Balls and Walnuts
more than you ever wanted to know
Category Archives: Favorites
I think I can, I think I can
I had a student dream last night. You know the one: you’re late for the final, can’t remember where it was supposed to be held, forgot to cram for it anyway, and when you finally get there you’re naked, the proctor is your great aunt Helen in a black corset (with red trim), and she intends to punish you severely, young man if you haven’t brought three sharpened #2 pencils —
Well, maybe not that dream.
My all-time favorite student dream: after racing around trying to find the final, I get there an hour late. The first question is
1. Tamarind is to homily as espresso is to
A) 2.01
B) 5,134
C) 0
D) pi
E) all of the above
and the rest of the questions make no sense at all.
If I remember my Freudian bullshit correctly, and I doubt that I do, student dreams are an indicator of performance anxiety. So here’s my analysis. Karen isn’t getting pregnant any time soon. I’ve already done my tough surgical cases for the week. The only ‘performance’ I have to be anxious about is my novel.
Tomorrow, I start righting my second-to-the-last chapter. You need a sense of scale. This mother is going to be at least 270,000 words when it is finished. I have five major POV (point of view — although I think most of you out there are either writers or writer-wannabes like me, and knew that already) characters, three almost-major POV characters, and two characters who are important enough to require a bit of time in the big climax. I’m wrapping up a trilogy. This is my Battle for Gondor (if I’m mangling that, forgive me; I like Lord of the Rings, but I’m not a big enough fanboy to remember the details).
So far, I have thirteen scenes mapped out. It’ll have to be twelve or fourteen, since I’m superstitious about thirteen*. After I finish a-bloggin’, I’ll reread all my notes and do what I always do before starting a new chapter — I’ll sleep on it. Here’s hoping I’ll have better dreams tonight.
D.
*I dated a girl in college who wore a gold necklace — a ’13’ — her grandmother had given her. Gran was a Northern Italian witch, Carmela told me, and the villagers burned her workbook after she died. Carmela had recurring dreams that she was a young virgin living in ancient Greece. The girl in the dream aged along with real-time Carmela.
My Catholic almost-girlfriend Carmela told me (repeatedly) that her father would kill her if she got pregnant. She left to my imagination what he would do to me. How Carmela would get pregnant is still something of a Catholic mystery to me, since we never even kissed.
We didn’t last long. Nevertheless, I think of her fondly.
Because Maureen asked for really bad angst-ridden poetry
I’ve decided I would make one rippingly good homosexual. I’m obsessed with my body; I cook like there’s no tomorrow; I cry at the end of every episode of Dead Like Me; I think Winona Ryder is hot. (Wait. No. That would make me a lesbian.) My high school girlfriend once called me ‘one of the girls’ and, now that I think about it, she’s never taken it back.
There’s just that one picky little detail. You know, the one about having sex with men. Like, eeee-ew. Is that strictly necessary?
Anyway, for Maureen, I’ve posted a poem today. Read it and see if you don’t agree that I am a total bitch. Here’s the set-up:
Third year of med school: that’s when it starts to get tough. You take call with the big boys and girls; you’re actually expected to do some thinking on your own; the hours are long and you’re beginning to wonder if maybe, just maybe, this isn’t all a big mistake. Unfortunately, you get used to it, and learn to ignore that inner voice.
Bad turned to worse when our med school newspaper began running whiffy poetry written by a sensitive, angst-riddled soul* who regularly opened a vein for our benefit. His metier: the cryptic rhyme scheme, the mangled metaphor, the trite simile, the archaic contraction. His chief gripe: not being able to spend enough quality time with his loved ones.
Perhaps I should have been more sympathetic. Instead, I decided to shut him down.
I was a Teenage Angstwolf
Mistah Donahue — he dead.
Oh faithful collie at my feet
Do not ask me why I weep
For I might tell you, and you must sleep;
Sometimes it hurts to feel so deep.
Spring is the cruellest month, sigh;
Winds whisper the throbbing question, why
The swollen hopes of huddled masses,
Hardened hearts, and real tough classes.
In a dream, I asked the Deity why
She told me
“Everything I tell you is a lie
Including this.”
