It doesn’t. It doesn’t in any way negate his blackness. I’ve written about this before, so I won’t rehash it here. But it did get me thinking about this issue from another perspective.

The way I see it, (and this isn’t what I talked about on the radio because this particular morning show ain’t exactly on this level) you can look at the story of the first black president two ways. If what interests you is the story of the black guy who wants to be president against the values of the black community, and was reared in a culture that did not value education or politics and therefore faced substantial obstacles just from his upbringing, I can see how Barack Obama wouldn’t fill that role. He was black but he grew up in a world of white, like I did, and so his values and aspirations largely align with those of your typical affluent/upper-middle class white person’s.

On the other hand, if the story of a black man’s bid for the presidency is interesting to you because it is remarkable that white people as a nation rallied around him and offered tremendous support and enthusiasm, then Barack does fill the bill. Then it no longer matters how he was raised or what was on his mind, because it’s all about his skin, how he is perceived, and how people interact with him based on their impression of blackness.

These are two different stories. One is the story of a person going against the grain of his community, his people and their values, and the other is the story of America, of hundreds of years of prejudice and conditioning slowly eroding to give way to a narrow, but visible, crack in the political edifice where a black man can now apparently stand. They’re both good stories, and there is room for both, but the story of Barack Obama clearly doesn’t match both narratives. Which story is the one we’re supposed to follow? Which story is the one we want to be involved in the making of?

As far as I’m concerned, the bigger story is the second one. Yes, I can se the value in a different black man, one who grew up in a ghetto amidst violence and poverty, rising above and reaching out to the poltical machine. But that’s not the story that moves me personally. For me, the real import of Obama’s blackness is not one of self-identity and identity crisis, but that even in his blackness he is not only accepted but deeply loved and supported by white Americans in this country. His upbringing and trials aren’t as interesting to me. I’m interested in what Barack’s blackness means for us as a nation, and that’s bigger than a personal story of triumph. His blackness matters. His blackness is real. And it’s astounding to watch how this great play is unfolding.

I sighed, deleting the email. I will not now, nor anytime in the near future (I dare not say “never” for the word “never” seems to attract the attention of the universe who will then go out of its way to prove you wrong) sign up for Twitter. It isn’t that I don’t think it’s a cute idea, or that it is useful for some people, but for me, Twitter is exactly what is wrong with adult friendships.

As a teenager in high school, I had the best friends anyone could ask for. A lovely, small, full-of-life artist who brought sun into my world and taught me about love. A late-blooming, intelligent writer with a soft spot for British literature. A wild-at-heart Mormon with a taste for German philosophy and fresh rosemary. These were my closest friends, the girls who knew all my secrets–who I loved, where I hurt, my shame, my fear, my voice, my laughter.

We were thick as thieves, the four of us. We talked about everything, from school, to romance, to sex, to the fear of being on our own. We wondered what the future would bring. We wondered if we’d lose each other (we would). We discussed religion and art and philosophy one minute and Xena the Warrior Princess the next.

But we grew up and we grew apart. And I don’t have friends like that anymore.

What I do have are blog posts to read instead of actual people to talk to. We’re so busy–oh, so terribly caught up in our own lives!–that we don’t have time to sit with friends at a posh cafe downtown and swill wine and slurp soup for hours, talking over all the things that held our fancy in our carefree youth. And even when there is time, when we make time, we fill the conversation with venting about work, or complaining about a lover or cooing over our children that we don’t reach down very far and bring up the topics that actually reveal who we are.

And if your friends dont’ know who you are, what’s the point?

Twitter makes all this even worse. “Hey, I’m standing in line at the bank behind this lady wearing a white silk blouse and a bright pink bra. omg what is she thinking?!” and “My son just peed on the floor”–these are interesting tidbits, but they don’t make a real friendship. The problem, however, is that when we’re inundated with this pseudoinformation about what the people we care about, we get an artifical feeling of closeness. Oh, sure, I know what Alice is up to, I hear from her on Twitter all the time.

What’s she thinking about? What’s she working toward? What is she afraid of? What is she longing for?

I don’t blame Twitter, of course–if anything, Twitter is an outgrowth of vapid adult relationships, not the cause of it. But it’s not something I need more of in my life. There is plenty of chatter–I want more substance. I want dinner and real conversation deep into the night. I want healthy friendships built on a foundation of intimacy and closeness, and that don’t consist primarily of clicking “send”.

Tags: friendship, twitter, conversation, relationships

Nevertheless, my midwife cursed my daughter and me on the day of her birth. As she slid into this world covered in goo and screaming her slimy pink head off, my midwife stared at her white skin, her slender nose, the almond shape of her eyes, the dark blonde hair. And the midwife looked from the newborn baby to me, her newborn mother, and put words on us both with, “If I didn’t just take this baby out of you I’d never believe she was yours.”

And with those foul words, a world of difference between mother and daughter was created.

