Roleplaying for Writers, Or Why It’s Cool to Geek Out.

I have a confession for everyone. I was such an outcast in high school, I had to beg other outcasts to teach me Dungeons & Dragons. Their geekiness had advanced to such a state of cool that the circle was pretty exclusive, and they’d been playing for a long time anyway, and besides, the last girl they’d taught to play had wound up scalping her first kill and stitching a hat out of the skin.

I did learn. I played a bit. And I discovered a secret that I have just uncovered again, playing Escaping Reality, a creative writing role-playing game which the good Men with Pens have just created.

Roleplaying is good for writers.

Hah, say you. Yes, I’m sure that many fantasy writers had their start in role-playing. Adorable. You’re supposed to be a businesswoman, dude. (Side note: Businesswoman Dude is the title I want on my business cards.) Why are we screwing around with barbarian dwarves and psionic magicians?

And I say unto you: HOW CAN WE RESIST?

Also, it’s useful to copywriting. Really it is. Roleplaying hones a huge number of skills that are useful to copywriters, and to PROVE TO YOU THAT MY GEEKINESS HAS PURPOSE, I shall cite some of those reasons for you.

Ahem.

Finding a voice.

We talked about finding your client’s voice some while ago, and I’m not going to recap, because I have learned to hate the recap since TV shows started to come out on DVD. You would think that a logical place to allow your ’skip to the next scene’ button to do its thing would be RIGHT AFTER the recap. But NO. They skip right to the middle of the next scene, when the new story begins, and then you either have to watch the recap of the story you JUST SAW, or miss part of the scene, or learn to fast forward on your DVD player, and there is only so much time in the day. Recaps, therefore, are evil. Finding your client’s voice is a good idea. If you’ve forgotten just why, you should go check out that episode again. It was a good one. Trust me.

Finding a voice is what roleplaying is all about. You have a character, and your character needs to think and talk and swear, and you need to know what all of that sounds like. You can’t give your character a voice until you know who your character is. Male or female? Large or small? Confident or shy? Quiet or brash? You need to know who this person is, or his voice won’t match. Try giving a woman’s voice to a male character sometime. It won’t work. Or it will, but not the way you wanted it to. Your male character will be ordering the pink frilly drinks in the bar, and that is going to get awkward right quick.

Likewise, you need to know who your client is in copywriting in order to find their voice. You need to know who they are and what they’re about, or the voice in which you’re writing will come out wrong. If the atmosphere your client projects is fun, young, and enthusiastic, giving them the voice of a forty-year-old accountant simply will not fly. No one will believe you, and the client will feel a little humiliated and betrayed, which is never the reaction you’re going for, but seriously, imagine how you’d feel if someone gave you the voice of your Aunt Esther. You’d be pissed. That’s how it works.

Getting rid of cliches.

Cliches in fantasy games are no fun. Cliched characters are boring. They make everyone else playing want to stab your character while he sleeps. Actually, if everyone else in your party attempts to murder your character for no apparent reason, there’s pretty good odds your character is Legolas with, oh, different colored eyes, or something. Ditto for creating a situation that’s so common as to be annoying.

Really? I’m going to go and avenge my dead parents by killing an overlord who is the epitome of all that is evil? I personally cannot think of at least five major films/books/plays/interpretive dances that follow that storyline. This may have something to do with the fact that I live in a cave. Tra-la!

It’s annoying, and no one wants to play it, because they know how this one ends already. THIS, by the way, is why guys hate chick flicks. It’s not that they’re about love. It’s that they’re all identical. He’s seen this one before. He’d rather go roll a half-orc with hydrophobia.

Cliches in copywriting are equally annoying. Actually, cliches in copywriting are more annoying, because they don’t come with dragons and treasure. There is no upside to the writing cliche. It is pure scribbled annoyance. On a stick.

“Ever wish you had a solution to that problem we all have? Then have I got a product for you!”

Shoot me now. Make me play Harry Potter through all seven books. I can bear that, but I cannot bear “the best just got better” one more time. I need some magic tricks to make it worth my while. Even that stupid light-trick.

Thinking on your feet.

