All man’s miseries derive from not being able to sit quietly in a room alone

- Blaise Pascal

Channeling my inner Holly Golightly.

In the last week and two days I have proven – in spades and in excess – that I am capable of sitting quietly in a room alone.

Hell, I thrive quietly in a room alone.

I’m like a low-maintenance houseplant.

Or a cat with access to a dripping faucet and an open feedbag.

Go about your business and don’t worry about little old me. Just leave a light on and let a neighbor know I exist, okay?

All the same, I’m kind of appalled at my own absence.

Five days?
How did five days get by me?

Well, for starters, I’m sitting quietly – minus the ticky tacky tapping of Macbook keys – in a room alone all the livelong day (and night).

I could be on Mars for all I (or you) know.

Secondarily, I’m writing a chapter a day.

I should be proud of this, but the thing of it is, my (overly, I now realize) aggressive schedule had me writing two a day.

Two!?!?

Who do I think I am?

Joyce Carol Oates?

(I once read that on a real roll she writes 40 pages a day, so she is my Parthenon of big-time page quota writing)

Doing my laundry old school. Feeling very salt of the earth and wondering to myself, "Do I own any clothes that aren't gray?"

Anywho, I’ve been writing a chapter a day, which honestly isn’t easy, and due to my own strange (inspired?) idea to have the first ten chapters be parallel and modern-day retellings of the life of Christ ages 30 to 32, they’re tedious as well. In addition to the time spent doing said writing, I spend about two hours a day reading Biblical interpretations.

Which I kind of hate.

Okay, I hate it a lot.

I wouldn’t go so far as to say I hate Jesus…but when you’re dreaming about the man in a scholarly kind of way, you’ve possibly/probably/definitely gone too far.

Anyway, I’m working like a dog and making daily progress. Despite this, I’ve been growing increasingly despairing.

“Why?” you ask.

Well, if you’d been paying attention, you’d know I’m growing increasingly despairing because I thought I could write two chapters a day, and it just ain’t happening.

So self-admonition and “mañana, mañana” kick in until today, when the landlord sneeringly asks me, “So are you getting any writing done? Or do you have writers’ block?”

“No,” I told him, “I’ve written nine chapters.”

The sheer look of shock was enough to make me realize that although I may not be JCO (see above for secret decoder ring), but I am doing pretty darn good.

And then he stammered, “Wow. You’re a disciplined writer.”

I only buy cereal that's at least four times the size of my head. And yes, the house really is as round and pink and freakishly fluorescent light lit as it seems here. I've grown accustomed...

And THEN he went and made my day (sort of) by adding that he’s happy if he writes a chapter a month.

I don’t have any clue what it is that he’s writing, but whatever.

Doing some quick math, I calculated that on his ‘aggressive’ plan, it would take me three years to write this book. So two or three months instead of one ain’t too shabby.

And it certainly isn’t three years.

So yay me.

In other news:

• The first day I got a funky tan from my ever-present necklaces, but I have hence removed now-not-so-much-ever-present necklaces and evened that mess out.

• Last night, in a fit of “I’m sick of corn tortillas and beans” I made cabbage rolls (any of you with any kind of Eastern European or Russian heritage know what I”m talking about), and they were wonderful. And I ate more for breakfast. And more again tonight for dinner. And there are still five left. Happiness…

• I was trying to trim an errant hair with oversized scissors and cut a chunk out of my eyebrow. Oh well. It’s hair. It’ll grow back.

• I have a girl crush on Ellie, the fast-talking Mexican maid. Not my maid, mind you. I do my own laundry and dishes and sweeping and cleaning. Not that I mind. It’s kind of a simplified, hand-hewn Little House on the Prairie-type existence. Anyway, back to Ellie, she’s so sweet and doesn’t seem to care a lick that I only understand about 30% of what she says. And she’s willing to try all kinds of words until she stumbles into some vocabulary I recognize. The same cannot be said for everyone…  Enough said.

• I miss TV. A lot.

• I am really damn tired (it’s a little after midnight here) due in large part to the aggressive ray of sun that shines directly on my face every morning at 7:00am and my persistent very late night bedtimes. In other words, I couldn’t let another day go by without posting something, but in just a few more words that’s all there is to say. Be good. More soon.

Not to be confused with the Marvin Gaye song of a similar but slightly different title, I am obsessed with the Amos Lee tune (particularly the live version) “What’s Been Going On.” I can do a decent job with the guitar, but I can’t sing that low to save my soul. Which is fine in general, seeing as I’m a woman, but a bummer in that I really love the hell out of that tune. Oh well. Download’s Amos’ version. It’s worth the $.99.

