Everyone wants to make their own mistakes.

One of the things that puzzles me the most about human nature is an unwillingness to follow advice. As a teenager I was especially resistant to it, and I often said (or at least thought to myself), "Let me make my own mistakes!"

And I did. My modus operandi was to, whenever possible, not make decisions. Instead, I allowed life carry me like a river. A sort of very boring, slow-moving river that would be the absolute opposite of a thrill ride. When faced with a major decision (or even a minor one), I would consult a Magic 8 Ball. Or I would establish an invisible yes and no on a table top or my knees, then alternate between them with my finger, saying:

Engine, engine, number 9,
going down the Chicago line.
If the train should jump the track,
do you want your money back?

And then I would have to make another decision. If I was riding a train, and the train derailed, would I ask for my money back? Well, I guess. And if I was injured, I might even file a lawsuit against the railroad. I mean, really, that's not a hard decision to make. So, yes.

Y - E - S spells yes
and you are not it.

And there would be my answer, which mathematically is always 'no' if you have alternated between the two choices by syllable and chosen 'yes' to the 'do you want your money back' question, and 'yes' if you would be stupid enough to forego monetary compensation.

But why put yourself through a train wreck at all? Not sure about college? Just don't go. Get a job at the first place you go looking for one. If it's that easy, it was meant to be. Thinking about marriage? Get pregnant - accidentally, of course - which sometimes but not always assures a ring on the finger. And if a ring happens, it must have been Fate! In the years that follow, don't even consciously plan your other pregnancies, either! They'll happen on their own.

In the event your 'plans' of being just a wife and mother don't pan out, and you get tired of working at a particular job, someone you know will always know when there is a job available somewhere else. You won't necessarily make very much money, because, remember, you refused to make a decision about college, and colleges didn't come to YOU, and if you don't have that little piece of paper that says you are smart, no one else will think you are smart and pay you accordingly.

And for heaven's sake, DON'T SAVE ANY MONEY! A few years ago, about twenty-five years too late, I read a neat little book called The Richest Man in Babylon, a collection of parables on finance. Probably the most important advice contained in the book is to pay yourself ten percent of everything you make - and then don't touch it. I remember thinking, I wish I had read this book 25 years ago! But, would it have made a difference? No. And do you know how I know? I gave the book to my oldest son to read. While it's possible he didn't read it at all, I still told him about the ten percent thing. And he hasn't taken my advice. So I told my middle son about the ten percent thing, and he hasn't taken my advice.

So, go ahead everyone. Don't listen to me. Make your own mistakes. I know you want to. Go on and flip a coin or eenie-meenie-mynie-moe your life-altering decisions. Or don't decide at all, and just give Fate the job.

Who could have a day this bad?

I watched the first half of Gone With the Wind last night. It's been a while since I've seen the movie, so it felt a bit fresh to me. And as I watched Scarlett deliver a baby for the wife of the man she loved, escape a burning city, be kissed and abandoned by Rhett Butler, and drive a dying horse home to Tara only to find her mother dead and her father crazy, I decided I've never had a day that bad. We should all consider that comparison, even though my example is fiction. But you don't have to look very far in the world to find bad days even worse than that.

I'm very happy at the moment. So happy that I just spent the morning shining up my house and cleaning windows inside and out. It helps that it is 50 degrees F outside. This afternoon I will devote myself to oil painting.

I looked at the boys basketball statistics for the Indiana High School Athletic Association last night, and discovered that my son was listed as 38th in the State for the number of rebounds per game. This morning, the Indianapolis Star listed him as 13th in the State. Frankly, I'm amazed. His school is one of the smallest in Indiana, and his team doesn't have a very good record. Mom is pretty proud.

Look out, Vermeer, here I come.

I'm ready for my next form of therapy. On my lunch break, I bought a 30 x 48 inch 'gallery wrap' canvas upon which I plan to brush a masterpiece. Well, that's the plan. I'll be using a technique known as glazing, for which Johannes Vermeer was well known. Without boring you with too many details, glazing is a method by which colors are placed on a canvas in very thin layers using an oil-based medium. After a layer has dried, and another placed on top of it, the colors become not physically but optically mixed, thus creating a luminosity in the painting.