My daughter and I have nothing in common. I am girly and frivolous. I like mary janes and sparkly eyeshadow. I hoard perfume the way a junkie hoards his crack cocaine. My daughter is sporty and serious, deeply concerned about following rules and obeying orders. She wouldn’t be caught dead in a shoes that showed her toes, an making herself pretty means brushing her hair with a wet brush to flatten every single hair against her head so that she looks like a greasy homeless person. Where I am spontaneous and carefree, she’s a planner and a worrier, always fretting about details I’m much happier to leave to chance.

When she was younger, the glaring discrepancy between our personalities bothered me. I tried to mold her into a miniature version of me. Those of you who have tried this know how well it works, which is to say that it doesn’t. (I am reminded of Alanis Morissette’s song “8 Easy Steps” where she offers to teach you “How to control someone to be a carbon copy of you; how to have that not work and have them run away from you.”) Try as I might, my daughter insisted upon having her own personality, her own likes and dislikes. And nothing I did could dissuade her; in fact, my attempts to make her more like me succeeded only in emphasizing the ways in which were we neatly and irreparably different.

Eventually, we came to accept each other. When asked what she thought of my new blouse, she learned to say, “Well, it’s not something I would wear but it looks very nice on you” and I learned to ignore that her clothes didn’t match or that she went to school with dried milk on her upper lip. When we went shopping not too long ago, she bought a hideous pair of polka dotted shoes.

“I hate those shoes,” I said to my husband as she walked out the door to go to church with a friend.

“Then why’d you let her buy them?” he asked, bewildered.

I shrugged. “She likes them. She’ll wear them. And they were cheap. So what do I care?”

But secretly, deep down in my heart, I was sad that she was completely unlike me in all the ways that mattered.

Except, she wasn’t. She isn’t. I found out last week that my daughter, my antithesis, can sing.

I grew up in a musical household. My mother has a sparkling coloratura soprano and my father is a songwriter and musician. Singing and composing are part of my DNA. I studied opera in high school, and although I abandoned opera as a career, it still holds a special place in my heart. I sing all the time. (In fact, my son’s kindergarten class recently did a mother’s day project where one of the things the children had to talk about was their mother’s favorite song. My son responded, “Her favorite song is every song.”)

But although in the school choir, my daughter never sings around the house. Ever. So I assumed that she couldn’t. After all, she’s always moaning that she doesn’t have a talent–if she could sing, I figured she would.

She sang a solo at her choir concert. She sang a solo that stupefied me. I watched her with my mouth agape, my mind whirling. “How can this child, this child with this amazing voice, be my daughter? How can she have this gift that I never knew she had? ”

But the shock was only momentary, because it was soon replaced with the most amazing realization–that my daughter, who was cursed from birth to not be my daughter, did have something of me in her veins after all. So she didn’t get my dark, curly hair or my brown skin. She didn’t get my upside down or my too-wide nose or my long, crooked fingers. What she got from me is more intimate, more astounding, more breath-taking, because though it isn’t immediately apparent, it bonds us together in a way nothing else could. The gift of song passed through the placenta and penetrated her soul. And now she is mine. And if we never share a similarity in any other way ever again, we’ll always have this.

And for that, I am eternally grateful.

I don’t have tons of memories of having been read to as a child–not by family members, anyway. I’m sure my mother did read to me, as she has many stories about “that time I was reading to you…” but I  must have been very small and I don’t remember. I learned to read very young and was a voracious reader, so maybe my mom just figured if I could read by myself there was no real need for her participation. Or, just as likely, perhaps she read to me frequently and I just don’t remember.

I do, however, remember two distinct times of having been read to by family. The first time was my father, who read The Magician’s Nephew by CS Lewis when I must have been 8 or 9. I remember sitting in the garage with him, writing on my chalk board, and my dad came out book in hand and said, “I’d like to read this story to you.” My parents were divorced and I didn’t live with my father. In fact, I saw him very little, so any time spent with my father was precious. I don’t recall being overly excited about the idea of being read to at first, but as we got into the story I remember being spellbound, utterly captivated by the goings on in Narnia. My father brought reading to a different level. It wasn’t just a story, it was magic.

The second time was when I was in 9th grade and had been assigned The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. I didn’t want to read this. I mean, I really didn’t want to read it. It seemed stupid, and boring, and written for boys, and I resented that I had to read it. The more I complained, the more fed up my Aunt Yolande became until she snatched the book out of my hands and started reading it to me.

She made Jim talk in a deep, throaty, Black man’s voice. She gave Huck a southern drawl, and had him mispronounce certain words. She gave dramatic pauses and acted things out. And suddenly I was fascinated. Mark Twain became my hero, delivering me into a dreamworld I would try repeatedly throughout my life to recapture, to embark on anything like the journey Huck and Jim went on. She made me love something I had previously hated. And it was then, at 13, that I began to believe that oral storytelling was  sacred.

After my daughter was born, I got out of the habit of reading to her. And my son, now 5, had never sat down with me for story time. I realized what a disservice I had done them, and decided to make the time to read to them, every day, for as long as they were interested. My little boy has a very short attention span, and truthfully,I was worried that he wouldn’t get much out of story time. But it was worth a try.