In a good roleplaying game, your character will constantly encounter new situations. You won’t be certain how you ought to deal with the situation. You’ve never seen this situation before. (This is because we took all the cliches out back and had them shot. You’re welcome.) Instead, you have to put yourself in your character’s shoes and think quickly to determine how best to react. If you do it well, your character both survives and is believable. If you do it badly, your character is mauled and everyone hates him. Totally up to you, but I know which side of the cat my bacon is taped to.

Copywriters are constantly asked to write about products, people, or philosophies that they’ve never before encountered. I throw myself into other people’s shoes all the time in order to keep up in meetings. Thinking on my feet is rarely useful in terms of pretending I know something I don’t, but it is extremely useful in projecting an aura of capability. Being able to hear a lot of new information and apply it sensibly to a situation in a way that makes sense to your client is a valuable skill, and I swear, the time that you set off a spell trap and you didn’t know what it was and you had twelve minutes to identify and disable it will in fact serve you well. If nothing else, you’ll remember not to hyperventilate.

Shameless Pimping

I’ve been playing for a day now, and I missed it so much I nearly broke my cheeks grinning. All of the above is completely and utterly true, but I mostly wrote this post because role-playing makes me happy, and I want everyone to get involved.

So now that I’ve already secured my slot in the limited roster for Escaping Reality, I think all of you should go over and try to get in. Or at least enter the contest on their creative writing and online gaming blog, Capturing Fantasy, because I haven’t won that yet, and you can ruin my statistical likelihood of winning if you skedaddle on over there. That’s math working for you and against me, which is the way I am most comfortable with my math. The day I have a comfortable relationship with math, you will know the Apocalypse is short a horseman.

Subscribe. I may never post again, for I shall be role-playing.

16 Strange Things About Tei

I got tagged by a meme. This is my first meme ever, and I can’t say I’m entirely thrilled about it, because I don’t like to waste all my random at once, but here goes. Thanks to Brett and Matt for making this one a double-header.

1. I have a deep and abiding love for my car. In a scary way.

My car is a ‘94 Honda Civic named Billy Markham, and he is my faithful companion and true. We have borne some fifty thousand miles in each other’s company over the last two years, and we have met many strange people and seen many amazing things, the oceans that bound this country and the mountains that raise it. The exploits of the ubiquitous Billy Markham are many, and some few worth recounting. He once pulled an eight-by-four trailer with a mattress strapped atop it through the Rocky Mountains, the Nevada desert, and the Sierras, expiring many a time in the heat only to rise again to battle his mistress homeward. He once brought me through a snowstorm all night long with a busted coil that could have exploded at any time. He delivered me, safe and unexploded, before quietly expiring in the night, never crying out of his ills, never letting me know of the torments he had suffered that night on my behalf. The mechanic who saw him the next day was in awe. “Truly,” quoth he, “this steed must bear you the greatest of loves, for I have never seen another sustain such a wound and continue onward. Had he been a lesser beast, you would have died out there, in the snows of Montana.”

Seriously. It’s a little sick. But I love him, and I will not let him die, not yet, not while I have breath to work on him and money to repair what I cannot. Also, he’s about to become a Colorado citizen, as of June.

2. I can’t whistle.

I really can’t. Good men have tried and failed to teach me. I blame it on my dental work.

3. I am a Champion.

No, for real. When I was sixteen, I became a swordfighter. I was good at it. The friend who taught me to fight and I had long talks about nobility and goodness and chivalry and what it all meant, and six weeks later he came back from Colorado, where he’d been studying blacksmithing, with a sword he forged me. He asked me if I would be his Champion, to guard over him and his children, for the rest of our days, and I accepted.

Come on. It’s not like I could tell him, “Sorry, dude, I’m not into this Champion stuff. Can’t I just be your homefry? We’ll get pizza. It’ll be just as good.”

It became a big part of my life, and if you’re one of my closest friends, you’ve seen it in action. Call it a hero complex. One of my kith and kindred needs me, I’m on the next flight out to be by their side and solve all the troubles. It’s a good credo. Never could think of better.

4. Karaoke. I’m great at it.

Once I was doing Salt-N-Pepa’s Shoop and the machine got behind on the tempo, so that the words on the screen weren’t synced with the music. They were, in fact, not the right words for that section at all. I got through the whole thing. Perfectly. I was AWESOME. I can also do Tupac’s California Love up right.

