Oh wait, I’m not done yet today. I’ve been in a state of high disgruntlement since about 11:23 a.m. yesterday morning, when I realized that no-way, no-how was I gonna get any writing done this weekend. See, Saturday was pretty much a wash due to running around planning my new desk and bookshelves, followed by pissyness and total exhaustion. Sunday morning we had to get up early ‘cuz we have a cleaning lady (Vicky) who wanted to arrive at 8 a.m. but settled on 10 a.m. to give us a break.
*segue* I just found Vicky when she showed up last week at Lane’s jewelry party to clean up after everybody. She’s Inger Miller’s cleaning lady, and she also does the apartment of Lane’s business partner who also is a sports massage therapist for superstars like Inger and the Dallas Cowboys, etc. She’s gonna work on me as soon as I can afford her (the sports massage therapist, not the cleaning lady). Turns out Vicky has four kids – three are still living in Guatemala where the eldest is about to graduate from college with a teaching credential, thanks to the money that mom sends home every two weeks, and the youngest (about to turn 11) here with mom. No mention of dad or father or husband… maybe back in Guatemala? Anyhoo – had major weirdness/class consciousness issues until I got that she’s working her butt off for her kids and that’s what we’re all doing here for my husband’s family – the differences are in the number of people pulling together to make money in America, and the number of folks supported by it.
That’s what makes this country great – even if you can only make money by cleaning houses or doing one of those other crappy jobs that most folks don’t want, if you’re in the right place at the right time and work hard and keep your nose clean and all those other cliches that cling to the Great American Dream like flies on shit, you can still get a hell of a lot further ahead than if you had stayed in your village back in the home land. Or at least you can help the people you care about survive.
Not to over-romanticize or anything, but I know of so many people who are educated professionals in their home countries, but come here and work as manicurists, gardeners, house cleaners, etc., because that’s all they can do to make money here and it’s still more than they’d make back home as a surgeon or chemist or teacher, and making money to take care of their families is their only reason for leaving them. That sucks. My family has been here for over three hundred years, my husband’s for over a decade, but both groups came here for the same reason, and had to leave everything and everyone they knew and loved behind. I’m getting a bit overwrought and sappy, so I’ll stop here and give you something snarky instead….
Thanks to Live From the WTC for this little walk down Propaganda Lane… oh, and as I commented in reply to her post “…we’re only supposed to intervene when it will hurt our interests…” um, pretty much, yeah. Unless, of course, that means foregoing the higher moral ground and getting caught doing it (both conditions required). Has anybody else noticed that Venezuela has huge oil reserves and we just signed a trade agreement with them? Sing it with me now: “bye, bye, miss arabian pie…” */segue*
Back to my pissyness of further up the page – I really don’t have time for this whole housekeeping, cooking and laundry bullshit on top of the day job which takes me away from writing for at least 9 hours a day – less if I sneak blogging into the mix – but does this count toward my daily pages? FUCKSHITDAMMIT! I feel the need to jump up and down on something small, fluffy and squeaky (and non-living – I don’t do crush) like my nephew’s favorite Tickle Me Elmo doll. Too bad those things are built to withstand toddlers – I wouldn’t stand a chance of destroying it with the power of my awesome pissyness without at least a Krypton ray or two on my shoulders.
It’s already the end of April, and all I have done so far this year is a few months of Horroskopes, lots of technical documentation, chewed up and spit out a couple of short stories that are almost dead a’borning, and blogged. Oh yeah, and outlined a novel and done lots of research for it. I am Dejected Research Queen.
What brought this mood cyclone on? I’m doing a one-day workshop to get back in novelist mode this coming Saturday with a couple of folks – Will Shetterly and Emma Bull – who run a weekly workshop as well that I attended for a month before I realized I’d better go there with novel pages, not just lots of short stories. Both are sweet, tactful and soft-spoken. When I sent Will an email last week gong “Look What I Can Do!!!” and basically being a hit-counter trollop, he replied that he liked my blog (you are here) but not to let it distract me from writing stories. *snivel*