Haterade

Why are female action stars always in heels?!

writing too honestly (day #8)

At some point I must have stopped being remarkable. I can't really tell if I lost my momentum or if I just climbed high enough to realise I would never be at the top. I think - I hope - I am still above average. But I am not Boston brilliant. Some days that's okay. But a lot of days it makes me feel small in a way that paralyzes me and lets the hope leak out. They don't seem that different from me, these game-changers. I could have done that. But I didn't. Why? What was I doing instead?

I think I've peaked. In fact, I think I am riding the crest right now in medical school and in one month I will start the slide. I think the world finally caught on and the game is up. Upenn, UNC, and UCLA could see through me. They could tell I am not one of the Leaders and the Best. But Upenn, UNC, and UCLA don't have to take the Loudest and the Betters. I wonder if Michigan is ashamed of me now. I wonder if they look at me and think, admissions got that one wrong.

With inferiority inevitably comes guilt. There are people who believe in me; should I give them their money back? I am ashamed I have failed the expectations I projected onto them. My mother's voice is telling me, you have a job in a field you love, you are one of the lucky ones. Her voice makes me feel ungrateful and ashamed even as the real mom is giving me a hug.

I think this is why a friend told me I will be better off when I'm a big fish in a little pond. Go down a level so that your ego survives the comparisons. But that means my ego is important to my happiness and I don't like that truth either. I keep expecting someone to react with pity, but everyone is too polite for that. I wish they weren't; I'd rather be angry at their pity than wallow in my own.

Writing (day #7)

It was the 7th item, of 15, that the psychic had foretold.

7. Someone in your family will get sick.

It was right between:

6. You will fight with a female relative

and

8. An old friend, gone from your life, will return.

I don’t remember if the other 14 ever came true; some of them must have because they were sufficiently vague and honestly, there is no way I got through a month without some tiff with my mother. Not back then. Regardless, number 7 came true, rather immediately and abruptly.

I wonder, if she really had been psychic, could she tell it was my father? Did she know it was cancer? That’s also a sufficiently vague guess with a high probability of being right – lots of people get cancer. Dad got prostate cancer, but not the kind you carry around until you die from something else. He got the you’re-just-young-enough-to-die kind. Oh, but he didn’t die. Or, at least, he hasn’t yet.

In a rather movie-like plot twist, his surgeon did die. Soon after he fixed my dad my removing his prostate, he succumbed to a massive heart attack. Doctors dying of heart attacks has always struck me as odd, as if they should be able to see them coming, even though that makes no sense.

Since my dad survived, I’ve started noticing the other men, his age and younger, who aren’t so lucky. Besides his surgeon, there was a banker with whom he worked: motorcycle crash. And the singer I was rooting for on television; her dad succumbed to pancreatic cancer. I feel guilty that my dad, who also rides a motorcycle and does silly and dangerous things, he’s still alive. Guilty, but I wouldn’t trade places.

Writing (day #6)

Day 4 and 5 have been combined along with a few other paragraphs and submitted for workshopping. We'll see what comes of that. It's a crappy two pages born out of an interesting idea. I'm still struggling with the fact that I don't have a character in mind nor a story that I need to tell right now.

Recall, when reading the below, that this (these writing assignments) is not a journal. First person does not necessarily mean this is me.

***

I cannot pinpoint the moment when I got old. For so long it was just growing up, until one day; looking backwards, it became aging. Innocence, spontaneity, and lightness were all behind me. Indeed, I cannot remember when I stopped looking forward and instead begin reminiscing. I have heard many people say they feel young in their mind, but their body betrays them with it's aches, stiffness, and effort of motion. But I don't agree. My mind is much more cluttered than it was in youth. Full of consequences, worries and compromise. Youth is simple in part because it exists so much in the present. Age is burdened with the past and provisions for the future. Or maybe the lack thereof.

So I am old. And I know that I am old. But I am not aged. I am not decrepit or infirm or demented. Old is a relative state, not a physical one. My soul is old. My point of view is old. But my body, well, my body is neither young nor old. If you asked a child, that child would call me old. If you asked a pensioner, that pensioner would call me young. And my ouwe oma - bless her demented 96 year old self - my ouwe oma would call me barely born.

Chocolate madelines

I have to admit, I didn't think I would like these as much as their original orange-y cousins, but they are actually quite fabulous. The cocoa is divine with the richer texture of this cake-cookie.