The key words there are 'after a layer has dried.' This project is meant to be a work of patience, above all else. My tendency to rush things is legendary, and I'm hoping to prove I can wait. A little.

This is why I'll be painting in my husband's heated 'shop' - the same place my cat resides. The wood stove keeps the place at an almost constant, arid 80 degrees. It's hard to say whether oils will dry faster in those conditions, but I'm betting on it.

And if not...well...I'll be patient. What's the hurry?

Cuckoo Cigarettes

Several years ago, I sent a carton of Swiss-made, Russian cigarettes to a writer friend of mine. When asked how in the world I got them, this is how I replied:

After the cigarette plant's great purple flowers are buzzed by bees, their long, graceful stems (which look like ivory cigarette holders) begin to sprout tiny white cigarettes. This happens in a valley somewhere between the Alps and the Red Sea. The plants are nourished by pure mountain water and the pale Swiss sun. A pretty maid named Adelheid tends the plants carefully, protecting them from night creatures such as foxes and bums. When at last the moon is full and the cigarettes are ripe, Adelheid picks each one by hand and packs them into small boxes.

She gives the boxes to Tobias, who strings them on red ribbons from the legs of cuckoos, who have been fortified for their long flight on cheese and chocolate. The cuckoos are trained to make the arduous journey to Ukraine almost overnight. Sometimes they are shot down over Moscow by MiG fighters. Finally, the birds arrive at the home of Ivan and Kiska Solovyov, where they are fed Borscht and the cigarette packs are removed from their legs.

Then I order cigarettes on the internet and they're sent by international airmail from Ukraine, which takes about 5 weeks.

The cuckoos are much faster.

So I do have an imagination, after all. Occasionally I'm capable of writing fanciful things. But it's been a long time.

Prompted by a Bot

There was an email in my spam box just now from Polina. Polina asks in her subject line, "Hey, why do you not write?"

Well. That's a very good question, Polina. Why DO I not write? Because not writing is what I do.

I watched a film called Finding Forrester a few nights ago. The film stars Sean Connery as William Forrester, a reclusive writer who published one critically acclaimed novel, then disappeared. Forrester reluctantly takes under his wing a young black writer, Jamal Wallace, whose talent blossoms under Forrester's mentorship.

One of the scenes that stayed with me was when Forrester tells Jamal that "you write your first draft from the heart, and the second draft from your head."

My problem seems to be writing from my head too much. My head is full of critics who don't want me to write at all. It's funny; the critics think everyone else writes beautifully. The critics believe I have nothing important to say, and above all else, nothing interesting or entertaining.

This is why I do not write, Polina. I could give you a hundred other excuses, but I have given you the most valid reason. So stop emailing me.

Call me The Light Bulb Bandit

After an already shitty day, my husband informed me this evening that the new owner of our former house (our former landlord's son) is telling people that we took all the light bulbs with us when we left.

Well...light bulbs are expensive. And I'm so frugal (NOT) that it only makes sense that I would steal light bulbs that might be considered "fixtures" by someone else.

No, I didn't take your f*&^%ing light bulbs, you douchebag. The only fixture I can think of that didn't have light bulbs in it when I left was the ceiling fan that hasn't worked for 15 years.

People are idiots.

Mutants

This morning I watched some animal program that showed the largest cat in the world - a liger - half lion, half tiger. This was especially surprising to me, because I thought the liger only existed in the imagination of Napoleon Dynamite.

I've become sort of an odd creature, too, since the move. You might call me by my latin name, Ancilla analus. My OCD has really kicked into high gear. Speck of lint on the floor? No way. Little orange flag sticking up from behind the satellite receiver? Gone, because it wasn't one of my colors. Bread crumb on the countertop, I laugh at you before I pinch you between my fingers and throw you in the trash. And heaven forbid there should be a streak on the glass tabletop. I hardly recognize the person staring back at me from the mirror as she battles a speck of something on the glass.

Too bad my behavior is only the result of newness. Give me a couple of months, then you can come over and hunt for dust bunnies under my sofa.