Writing. What else would I be doing?

Anyway, I’m just sitting here watching Old School and drinking some horribly sweet, overly dyed apple soda (Just a small bottle. I couldn’t help myself. I had to know…) and thinking about anarchy.

Not really.

I just threw that last part in to see if you were paying attention.

So anyway, as is often the case with me when I get myself into remote locales with very little human contact and even less English, I have been wallowing in my own habits and taking an excessive amount of self-portraits. Luckily, my habits tend to be pretty healthy and self-driven and I’m rather photogenic, but then again maybe I’ve already been alone too long to judge?

Me in front of tonight's sunset

So here’s a random smattering of stuff in my life circa 9:48pm Mountain Time:

My back hurts

I’ve been brushing my teeth with tap water since I got here on Thursday. I suppose I just like to tempt fate. Or prove that I have a superior immune system. Or lose five pounds the painful way. Time will tell…

I’m already sick of corn tortillas.

Random horses.

I was sitting out front today and four horses just came randomly sauntering by.

My only tie to the modern world is a super flakey dial up 3G connection that occasionally makes the touch pad on my MacBook freeze up and stop working and which delays incoming emails as much as two days and isn’t even powerful enough to run a YouTube clip. I am completely cut off. With 25 days to go. But I’m still sane. Mostly.

I’ve written five chapters of the new book. It’s going pretty smoothly, which either means it’s inspired gold or total drivel. Time will tell here as well…

Tonight's sunset all by itself.

I don’t like the American landlord and his Mexican wife is really unfriendly. I could bitch about this at length, but a) who wants to hear me bitch and b) he knows about this blog, and I hate to be a jerk. Sufficed to say, he went to Stanford 25 years ago, and works it into EVERY SINGLE CONVERSATION. Whateves, dude. It’s ancient history now.

There’s a mosquito on my thigh.

I tried to take a bath last night, and got about two inches of hottish water into the giant tub before it started to come out of the spigot cold. So basically it was like splashing in a hot puddle. Not so much…

Me in front of the only walls in this joint that aren't pink.

Special K is different down here than it is at home. It’s somehow kind of corn flakey or something. It’s not bad. Just different.

Topes are those giant, unexpected bumps in the road and totopos are what they call tortilla chips.

The ocean is literally 50 yards away (over a sand dune covered with some seriously prickly stuff), and I can hear it roaring all the time, which is super awesome.

It’s been cloudy and raining all weekend and barely 10 degrees warmer than back home…but tomorrow all that changes when the sun comes back out! (The sun had better come out tomorrow, bet your bottom dollar that tomorrow there’d damn well better be sun…)

I’m driving around in a 2000 Nissan Frontier with plates from South Dakota and expired tags. I’m basically begging to get pulled over. See “not so keen on the landlord” above.

The beach here in Todos Santos by day

I am definitely in the early stages of Carpal Tunnel or some other forearm overuse problem, which totally sucks. I actually woke up in the middle of the night last night my right arm hurt so much. This happened when I was writing my graduate thesis a few years ago. And when I was finishing the first book. Basically, it’s like an overuse injury I’m still using. Ow.

I bought some bagels at the corner store and despite the fact that they were frozen, every last goddamned one of them was molding, and I just threw them away rather than drive them back and fight about it, because I don’t know enough Spanish to explain that “These bagels are molding, and I don’t want a replacement because I am now afraid of your food. Please just give me back my 550 pesos, thank you very much.”

Getting all artsy.

Will Ferrell just said my favorite line of the movie, “I think I see Blue. He looks glorious!”

As mentioned above, there are 25 more days to my literary experiment.

And there ain’t much going on but me, my daily workouts, my writing, and trips to buy overpriced spoiled foodstuffs.

Happily, I have yet to go totally Ernest Hemingway, but I am pretty isolated, so I guess we’ll see what happens. I am half-Irish, you know.

Da da da da da da dum dum

Da da da da da da dum

Tequila!

Let’s get down to brass tacks: Love is for suckers.

So the other day I found this article about signs you might be headed for a breakup, and I decided to pass it on for your edification…along with a few embellishments of my own, of course.

In honor of Valentine’s day, I figured it was the least I can do.

Some people might find this romantic, but a sight like this would seriously freak me out.

Love is elusive, but wanting to kill someone with your bare hands is, thankfully, less so.

