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The Groups
Mothertalk Review: More Than it Hurts You
One of my favorite modern art developments is the photo-mosaic. Much like the neo-Impressionist created pointillist process, photo-mosaic is a technique that renders a work of art into many smaller works of art. It actually can be viewed in different ways depending on where you stand. Up close you see either a dot or, in a photo-mosaic, a photograph. The photo could be placed next to something that has no obvious relation to it. A vacation photo next to an old photo of your childhood pet. Next to each other they don’t seem to work as something that you could imagine as a cohesive work of art. And then you step back a bit and gasp. Stepped back you don’t see individual images, but rather one singular image comprised of the smaller ones. Suddenly it is something else entirely. Suddenly it all makes sense.
Darin Strauss’s latest book, More Than it Hurts You, is an outstanding novel that reads like what I imagine looking at a photo-mosaic feels like: characters that seem out of place up-close, but when you turn the page you step back and are blown away by the big picture.
The novel begins with Josh Goldin a popular everyman type at the top of his game. Successful in his career, his marriage, and his self-esteem, Josh is the cool guy in your carpool, the fun neighbor down the street. He brings you into his world simply and honestly and immediately you feel like this is the guy you would have voted best all around on class day.
Josh is a smooth operator at chit chat in his office’s break room and relaxed in a way that only the truly popular can achieve. And then his secretary runs into the break room with the news that Zack, Josh’s son, is in the emergency room. His eight month old son.
At the hospital we meet Dori, Josh’s wife. An expert at all things with the temperament to back it up, Dori is clearly the driving force behind many things, including her marriage. We quickly find out that Zack has been brought in to the hospital after he threw up and Dori noticed that there was blood in the vomit. By the time Dori had reached the hospital with Zach he had coded.
Dori, a phlebotomist, indicates that she believes that the hospital has been negligent with the care and testing of baby Zach. However we soon discover that it is the hospital staff that is suspicious of Dori.
One of the most engaging and fascinating characters of this novel is Dr. Darlene Stokes. To give you an example of how Darin Strauss achieves this photo-mosaic effect with his writing this is the character to study. We are briefly introduced to Dr. Stokes early on in the original hospital scenes, the lengthy and riveting prologue of the novel. Part I then begins in an unfamiliar world, the back of a prison release bus. We are brought into the world of a just released prisoner, Intelligent Muhammad.
It feels jarring at first. The switching from such a tense and climactic moment at the hospital to a dark and grungy portrait of street life. Soon it is revealed how Intelligent is connected to Dr. Darlene Stokes and almost immediately your perspective begins to shift. We then go in depth into the childhood and life of Darlene. It is a submersion that is so powerful that you might find yourself actually feeling like you are inside Darlene’s head. When she banters with a parent hosting a play date we understand how much is left unsaid. We understand her as if we are her.
It is this kind of intense and breathtaking character immersion that makes this novel unique. It is crucial that you are connected to every player before the onion of the story can completely unfold. We are hooked into Josh and Dori Goldin. We are hooked into Dr. Darlene Stokes. We feel ready. And then the world explodes with three words: Munchausen by proxy.
This novel just blew me away.
Everything I know about Munchausen by proxy I have learned from television or movie plots. It is always such an obvious story line on tv and usually resolves in this tidy and absolute way. What this novel presents feels like a more authentic portrayal of this syndrome. Everything feels true. It is not tidy, nor is it absolute. It is a mosaic of characters all trying to do what’s best for a baby.
Author’s Website (really awesome insight into this author)
Amazon Link to More Than it Hurts You
My browser is on redbull.
There is not a heck of a lot to blog about right now. I am actually sort of glad for that. I have some good friends (my neighbors) that are going through a horrible chaos with their Dad who also has Alzheimer’s coupled with congestive heart failure. My friends are so strong and resilient but this is the kind of shit that breaks you down and I wish there was something I could do to help.
So in my nice and quiet morning (GM is absolutely transfixed with The Family Fued right now) I am trying to catch up on blogs and simultaneously read some nice photoshop tutorials. But things were moving slow on the internets and it was frustrating me.