Prolifique

A few days ago I happened to pull up actor Johnny Depp's IMDb page, perhaps by accident, and I was stunned to see what he's working on simultaneously. Fifteen films in development. Two films in pre-production, two films in production, and three films in post-production. I realize, of course, that he isn't doing all of this alone, but just having committed to all those projects might be overwhelming for some.

This led me to thinking about the creative process in general. Is it fair that some of us spend most of our lives doing things we don't want to do? I don't think so. I would love to be constantly involved in creating something beautiful and lasting. Unfortunately, that isn't the case. At all. If creativity were measured on a scale of one to ten, I would be somewhere near...let's see...minus 100.

On the other hand, I do spend eight hours a day, five days a week making something. If I was a sculptor...but then again, no...(Elton John reference), I would have created, by now, about 100 Davids. My efforts in working for someone else might have yielded a few War and Peaces. Because, really - I'm not bragging, since it's the truth - I am the world's most prolific Aircraft Maintenance Work Card Package Creator.

So eat my shorts, Johnny Depp.

The Elusimuse

Rather than write some painful thing that would resemble nails on a chalkboard, I'm going to sleep, then try again tomorrow.

Out With the Old; In With the New

That phrase is especially meaningful to me this year, since we moved to a "new" home the first week of December. In fact, I turned over to the landlord the keys to our old house only the night before last. As much as I hate to admit it, I had a few emotional final moments at the old place, especially since I'd lived there almost half my life, my boys were raised there, and the rumor is that the old house is going to be torn down.

I've never been sure why I become attached to inanimate objects, somehow attributing to them a human quality. A little crazy, I know, but I do it anyway. So when I said, just before I walked out the door for the last time, "Goodbye old house; I love you," I felt that the house understood, and forgave me for abandoning it.

So today I'm a bit lost. Trying to embrace the new, but not exactly having bonded with it yet.

I guess that's what the next 364 days are for.

I like my passport photo because it makes me look like an international spy or at least a drug dealer.

Unfortunately, the title of this post has nothing to do with what I'm about to write. I know you're surprised, because who among us couldn't write an entire blog post about their own passport photo?

No, the reason I'm here is to chisel in internet stone my resolutions for the coming year.

Wait! Don't go!

I'll keep it brief. And simple.

1. Walk every day
2. Blog every day

Actually, I hadn't really given it much thought before this very moment, and now I'm drawing a blank.

The good (or bad) news is that I really mean #2, and I think I can stick to it because I installed a wireless router yesterday, which means I can blog in bed. Maybe I'll change the name of my blog to "Blogging in Bed" or even "Blogging in Bed Every Day." Okay, no I won't.

See you tomorrow, and have a very safe but irresponsible New Year's Eve.

Light at the End of the Tunnel

For the past few months, my husband and I have been remodeling what was previously my mother-in-law's home, located on the 43 acres we have owned for about ten years. It seems rather strange, having owned that kind of acreage, that we have rented the home we live in for the past 22 years, but that's just the way it was...because the agreement was that my mother-in-law could live in the house until she passed away, and my husband was either too cheap or too busy to build a new house on the property.

In the last two years, my mother-in-law began to show signs of dementia. We didn't know how much longer she could continue to care for herself, and the strain of helping care for her was becoming too much for my husband and me. But mostly my husband, since "the farm" is where he works every day. There were some pretty strange things we had to deal with; for instance, my mother-in-law claimed that I told her I wanted to cut her head off, she imagined that people were stealing from her (particularly telephones, which we later found stuffed in closets). Then in July, she fell and broke her hip, which made the decision for us. She is now in an assisted living facility, where she is well cared for 24 hours a day, which had been impossible for us.

So the house remodeling thing: I'm worn out. I have no time to color my hair, or read a book, or keep up on housework, because I've been so busy trying to help get the "new" place liveable. And basically, it's only been three rooms that we've redone. Our bedroom, a living/dining area, and kitchen. The rest will have to wait until we're living there, and even the exterior won't be finished until who-knows-when.

