New blog

So I’ve decided to start a new blog to chronicle my life in Washington henceforward. That doesn’t mean this one is necessarily finished, only that it has served its primary purpose in documenting my major life transition. And while that transition isn’t finished (are they ever?) I think it’s time to at least begin the next chapter.

I’m also doing this for professional reasons; I recently read an agent’s comment that before she’ll consider a book, she checks to see if the writer has a Web site or blog. So I thought a blog more specifically focused on writing would be appropriate. For the same reason, I’ve opened a new, professional-writer-type e-mail account. I’m serious about making this writing thing work.

Anyway, you can catch up with me at The Literary Gargoyle…see you there!

Boy jeans and Jessica Simpson

Two random and unrelated things:

Initially unbeknownst to my brother, I inherited a pair of his old jeans when I was in Colorado. They’re super comfortable and I wear them all the time, which may be why in the space of two months they’ve gone from having a hole in one knee to having gaping holes in both knees, a fraying patch in the butt, and unraveling threads in a dozen other places. (He did mention that with this brand, once they start to fall apart, they go quickly.) I’m wearing them today and thinking about how much I’ll miss them when I have to remove them from my wardrobe.

Last night’s bizarre dream: I was hanging out at Wrestlemania with Jessica Simpson. Don’t ask me why she showed up in my dream, because I have no clue. Because it was both Wrestlemania and a dream, there were lots of pretty boys with mohawks. Mmm. Anyway, we were talking and she mentioned the tabloids constantly harping about her weight fluctuations. After some reflection, I told her as tactfully as I could–with no feeling of cattiness, genuinely wanting to help her and thinking no one else around her would tell her uncomfortable truths–that if she didn’t wear clothes so tight you could see every ounce she gained or lost, the tabloids might have less to work with. At that point Bishop woke me up, so I’m not sure how she took it.

Growing tentacles, maybe

Today I tried to refill the ink cartridges for my printer, because they are dry. The Rite Aid down the hill from me doesn’t do refills, so I have to take the bus to Walgreens. A pain, but I save $10/cartridge, so it really is worth it. So I hauled my still-aching carcass to Walgreens, the one where I refilled my prescription last week, and guess what? They don’t do refills at that particular location. I very nearly burst into tears when the poor woman at the counter told me this. (They did them in Savannah, and this is the much more environmentally responsible Left Coast and no one recycles printer cartridges?!) So I got back on the bus, thinking I would go to the other Walgreens I knew of, but on reflection I realized that while I knew that it’s NEAR Trader Joe’s, I didn’t know exactly how near, and twilight might not be the best time to wander around trying to find out. Later, when I got home and checked online, I discovered that near=3/4 of a mile. I’m going to call tomorrow or maybe Thursday to make sure they actually refill cartridges before I go.

So that the trip would not be entirely in vain, I went to Joanne and loaded up on craft supplies. There are things I think I could sell online–wreaths, painted birdhouses, carnival masques, possibly some photographs–and these are the tentacles to which I refer in the subject line. I’m trying to branch out. I read several writers’ blogs, and many of them have other little creative sidelines, so I’m trying it too. I like creating, and if I can make some extra money doing it, then so much the better. When I have items available, I’ll set up links from here and my FB page.

I feel like this entry is whiny, and here’s probably why:  I’m starting to think I pinched a nerve or pulled a muscle in my neck during the long walk to and on the beach Friday. It’s been very sore, and lugging around craft supplies today seems to have made it worse. I’ve tried hot baths, the heating pad, and Icy Hot, and nothing helps for long. I just took ibuprofen, so I’m hoping that kicks in soon. The finger I broke rollerblading has also been really stiff for the last few days, maybe because of the plummet in temperatures. I wonder if I should put the splint back on? Would it still help? And please, no one say, “I told you so.” It’s impossible to work as en editor with a splinted finger. I was hurting my hand stretching around the keyboard at all kinds of crazy angles to compensate, and I don’t have the patience to type one-handed, and that’s why I didn’t wear the splint as much or as long as I know I should have. So there.