And then I decided to upgrade my firefox to the new 3.0 version. Maybe I am just mesmerized by the newness (& who doesn’t like new things?) but it really, really feels faster. Is that possible? Any of you guys downloaded it yet? If you have a mac I can vouch that it is a crazy easy download. I am sure it works for PC as well, but I wouldn’t know.
Now back to Family Fued. Currently we are trying to name the top 6 answers to the question: “If someone uses ‘bust’ in a sentance what are they referring to?”
Top answers:
1) Woman’s bustline
2) Drugs/arrest
3) No money
4) a failure
5) head statue
6) breaking something
Seriously. I could write this show…& what is wrong with the people that they surveyed that no one came up with “bust a move”? And just WHO are these random 100 people polled. I want to be polled!
ADDED: Need a reason to upgrade or switch to Firefox 3? Read this awesome link sent to me via Vee & Jay.
Bitter and want to talk about it?
There is a new speakeasy in the Infertility blogosphere. A little, tucked away space down an alley thisaway. To gain entrance one must knock three times on the arched door and wait for the peephole to open. Once open you must identify yourself as being sick and tired of being infertile. You will then be escorted in, hat & coat checked in, and somehow a beverage will be placed into your hands. You will hear the soulful and aching sounds of a woman singing the blues from another room. You will hear the clinking of glasses at the bar. You will hear, from a nearby booth, a group of women swearing like sailors. You look up just in time to see a woman come out of a powder room, the scent of progesterone in oil wafting behind her. You will be at home. Safe. Protected by dark brick walls and an off the grid location.
Are you Mafia? Are you? Come find out.
Saturday is for Scattergories
SCATTERGORIES - it’s harder than it looks! Play here or play on your blog. Saturday is game day!
Use the first letter of your name of your street to answer each of the following. (if your street name is a number use the first letter that spells the number. If you live on Fifth Avenue then your letter should be F) They have to be real places, names, things - nothing made up. You can not use your own name for the boy/girl names.
1. What is the name of your street?
2. A 3 letter word?
3. Something you would find in an office?
4. Something that smells bad?
5. Movie Title?
6. Slow Dance Song?
7. Something in your pantry?
8. Name of a pet turtle?
9. Fetish or Phobia?
10. something you would find in your medicine chest?
Play along here via the comments or on your blog (just let us know so we can marvel at your wit!)
Other uses for tracking numbers:
Early this morning I began what I usually need/must do at least once a week- I cleaned up the massive pile of post-it notes, random receipts, phone messages, and tidied up my highlighters. (anyone else have a love affair with highlighters? They really do make your to-do list colorful!)
And as I went through the stash of clearly miscellaneous I had the same panic attack that I have every week doing the same task: What if I accidentally throw away this bit of paper and then realize in a week/month/year that it was absolutely essential for fillintheblank? I mean sure this note looks like trash NOW, but does that mean it is? And yet again I wish that I could travel to the future to see what sort of organization devices will be in use. After my brief moment of day dream is over I usually sort the bits of paper and then if it looks like something that has any potential for future importance I tape it into a little notebook I have. Yes I have a notebook full of post-its. Don’t you?
The last post generated some really excellent off-site e-mail exchanges. I did lots of claiming (or reminding of claiming!) and traded several other war stories with people that also fought the battle of I went to a bajillion schools. Something that was brought up to me actually made me get teary-eyed: the penpal situation.
Yes, because I moved around so much I usually had a good stash of pen-pals. But what I didn’t think about was how emotional it must have been to be the pal that stayed versus the pal that moved. When you move around a lot usually all you want to do is STAY, plant roots, be able to actually be in a yearbook or sign up for classes the following year. What I didn’t know was that for every gal that is moving on there is someone else that is screaming inside, “Take me with you! Get me the fuck OUT of this town!”
I was really good at writing letters. Super good. I spilled my guts out and described in detail everything about my new school/town. I genuinely missed my old friend, but eventually (& usually after a month of school starting) the letters would slowly die off and life would move on.