1/3 cup all purpose flour, sifted

1/4 cup dutch cocoa powder, sifted

2 eggs

1/2 cup white sugar

1/4 tsp salt

1 tsp vanilla extract

6 Tbl butter, melted

1. Preheat oven to 375.

2. Liberally butter the madeline pan, then lightly flour. Use real butter, PAM won't work.

3. Combine eggs and white sugar in a bowl. Use an electric mixer on medium for at least three minutes - the mixture should be fluffy and have air bubbles.

4. Add vanilla

5. Sift in the flour, cocoa powder and salt. Mix on low to incorporate.

6. With a spatula, fold in the butter. I recommend doing this in 2-3 parts.

7. Spoon a heaping tablespoon into each madeline well.

8. Bake for 12-14 minutes

9. Invert onto a wire rack immediately when removed from oven

TIPS:

1. The madeline pan must be room temperature or colder

2. Mixing the butter and sugar is crucial - if insufficiently whipped the madelines will be bricks.

3. Cool the butter before mixing in

4. Use good cocoa powder, this will not mask budget ingredients

Next time I might try including almond extract or orange rind.

Continued (day #5)

The baby in the stroller begins to cry.

This appears to be a call to action as the mother startles, stands, and picks the baby up. The Osh Kosh toddler stops punching the fish tank wall and waddles back towards his mother with his pudgy little hands aiming for her knees. He wraps himself inconveniently around one of her legs and how his spit is all over her jeans as well. You don’t know what happens next because your attention is drawn upward to a twenty-something woman standing almost, but not quite, too close to you.

You shift in your seat and the woman leans on her back leg, creating another inch of distance between you two. She states your name in a way that clearly means, why don’t you follow me? As she starts to turn away, as you stand up, you consider simply walking out of the clinic instead of into the exam room. You think this in the way that it occurs to you to drive into walls when you’re going 80mph on an interstate. You would never do it, but the possibility pops into your head anyway.

The thought of walking away occupies the four paces it takes you to arrive at a familiar exam room where the twenty-something woman is guarding the door, waiting for you to enter first. It’s polite, but somehow also trapping. You hesitate for a moment, slowing a little but not truly arresting your forward progress. With the next step, your shoe leaves the carpet behind and announces you on the squeaky floor. In here, there are real chairs. Once she follows you in and closes the door, the room immediately feels smaller. And warmer. And devoid of natural light.

Just a snippet (day #4)

Let me start by telling you where you are.

You are in a hospital, but you are not a patient. You are sitting in the waiting room of a children’s neurology clinic on a plastic chair upholstered in clashing purple and teal. The material is rough against your skin, more like carpet than the usual chair fabric. The walls have toys built into them, all at little-child height. Directly in front of you is something akin to an abacus with brightly coloured wooden beads strung on parallel bars. Huh, wood, not plastic. Next to that is an aquarium structure, except the fish are plastic and the tank is filled with shockingly blue glitter gel. The tank wall is mashable and a cherubic toddler is plunging his fist in every direction, making the neon fish writhe in every direction. He squeals and a little frothy white spit dribbles down his chin and plops onto his overalls.

The chairs themselves are stuck together the way airplane gate chairs are. More like a bench, really, but with pre-defined butt dominions. Three of these chair-benches are arranged in a square, which is completed on the fourth side by the registration desk. This too is purple and teal and covered in paper charts, despite the facility having electronic medical records.

First lines (day #3)

“Japanese students blow their brains out when they do not get into the college of their choice; Americans some time after they do.” - Whit Stillman

Damn. That's an opening sentence.

***

I've been playing with the concept of point of view in writing. What would it be like if the narrator of a story didn't actually know the people in it? Most of the movie the Lives of Others is told from the perspective of a Stasi secret policemen; he doesn't actually know his subjects, yet he is the vehicle for the story. Or rather, the story he follows is actually a vehicle for his own character development. You are watching a movie about East German underground protestors, but the true protagonist is the Stasi officer.

Instead of using a spy (too easy!), what if you adapted the non-linear perspective of Egan's A Visit from the Good Squad. That is, what if lots of tangential characters told the story of a stranger. Egan plays not only with point of view, but also uses a non-linear timeline. I'm less ambitious: linear chronology, but a series of narrators whose only commonality is their interaction with the protagonist, whom we never directly hear from.

Now I just need characters and a plot.