Time for Plan Brat!

November 17, 2005 by Wendy

Ladies! Are you sick of getting the stink-eye whenever you bring your small children to froofy coffeehouses? Tired of having to take them to some sticky McDonaldLand to turn them loose? Or maybe you keep reading about those snotty parents who seem to feel no compunction about letting their spawn run amok in grown-up places and find yourself wishing that you could act that entitled and self-righteous. Looks fun, doesn’t it?

But where can you take your kids, relax a little, and impose your own values on strangers? Forget those twee little bakeries with their overpriced scones and tin ceilings: Why not take your kids to the pharmacy at Target instead? Or Rite Aid? Or Walgreen’s? Any pharmacy, in fact, with a policy of employing pharmacists who believe children are so special, they think it’s a shame when you try to not conceive them. These nice people in white coats will be thrilled to host your rambunctious toddlers for a couple hours while you shop. Sure, they make it hard for you to get Plan B, but you can always count on them for a big dose of Plan Wheeeee!

Who says a pharmacy isn’t a kid-friendly place? Some of these pharmacists like children so much, they want you to have the ones you didn’t even mean to have! And when you think about it, pharmacies are awesome places for young children to run and play, especially behind that door marked PRIVATE (Go on in! These folks don’t care about privacy!) which leads to a wonderful land of bottles and jars to shake shake shake. Plus plenty of childproof caps to challenge them, hundreds of colorful little beadies to count, lots of new words to learn (Say it: “Meth-o-trex-ate.”) and no shortage of arthritic elderly friends to trip up. Really, it’s like a Montessori school with Muzak.
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Various updates

October 18, 2005 by Wendy

This Thursday’s Chicago reading: will be a benefit for Literacy Works and not some other organization, despite what you may have read on a couple of events listings somewhere. Literacy Works does all kinds of fantastically swell stuff like train ESL teachers and volunteer tutors to help adults learn to read, and while presumably the other organization is devoted to good things as well and not, say, into playing cruel literacy-related tricks such as hiding rubber cockroaches in books, tearing out the final pages of mystery novels, and recommending House of Leaves, they are nonetheless not the same organization as Literacy Works, on whose behalf I am reading on Thursday. So come to Hyde Park! And bring ten dollars! Or more!

(It’s hard not to be nervous about the attendance. For most readings, having a lousy turnout simply means that I’m pathetic. When it comes to this reading, a lousy turnout means that PEOPLE WILL BE DENIED THE GIFT OF KNOWLEDGE THROUGH READING, and that I’m pathetic. So do what you can.)

Last Thursday’s New Jersey reading: was fine, except for all the apocalyptic rain. From my rental car along the Garden State Parkway, New Jersey looked very, er… smeary, though I’m sure it’s way nicer when it’s dry. This state has lovely radio stations, which are great to listen to while you’re trying to find a place to turn around on the highway.

My cold: is much better, thank you. You needn’t have worried at all.

The Beeping Thingy ceased its daily beeping two days after I wrote about it and I KNEW THAT WOULD HAPPEN. I still have no idea what the hell it was.

We did, however, catch a squirrel in my office building today, after the thing came down through the ceiling this weekend and ate some of the office M&M’s. Working for a children’s book publisher means you are always surrounded by enchanted animals. And by “enchanted” I mean “awesomely freaked out on sugar.”

Bootsy the Fish: Still alive after a year and three months. Sort of. He seems to have swim bladder disorder. (Look it up.) From what I’ve read this won’t kill him, but it’s killing me to see him lying listlessly at the bottom of the tank like a junkie, flopping his semi-useless fins around like a thalidomide baby Smurf. I mean, you can’t have a fish “put down,” can you? Something dignified and fast. A tiny harpoon I can shoot into him, maybe.

Weight Watchers: Oh, you shouldn’t ask right now. I’m only mentioning it because I know you want to know, which is my own damn fault for telling you I was doing it again in the first place. You get where I’m going with this? Yeah? There you go. (And this may not be up for discussion, inasmuch as I can control that.)

But never mind that. Most everything else is good.