Monday evening we gathered in my daughter’s room with my beautiful copy of The Magician’s Nephew. I read the first chapter, which ends with the cliffhanger of Polly vanishing into thin air, and when I slammed the book closed, both kids jumped up. “NO! Keep reading!” they shouted. They begged and pleaded, wanting to know what happened next, but my voice was tired and I was enjoying the suspense. I promised to read more at 7pm the next day if they could tell me what happened in Chapter 1. My son, who normally can’t sit still for three minutes, told me in explicit detail what had just happened, and my heart warmed.

The next morning, 6:30 am, I sat down next to my son, resting my hand on his leg. I rubbed him gently, coaxing him to wake. His eyes opened slowly,  a smile spreading slowly across his face. And as he reached out to touch my hand his first words of the morning were, “Mommy, I can’t wait for 7 oclock tonight.”

The magic of storytelling lives. I am a priestess in my own home.

This might seems strange coming form a born-and-bred Angelino, yet it’s the truth nonetheless. It is no coincidence that when I turned seventeen and went off to college I ran as far away from the City of Angels as possible. My grievances against my hometown are many: it’s crowded, it’s dangerous, it’s expensive, it’s uber trendy, it’s polluted, the people are vapid and fake, the schools are terrible, it’s on the Pacific time zone. .(Of course, to be fair, there are some wonderful things about Los Angeles, most notably the weather, bountiful things to do, and the fact that you can drive 30 minutes in any direction and land at either the desert, the beach, the mountains, or the woods. It’s all there for the taking, and within easy reach. But it’s still, at the end of the day, freaking Los Angeles.)

And yet, for all that I harbor no real love for the city, when my mother comes to visit me I do get a little homesick.

When people learn that I’m from LA I’m often asked if I knew any famous people when I lived there. It’s such a funny question to me. My father is in the music industry, and my mother’s sister was a celebrity of sorts back in the 80’s (I think she was the first black female sports-talker or something) so certainly I met a few, and I ran into them from time to time (John Goodman held the door open for my mother at a 7-11 once) but did I ever sit around and jaw with celebrities? Did I know any famous people?

Well, yes, actually. Except she wasn’t famous at the time.

When I was a little girl my best friend was Russian. As in, came from Russia, spoke fluent Russian, the whole shebang. We were fast friends and did everything together—I slept over at her house, we prank called boys we liked, we played dress up in her grandmother’s closet. I used to get her to teach me Russian phrases, but eventually she grew tired of that, and I was so envious of her polylingualism (she also spoke French) that I told her I spoke Yugoslavian just to sound cool. Of course I had no idea that Yugoslavian was not a language, and apparently neither did she because she said, “You do? My babushka speaks Yugoslavian! Let’s try it out on her.”

I wanted to fall through the floor as Julia dragged me into her grandmother’s presence and announced, “Baba, did you know Amber speaks Yugoslavian?”

Smiling, the woman raised an eyebrow. “You do?”

Julia spoke for me. “Yes! Amber, say, “Hello, good morning” to my grandmother!”

I felt my face go red, and I felt like I was going to throw up. But instead of refusing and just turning on my heel and getting the hell out of there, I had the balls to make up a phrase in a make-believe language.

(This is actually not novel. My bother and I frequently played a game where, whenever we out in public, like at a bookstore or the grocery store, we would babble to each other in a fake language. I must say I was good at it; my babblings sounded utterly genuine. My bother, on the other hand, could have been speaking Martian for all that his language sounded authentic. I remember actually schooling him on how to make his fake language sound more convincing. “Nobody talks in solid rhythms,” I explained. “People pause and stutter, they drag their words out here and there and they change inflection.” But none of that helped when his language consisted mainly of, “Bogo pa kiki?”)

After Julia and I had been friends for a while, her cousin moved to Los Angeles from Russia and came to school with us. She was a year ahead of us, putting her in the sixth grade. For a while, we were her only real friends. Not only did she come to school in the middle of the year, but she was Russian. You have to understand, this was the height of the Cold War. We were properly indoctrinated to view Russians as evil and backwards, and most of the kid saw the new girl in just that light. They picked on her and called her names. So she mainly played with Julia and me.

I remember her fondly and well, and not merely because she grew up to be a fairly well known model and actress. I remember her well because I really liked her. She was funny and interesting. She liked to play on the slides. At her birthday party, we had a talent competition where I was voted best singer (naturally!) Her birthday was the day after mine, so we shared that, too. I liked her because other kids were mean to her. I liked caring for her. And the fact that her cousin was my best friend only endeared her more to me.

So, when asked if I knew anyone famous, I sometimes smile and shrug. “I don’t know,” I’ll say. “Sort of.”

The truth is that I don’t tell many people that I was friends with this girl in school because I harbor this fear, a very real fear, that though I have fond memories of her, if someone were to ask her if she remembered me she’d respond, “Amber who?”. It’s terrible to be forgotten, especially by someone you’ve remembered in your heart. And while I know it will never be an issue, (no one will ever interview her at the Oscars and ask about a little black girl) I still prefer to keep her to myself. I don’t want to imagine her forgetting me.