1. You stop relationship-building behaviors. Maybe you stop kissing each other goodbye or stop texting each other during the day. Instead of adding things to the relationship, you start to resent each other like two five-year-olds who stop sharing their crayons.

2. You have really bad thoughts about crayons. You not only don’t want to share your crayons, you would like to stick a fistful of crayons into every orifice in your significant other’s body. And set them on fire. And you wonder whether their blood would be more torch red or wild strawberry?

3. You don’t understand each other anymore. The fighting escalates to a place where you no longer feel like you’re understood by your partner. Physical intimacy stops, communication stops, and you are living like roommates.

4. There is a roommate-like person in your house that you’re trying to pawn off on someone else. Look, let me level with you here, the reason your old friend from college won’t have an affair with your significant other is because you already told her way too much about him. Consider setting up a match.com or eHarmony account with their (Photoshopped) photo and some slightly-improved personal details.  Find someone new to deal with their bullshit.

I wonder what kind of test he's planning to cheat on?

5. You start punishing each other. When you get to the point of no longer understanding each other, what happens is that you end up just kind of coexisting in the new dynamic. Resentment builds and you get in your head too much. You are no longer about feelings, and you start punishing each other. “Well, he hasn’t done this for me, so I’m not going to do this for him” are the kind of thoughts that take root.

6. You start trying to kill each other. Seriously, the head-shaped dent in your frying pan is the first clue. So are your attempts to import poisonous cobras from India. And when you find yourself absent-mindedly researching which states’ penal codes go easiest on ‘crimes of passion’, well, who do you think you’re kidding anymore?

7. You fight less. When you get to the breakup point, you actually fight less with your partner. You fight less because in your mind and heart you start detaching yourself from the other person, and you don’t care as much anymore.

8. You don’t give a rat’s ass. When you’re past the breakup point, you actually don’t care whether your partner lives or dies. You forget their name and any reason you ever liked them because they’re dead to you now, and nothing ain’t ever gonna bring ‘em back.

9. You’ve taken the time to think it through. If you don’t think the relationship is going to work, or you know you’ve already disconnected based on how things have been going, then you might want to consider walking away for a few weeks. When you’re in the thick of things, they never seem to be able to work out.

10. You’ve taken the time to get a new identity. So you’ve faked your own death and are living in another state under an assumed name and stolen social security number? Let’s face it, things are probably over.

Thanks for playing.

Better luck next time.

So I got this comment on a (nearly) year-old post yesterday. It’s the one about tax tips (and – now that I’ve re-read it for the first time in about a year – a pretty funny one, if I do say so myself.)

At first I thought it was spam. I hoped it was spam, because it seemed a little bit mean. The part about my game. So I decided it must be spam.  Then I realized it wasn’t spam, largely because the first word of said spam happened to be my first name.

“Vanessa. I have been waiting for your blogg. Ki you really need to step up your game.
Is something else taking your focus away from writing? Everyone can spit, But few can spit around the corner.
Just a tip from your old uncle Dors.”

And you  know what?

Old Uncle Dors is on crack.

But he’s also onto something.

I have no freaking idea what the spitting stuff is about. I’m chalking that up to the crack.

But otherwise – although completely baffling – he’s kinda right. There are a few things taking the focus away from my writing. I don’t really like to get into my personal issues in this medium, but I suppose the long silences and extended absences may require some kind of explanation or commentary.

Thus, as much as I hesitate to go there in public, please enjoy a short list – in no particular order – of the myriad issues that distract my mind and take my focus away from my writing:

Damn. They should hire him to do the next Exorcist movie.

• Generalized fears about solar flares
• Generalized fear of that Millionaire Matchmaker lady.
• What the eff happened to Gary Coleman?
• Deep thoughts of no particular consequence
• Why can’t I do a cartwheel?
• Why didn’t I move that 401K when the stock was still worth something?
• Does Eric Clapton really get off on ‘57 Chevys? Define ‘get off’,’ because I think maybe I have a different idea of what getting off means? Does he mean he gets off on or he gets off ON? Man, I hate that song.
• Why do I keep dreaming about snakes?
• Who wrote the book of love?
• Wouldn’t it be nice if there really were such a thing as money trees? Like a plant that makes money, not a store where you trade your car title for $50 or whatever. Those are real.

Last count, he was 542 years old. So either he's a vampire or he's dead.

