finished us off. I'm writing this book to try to make sense of what happened, to both my family and a country as a whole. And I can't do that unless I relive the summer of 2007 during the summer of 2012.

Short Play Project

When I'm not working on my recession memoir and having tiny anxiety attacks about it, I'm pondering a submission to 3Girls Theatre here in the Bay Area. The theater is soliciting plays by Bay Area women about family dysfunction over the holidays. They'll pick one to be a part of their Holiday Showcase in December.

So I'm developing a script for it. That sounds impressive, but what it really means is "I scribbled some ideas on the back of a hotel room receipt in Eugene, Ore." But I like writing 10-minute plays — it's a lot of fun — so I'll try to have something ready by the end of August.

Old Mortgage Company Declares Bankruptcy

I haven't gotten to the short sale part of my financial memoir yet, but I plan to detail the horrendous paperwork process with my mortgage company. While doing research, I discovered that AwayGo Financial (its nom de plume until I figure out what will get me sued and what won't) has declared bankruptcy. Ha! I'm surprised it took so long.

Actually, as traumatic as the short sale process was for me, it actually was a lot better than most experienced with AwayGo. I'm guessing it's because it was clear we couldn't keep the house, we were current on payments (despite pressure to default) and it was a relatively small amount.

This news is yet another reason to include an epilogue in this memoir detailing not only what happened to the Killer Robot Family, but to the the other characters and companies in this saga. It will take a page just to list the bankruptcies. I'm just grateful we weren't one of them.

The Perils of Consumerist.com

So apparently I'll be unable to read any mortgage related posts on Consumerist.com while writing this memoir, because I'm sure that the site's take-no-prisoners community will make short work of this book if it ever gets published.

In this post, a young couple moved into their first house a few years ago. Then the husband lost his job and they couldn't make the mortgage payments. They asked their lender PNC Mortgage for help, and we all know how that goes.

They moved out of the house, sold their Pottery Barn and Crate&Barrel furniture, and moved into an apartment with some IKEA furniture. They still pay the HOA fees and are trying to negotiate a short sale. PNC is being awful and now calling their relatives about the missed payments. Now there's a short sale under review and the bank's locked them out.

It just seems like PNC has made a bad situation unnecessarily horrible. They're obviously doing their best, though, so why is the Consumerist community piling onto them and treating them like whiny ax murderers? The reasons are legion:

1. They had Pottery Barn furniture.
2. They had Crate and Barrel furniture
3. They signed a mortgage, so tough titties.
4. They didn't have enough savings -- obviously because of the Pottery Barn and Crate&Barrel furniture.
5. They bought IKEA furniture.

So I've decided not to read Consumerist posts about mortgages for a while because there's no way I can write this memoir with visions of the Consumerist hive screaming for my blood. But this does remind me to keep the "poor little me" attitude out of my writing. I must never forget that Mr. Killer Robot and I got ourselves into this situation. The recession just made it worse.

Hold the Irony

From First World Problems:

"This screenplay I wrote is so far past post-ironic that it's actually approaching ironic again from the other direction."

April 21, 2012

The Stink of Failure

Writing prompt: Describe a smell that evokes a particular place.

Burned Popcorn

Whenever I smell burned popcorn I think of the first hair salon I visited after moving to Ann Arbor, Mich. Seeking a new hairstylist is always a traumatic experience and after moving from Detroit to Kalamazoo to Prague to San Francisco and now to Ann Arbor, you'd think I'd have a better grip on the process.

I'd read all the magazine tips for finding the perfect stylist — not that I needed the perfect stylist, I just wanted someone who could play up my hair's natural blonde as opposed to its natural gray. The gray had established a beachhead at the crown a few years before and now threatened total conquest and I needed a stylist who could help me fight the good fight.

So I read the magazine tips and they were predictable: ask your friends, ask women on the street with good hair, interview candidates. I found such suggestions ridiculous; I had exactly one friend in Ann Arbor at this point and she had terrible hair.

As for the second suggestion, well, that created a fascinating social experiment. Seriously, I think UC Berkeley researchers should take this up. I found the most friendly-looking women, those most likely to cheerfully respond to my request, had the worst-looking hair, while the beautifully coiffed ladies strolling down State Street looked ready to smack anyone foolish enough to address them.

So I adopted the time-honored tactic of walking down Main Street and picking the salon with the nicest sign. They brought me in and introduced me to Stephanie, a cheerful, heavyset stylist with a nose ring and a henna rinse. All was well until the faint odor of burned popcorn entered the room. Stephanie froze.

"What's that?" she asked.

"I think it's burned popcorn," I piped up, ever the helpful one, although it was obvious what the odor was.

"The new girl did it," whispered the neighboring stylist.

"The eyebrow girl?" Stephanie asked. A quick, grim nod.

"I don't understand that," Stephanie said, dabbing some potion on a lock of my hair. "You have to stand by the microwave while it pops."

"Everybody knows that," said the other stylist.

The smell grew stronger and the culprit, a young Asian girl, scampered out to apologize, but the stylists were having none of it. "You have to stand by the microwave," Stephanie said. The eyebrow girl looked ready to cry.

And that's why, although Stephanie created the perfect soft buttermilk highlights for my hair, I never returned to that salon.