Author Archives: Cathy

Flew in from New York yesterday, and boy, are my arms tired. Ba-ding dum!

Actually, my entire body is tired. While flying the last leg of my trip from Anchorage to my current home, I gazed about the cabin of the deHavalind Twin Otter (18 seater, co-pilot leans through the open cockpit door to give you the safety speech, seats don’t recline, and one passenger’s carry-on was a box of ceramic tile she could only find in Anchorage) and noted a number of my fellow travelers nodding off despite the loud drone of the twin engines and the bumpy ride down the peninsula. Not an unusual sight.

From conversations in the waiting area before boarding, I learned there were at least two other flyers who’d come from the East coast that day. I’m sure we were all up before dawn and plain tuckered out from jetting across the country. Travel to and from Alaska is no easy task. It takes about 12 hours (not including the time difference) and several schleppings through various airports. It requires juggling plane schedules so your commercial jet flight into or out of Anchorage meshes with the local air service to/from whichever little town you need to get/go to. If planes are delayed, an overnight stay (in either an Anchorage hotel or on the oh, so comfortable plastic seats of the airport) is not unexpected. If you’re heading to one of the smaller towns up here, there is usually another plane to your final destination. Eventually. Some only fly on certain days of the week. It’s the price we pay for living the way we do.

Frustrating? It can be. But as long as there’s no great rush (and in AK, we are a fairly laid back kind of people when it comes to travel) we deal with it. My mother bought me and my husband matching travel mugs with “Zen for Travelers: We’ll Get There When We Get There” on them. I try not to let travel glitches get to me. I have more important things to worry about.

Watched October Road last night. What a waste of time.

The show is about Nick,a first time novelist who returns to his hometown after being gone for 10 years. At 18, Nick left to backpack through Europe for 6 weeks and didn’t come back. Well, apparently he came back to the States, but not back home. Anyhoo, he’s gone for a decade, wrote a wildly successful book, and is asked to do a one day seminar about writing at the college in his hometown. While there, he reunites with his high school buddies and his old girlfriend. Some of whom hate him because he trashed them in his book (ie: using “Anna” as a name for a not-going-anywhere-stuck-in-a-small-town girl in his story when his old girlfriend’s name is “Hannah.” VERY creative, Mr. Writer Dude.).

Aside from the less than stellar acting, I have to say the whole thing was ridiculous. Which is a bummer because I like Laura Prepon (Hannah). She played Donna on That 70’s Show. Nick just decided to not come home for 10 years because on her death bed his mother had told him to be sure to have adventures? And he never called his girlfriend? Ever? Or the best friend he was supposed to start a business with? Never wrote a letter? A post card?

Ok, fine, so Nick the kid was a REAL jerk. Then I’m supposed to believe he began writing a book just 3 years ago and it’s already published, in HC and PB, and is a movie (I think) and on audio as a super bestseller but now he’s having writer’s block and can’t get another story out. Glad I’m not his agent or editor. But maybe they’re making buckets of money off this guy with this one book, so they can coddle him.

In one scene, he visits the rundown NYC apartment where he first wrote the book. It’s the middle of the night and he knocks on some stranger’s door so he can return to where he first got his inspiration. The couple who answers (with the guy holding a baseball bat) listens to Nick explain he once lived and wrote there, and the woman asks if he wants to come in! In NYC!?!?! In the middle of the frickin’ night!?!?!? She does, of course, impart some “you can go home again” wisdom on him. I’d’ve hit him with the bat. He decides to go back to his hometown.

He meets with a couple of his buddies and sees the girlfriend. More on that in a second.

At the start of his seminar he has a panic attack and bolts out of the auditorium filled with people waiting for him to impart his wisdom about writing. I hope it was a free seminar. He returns to the seminar room and meets the one person who stayed in the otherwise empty auditorium, a young woman who “never read his book” but can discuss it thoroughly. Uh huh. Oh, and she’s about ten years younger than him and very, very cute. Hmmm….

So he’s a wunderkind of a writer with a single load who wants to get over his writer’s block. Got it. Now I have to swallow that he’s gone back to his hometown, when he apparently skewered his best friend and girlfriend in his novel, added to the complete lack of communication for 10 years, and can’t seem to understand that (a) they hate him, and (b) they’ve moved on with their lives. His buddies seem stuck in late teenage-hood, but maybe that’s how guys in their late 20’s are, including the one who hasn’t left his house since 9/11 and the one who screwed the other friend’s wife. (Why would you blurt this out to your estranged “buddy” the night before he is supposedly going to drop out of your life again? Would a guy REALLY do that????) Also, the ex girl friend’s kid (she denies the boy is the Nick’s), a precocious little bugger, has peanut allergies that Nick also has so Nick MUST be the father, ‘cuz, yanno, there are SO few people on the planet with peanut allergies like Nick and his entire frickin’ family have.

