Month: November 2010

Lost: Adventurous Spirit

~ Kiki Writes ~ 2 Comments

According to science, your brain finishes developing in your late 20’s. That last little bit deals with rationality and impulse control and anticipating consequences to actions. It’s a good thing, in the long run.

Unfortunately for me, that final development seems to have just killed my spirit of adventure. The iron curtain came down and separated it from the rest of me.

In my early 20’s, when I was friends with people involved in the independent professional wrestling circuit in Chicago, it was nothing for me to get off of work at noon on Saturday (after getting up at five in the morning), drive to the Chicago suburbs for a show and not get home until two in the morning. There a few times when I’d find myself driving home as the sun rose after having spent several hours after the show wandering the streets of Chicago, being up a full twenty-four hours. I don’t recommend doing that.

I didn’t say that my adventures were necessarily smart. I once drove through a tornado to go to a bar to watch a group of friends put on a wrestling show that nobody came to see because there was a tornado. To be fair, I didn’t know I was driving through the tornado at the time. I heard the warnings as I was driving, but I wasn’t familiar with the counties in that area of the state, so I wasn’t sure exactly where they were warning. And those cars that pulled over to the side were wimps. Wimps!

Around that time, it was beyond me to drive eight hours to Arkansas to visit a friend for a weekend. Or fly to Philly to visit another friend for a weekend. Or drive to Arkansas, spend the night, drive to Memphis, catch a flight to Philly, spend the night in Delaware, spend another night in New Jersey, fly back to Memphis, drive back to Arkansas, spend the night, and then drive home.

Once, I took the train with one friend to Chicago, met two other friends up there. We spent two nights in a hostel. The bathroom was communal. The showers had curtains, but most of the bathroom stalls didn’t have doors. Our first night there, we spent three hours talking to a guy named Dylan whose entire side of the conversation amounted to a pick-up line. We spent an entire day at Six Flags. We went to Navy Pier. We got lost in Chicago and were mistaken for prostitutes (we weren’t directly solicited, but why else would the same car slowly pass us five times as we stood on the sidewalk trying to figure out how to get back to the hostel?). We missed our train home because we just had to go back to My PI for lunch and we tipped our waiter for being cute.

Did I mention that I did all of this in a three day weekend after working seven days straight, four of those days working twelve hours a day at a store in Indiana, and before going back to work for another ten day stretch?

I was crazy, but I was also fearless. I wouldn’t think twice. I lost quite a bit of that between twenty-five and thirty.

Oh, I’ve had adventures since then. I went to three Chicago Comicons (back in my day they were called Wizard Worlds) and two DragonCons. But those adventures were better planned out in comparison to my earlier trips. They reflected the growing awareness that not everything could be winged and some things were better with a little foresight.

But, I realized this past summer that my adventurous spirit was off in an old folks home somewhere. My mother surprised me with tickets to a Cubs game as an early Christmas present. My first thought after “YAY! CUBS GAME! THANKS, MOM!” was “Wow, I’m going to have to find someone to go with me who will drive because I don’t want to”. Now, I’ve never liked to drive, but ten years ago that wouldn’t have stopped me; I’d have just driven if I couldn’t have found someone else to do it.

I need to get some of that adventurous spirit back. Some of the fearlessness, not necessarily the stupidity. I’ve still got some stupidity to spare.  But, adventures are what make life fun and interesting and I need to get back into the habit of having those.

I need to raise that iron curtain in my brain and let a little of that spirit back out.

And I need to get some money to make having those adventures possible. But that’s a post for another day.

The Late Bloomer Blues

~ Kiki Writes ~ Leave a comment

I can remember going to my mother the eve of my thirteenth birthday quite upset. Tearfully, I told her that I didn’t want to be a teenager. I didn’t want to grow-up.

Needless to say, my mother had no idea what to do with that. What kid doesn’t want to grow up? That’s what every kid wants. They want to big. They want to be older. They want to do whatever the adults are doing because the adults get to do whatever they want!

And I wanted to stay a kid. Baffling to say the least.