Don’t even talk to me about Eminem. I don’t want to hear it.

5. My hands and feet are seriously tiny.

I’m 5′8” and I weigh in at about a buck-forty, and my feet are a size six and a half. My hands are the palmist equivalent. Certain friends of mine have been known to stare at my toes. Not in the cute baby way, like, “Aw, wook at da widdle toes.” In the: “Dude. Your pinkie toe is disappearing into your foot and it’s scaring me,” way.

6. I’ve never done drugs.

No. Not even that one. Not even the demon weed. I don’t have any particular reason why. Never had a good reason to. I expect that some day I will find myself in Amsterdam with Snoop Dogg, and then I will have a damned good reason, but for some reason, ‘because we’re all getting high in the basement’ was never good enough for me. As it stands, though, my parents are more experimental drug-wise than me.

Yes, I’m aware that alcohol is technically a drug, but until the FDA classes it as such, no, I haven’t done drugs. I am a bad Californian.

7. I need my feet on the ground.

I can’t bicycle, roller skate, roller blade, ice skate, skateboard, unicycle, stilt-walk, or do any other activity that involves my feet only slightly elevated from the ground and balanced upon some object whose integral structure I cannot feel. Cars are fine. I’m actually a great driver, and I enjoy it. The jury’s out on motorcycles. I’m a little afraid to try. This is because the last time I was on a bicycle, I knocked out my two front teeth. And a motorcycle is kind of like a bicycle with an engine and a higher top-speed. It seems like I could potentially do a lot of self-damage on one of those.

I really want to try, though.

8. You can see 3-D images in my handwriting.

This is something a buddy of mine claimed back in high school. It is tiny. It is pretty. And it is damned near illegible. Here is my best attempt at a photo of it.

Cross your eyes and move your face away from the page slowly. If you do it right, you’ll see an elephant.

9. I used to play football.

Also soccer, basketball, and volleyball, but football’s the one everyone gets kind of weirded out by. No, I wasn’t a kicker. I was a running back. It didn’t last much past puberty. All the boys went and got huge, and there started to be a physics problem. If a body of mass x encounters a body of mass y at the same velocity, does the body of mass y get slaughtered? I do believe it does.

10. I’m a homophonophobic.

I just made that word up, but it’s true. Homophones: words that sound like other words. Your-you’re. They’re-there-their. If you screw these up, I will hurt you. It is the equivalent of nails on a chalkboard to me. I do not understand what the problem is. WHY is this so difficult? Do you write PHONETICALLY? Do you still SOUND OUT YOUR SYLLABLES AS YOU TYPE THEM? Then WHY ARE YOU MAKING THIS MISTAKE?

I understand a typo. A typo is fine. I do those too. Hit the wrong key. It happens. But this is not a typo. This is a word that MEANS SOMETHING ELSE ALTOGETHER.

It especially troubles me when professional writers do this. I am not naming names, because that is mean, but I recently saw a professional copywriter do a blog post whose TITLE had a homophonic error in it, and then someone else RE-posted it, HOMOPHONIC ERROR INTACT. And I wanted to kill EVERYONE IN THE WORLD. And use CAPITALS GRATUITOUSLY. Which I realize is probably someone else’s pet peeve, excessive capitals. That’s okay. We all have our little things, and this is mine.

‘Cause, you know. MY LIST.

11. I’m superstitious.

I like magic. I like signs and portents and fortune-telling, and I’m a sucker for the real stuff. I’m not going to believe every charlatan on a street corner, but there was this one card-reader in Manhattan who totally got me because she was precise about things and she looked like a walking mummy with these big eerie eyes. She said I would have ‘at least two children’ and she wouldn’t talk about my health or my friend’s, which freaked us both out a bit. We were a little convinced that we were going to walk outside and a piano would drop on us.

We didn’t really. But there’s a strange little midland between believing in something completely and having it work its way into your brain, and I live in that midland.

I leave milk out for the fairies. I throw salt over my left shoulder when I spill it. I fork my fingers at evil people. I don’t follow any particular faith on this one, pretty much any-and-all. If you tell me some African tribe back in the early A.D. period used to spin in a circle and belch to dispel evil spirits, I’ll probably add it to my repertoire. Be careful with this one. I already have a bunch of strange little ways.