I guess I'm just trying to explain why I haven't been blogging. It took until this morning to realize how much I miss it, and I'm hoping the colder weather, the move, and the advent of Winter will all remedy that.

Maybe I'll even have time to color my hair.

A Word About Flavo(u)r

Those of you who have read me for a while might know that I am on a very silent, lazy, and fruitless campaign to eradicate Monosodium Glutamate from the planet. Let's set aside the fact that MSG causes me and two of my sons to have migraine headaches, and focus instead on a radical concept: that humans don't really need that much flavor [flavour, if you are reading this in English].

For a while now, I've felt as if my taste buds are dead. I think they've been numbed by too much manmade flavor. It doesn't matter that I've stopped using table salt because of my high blood pressure. Or that, because I'm a smoker, I've slaughtered all the senses in my nose and mouth. No, it has to be all the crap they put in (and take out of) our food, and here's why:

One of the best things about living in the country is that you have access to meat. Like, actual livestock that you can take to the meat processor to have cut up and frozen in little packages that in no way resemble a live animal. Recently, we had a hog butchered, and it was my job to let the meat processor know how I wanted my unrecognizable meat packaged. When we got to the sausage, I was asked what kind of seasoning I wanted. I asked, "Does your seasoning have MSG in it?" They had to check, and the answer was yes. So the woman on the phone suggested something radical - "Do you want us to season it with just salt, pepper, and sage?" "YES!!!" I shouted, as if I had just discovered electricity.

So that's what I got. Sausage, flavored with salt, pepper, and sage. And honestly, it's the best sausage I've ever had. And do you know why?

Because it's full of TRANS FAT.

An Ethics Question

Suppose you hired a local mechanic/alcoholic (though you weren't aware at the time he was an alcoholic) to work on your car. Suppose you gave him $900 in advance of the work, and he proceeded to be in possession of your vehicle for 5 months. Then he never returned your calls, but when your husband finally stopped by and caught him at home, he told the tragic story about how his 94-year-old father was tortured and murdered by drug dealers in some completely freakish scenario, and when you looked it up on the internet it turned out to be true, so you felt a little sorry for him and understood why he might be stinking drunk all the time and not able to work on your car - not to mention that he was in a terrible truck accident about 10 years before and is in constant pain. So you let it go on a little longer until you've finally had enough, and you go pick up your car, only to find out he didn't do a damn thing to fix it.

What do you do then? Do you let it go, out of compassion, and consider it a lesson learned? Or do you stand up to be the one who stops enabling this person to be an alcoholic who is screwing people over (since you find out you aren't the only one he's done it to)?

Remember, there are no right or wrong answers, but keep in mind this guy is an alcoholic who carries a handgun.

By the way, I missed you all.

Expect the worst and get it.

I've been gone a while. I'm not even sure why, except that the internet holds little appeal for me right now. (No offense.)

I was experiencing those few, terrible days which occur after the full moon begins to wane, trying to reverse my bad mood by convincing myself that my brain chemistry and thought patterns were completely responsible. It didn't work. On Sunday I went to church, something I rarely do. When I left the house, my kitty was happily dashing about the yard. It occurred to me to put her back inside, but everyone deserves a little freedom, even cats.

It wasn't until later in the day while cleaning house that I realized I hadn't seen her since that morning. I went outside and called for her. No response. This was unusual, since she usually stays very close to the house. I knew that my sons had been in and out of the driveway in their trucks, and I had visions of my cat splattered all over an engine, or, alternatively, a bold coyote having snatched her up by the spine. It sure didn't take long to convince myself that she was gone forever. I decided to take a break to visit the pond, and by the time I got there, I was in tears. My husband asked what was wrong, and I told him I was sure my cat was gone forever. I said it figured, as bad as everything else had gone for me lately. Story of my life, just my luck, God hates me, why would I expect anything different than to get attached to something and have it die. Yep, 'bad luck' has been my training program for years.

So it was pretty humbling when I got home about an hour or so later, and my cat greeted me at the door. On the inside of the house. Apparently she'd found an excellent place to nap.