In fact, my cousin was not only was a brilliant liar, but she told so many lies that my brother and I used to joke that we should assemble and publish a collection of her lies and title the book, “The Many Lies of Shannon Jones: a true story”*. At times I did get fed up with my cousin’s incessant lying, but at other times I found her fabrications enthralling. The key was that I had to recognize that she was lying. When I knew she was lying, I could sit at her feet and listen to her spin a tale of lies with utter fascination, asking her to elaborate on key story points and taking delight either in her squirming to satisfactorily answer my questions or, just as often, in her magnificent ability to produce sensible and realistic details on the fly and out of thin air.

Of course, a natural side effect of her penchant for make believe is that I usually didn’t believe a word that came out of her mouth. Whenever she started telling me stories—even if it was just a summary of a trip to the grocery store with her mother—I assumed she was talking crap. Sometimes that crap was interesting and I’d play along, but other times I’d tell her to shut up because I’d had enough of her nonsense.

But Shannon wasn’t the only one with a fatal flaw. I was a sucker for adventure, even make-believe adventure. I was the queen of suspending disbelief, especially if it was to lead to a day of marauding about or otherwise making a nuisance of myself. One day I let a neighborhood girl convince me that I was being chased by invisible zombies and that the only way to escape them was by climbing a tree, because evidently zombies are either afraid of heights or simply unable to scale trees (Presumably on account of being undead. I imagine undead limbs are not particularly nimble or limber.) . Unfortunately for me, although I discovered I was perfectly able to climb up a tree (something I had heretofore never attempted) I could not for the life of me muster the courage to climb back down the tree. (I suddenly harbored most tender feelings for poor Tigger in The House on Pooh Corner wherein he found himself in a similar predicament.) But eventually I confessed to myself that I wouldn’t be able to hang in the tree forever, so I wrapped my skinny legs around the meager trunk and did the unthinkable—I slid down the tree. I cut up the insides of my thighs something terrible. I still have some of the resulting scars to this day.

The pair of us were a deadly combination. With Shannon’s ability to wave a wondrous tapestry of deception and my utter willingness to believe anything if it led me into danger and mishap, we often found ourselves in the most interesting situations.

So when my cousin handed me a shovel and told me we were going to dig up Tony’s treasure, I thought, “What the hell? Could be as good a way as any to spend the day.”

My brother and I lived in California, and we spent summers with our grandparents in a little city just outside Cleveland, Ohio. My cousin Shannon, who was a year old than me, lived next door. Her mother worked, so Shannon stayed with my grandmother during the day. The three of us engaged in all sorts of mischief. We had to be covert in many of our missions, as our grandmother had a very discerning eye and would often spy on us from her kitchen window. (We called it spying; she called it checking up on us.) So when we were up to no good, we had to be creative about how we handled it.

I took the shovel in my hand and glanced at the kitchen window. Grandma was nowhere to be seen. “What’s Tony’s treasure?” I asked.

“My mom told me about him,” Shannon said. “He was an old man that used to live in a house right here where we’re standing when our moms were little. He had a tiny little shack and my mom says he buried a treasure here before he died and our moms were supposed to dig it up. But I guess they never did, so it’s probably still buried here. And if we’ve got nothing better to do, we can dig it up.”

Now, I knew better than to believe this story. I’d heard a billion stories from my mother’s childhood and none of them included a shack in the middle of her yard inhabited by some old man named Tony. And even if that were true, which it surely wasn’t, there was no way he buried some treasure and told my mom and aunts to dig it up after he died. And even if he had, which he indubitably had not, it was inconceivable that nobody ever dug up said treasure, even just out of sheer curiosity. The holes in her story were glaring, but far be it from me to say no to adventure.

“What are we going to do about Grandma?” I asked. “If she catches us digging a big hole in the yard—”

“Oh, that’s not the problem,” Shannon assured me. “The problem is that we’ll have to dig lots of holes in the yard, not just one. I mean, I don’t know about you, but I don’t know exactly where Tony’s treasure is. I’m not even exactly sure where the house was. But, it’s gotta be here somewhere so we’ll just have to dig around until we find it.”

What remained unsaid was obvious: the lot in question was over an acre; it was going to be like finding a needle in a haystack. But neither of us bothered to voice that concern.

I dropped down into a deep crouch and rocked back and forth on my heels. It was my best thinking position. “So how are we going to hide these holes from Grandma?”

My little brother, who mostly went unnoticed between me and Shannon owing to both his being a boy and being three years younger than us, dropped down next to me. “We could build a fort,” he said in his quiet, little boy voice.

“A fort? What do you mean?” Shannon joined us gingerly on the ground. She was wearing a new pair of pink pants and was afraid of getting dirty.

My brother drew in his breath, glancing from me to our cousin. I could see that he was afraid of speaking up, because if his idea turned out to be a stupid one we’d make fun of him and then punish him by ignoring him for the rest of the day. In retrospect, the poor little guy had it rough. I’ve never completely forgiven myself for how we treated him.