12. I mimic dialects.

Not on purpose, it just happens. When I lived in Oakland, I spoke Ebonics, well enough that my boyfriend at the time had a friend who got on the phone with me and said, “I thought your girl was white?” When I went to England, I had an English accent, which was difficult because I would usually start, say, asking someone for directions, realize that I had asked in an English accent and now I had to keep it up, lest they think I was mocking them.

It works in other languages, but to a lesser degree, since my vocabulary isn’t fantastic. When I was in France speaking French, they assumed I was Italian because my accent was good but my grammar was mediocre. Same thing, reversed, for Italy. The accent was good enough that they thought I was just over the border, but the words weren’t fooling anyone.

One exception: Scots accent. Can’t maintain it. I think it’s because I’ve only ever heard men talking in a Scots accent. If I mimic them, I pitch my voice lower, as though the male baritone were part and parcel of the accent. I’m still trying to figure out which portion of my brain to blame on this one.

13. I can recite poetry.

Lots of it. I used to memorize for fun on long car trips. Still do, actually. Good way to freak out someone who’s arguing badly. Just start quoting appropriate Wordsworth at them. Clams ‘em right up.

14. If I’m with a good female friend and some guy tries to hit on us, we will unabashedly pretend to be lesbians.

Not in the hot lesbian lover way. We’ll basically act a little embarrassed, as though we’re sorry he got the wrong idea. “Oh. Um, this is awkward, but you see, we’re together. Yeah, together together. We’ve actually been married in a civil ceremony and we’re about to adopt. She’s planning on taking some time off of work to take care of the baby since I really can’t be away from my job right now, and - I’m sorry. Are we boring you?”

It’s good fun. Making up professions is good too, especially if you can throw in some age-old couple banter.

“Yes, she’s a photographer and I’m a lawyer, just made partner actually.”

“She’s the smart one in the relationship.”

“Oh, honey, stop that. That’s just not true - she’s brilliant, really she is.”

Kills the mojo dead. It’s amazing.

15. I am a speedy touch-typist.

85 words per minute, easy, and I can do it without looking at the keyboard. Good party trick.

16. I am Catwoman.

No, not really, but cats really like me. If I live with them, they’re totally indifferent, but I cannot tell you how many times I have been wandering down the street and cats have begun following me. They also invade my house - I’ll open the door and a cat I do not know will slink in and start looking around, as though searching for my secret drug stash. Then they’ll sit back and look at me expectantly. I keep feeling like someone told the cats that I’m the incoming prophet, and they got the wrong girl.

There you go. A plethora of randomness. To bed with me, because, bonus fact: I get tetchy if I’m in the same place for too long. I like having a home to come home to, but I am riding the wind much of the time. If I can ever get the writing together enough to become a travel writer for National Geographic, you’ll never see me again.

I know you’re supposed to tag people on a meme, but unless someone dinks my superstitious side and tells me that all the babies born today will die horrible deaths by a vengeful god unless I pass it on, I think I’ll let it die with me. If for no other reason than I don’t know eight bloggers who haven’t already been tagged. Tell you what, give me your favorite awesome blog in the comments and I’ll go expand my Pool of Awesome.

Subscribe. More random every day.

The Rogue Mother’s Day

It’s like the Queen Mother. But different.

It’s Mother’s Day, people. Mother’s Day is at the top of my list of holidays-that-got-shanghaied-by-commercialism. Right up there with Valentine’s Day and Christmas. Now, one of my favorite things in life (and this is true) is to redeem holidays that have gone native and spend them doing activities in the actual spirit of the day (on Valentine’s Day, I write love letters. Real ones. With pen and ink and nice paper and perfume dottings and all. Take THAT, Hallmark). Mother’s Day I haven’t figured out yet, and here’s why.

My mom really likes Mother’s Day.

And I get that. What’s not to love about a day that celebrates the extraordinary pain involved in bearing and raising a child? (Seriously. I did NOT make that second part easy.) It started off so well, too. Mother’s Day had some great origins. Historically, lots of countries have a day to celebrate motherhood, and moms get gifts and appreciation on that day. It’s been going on since Greek and Roman times (for those of you who aren’t reading the comments, and seriously, you’re missing out, yes, those are the same Greeks and Romans who admired the aesthetics of a small penis). In this country, it was adapted originally to be a peace day, “Mother’s Day for Peace.” Later, as a movement to get better sanitary conditions during the Civil War.