Her saffron robes were the color
Of Existential Panic.
A toast to my colleagues, Sturm und Drang,
Angst and Ennui, that noble gang
Though only geists, their spirits sang,
They never forgot for whom the tolled bell rang.
(Bonus points if you can name the kid.)
Post script: my poem worked. Mr. Sensitive’s Rod McKuen-aspirin’ days were over.
Next up on the book review list: an oldie but (if the first two chapters are any indication) a goodie. Hint: Nebula Award Winner; chief influences, Carlos Castaneda & Joseph Conrad. Pat, no fair guessing, since you recommended this one to me.
*I forget his name, but he’s undoubtedly one of those HMO docs who is on the phone all day telling other docs how to practice shitty medicine, then goes home and whines to his family about how rough his life is.
My Deep Throat
Today’s announcement that former deputy blah-di-blah-blah of the FBI W. Mark Felt was Deep Throat made me feel mightily pensive; like, I suppose, any great writer, today’s Watergate watershed made me think of me.
This is a story about a revelation. Not one of those “LUKE, I AM YOUR FATHER” revelations; this is more of a “I was in love with you all through seventh grade!” revelation.
Nixon resigned in the summer of 1974. A few months earlier, towards the end of 7th grade, I became our junior high school’s Student Body President by running on a platform of, “Elect me, and I’ll try my best to do whatever you want me to do.” I narrowly beat Linda Bloem — my chief academic rival, occasional object of my affection, and the only girl in junior high who would dance the slow dances with me — primarily because Linda ran on a platform of, “Elect me, because God wants me to be your student body president,” thus prefiguring George W. Bush.
When I opened my locker on the first day of eighth grade, I found a handwritten note:
I was a victim of synchronicity. Throughout eighth grade, I had to endure taunts of “Impeach Hoffman!” and “Hoffman, Resign Now!” all because of Richard Nixon. And I was a good student body president. Our dances made money. With our profits, we bought a drinking fountain for our quad, which made us the first student council to do anything, ever. We became the paragon by which all future student councils would be measured.
And yet the notes trickled in at regular intervals: stuffed in my pre-algebra book, scooted under my lunch tray, dropped in front of my gym locker.
Naturally, Linda Bloem was my chief suspect. Sure, she continued to dance the slow dances with me — that was just her crafty way of deflecting suspicion. My next suspect was the student council treasurer Bret Lawson. Why? Sheer antagonism. I’m pretty sure Bret didn’t like me. I’m pretty sure he still doesn’t like me (if he thinks about me at all) even though we went to Berkeley together, which should count for something, you know?
I had other things to distract me that year. I can’t remember who I was in love with, but I was always in love with someone, ever since age 2. (If anyone from my family still reads this — that girl at Cassie’s, the one I used to play King of the Hill with, and she always won. What was her name?) I think I was messed up about Tamara Cynar that year. Right at the end of seventh grade, Tamara told one of her girlfriends, right in front of me, that she thought I was cute — so of course I fantasized about her all summer. Come eighth grade, she wasn’t there. She’d moved.
Only a thirteen-year-old can be totally destroyed by something like this.
Meanwhile, Linda Bloem’s dancing slow dances with me, and Lilly Sznaper’s making eyes at me too (well, at least once or twice), and all I can think about is some girl I’d never even looked twice at, just because she was unattainable. And how fucked up is that? Adolescence SUCKS.
End of the year: yearbook signing. Sue Youmans, a very tall and very gorgeous girl who had never had very much to say to me, wrote
Sue had the flattest stomach and the hottest belly button of any eighth grader. My sexual fantasies were only beginning to take on a bit of character (having, that year, discovered Xaviera Hollander’s book Xaviera! — thank you, Jeff Swee, fellow Berkeleyite, for being a dumpster-diving thirteen-year-old), but I could still see the potential of belly buttons.
Asked why she had messed with my brain all year**, Sue stuck to her guns. “I thought it was pretty funny. Didn’t you think it was funny?”
Well, sure. Now I do.
D.
*Do I actually remember what the note said? Hell no. This is personal history. No one said anything about historical accuracy.
TAMARA! WHY???