“If we build a fort and then dig the hole inside the fort, no one will ever know it’s there. And if we don’t find the treasure, we can fill the holes back in, move the fort, and try again. I don’t think Grandma will notice. She never comes inside our forts.”

He was right about that. For all that our grandmother loved to spy on us, she wasn’t much for invading our privacy and she took no real interest in what we were playing at as long as we were safe and weren’t messing up her yard.

I patted my brother on the back. “Carleton, that’s an excellent idea.” My brother gave a curt little nod as if to say, “I already know that,” but he accepted my praise for what it was worth. The three of us stood up and began building our fort. It took the better part of an afternoon, but once it was built, we were in a perfect position to start digging for Tony’s treasure.

We dug for the treasure for three days before I finally called my cousin’s bluff. “We’re never going to find any treasure anyway,” I said, throwing the shovel on the ground, “because there isn’t any treasure to find. I’m bored of this game; let’s play something else.”

But Shannon was not so easily dissuaded. “It’s got to be here,” she said. “My mom said it was here. And nobody ever dug it up. We have to find the treasure. Think how much money could be there. Think how many Garbage Pail Kids we could buy with the money if we find it! We can’t give up!”

“Shannon, shut up. It was fun for a while but now I’m sick of digging for fake treasure. Let’s go play Starships on our bikes or something.”

But my cousin was getting angry. “I’m NOT LYING!” she shouted. “Tony did bury a treasure here and I want to find it! But I can’t do it alone! Why won’t you believe me? AMBER!”

But by then she was screaming at my back as I had already walked away with my brother in tow. And as far as I can remember, that was the end of our search for Tony’s treasure. Shannon never mentioned it again.

**

Fast forward twenty or so years.

My mother was just here for Christmas, visiting me from Los Angeles. I only get to see my mom once a year, so I had saved up a series of questions about my childhood that I wanted to ask her about, but which I had never wanted to ask her on the phone. (Such as why we lived in a Hyatt hotel for 6 months when I was in junior high. “Why didn’t we just rent an apartment?” I asked her. She shrugged. “There weren’t any apartments downtown and we wanted to be close to he office. We sold the house before we bought a new one, so we just stayed in a hotel. We didn’t’ realize how long it would take.” “That’s it? There’s no other story behind it than that?” “No. That’s it.” I was utterly disappointed.)

Anyway, one of the questions I wanted to ask her was about Tony. Admittedly, I wasn’t sure how to broach the question, as not only was I not sure such a person existed, I couldn’t remember his name or anything about him. In fact, I didn’t’ even remember the above story until after this conversation. I just remember vague reference Shannon had made in our childhood about some ghost that lived in a shack.

“Mom, was there ever a house between your house when you were growing up and the house next door? I mean, the house that was Aunt Lisa’s when I was little. Was there ever a house between your house and that house? With a guy that lived in it named…Sal…. or Moe…?”

My mom nodded matter-of-factly. “Yes. There was a tiny little shack in between the two properties and an old man named Tony lived there.”

“Tony!” I shouted. “That’s it! So it’s true? An old man named Tony lived there?”

“Oh sure,” my mom said. “Tony was an Italian immigrant, and he was pretty poor, but he loved me to death. He called me Little Girl. When he came from work, he’d call to me, ‘Little Girl! Come here, I got you a present!’ And he’d give me some little toy or piece of candy—nothing big, but he always had something for me. See, I was always nice to Tony, and other kids were nasty to him—throwing things in his yard or making fun of his goats. Tony kept goats in the yard, and they stank, and the kids would torture them. But I never did anything like that, so Tony liked me.

“We saw old Tony every day. He came home from work carrying a bottle whisky in a paper bag. He’d stop by the house and ask Daddy if he wanted a swig, but Daddy’d always say, ‘No, thank you, Tony’ because Tony’d already put his mouth on it. One day, Tony figured out why Daddy would never share his whisky, so after that, old Tony would bring the bottle to Daddy unopened. And then Daddy would take a swig. That made old Tony very happy.

“Well, one day, we didn’t see Tony. We didn’t see Tony for three days, and we knew something was wrong. So Mom called the ambulance and they found Tony in the house, dying from pneumonia. They took him to the hospital, but before they loaded him into the ambulance he summoned me over to him and said, ‘Little girl, listen to me. You see that lightpost I got in my yard? Under that lightpost I buried something for you. I’ve been saving it, and I got no one else in the world to leave it to, and I want you to have it. When I die, I want you to dig up that treasure. It’s for you.’

“Old Tony died in the hospital. And do you know that I never did dig up that treasure? They bulldozed his house down and buried what was left. So I just never looked.”

I stared at my mother in disbelief. “You mean that’s true? Tony’s treasure is real?”

My mom laughed. “I don’t know if it’s true, as in truly there, but that’s the true story, yes.”

And that’s when I remembered the days my brother and cousin and I had tried, unsuccessfully, to dig up Tony’s treasure.

“Sometimes I think about going back out there with a metal detector and seeing what I can find,” my mother said wistfully. “But I don’t know. Maybe it’s just a nice story.” She giggled and seemed to dismiss the thought.