Seriously. How cool is that? Mothers stood up to ask for peace and for safety. They wanted their day to symbolize those things that are associated most with hearth and home. Before anyone gets all uppity on me about the fact that women can be the breadwinners too, I remind you that I am single, female, and an entrepreneur, and that I wield mighty double-handed swords. I still think it’s awesome that instead of saying, “We deserve a day to be pampered and loved for being mothers,” they said, “We want our day to symbolize motherhood, and so we will use it to stand up for peace and safety, because that is what motherhood is about, bitches.”

They probably didn’t say that last bit, this was the Civil War. They were thinking it, though.

I’m two days away from going home to see my own mother, which is when she’s going to be showered with the gifts and all. Until then, I’m going to call her up and we’re going to have a long, long talk, because in twenty-four years of being my mother’s daughter, I have discovered that the thing she likes most is talking with me. Not most in the ENTIRE WORLD (I’ve got a brother and a sister she’s pretty fond of talking to as well, and I’ve seen her get positively squidgy over new cellphone technology), but most from me.

I’m also going to blog about it, because she gets kind of tickled about the blog thing, too.

Maman

You’re amazing, and I love you. In honor of the Greeks and the Romans and the Chinese and the Brits (back when they were English) and really awesome colonial mothers, Happy Mother’s Day.

If I am happier than I have ever been in my life right now (and I am), it is because of you.

If I am smarter than the average box of biscuits (and I like to think so), it is because of you.

If I am an incredibly speedy typist and that fact helped me become a better writer, because I could get what I was thinking onto the page as I was thinking it (which is true in ways I never dreamed when I was trying to beat the hell out of Mavis Beacon Teaches Typing), it is because I saw you working on a computer back when computers were not common, in your basement office, and you were tapping away like mad, and I thought “That is so cool. I want to do that.”

If I am an incredible wiseass on this blog and you worry about it sometimes (which I know you do), you should blame Daddy. It’s all his fault.

I love you.

Subscribe already. You’re my Mom, you’re supposed to.

Working on the Weekends

It’s Saturday morning. By ‘morning’ I actually mean ‘one in the afternoon, but I just got up and made breakfast, so bite me.’ Last night I went out and saw a movie with a friend, played some air hockey for the first time in a decade, and won both games, which feels just as righteous at twenty-four as it did when I was fourteen. Arcades should never go away. And screw first-person shooter games. It’s all about air hockey and skeeball and those machines that would let you keep playing forever with 50 cents if you were good enough. Mortal Kombat. Oh, man, nostalgia’ll kill you.

Now, yesterday was a blow-off day for me. I had just finished a pretty hefty-sized couple of projects. It was a cold, gray, ‘Curl Up With a Cup of Tea and Watch Doctor Who on DVD’ kind of day, and I know to obey those days if you don’t have a good reason not to. Otherwise the Gods of Naming Days come after you, saying stuff like, “Dude, we named it that for a REASON. We did not name it ‘Get a Jump Start on Next Week’s Work’ Day, DID we? NO. It was even sub-titled ‘Christopher Eccles Is MY Doctor’ Day. What is WRONG with you? Quit organizing your receipts for tax purposes this second and watch him dip Billie Piper.”

Which means that today, Saturday, is a work day.

And I have a confession to make.

I like working on weekends.

Seriously. I like the devil-may-care nature of the whole thing. I like heading on over to the farmer’s market and parking myself and my notebook behind the cart full of fresh tomatoes and basil and scribbling down outlines in the midst of the smell and the street busking musicians and the flower-sellers. Eventually I’ll toddle over to a cafe full of people who are all having a lovely weekend, getting some breakfast with their lovers the morning after, discussing the vacation they might take, the book they just read, the relaxing, diverting, amusing stuff. Nobody talks about work on a Saturday. Everyone is tired of that. They talk about the stuff they enjoy, and that’s a delightful environment to write in, because I enjoy my work. It’s writing. It’s the best fucking job in the world.