And while I’m quite over not having a car, I put on my super-skinny pants today, the ones I couldn’t even pull up all the way two years ago, and they fit comfortably. So at least all the walking has some other effect than just sore mucles.

In other news, I’m currently reading two very interesting books and will post reviews here when I finish them.

Sleep redux and writing

OK, I found my disorder: delayed sleep phase syndrome. Most of the description fits, except that I still sleep more than a normal amount and have trouble waking up, but those might be due to other medical conditions.

According to Wikipedia, this disorder fits under the Americans with Disabilities Act as requiring employers to make “reasonable accommodations.” I’d need an official diagnosis, of course, and I’m not sure how you broach it with an employer (or how many employers would consider shifting work hours a half-day back “reasonable”). But it makes me feel better about what I’ve tried to resist believing was just laziness and/or a character flaw.

I slept better last night, with dreams but not the draining, blood-filled kind.

In other news, I’m trying to write short stories specifically targeted to various anthologies and contests–nothing that pays much, but I want to get my name out there. I just finished my first piece of flash (under 500 words) fiction, called “Roadkill.” It’s quirky and I like it, but I’m not sure whether it works. This is a problem I often have with short stories and the reason I neither read nor write many of them. Short stories when they work well can be amazing, but most of the time, it seems like they fall flat. With most novels, if one element–plot or characters or setting, say–is weak, the others can make up for it. With a short story, there’s not time for the author or reader to have that luxury. For me, many of the best short stories end with a “zinger” of some sort–my favorites include “A Rose for Emily” by Faulkner, “Ligeia” by Poe, “The Landlady” by Dahl, etc. Even these writers did not always succeed with their “zingers,” though, and I’m not sure whether I do either.
 
The direction “Roadkill” took surprised me, which is fairly typical. Even when I think I know where a story is going, it usually has plenty of surprises for me along the way. In this case, and especially because the length is so short, I know there’s a lot more to say about the characters and situation; I’m just not sure what yet. But it should be fun and interesting to explore.

To sleep, perchance to dream

I’m having trouble sleeping lately, and trouble waking up. This is not unusual; ask anyone I’ve worked for. They’ve heard stories (which they may think of as “excuses”) about how I tried to go to bed on time, tossed and turned for hours, was completely unable to lose consciousness, then sometime around sunrise I finally tumbled into deep and disturbing dreams and either slept through the alarm or was barely able to move enough to reset it when it went off.

I chalked this up to being a night person forced to be out of bed by 8 a.m. on a regular basis, but it’s happening again now. Last night was a perfect case in point: I think I walked at least five miles yesterday, up and down hills, and soaked up sea air. I thought I’d sleep like a babe. Yeah, not so much. I watched the first disc of Storm of the Century and then read about the Haitian Revolution until very late/very early. (I didn’t check the exact time.) This combination may have contributed to some of the dreams I subsequently had; more on that in a moment.

I eventually closed my Haiti book and decided to try to go to sleep, not because I was particularly tired (I wasn’t, to an almost alarming extent), but because my eyes were tired and I was ready to end the day. Sleep, however, did not come, and every time it nearly did, Bishop intervened. To the point that he ended up in his crate, because being 3/4 asleep and then being roused by a dog bouncing over you to chase a cat or growl at the door or nudge the blinds gets old very, very quickly.

Finally I dropped off, and I had dense, intense dreams. A former friend of mine had let Bishop out into the street, and his back legs had been shot off in the war going on in my neighborhood. I was at some kind of maze-like museum that featured shells and tribal artifacts, and again we were in a war, and I was trying to rally other women to make a stand behind some tables deep in the labyrinthine maze. Somewhere in there, I was also collecting shells and trying to decide on a sort of half-tattoo, half-brand I wanted, but I didn’t decide in time and the artists packed up and left. Monica, Rachel, and Chandler from Friends were there and we were eating dinner. Then I was at some kind of religious retreat, both reading and living a diary by a woman named Jo Alexander or Alexandra Jo or something similar. (The simultaneous reading and experiencing is pretty common for me in dreams, as is, if the dreams have particularly horrible endings, going back to “rewrite” what happens–which I did last night with the war in the shell/artifact museum because we all got killed the first time around.) My sister was there, and my father, and the Alexander woman was counseling another woman whom everyone knew had sexually abused 30 children in Canada. Then I woke up (in the dream), and it was 3 p.m. and I was in a hotel room and starving, so I called my father. He, however, was in Ormond Beach, Fla. I’m not sure where I was, but hours from there. I panicked and started screaming at him. He said I was supposed to eat in the cafeteria at the retreat; I shrieked that I couldn’t because no one had awoken me. Throughout this part of the dream, my eyes were extremely heavy and wouldn’t stay open (again, not uncommon) and there was a fuzziness in my head that persisted for several hours after I awoke.