It is a nice story, indeed. And it makes me wonder how many other nice stories I dismissed as my cousin’s overactive imagination.

*Not her actual last name, of course.

In terms of this blog, and writing in general, I start to think–what the fuck have I been doing with my time?!

It would be easy to say, “I vow to write at least one blog post a week for the rest of 2008″ and then it will be eight times as easy to not do it, and I am not into setting myself up for disappointment. However, what I can do is make an effort to at least consider writing in this blog. I can at least take the time to think about what I would write if I weren’t too tired to write. And then, with an idea in hand, I’ll perhaps have the motivation to pound something out when a spare 20 minutes avails itself to me.

Last night I sat down with my laptop and composed another memory-story, this time without a religious theme, but something I wanted to remember. I forgot to post it last night (I fell asleep early after a long first day back at the office) but I will post it tonight. So, here’s to more frequent updates.

Because, the truth is, what good is a writer who doesn’t write? Oh, sure, I could take the easy way out and say I’m more a graphic artist these days than I am a writer, but that would be the worst kind of lie, because I’d be lying to myself. I will never be anything more than I am a writer, and that’s probably how it should be. Graphic art only came into my life a few years ago. I’ve been writing since I was a little girl. In fact, when I was about 10 years old, I dragged my ancient, enormous, heavy-as-hell typewriter with me to my grandmother’s house in Ohio for summer vacation and I spent the summer in her basement writing a novel. It was terrible, to be sure, but it was coplete. My 10 year old self spent summer vacation writing a novel. And I would dare to call myself a graphic artist instead?

Pish posh. I can’t even draw.  There’s the rub.

I have also decided that I need to write a novel this year. I say “need” because I’m not sure it’s something I want to do so much as something that I feel compelled to do. I haven’t written any good fiction in ages. I’ve gotten out of the habit, and I’ve quite forgotten how. But it was how I began my life as a writer, and it is how I think I may continue my life as a writer, so I’d best get started. The only way to grow a muscle is to use it, and there’s no time like the present. So, whether I want to or not, there it is. And I’m sure that once I get going I’ll want to.

And that’s really all I have to say about that. Wishing everyone a splendid new year.

(On more than one occasion I was asked what the hell I was doing, stomping my feet and smiling like a damned fool at the ground. “I’m smiling at Satan,” I’d reply. “He doesn’t like that.” Grown-ups would raise their eyebrows. Unbelievers. “Satan doesn’t like it when you smile at him?” I shook my head. “No.” I knew they were ignorant about the ways of Satan, but it wasn’t their fault that they didn’t go to Lutheran school when they were kids and therefore didn’t know about the song, “Grin again gang get gung-ho about Jesus*. If they’d known that song they’d have known all about how turning a frown upside down was the best way to get Satan to crawl away with this tail between his legs.)
But Satan was tricky, and he kept finding ways to wriggle himself into my life. And as hard as I tried, I couldn’t seem to divest myself of his wily charms. One morning on the playground as I was building a sand trap (for unsuspecting kindergarteners to fall into) I was humming softly to myself when my best friend Kimberly sauntered up to me, hands on her hips and said, “You know that Boy George is going straight to Hell, and my mom says I can’t be friends with anyone who listens to Boy George.”

I looked up, puzzled. “Boy George is going to Hell? What for?”

Kimberly flipped her blonde hair and shrugged. “I think for dressing up like a girl. The Bible says that in the end times the men will look like women and the women will look like men, and Boy George dresses like a woman so he’s going to Hell.”

Now, I sure didn’t know what Satan would want with a boy that wore blue eyeshadow, but then I didn’t understand most of Satan’s motivations so I had to take it on faith that Kimberly was right and Boy George was going to Hell. But “Karma Chameleon” was my favorite song in the world that month, and I wasn’t going to give up humming it even for Jesus. I h ad spent many hours sitting on the floor with my telephone hitting redial to call KIIS FM and asking them to please play “Come on, Chameleon”. After all, as far as my little girl self knew, there was no such word as “karma”, and even if there had been, I wouldn’t have known what it meant, and even if I had, well, “Come on, Chameleon” just made more sense anyway.

Mentally, I vowed never to hum Boy George in Kimberly’s presence again, but I still loved the song.

But since I was now harboring a fugitive piece of Satan in my heart, I had to counteract that act of espionage with something truly Christian, something out of the ordinary. Stomping my feet and smiling like a madman wasn’t going to be enough. If I was going to let Satan into my heart via the music of Boy George, I had to find some way to really let Jesus’ light shine through me.

I let the question stew inside me for several days before I gave up. Maybe it wasn’t really that important. After all, I was constantly surrounded by Satan’s temptations and he had thus far failed to capture my soul. Perhaps I was simply immune to Satan’s seductions.