If you’re a writer. I imagine that for a fisherman, catching fish is the best job in the world. And that is cool too. Power on, fishermen. Everyone’s got their own truth. My truth is Writing Rocks. Yours may be that Star Wars Rocks. And both of these things are equally true.

When I write around other people who hate what they do for a living, it starts to rub off on me. I start to go, “Yeah! Work sucks! Rise up and overthrow your overlords! Who’s my overlord? Damn it, it’s me.” When I write in a cafe full of people enjoying their Saturday, that rubs off on me too. I say things like, “It IS a lovely Saturday, and look, I just finished this first draft! And you’re starting a band with some buddies of yours? Awesome. We are both extremely cool.” Much better. Anarchy is good for desperate times, but this is writing we’re talking about. I prefer to be chill.

Nine-to-five, Monday through Friday. Uh, no.

I like that I can tell the common calendar to back off, because I am going to take one day off on Friday and one off on Tuesday and hell, maybe half a day off on Sunday, just because I can. As long as I put in the forty hours a week (or so) I promise myself, I can work any day I want, and at any time of day. I can wake up at noon if I want to and work until eight. I can work for two hours in the morning, take the afternoon off, and finish up in the evening. I can get up at five and - no, wait, I can’t do that at all. Early morning is where my abilities are shot. But all the rest of it, I can do.

And yeah, this does often mean that I work Saturday AND Sunday. Or Friday evening, or other times when all the world is theoretically supposed to be out gallavanting the night away. That’s where my roguish nature steps in. I don’t want to dance just because it’s Saturday. I’ll dance on the day I wake up and just have to dance. I will dance in my front yard if I have to because it’s four a.m. on a Wednesday and no dancing places are open. I don’t want to work just because it’s Monday. Actually, if you think about it, nobody wants to work on Monday because it’s Monday. But you do, don’t you? Yeah, you do. Stop that. Listen to the gods of naming things. If they say that this particular Monday is, in fact, “Wear a Stupid Hat to Work and Shoot the Breeze with Your Boss All Morning” Day, do it. Go for it. Especially if you’re a freelancer. You have no excuses. No one is going to fire you for this stuff.

Outside-World Intrusion.

Yeah, sometimes I have a deadline. Sometimes I have to work on days that are much better spent hiking up a mountain. Most of the time I don’t, though. If I work whenever it feels good to work, and play when it feels good to play, my schedule generally accommodates that. I don’t need to play all the time. I don’t always have the urge. In the space of a week, I try to work about the same number of hours as everyone else works. I just catch them when the time is right.

It’s Saturday. I’m going to go write a bunch of monthly missives for a woman who runs public speaking seminars, and eat free melon from the fruit-stall guy, and maybe sit under a big tree and flick at ants that invade my personal space.

I love my life.

Subscribe. It’s Saturday.

In Which I Continue to Be Off-Topic: More Dandelions

Since I don’t really have anything else to write about and I was up until four in the morning last night, this post is late and I’m going to share with all you dandelion-lovers some of the pictures of the dandelion goings-on. This was my bookcase, all covered with ‘em. Everyone should note that I’ve only just moved into my house and I do not actually condone this color for bookcases or furniture in general. Also, that I do know to hang pictures. I just fail at it so far.

This was the hallway. And by ‘hallway,’ we mean, ‘dining room that has yet to have dining room furniture in it.’ That path goes all the way to the front door, you just can’t tell. Because I’m standing on it. Random fact: the gods of weather in Boulder are fickle and mischievous. This is a beautiful day today, warm and sunny. Perfect for flower-picking. Yesterday? SNOWED. I kid you not. Not in a big crazy way, but in a ‘what the hell are you doing outside picking dandelions’ way. Some guy asked me if I was picking them for dandelion wine, and I have to tell you, that sounded like a mighty fine idea at that point.

SNOW. I ask you.

This is the whole kitchen nook, all dandelion-ified. There’s also dandelions on the fridge and the water heater and in glasses of water on the counter. There’s also a crown, hanging on the wall, up in the right-hand corner, there. I found out that Disney LIED to me as a child. LIED, I say. Alice of Wonderland fame, when she was making her daisy chain? She BRAIDED the daisies. I used to try to do that as a kid and get so frustrated, because mine never looked like hers. And I found out yesterday that apparently a daisy chain is made by splitting the stem and sliding another daisy through it (this also applies to dandelions). Disney, you have robbed me of a satisfying childhood full of daisy chains. We shall be having words about this.