There's nothing quite like the feeling of

October 12, 2005 by Wendy

being name-checked in the lead story at Salon (okay, just page 4, and wow, thanks, Steve Almond) the night before you leave for a trip on which you’d resolutely decided not to bring your laptop for a change, effectively keeping you from following the various blogospheric reactions and responses and snickering and shitflicking that could ensue as a result of the article (though you don’t imagine any of it will be aimed at you (but if it was, though, you’d prefer to know (which just goes to show how much of a freak you are (which is pretty damn freaky)))). I mean it KILLS YOU to not bring the thing but you know it’s the right thing, philospophically and everything. So despite the temptation to keep logging on to see what everyone has to say about Almond’s article, my honest labor of self-reflection will not involve lugging my iBook and all its cords and attachments through airport security. Not this time, at least.

(But I can check my email, right? If there’s an internet cafe somewhere?)

See you in NJ tonight…

Apparently

October 6, 2005 by Wendy

I fell into some kind of internet wormhole where time appeared to elapse at a normal rate in my daily life while I worked at my job and bought a car, and watched America’s Next Top Model (my heart beats KIM KIM KIM and CORYN CORYN CORYN and maybe just a little bit for LISA, though she could stand to be medicated a little, okay, a LOT), and counted Weight Watcher points, and then didn’t count Weight Watcher points and pretended it was “core,” and drank beer, and caught up with friends, and danced. The usual. But on the internet, time lost all meaning, and it seems I was sleeping for weeks and weeks in my airtight cyberspace pod. Then again, maybe I needed the rest.

Apparently summer’s over. For months there’s been a Dove Girl in an ad on the side of a bus shelter in my neighborhood, and tonight, when I drove by, I wondered if she was cold now, in her underwear like that.

Odd Daily Occurrence

August 23, 2005 by Wendy

I believe it has been going on every morning here for at least the last two weeks: at some point around 11 am I’ll hear a short but jubilant burst of mechanical beeps coming from one corner of my office. It’s a little jingle sequence, really–the sort of deetleleety-deetle-deetle that you might hear from a digital watch alarm, or maybe the voice mail alert on older cell phones. I have no fucking idea what it is. I think it may be coming from somewhere in the pile of manuscripts I have in that corner–two or three file boxes of manila envelopes full of stuff I have to return.

I suppose it’s possible that a beeping thingy would have come with one of the manuscripts. People send us all kinds of things with their stories sometimes: stuffed animals, finger puppets, puzzle pieces, bits of felt shaped like dinosaurs, and once, an insect specimen. I’m having trouble imagining what kind of Beeping Thingy could have been sent to me, much less the kind of children’s story it would accompany, but I can’t rule it out. As far as I know, though, I’ve opened everything in that pile and wouldn’t I remember finding, you know, this Beeping Thingy?

I’ve ruled out everything else in the general vicinity of the beeping. No surge protectors; nothing electronic or battery-powered. Nothing, really, that could make a sound on its own, as most things in my office tend to be silent unless kicked or thrown against a wall. But every day the beeping continues, and every day I kind of forget I hear it.

And now that I’ve mentioned it, I bet it will stop.

No, really, what is it? Did I black out one day and buy a Tamagotchi? Is there some Children’s Book Unabomber who has it in for me? Is there a portal to another dimension? What?!

One of those book meme thingies that I keep meaning to do

August 22, 2005 by Wendy

Because Kevin Smokler tagged me. And because I went to the lakefront after work instead of writing a real update.

1. How many books I own: I just counted; I have about 400. This doesn’t include my books at work, though most of those are editorial copies that I wouldn’t necessarily claim as my own. And do perfect-bound lit magazines count as books? I didn’t include those, either, though I suppose one could claim that anything with a flat spine is technically a book. But that’s dumb, because then the IKEA catalog counts as a book. Okay, never mind.

2.) The last book I bought: Paradise by A.L. Kennedy. I don’t have it yet. I just ordered it. I couldn’t say which book I bought before that, because it’s a gift, so Paradise by A.L. Kennedy is totally my beard. Plus I really want to read it.

3.) The last book I read: That I finished? And that I wasn’t paid to read? I think it’s The Wonder Spot by Melissa Bank.

4.) Five books that mean a lot to me:
   1. Jane Eyre by Charlotte Brönte
   2. The Dream Songs by John Berryman
   3. Short Talks by Anne Carson
   4. Metamorphoses by Ovid
   5. A foreign edition of Richard Scarry’s Best Word Book Ever with words in English, Hungarian and German. It belonged to my grandmother. It’s how I know “szalonna” means “bacon,” “szállítókocsi” means “delivery van” and “robot” means “robot.”