The idea that I might be among the blessed few to be above and beyond Satan’s reach changed my outlook on life. I started doing things I wasn’t supposed to do, like watch the Smurfs on Saturday morning TV. (My mother had heard that the creator of the Smurfs sold his soul to Satan for a hit cartoon show, and that one night, while drawing the tiny blue characters, a Smurf jumped off the page and bit the artist on the arm. As a result, my brother and I were forbidden from watching the Smurfs. It put quite a damper on my ability to contribute to playground conversations.) I snuck in a few minutes of MTV watching. And sometimes, after an especially long day at school, I skipped bedtime prayers and simply went to bed.

I just wasn’t afraid of Satan anymore.

One night, sound asleep in bed (on a prayer-free night, I’m sure) something shook me awake. As I opened my eyes to complain that it was too early to get up, I realized that no one was standing over me, cajoling me to wake up. It wasn’t just me that was shaking—my entire bed was shaking. And it wasn’t shaking slightly, it was rattling, the brass screws coming loose, creaking, cracking, making horrible sounds as it shook. I tried to scream but the sound caught in my throat and it was all I could to hang on to my blankets and sheets lest they tumble to the ground. If I had to get out of bed to retrieve them I would be exposed to whatever evil had shaken me from my sleep, and the thought of baring myself in that way was soul rending. I clutched my blankets to my chest, too paralyzed to scream, to confused to cry. And then, as suddenly as the shaking began, it stopped.

The darkness around me thickened as the silence settled. There was no sound to hear beyond my own heartbeat. If anyone in my family was disturbed by the phenomenon in my bedroom they didn’t show it. I sat staring into the darkness, waiting for something else to happen—for the roar of demons to descend upon me, for my bed to lift off the ground and start to fly, something. But after an eternity of sitting and waiting, I finally accepted that nothing more was going to happen, and eventually I fell back asleep.

By the next morning I had forgotten all about the incident the night before. One of the magical aspects of daylight is its ability to erase the fear and anxiety that can only exist in the black of night. With the sun overhead, the sound of bacon frying and intermittent notes of some obscure piece of classical music wafting up from downstairs, no such thing as demons or Satan could be a problem. The possibility didn’t exist, therefore there was no reason to remember anything about the night before.

It was Monday morning. I dressed for school, ate breakfast, and went outside to wait for my mom and brother by the car. As I stepped out onto the patio, I noticed a pile of broken ceramic pieces on the ground. I looked up and saw that a planter had fallen and shattered. I knelt down and watched little ants and tiny spiders crawling through the dirt. I probably should have picked up the shards and threw them in the garbage but it never occurred to me. Besides, watching insects was much more interesting. Finally my mother and brother bounded out of the house, backpacks and purses in tow, and we piled into the car for our daily commute. I rode the thirty minutes to school with my nose in a book. I kissed my mom good-bye and dashed out onto the playground, just in time for the bell that called us to line up.

The day went by quickly, or at least nothing memorable happened. We were focused on our lessons, just like every other day. My teacher, Mrs. Kirkpatrick, was in a particularly crabby mood, and every time I tried to pass a note to one of my friends I was scolded, and eventually asked to sit in the corner.

When lunchtime finally came, I gobbled up my food and hurried to the playground. I hadn’t been able to talk to anybody all day and I felt like I was going to explode. My inner chatterbox was bursting to get out. I found my friends sitting under a tree and plopped down next to them dramatically.

“I think someone tried to break into my house last night,” I said. I hadn’t known I was going to say it until the words came out. It wasn’t even true, and I knew it wasn’t true. I just wanted something to talk about. It was a persistent problem I had in those days.

One of the girls, Robin, looked down at me through her long, dark lashes. She seemed to ooze disdain. We were not friends. “Why do you think that?”

I sniffed. “Because,” I said importantly, “one of the planters on our front porch was knocked down and broken. I bet the burgler knocked it over and it made so much noise he got scared and ran away.”

I smiled smugly at Robin, because I knew my logic was infallible. Now everyone would ask me if I was afraid, if we’d get a guard dog, and the next thirty minutes I would be the center of attention, just the way I liked it.

But Robin tossed her hair back and shrugged. “It probably just fell during the earthquake last night, that’s all.”

I frowned, stumped. Earthquake? We’d had an earthquake the night before? Why didn’t anyone mention it? And why hadn’t I felt—

And then I remembered. North Hollywood, California, was certainly a diabolical place. It also happened to sit damn near on top of the San Andreas fault, one of the most active fault lines in the country.

It all came back—the shaking, the rattling, the inability to scream, the soul-deep fear. The certainty that Satan and his minions had come to claim my soul, to put asunder my relationship with the Prince of Peace and Redeemer of Sins once and for all. My body went cold with the memory, and as quickly as realization dawned on me, there was embarrassment not too far behind. I was glad beyond belief that I hadn’t remembered my brush with Satan earlier or I surely would have mentioned my near-possession to my friends and Robin, who would have sneered in that snooty way of hers and informed me that it was probably just an earthquake that had awakened me in the middle of the night and not Satan at all.

It wasn’t Satan that had shaken me out of my bed and scared me out of my wits. It had only been an earthquake. Not the Devil, but an act of God.