Anyway. And then we had dinner, which I did not take pictures of, because it wasn’t that exciting. Do you really need to see pictures of salad and pasta? I thought not.

That was the magic of dandelion-ville, and why I’m taking the weekend off useful blogging. Thanks for bearing with. I’ll be up and running again tomorrow. Well, tonight, actually. Since all you people evidently go to bed in different time zones.

Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have to go sweep up a couple thousand dandelions before they turn to chaff and suffocate me in my sleep.

The 27 Year Old Pact

With all the the terrified reactions to the weevil post, I feel it necessary that I oblige you people with the third post today and tell you about the 27 Year Old Pact. Do NOT get used to this. I am giving myself shingles just trying to appear daily in feathers and bangles for you people.

I am in New York, in my old apartment, with my old housemate. We are here celebrating her 27th birthday, which is her official Introduction to the Land of Intoxicants birthday. I know all of you are thinking I had a repetitive typo there - it’s the 21st birthday, you incompetent freak, you’re all thinking. You just did a whole blog post on the Evils of Typos. You are a sham and an impostor and I am un-subscribing right NOW. (Don’t un-subscribe. Subscribe! Right now.)

A long, long time ago, when my housemate was just a wee sproutlet, her father sat her down and made a serious pact with her. She would neither smoke, drink, nor do drugs, until her 27th birthday, at which point she was free to do as she pleased. At the culmination of these 27 years, her father would award her a very large monetary award. She’s asked me not to note the actual denomination of this award, lest you think she entered this pact for that alone (also, lest you immediately call her asking her to buy you a round, since all kinds of ex-college folk showed up out of the woodwork upon hearing about this deal). But I will say that she could buy a very nice car with this award. Not a new one. But a nice used one. And then fill up all the seats in the new car with friends and take us to the Four Seasons.

It got me to thinking why we enter into pacts. For her, this pact was appealing largely because her father had done it himself when he was young, and he has forever believed he has a better relationship with alcohol for having missed the years where an ideal activity was getting hammered. The monetary award, while a good impetus, wasn’t so significant as the fact that she’d given her word to her father.

All parents out there note: imagine your sixteen-year-old daughter being handed a beer by a friend at a party. Now imagine which of these two responses gets a better result:

“My dad says I can’t drink.”

“I made my father a solemn oath that I would neither drink, smoke, nor do drugs until I turned twenty-seven, the culmination of which is a long several-months all-expenses paid tour of Russia for vodka, Turkey to smoke a hookah, and Scotland for their magic peat-juice, otherwise known as Scotch.”

She is one of the only women I know who reached her late twenties with a vivid memory of every single amazing, impossible thing that has ever happened to her. She is a phenomenal artist and costume and jewelry designer, has traveled to China and Europe and speaks Arabic because she lived in Cairo for well over a year. She is one of the funniest people in creation and the lack of alcohol in her system has never prevented her from dancing, singing, or giggling uncontrollably in inappropriate places. It is her twenty-seventh birthday today and her friends have all gathered to toast her entry into a new phase, with every hope that she will find a glass of wine with dinner yet one more of the infinite pleasures that bless her life.

I was going to do an analysis of what the deal was worth, and how to apply that to business and life, but I think I shall do that tomorrow. Tonight, I’m going to go raise a glass to this amazing lady, her talents and her phenomenal mile-long legs, her extraordinary necklace collection, her stories of the Dead Sea and her coyote totem, her unabashed laughter and her fine artist’s hands, who I am honored as ever to have known and loved, and we are going to sing karaoke in Manhattan. Because the Love Shack is a little old place where we can get together. Love Shack, baby.

Happy Birthday, most wondrous of Jojos. Your father is a wise man and a good one, and his daughter is a grace to this world.

The Sausage Story

So I asked Naomi whether she’d rather hear a story about sausage or a 27-year-old pact, and she said, “Sausage. Always sausage.”

So this is all her fault.