Decades later I would still have pains of missing. I felt this massive void where information should have been. I resented that I didn’t know what happened next to my friends. And wondered- did they wonder about me?
In early 2000 I joined one of those website reunion places. We’ll call it schoolmates dot com. My main objective was to track down every best friend that I had ever had. That’s right. I was looking for: Theresa, Michael, Tanisha, Jodi, Maureen, Penny, Rose, Kim, Kate, Sarah, Katty, and Liz. I found three of them. But the biggest find was Theresa- my best friend from first grade.
We had been the dorkiest first graders one could ever imagine at an extremely hippie-dippie school for the gifted in Florida. We were the girls that read at levels several grades higher and had to leave in the afternoon to attend classes with the third graders. We had a deep love for all things Wonder Woman and most afternoons we were co-Presidents of a secret society that met in a kiddie pool in my front yard. She was the foundation of every single friendship I would ever have.
(yes, you see, I am totally wearing plaid.)
And we found each other.
We reunited over cell phone, across the country, but both of us drinking wine and smoking Parliaments out on a deck/balcony. We spoke fast and on top of each other. We marveled at how similar we had remained even during the awkward growing up years. I guess it isn’t too much of a surprise that a pair of know-it-all 1st graders would blossom into passionate theatre dorks.
And we kept it touch and then, as things do, life moved on. But we know where each other is (dude! She is on my fucking bloglines!) and should the need surface again we can find each other.
But there are other friends that I fear I have lost forever. I will always wonder what happened to Maureen, my best friend from the 2nd half of 7th grade. She would send me the saddest letters about finding her Mother’s booze in the strangest places. She had an abusive step-Father and a family that never got how beautiful she was. And I wonder about Kate. Did she ever forgive me for meeting with her after school and telling her that I had found some new friends and would no longer be coming over to her house to hang out?
I can’t be the only one that mourns the friend of a certain era. But I do often wonder if my yearning is only one sided. I wonder if the people that were once my best friends ever give me a moments thought. Do they ever wonder about me?
Who would you track down if only you could?
If only Hedda Gabler could do Headers.
In my constant search for finding some way to make a small dent in my FET fund I keep coming back to doing something that I enjoy. Something that is satisfying and creative and interactive and ever-changing. And then I became a bit obsessed with changing the art in my header. Like crazy obsessed.
Now I won’t say that I am some rock star header designer (yet), but I enjoy it. It is therapeutic. Which made me wonder if I could whore myself out for header art love. Back in the early years of blogging I remember how we all griped about templates and finding something unique and sassy. I remember finding out that someone had the same blogger template that I did and getting wicked depressed about it.
But now I have art editing software and plenty of time and I want to flex this muscle and see if it takes me anywhere. Two things to know: I will work for cheap, and I will work with fun. I am currently working with a certain blogger on creating a new header image for her, but I wanted to know if anyone else might want my arty-farty skillz. Let’s talk about it.
Thursday is taking ideas.
I really dig the album cover meme over at Dead Baby Jokes. So I decided to do one as well. Then I thought maybe you guys would dig on the idea. Thus the rule sharing:
1. Click on this link. The title of the page is the name of your band.
2. Click on this link. The last four words of the final quotation on the page are the title of your album.
3. Click on this link. The third picture is your album cover.
4. Take the pic, add your band name and album title and tada! (this final step requires photo shop or other image editing software)
Let me know in the comments if you created one. If you don’t have the software for such time passing leave your results in the comments. Tell me the name of your band, the album title & describe your cover art.
We’ll have an imaginary blogapaloooooza.
to be deleted
<a href=”http://technorati.com/claim/m2xwbp2h3i” rel=”me”>Technorati Profile</a>
Hello from Boston
Here I am, in Boston, staying with one of my best friends, her husband, and their new baby. And as much as I like to be optimistic & Pollyanna about a lot of things in my life this was hard. I have known my friend & her husband since forever (at least as far as I am concerned). There is not one aspect of my life that I hide from them and I feel like I could tell them some fucked up things and they would not judge me one bit. But I am faced with a new aspect to this group friendship: the baby bubble.