My alarm went off, several times, and I was so tired that I could barely bring myself to move enough to turn it off each time. (It’s broken.) This is the kind of sleep, with these heavy dreams, that exhausts more than refreshes.

I’ve always had skewed sleep patterns. Some of the deep sleep is likely due to allergies. Some of the skewed-ness is part and parcel of my psychological makeup, but it’s so erratic that it actually prevented me from getting an accurate diagnosis for years. (“Well, the other symptoms match, but your sleep is just off….”) My excellent doctors in Savannah were a bit stymied that medications that helped in other areas didn’t regulate my sleep.

In some ways, I didn’t and don’t want my sleep regulated. I like having colorful, bizarre dreams, at least when they don’t wear me out. I’ve always had intense dreams, and now I’m on medication that has vivid dreams as one side effect, so you do the math.

On the other hand, though, I don’t like dreaming about my dog running around on two legs with two bloody stumps hanging off his torso. I don’t like screaming at people. I don’t like the fuzzy head.

And now it’s 3 a.m. and I’m wide awake. I was about to read more about the Haitian Revolution, but I just finished watching the second disc of Storm of the Century and, remembering my dreams of last night, I’m thinking maybe that’s not the best combination. Maybe I need to look for something more mellow.

Although, to be honest, many of the most disturbing dreams I have relate to what I’m writing, rather than what I read or what I watch. And that brings me back around to the core of the issue. It’s all in my head. My demented, imaginative, skewed, stubborn head.

Keeping the schedule I want to keep–staying up ’til all hours, sleeping all morning–isn’t preventing the insomnia and oversleeping. For the first time, I’m starting to wonder if I have some kind of sleep disorder. And if I do, would a cure (sleeping pills? NO, THANKS) be worse than the disease?

Picnic Point Beach, part two

I finally arrived at the Picnic Point beach. A covered walkway goes over railroad tracks to the shore. The view from the top of the walkway is amazing:

When you get to the bottom on the shore side, there’s a nice grassy area with picnic tables.

The day was cloudless and gorgeous, and you could see all the way across the Sound to the mountains.

The tide was coming in, but I still enjoyed walking along the water line.

 
And I found some cool shells

along with rocks and driftwood. I have vague creative plans involving the shells and driftwood. If the plans coalesce into anything cool, I might end up posting some results.

The shore was WAY too rocky and the air too cold to take my shoes off, which made my decision to plunge, fully shod, into a tidal pool to retrieve a few awesome shells…well, not the brightest thing I’ve ever done. But then, what is?

Never let it be said I let a little water stand in my way.

I had decided to call a cab to take me back to the bus stop, and not just out of laziness–the sun was setting and I didn’t love the idea of the fairly secluded walk back up the hills.

So I bade the beach goodbye. I liked it and I want to go back, but there’s got to be a better way to get there than the route I took.

* Note: Dogs on leashes are allowed and I saw quite a few, but with all the barnacle-covered rocks, I’m a little concerned that Bishop might hurt his pads.

Picnic Point Beach, part one

After my first year or so in Savannah, I very rarely went to the beach. Tybee’s not that great of a beach, really, and if I was going to drive that far anyway, I preferred to go somewhere less crowded and more swampy, like the wildlife refuge. But after spending a week in September ’08 and a week in August ’09 in houses on Puget Sound, I decided beachcombing was going to become a crucial part of my life in Seattle.

This is Bishop hanging out just before I left.