There comes a time in a woman’s life where she is so intensely happy with herself and her life that no glance of judgment can deter her from her chosen path. I am that woman, and it is that time. I officially have no shame.

Backstory: For the last four days, I have had a negative account balance in my bank account. This is due largely to the fact that the Boulder postal service still evidently uses ponies to deliver the mail. Sick ponies. Ponies with gout and arthritis problems. I have been waiting a long, lonely day for money to show up in my mailbox. And in the meantime, I’ve been eating a lot of oatmeal and Bisquick and the slightly dead vegetables in the bottom of my crisper. I eyed a lone jellybean left over on the floor from the previous tenant’s children for a good long while before finally letting it go, but only because it was a licorice one.

The freelancer diet comes highly recommended. Starving artists do not actually starve. We just decide that oatmeal is no longer worth it the trouble it takes to chew. I was lying awake in bed one night thinking I was kind of hungry, but deciding I simply did not want oatmeal badly enough to get up. Now, if there had been a pint of Ben & Jerry’s in my fridge, you better believe I could have bestirred myself. You would be surprised how much less food you decide your body needs when the only food available is, essentially, gruel. That Oliver Twist character was delirious. There is no way he actually wanted more gruel. He was hallucinating at the time. He thought it was brisket and deep fried mushrooms.

This morning, a very dear friend of mine, who has heard about my freelancer diet at length for the last few days, came to my house at 5:45 a.m., through the snow, to drive me to the airport. He brought me breakfast, which was sealed up in three Zip-loc bags. The three bags were: Toast with eggs fried in the middle. Two tiny muffins, and four strawberries. And sausage.

I may have sworn lifelong fealty to this man, as well as given my solemn word that I will bear his children and clean his fish tanks. It was the gruel talking. For pity’s sake, the man brought strawberries.

I chowed down with a vengeance. But he is a young man, this friend, and young men always think the bottomless pits they have for stomachs come standard for the rest of the human race, and so he brought me a lot of sausage. In fact, he brought me four little breakfast links, and an entire polish sausage. This is because he has ever experienced a stomach that is so disgusted with gruel that it has decided to wear black eyeliner and rock back and forth for awhile in its room, telling all visitors to go away. So the polish sausage went uneaten for a little while, while was delayed for nearly an hour in the snow for the first leg of my flight, landed with ten minutes to spare for my connection, and sprinted down half a terminal to discover that the second leg was also delayed, that I decided the time had come to eat lunch.

Next to my gate was a Dairy Queen. There were people surrounding the Dairy Queen, getting frosty shakes and burgers and french fries. There was ketchup involved. Also a good many bald men. I do not believe I have ever seen so many bald men in my life outside of a Congressional assembly.

I sat down. I put my beautiful brown leather computer bag, which I got as a graduation present, on the seat next to me.

Out of the beautiful brown leather computer bag I drew a Ziploc baggie with a giant hock of Polish ham in it, grease pooling at the bottom, still a little warm (those folk at Ziploc make a good baggie). Heads turned. Noses wrinkled. I distinctly saw one woman turn her child’s head away. I reached into the grease and pulled out my sausage, and began to merrily gnaw on it, among all the fries and the milkshakes and the bald men and the nicely dressed business people on business flights. A little sausage juice ran down the inside of my arm and I caught it with a fingertip and stuck it in my mouth, which is when one of the baldies decided to get uppity.

“Forget the bread?” he asked, smiling in the greasy way that too many Dairy Queen burgers will net you. He was wearing a pinstripe suit and a power tie, and he’d flung it over his shoulder to keep it out of the ketchup. He eyed my cleavage and bit off a french fry and it made a noise that sounded exactly like, “You poor, pathetic sausage-gnawing child. I can afford bread and meat to stick between it. And a milkshake.”

It was a noisy fry.

“A friend of mine woke up at five this morning to take me to the airport, and he packed me a little breakfast for a surprise. I’ve already eaten most of it.” I said calmly. I bit off a piece of my sausage, and IT made a noise that sounded just like, “You probably took a taxi to the airport, baldy, and nobody likes you enough to make you breakfast. Definitely not with strawberries.”

There comes a time in every woman’s life where she is perfectly, utterly happy with her life.

That’s the sausage story. Tune in a few hours for the 27-year-old pact.