Here is the deal. My friend & her husband have a beautiful, happy, healthy baby. A baby that gazes at them and recognizes their voice. And it isn’t just that I don’t have a baby, but more that THEY have a baby and so are now inside a cosmos built for three.
While many of us have lived through good friends dating new people and then falling off of the planet this is not the case. These friends, for as long as I have known them, have been a couple. They were never the type to not be inclusive, I never felt third-wheel-ish.
So with this amazing new addition there were some weird feelings brewing in me. At first it might have been sadness that I wasn’t in the new baby club, but when I dove into the root of my feelings I realized it might be that I was jealous of the baby. Which is kind of dumb.
I spent a while having these murky, odd, new feelings brewing in me and then I just spilled my guts to my friend. Thank fucking GOD I did. We talked & I cried & I tried to be articulate & then realized that there are some emotions that you just can’t articulate. But having my friend listen to me, not judge me, having her tell me that she felt the EXACT same way when her older sister had her first baby…I was not made fun of for having the feelings. If anything I was even more embraced and loved and told, “Yes. I get that. Yes. I have felt that. I understand.” See? Amazing friends can truly save you from yourself. And now I feel so much better.
It makes me wonder how other people adapt and grow within friendships when things change. It is a fact of life that we will constantly be evolving and one day I will be the friend with the new baby & that may be fucking weird for a lot of people in my life. I just thought that I would be super cool enough to not have a reaction and I am surprised that I did. But maybe this will enable me to be just as loving and sympathetic as my Boston friend when I am faced with an overly emoting friend down the line.
Boston, by the way, is a really cool town. It is certainly going on the list of places to consider moving to when I unpause my life. The vibe is mellow and the city is a lot smaller than I would have thought. My biggest disappointment was that it was not cold. Seriously- what is with the Northeast flaking out on the Winter for me? I haven’t even worn a coat in the last two days. Not ONCE did I see my own breath. And now I am heading home where rumor has it the high will be near 80 degrees. motherfucker.
9th Grade & beyond
Yesterday I had an opportunity to meet a group of internets, something that was immediately exhilarating combined with fucking scary. There is such a sense of safety when you have your lap top, some internet cable and a couple hundred miles between yourself and the people that you connect with on-line. You are in control about what you say, how you say it and there is no responsibility in regards as to how it is heard. In other words, when you rant or reveal on your blog you don’t have to see somebody read it & watch them react.
Meeting a group of “strangers” all at once versus meeting just one or two brought out a tremendous amount of anxiety in me. All of a sudden I was in 9th grade with all of the emotional angst of a 14 year old. My skin literally broke out. I worried about what to wear, what to bring, and most of all I was worried that nobody would like me. (and then worried that after I left that everyone would turn to each other & exclaim, “damn! That girl is fucked up.”
Walking in to a room and seeing the faces of bloggers was overwhelming. It might even have been sensory overload. I’m not exaggerating here at all. I was all a flutter with ridiculous nerves for a good 45 minutes & even had to go hide in the bathroom to get a grip on composure. I don’t remember anything I said for the first few minutes of meeting people. All that was running through my head was, “please like me!” “please think I am cool!” “please find me just as wonderful as I find you!”
But there eventually came the moment when I realized that I might not have been the only one with these messy, angsty, 9th grade emotions. We’re all human. We all need a glass (or 3) of wine before we feel like we can be our true selves. We all worry about if we are cool enough or if we are fitting in. We all fart when nervous. (um, ok, maybe that was just me.)
When I finally calmed the fuck down I got a bit emotional. These internets are people that have been virtually holding my hand for nearly two years as I walked through some pretty shitty moments. They have offered me words of support, called me out when I needed a reality check, and helped me keep it together on days when the sky was falling.
While some of the mystery has faded, in its place is a deeper connection. Everyone is more real to me, more tangible, and because of that I feel so much more invested. We aren’t just random people any more. & that is kind of huge.
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