Nick decides to stay in town to….what? Mend fences? Fine. Find out if the boy is really his? Fine. From the scenes for next week’s episode, which I will thankfully be missing, the kid is hit on his bike. I’ll bet you a cheesecake the boy needs some kind of transfusion or transplant that ONLY Nick matches because {gasp!} he was right! He IS the father!!!!!

Sorry if I’ve spoiled the twist for you.

Can’t wait to see how Nick makes it up to his friends for the character assassination in the book. Oh, wait, yes I can SO wait! Forever, if necessary.

I may be a bit late coming to this party, but as a writer and a reader I take umbrage at The New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd’s interpretation of Chick Lit. She and her friend, The New Republic editor Leon Wieseltier, seem to feel that today’s female readers aren’t getting enough of the classics due to the abundance of women’s fiction on the shelves. That the presence of “Cinderella bodice rippers…girls stumbling through life…drinking cocktails…looking for the right man” might mean we’re not completely in touch with the world. To quote Mr. Wieseltier from Ms. Dowd’s column: “These books do not seem particularly demanding in the manner of real novels. And when we’re at war and the country is under threat, they seem a little insular.”

Don’t even get me started on the first sentence of that quote. There are plenty of female-oriented and authored novels out there that address serious issues, issues that are sensitive and difficult to write about but perhaps offer a reader some solace, or inform her of her options.

Let me jump to the part about these novels being “a little insular.”

I start my day off with my clock radio waking me up to NPR. I listen to the news for a good 20-30 minutes, learning about the latest bombing in Iraq, the economic condition, and other such light-hearted information. Then I get my children up and ready for school, reading the daily paper as I make sure they are fed a decent meal, dressed appropriately for the current weather conditions, provided with a hearty lunch, and out the door in a timely manner.

During the day, I take care of my home, run errands, work on my pre-fledgling of a career, wonder what my husband and children are doing, hope my aging parents and aging in-laws are well today, drop an email or two to see how they’re doing, throw a load or two of laundry into the wash, volunteer at one or another of my kids’ schools, read or re-read articles in the paper or news magazines we receive that I only got a chance to glance at earlier, get dinner items together, catch some more news, chat with friends if they aren’t too busy with their families, and perhaps get an idea for a new story jotted down. And that’s not the whole list, I assure you.

When my kids come home, I ask how school went, ask if they have homework, check homework, have them do some reading and some kind of physical activity like playing outside or dancing. I start dinner, fielding questions from my kids, listening to the evening news. My husband comes home and we have dinner.

After dinner, it’s playtime with the kids, or finishing up homework then playtime, evening chores, getting kids ready for bed, reading stories and tucking them in. For the next couple of hours, my husband and I watch television (we particularly like “CSI” and “Heroes” and “Grey’s Anatomy”) or read, having our grown up time together by chatting about the day or saying nothing at all in completely comfortable silence.

And at night, after I kiss my sleeping girls again, straighten their covers, and thank God for their health and safety, I go into my room to read one of those “insular” novels. Something that never has the heroine lamenting how many people died that day from a suicide bomber, or how many children went to bed hungry this evening and will wake up the same way tomorrow, or how budget cuts will effect funding for her children’s schools, or if there’s enough bread in the pantry for lunches tomorrow. It’s fiction. Fantasy. Entertainment. Fun. When did “fun” become a four letter word?

I live with the everyday worries that abound, I don’t want to read about them all the time.

Ms. Dowd said, “The novel was once said to be a mirror of its times. In my local bookstore, it’s more like a makeup mirror.”

I say, maybe it isn’t always about a novel mirroring the times, but as a balm against its ills. I deserve the occasional break from reality, don’t I? Don’t we all?

Today was a “me” day. I don’t have many of them, despite the fact I don’t have an outside job and my two kids are in school. But see what kind of “me” days I tend to have and you’ll understand why I’m not terribly upset by their low frequency.

I did my workout after dropping off my youngest at school (I’m STILL the same weight I was when I started 4 months ago, but I’ve lost inches and body fat percentage. Woo hoo!), came home to shower then went for my mammogram. Though I’ve heard tell of women having mammogram parties (where a bunch of them get their appointments together and make a day of it), I don’t have a circle of friends with cooperative schedules, so I went it alone. After that, I went shopping. No, not shoe shopping or clothes shopping (*snort* Are you kidding? Here?). I bought dog food, glass cleaner, a rear view mirror adhesive kit, and laundry soap. I took myself to lunch where I did run into a friend and we chatted for a bit. Then, off to get my shaggy mane cut into submission. Now that I have laundry soap, I can finish up the week’s laundry. Oh boy!

So I guess I did do one girlie thing today. Two, if you count the mammogram. Which, BTW, was fine, thank you.