Nevertheless, as I sat there wallowing in my shame, I swear I could hear Satan laughing at me, and all the demons in hell howling right along with him. I knew then that my lackadaisical attitude toward Satan had to be retired. The score was obvious: Satan:1, Amber: 0. I resolved to be more ruthless in my attempts to defy and annoy the great UnderLord from there on out, all in the effort to be gung-ho about Jesus.

*Grin again, gang, get gung-ho about Jesus.
Smile sweetly, Sister, so you’ll send Satan sadly away, hey hey!
Buck up, Brother Billy, cuz a bunch of bitter boys become a bunch of better boys behind a big, big smile.
Grin again, gang, get gung-ho about Jesus.

And what’s even more aggravating is that he’s so freaking cute when he does it, I simultaneously want to hug him and rip his head right off his bony, little shoulders.

Confused by our son’s otherworldly ability to demolish us in Wii Sports competitions (he can reliably bowl a 200, and has bowled as much as a 245. My high score is a 190, which I was proud of until my son came home from daycare and said, “I can do better than that” and bowled a 219. Bastard.) my husband took it upon himself to figure out how in the bloody hell the kid kept beating us.

It all comes down to geometry.

The Wii consists of several different devices that interact with each other: the console itself, the IR (infrared) receiver that sits atop the television, and the Wii-mote (an IR transmitter). In bowling, in order to calculate the path of the ball, the Wii detects the change in the angle between the Wii-mote and the sensor to determine the path of the ball. However, when you are really close to the receiver, it does not detect changes in angle as accurately as it does when the transmitter is further away.

In order to appreciate the significance of this, you have to understand how my son bowls. He starts at the back of the room and then runs at top speed towards the television and hurls the virtual bowling ball in the air. It’s hysterical to watch, actually. Every time he does it I cringe because I can just imagine him not being able to stop and slamming full-force into the television. But, with uncanny agility, he’s able to stop just inches before the television and release the ball.

And thus bowl strike, after strike, after strike.

At Wii boxing, however, his advantage is somewhat different. Here his advantage is his freakishly short arms.

In boxing, the strength of a blow does not depend on how quickly or how forcefully you punch out. It is calculated based on the total time from thrust to recoil. So since my son’s arms are so measly, he’s able to repeatedly throw powerblow after powerblow, because the time from thrust to recoil is so short.

In theory, then, you could stand there and sort of bounce your Wii-motes in and out in rapid succession, but that doesn’t feel like boxing. The fun of playing the Wii isn’t (contrary to my competitive nature) merely to win—it’s emulating whatever activity you’re involved in. If I just toss my Wii-mote about, yeah I could win, but it’s feel cheap, like cheating. As as much as I like to win, I need the gratification of knowing I won honestly.

So, unless I want to start hurling myself at the television (which, given my mass, is probably not a good idea because I don’t think I could overcome that momentum) or reduce the length of my arms by 18 inches, I guess I’m just stuck playing second fiddle to a kindergartener.

I console myself in the knowledge that he has to grow up sometime, and the playing field will be level. Ah payback. She’s a bitch.

Tags: wii,, family,, competition,, storytelling

I understand what the Chinese meant when they cursed each other with the words, “May you live in interesting times.” I enjoy change; I’m the sort of person who grows idle and listless should I stay in any one phase of my life too long. I usually keep things interesting, but interesting is tumultuous. Interesting is dangerous. Interesting means I don’t have time to enjoy the moments in between earthquakes.

There is stillness here in the deep. It is not interesting. But it is stable. And warm. And delicious.

I won’t lie, though: I find myself fidgeting all the time, my mind racing for things I should be doing, but everything around me is so still. All my writing projects are complete and the new ones are still gestating quietly, developing into something that can live on their own. My design projects, too, are for the moment paused, as the university limps its way out of summer and into the blusterous activity of the fall semester. Everything is dormant right now; there is no drama.

Yet, I long for a wild, blissful adventure to muss my hair and dirty my hands. I want to hope for something. I want to embark on a journey.

I’m trying not to think, and I’m succeeding. I’m trying merely to be, to reconsider my life as I enter my thirties, trying to figure out who I am, where I want to go, what sort of legacy I want to leave behind. I say all this to say that if this blog hasn’t anything relevant or deep or thoughtful to say for a while, I apologize. I’m mentally cleaning house.

I do intend to continue with the storytelling, however, if for no other reason than I feel the need to reminisce, to leave traces of my little girl self and her experiences of the world. Not for you, I’m afraid, who didn’t know me as a child or as a woman and probably don’t care except that perhaps the stories are amusing to you (I hope they are; they’re funny as Hell to me in retrospect) but for myself, so that I can look back and remind myself when I forget that I was a religious, strange, overly thoughtful and yet all the same, childish little girl back in the day. I hope I never lose that.

So I apologize for what may come in the next few weeks or months. But if you’ll allow me the indulgence, I hope you’ll enjoy the memories as I dust them off and display them on the shelf. They’re my war medals, and though sometimes they make me look like an arse, they’re mine; I earned them.

Very well then, on with the show!