• My throat hurts and my ear aches and my skin is kind of sensitive and my head hurts and my hair hurts oh, dammit, I think I’m getting sick.
• Is Papa Smurf still alive?
• Are we really going to transcend to the fifth dimension on December 21, 2012 and what will the weather be like?
• Does my bologna have a first name?
• What’s up with brain tumors besides the fact that they suck balls?
• Low-grade fear of whatever it is that happened to Heidi Fleiss’ face.
• Generalized anxiety about money.
• Generalized anxiety about Monet.
• Man, did they screw up Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs or what? That was my FAVORITE book as a little girl. The movie was total crap. Actually, I quit after the first 15 minutes when the town wasn’t even named Chewandswallow, but I’m assuming the rest of it was equal parts crap.
• How come?
• Why not?
• What if?
• What’s wrong with Jennifer Anniston such that everyone always dumps her? Seriously, she seems so pretty and funny and is “America’s Sweetheart”, but obviously there’s something way wrong there. Ceaseless nose picking? An unpredictable mean streak?

I prefer cherry.

• Do androids dream of electric sheep?
• If Clonazepam is for seizures, how does somebody get addicted to it? And why?
• How many licks does it take to get to the center of a Tootsie Pop?
• Is there an app for that?
• Wondering where the lions are.
• Huh?
• Was Sherlock Holmes really that much of a badass in the books, or is that something they invented for the movie?
• How much coffee is too much coffee?
• Did the groundhog see his shadow or not and does it really matter and – the real question here – when the hell is it going to be warm and sunny again?
• Why haven’t I heard from my dad in like a month?
• What ever happened to Baby Jane?
• What’s the price of tea in China?
• Blog? What blog? Oh yeah. That blog.

And judging from so much of what goes on around us, their ain’t much altruism here on earth.

I could go on and on – foot binding, suicide bombers, The Darfur genocide, child pornography, the destruction of the environment, human trafficking, evil multinational corporations, famine, animal abuse, zombies, Fox News, and Tom Cruise’s ego – but it’s super depressing, so why bother recounting the endless list of our shortcomings as a species? You know what they are.

My dad used to do this SETI@home thing. Maybe he still does?

Regardless, the title of this post got me thinking. It came from this article I read entitled, “Scientist: Alien Life Could Already Be On Earth,” which wasn’t nearly as exciting nor fulfilling as one might’ve hoped. But I digress.

After suggesting the rather ho-hum premise that things such as organisms that live in hot springs (or my hot tub?) could have alien origin, he then digressed into a reflection about how our chances of having more exciting alien life show up are dwindling. You see, our former din of analog TV noise is disappearing as we switch to digital broadcasting, and we will soon become undetectable to other worlds. So not only is Comcast running an extortion scam on every last one of us, they’re ruining our chances of getting rescued off this rock and taken to a land where HBO is free.

Anyway, due to this looming lack of SOS, the scientists at SETI were excited by the possibility of using lasers to send super-bright flashes of light into space for a tiny fraction of a second and which could theoretically be seen by an advanced civilization up to 1,000 light years away. The issue, in the end, isn’t the signal so much as would any alien civilization would want anything to do with us in the first place?

Not the most attractive aliens on the block.

“For this to work … There has to be altruism in the universe.”

And not only altruism, but a complete and total lack of access to our media.

That or technological advancement combined with a stunning inability to judge character. Because, as we darn well know, unless they’ve come to blow us up, alien life would be best served to make a right turn at Jupiter and keep on going because we are one nasty and greedy plague.

Have you noticed that there are less and less true monster movies, and more and more ‘humans as monsters” movies. Where even the bad guys (aliens, vampires, vicious wild animals) in the end are the good guys when squared off with human beings? And don’t even get me started on all that “Saw” stuff.

I’m not saying it’s not all plausible, it’s just depressing.

Like District 9? I was despeartely hoping for the aliens to get out of South Africa and get away from us.

The Navi, on the other hand, are downright hot.

And Avatar made me wish I could move to Pandora, instead of walking outside to once again mingle with the kind of jerks that blow up and strip mine a beautiful and magical world in order to get at something they could sell for money.

I think what makes those plots so uncomfortable for me is that it’s not just feasible…it’s likely. It’s stuff we do every day to our own species and our own home. And it makes me wish the Navi existed and would be open to adopting me. Or even the District 9 ‘Prawns.’ They’re not much to look at, but I could adjust.

So what am I talking about?

I have no idea.

Maybe just that there probably is alien life out there, and they’ve gotten our Hitler broadcasts and Ku Klux Klan footage and listened to five minutes of The Howard Stern Show and realized we are not worth their time.

And perhaps our only hope is the fact that we’ve finally started to realize it and maybe can learn to collectively change our ways.

Or does that kind of stuff only happen in the movies?