There is a chapter in Norman Vincent Peale's book The Power of Positive Thinking called "Expect the Best and Get it." I know it's a stretch, but I'm going to work on rethinking my thinking. Of course then I'll have to deal with the agony of dashed hopes all the time, but hell. It's worth a try. I can always go back to the way things were.

My Son, the Cowboy

My son was walking out the door this morning when I convinced him to let me take some shots of him. Here are two:




I love and hate him for being so photogenic, even in work clothes.

Ben Stiller: the best time I never had.

It wasn't until I was drying my hair this morning that I remembered being with actor Ben Stiller last night - in my dreams. Though I can't recall any details, we were living it up. And he was incredibly funny; so funny that I woke myself up, laughing, at least 3 times. But was it Ben Stiller that was funny, or was it his comedy writer (me)?

The dream only illustrates to me how important humor is in my life. I've always considered myself more of a 'straight man' than a comedian, but I love to laugh, and I think people always appreciate you when you think they are funny.

Which reminds me of my inappropriate behavior this past Monday night.

My youngest son's high school baseball team played in their Sectional tourney and lost. On the way home, we stopped at a restaurant to eat. One of my son's teammates made it clear to everyone that he would be sitting next to me. Ronnie was a Junior this year, and he doesn't have any trouble growing facial hair. Let's just say it would be easy to forget that he's only 17. Plus, he's very funny.

So Ronnie and I sat together in the booth, with my hubby sitting across from us, and my son at a table nearby. I think it was one of those deals where teenage boys like to go on about "your mom is hot," only Ronnie had the added intent of harrassing my husband, too. The problem is that Ronnie is so funny and so engaging that it may have eventually appeared that I was flirting with him. In an innocent way, of course.

But I still feel like a perv.

"Change" You Can Believe In?

A cashier handed me this twenty yesterday after I bought groceries for my mother-in-law.

Obviously, the handwritten message brings up all sorts of questions. Where did it come from? Who wrote it? And why? Is someone trying to tell me something? And doesn't it look like a man's handwriting?

I've always been intrigued by the things people write on money. For a while, my oldest son collected dollar bills on which someone had stamped one of those cartoon dialogue bubbles with "I grew hemp" just above George Washington's head.

There's also a website where a person can track exactly where their money has traveled, as long as it is encoded with the www.wheresgeorge.com link, and the serial number has been registered, and other people have actually submitted notes on its progress.

What's the most interesting thing you've ever seen on money?

finally, something to look forward to

On Tuesday next (that's Old English for those of you not in the know) Survivalist Bear Grylls will be accompanied by comedian and actor Will Ferrell on an adventure in some "ice-bound Swedish mountain ranges" on Man vs. Wild. (Discovery Channel, 10 p.m. EDT)

I think it's sad that the only thing I have to look forward to in life is a television program where I can watch Will Ferrell drink urine and eat reindeer eyeballs. But there it is.

Star of the Sea

The name Maurita Mason came to me when I thought I was going to be a romance writer, and would therefore need a name that no one could possibly connect to me. I didn't know at the time that an author's real name is usually located next to the date on the copyright page.

For a while I considered Vicki Stone, a shake-up of letters from my maiden name. My dad invented that one, and I might still use it someday. You know...if I ever finish a manuscript. And get it published.

But I've come to identify myself with Maurita. She is me, and I am her. If I were walking down the street, and someone yelled, "Maurita!" I would turn and look, in exactly the same way I still respond to "mom" in public. In the same way I nearly panicked when a co-worker called me "Chickie" one time - my Yahoo Chat incarnation.

So where did I get Maurita? From my given name, Laura, and from a friend who was very dear to me at my first job. Her name was Marita. And Mason is a family surname from my mother's side, and merged magnificently into the Margaret Mitchell-esque author's name I was trying to create. I'm very fond of the initials MM (salute to Lermie), and I also used them previously at Journalspace when I was Moira McGartland and not yet gossamer.

I Googled Maurita Mason earlier, to see if it was safe to give out an email address of that name to someone from work. It isn't. But it led me to discover that Maurita means "star of the sea," which I think is the loveliest thing ever.