Accordingly, I did some research into public beaches in the North Sound area, and since the weather was gorgeous today, I decided on an excursion to Picnic Point Beach. I planned out my route online, and it looked very simple: walk a mile to the bus stop by Target, take the 113 to Beverly and 148th, then walk  a third of a mile west, and you’re there.

Pretty flowers I encountered en route to the bus stop

Now, if you know anything about me you can probably imagine what actually happened. I got off the bus and headed in the direction I thought was west. I walked and walked. I consulted the very sketchy map in my bus guide, because I hadn’t even thought of bringing my city map. I mean, it’s the beach–surely there would be signs everywere pointing the way if I needed them.

Yeah, not so much.

I stopped to ask directions from a little girl walking a cocker spaniel. “The beach?” she said. “Uhh…I think there might be one that way.” She pointed to what I thought was the southwest. The fact that she didn’t know exactly where the beach was alarmed me–it seemed likely that this meant I was not as close as I’d thought.

Tree in bloom near where I encountered the girl and dog

I consulted my map and determined that the beach I wanted was very definitely to the northwest. There was sketchy guy who’d gotten off the bus who may or may not have been following me. Like, he was walking behind me. He stopped and a half-block back the whole time I was talking to the girl. When I started walking, he started walking again. Kinda put me in mind of a dumpy, middle-aged, maskless Michael Myers. And the road looked like it got a little secluded ahead, so I was not sorry to turn down a residential road that, from my map (which didn’t have most of the roads and didn’t label the ones it did have), looked like it might get me to Picnic Point Road.

Yeah, not so much.

Pretty tree in someone’s yard

Just recounting this is making me tired all over again. Walked down the street, which dead-ended. Turned around and walked back. Sketchy man still standing on the corner. I walk further down this steep hill and turn right on the next street. Walk and walk.

I’m occasionally surprised to encounter what looks like semi-tropical foliage in this decidedly not semi-tropical area.

Walk up a street, turn, keep heading in the direction I think the beach should be. Keep thinking it looks like the trees are thinning out in another block or so…

I don’t know how far or how long I walked–I deliberately avoided looking at my cell phone because I didn’t want to know how much time I’d spent wandering around these wooded subdivisions. Initially, I’d hoped to get to the beach within an hour or so of low tide. I gave up on that and started hoping just to GET to the beach.

Preferably before dark. I finally found an older man who was walking and seemed friendly, so I asked him for directions. He told me to go back several blocks (I use “blocks” loosely, because the streets wound up and down hills and many of them were dead-ends) to Picnic Point Elementary School. “At the back of the school there’s a fence, and there’s a gate in it with a staircase going down the hill. That’ll take you to Picnic Point Road.” Slightly more complicated than the darn bus map. He shook his head. “Good luck. You’ve got a long way to go.”

So much for that one-third of a mile.

Gullies and streams cut beneath the road.

I found the school easily, and after walking around it, I located the break in the fence. I blessed that old man over and over. I hope wonderful things happen to him.

The stairs leading down the hill behind the elementary school

I climbed down several steep flights of stairs leading down the hillside. They came out in a little subdivision that in turn fed out onto what I assumed, for lack of a street sign, was Picnic Point Road.

Looking back up the stairs I have just descended, and firmly resolving to take a cab back to the bus stop

It looked like maybe, maybe the trees thinned out ahead. But that could be simply an effect of walking down yet another hill. My legs were exhausted and I didn’t know how I would make it back up all these hills, let alone find my way to the bus stop.

So I kept walking. On the right was a construction site, on the left a natural habitat refuge with a little stream and ferns and trees.

I think these little natural habitat preserves interspersed throughout the cities are very cool. I’ve never seen them anywhere else.

Based on my post-Okefenokee research, I think these are pitcher plants.

Finally I encountered the first concrete evidence that I was definitely on the right road:

But the beach was not yet in sight:

And then it was: I began to see the glimmer of water through the trees.

See that shine in the middle of the picture? That’s sunlight reflecting off the ocean.

I had arrived, finally, after what felt like at least an hour and several miles of walking.