The truth is I’m a late bloomer. Intellectually, I was ahead of many of my peers, but emotionally, I was behind. This gap has caused some problems. I’ve lived that line, “Old enough to know better, but still too young to care.” The trouble is that it’s not as fun as it sounds. Well, most of the time. What I mean is that I know where I’m supposed to be emotionally, how I should be behaving and responding to things, but my emotions are too far behind to respond correctly. And by the time I get my emotions to the level they’re supposed to be, my age has moved on to a greater level.

It’s frustrating. It’s one of those things that I can’t so much work on as cope with. I’ve learned to accept that I am just slow on the uptake when it comes to certain aspects of my life. At this point, I figure the emotional maturity gap to be about five to seven years behind my actual age. Sometimes more, sometimes less, depending on the situation.

Now, let’s not confuse this with wisdom. I’ve been told most of my life that I’m wise beyond my years. My friends often come to me with their problems because I’m so good at sorting things out and finding a solution. I’m very good with knowledge and logic. I do so well with them because my emotions aren’t a factor.

When it comes to acting and reacting, to coping and dealing with my own feeling and my own heart, I’m a sloppy mess of a person because I know what I should do and how it should go, and yet, it doesn’t. I should be beyond certain reactions. I’m still waiting for those knee-jerk reactions and flashes of anger and giddy butterflies to mature. In the meantime, I struggle to make them behave beyond their years. It doesn’t always work.

I hope one day things even out and my emotions catch up to the rest of me, but until then, I’ll deal.

At least I stopped pushing the boys I liked into mud puddles.

Three years ago.

A Mess of My Own Making

~ Kiki Writes ~ 2 Comments

I have no problem admitting that the mess I currently find myself in is all my own fault. Of course it’s my fault.  To say otherwise would be to say that other people have been controlling me and that’s the last thing I’ll admit.

Okay, so it’s entirely possible that other people may have influenced the decisions that I made that led me to be in this mess. I know that I don’t operate in a vacuum. I know that I affect other people and they affect me. But the idea of blaming my life on my parents, or my family, or my friends, or the cruel, cruel Universe doesn’t appeal to me. I prefer to take the blame and the responsibility for my actions.

Ah, responsibility. For some people, money is the root of their problems (to be fair, money is a big part of mine right now, but that’s another post); for me it’s responsibility. It’s the root of my mess. Not that I don’t take responsibility for myself, but because I end up taking responsibilites that aren’t mine. Astrologers say that’s the lot of a Capricorn’s life. Well, it’s the bog of mine.

When my parents split when I was fifteen, I became responsible for myself in an adult sense for the first time in my life, which I admit was a rough transition for a late bloomer like me that had been somewhat sheltered from the grown-up world. I went from kid to adult in less than a month. What’s worse was that I found myself been put in the middle of my parents’ divorce as an adult, being made privvy to their bile and venom for each other like I was a friend to vent to and not the result of their combined DNA. It was also the beginning of my unpaid career as a messenger.

When my sister got pregnant the first time, it became my responsibility to see that my niece made it to family functions on my father’s side. My grandpa never emailed or tried to get a hold of my sister; he always got a hold of me and told me to bring the baby down. This doubled with the birth of my second niece and tripled with the birth of my third. Never once was it laid on my sister’s head to ferry her children down to see the family; it was me. And when my mom adopted the girls, I was held even more responsible for them in that way because my sister was off the hook. She removed herself from the responsibility pond entirely when she moved to Texas. 

My sister never had to hear about it from my father or his side of the family for her mistakes. I heard it all. My mother is spared the rants I have to endure from my father when it comes to the girls. I’m the one who bears the brunt of the disappointment from my grandfather when my nieces can’t make it to a family get together for whatever reason.

Honestly, all of THIS responsibility put me off of taking any grown-up responsibility for myself. I still live with my dad (and now a roommate) because the idea of moving out and trapping myself in a job that I hate just to make ends meet just so I could say that I was out on my own didn’t flip my skirt. Why would I want to take on all of THAT when I was already dealing with all of THIS? Then I quit my job and decided to become a writer and now I can’t move out even though now I want to because I’m flat broke because the only part of the starving artist stereotype I’ve mastered is the starving part (my bank account is definitely starving). So, once again I’m looking at taking a crap job to make money, which will require me adjusting my writing schedule to accomidate it and I’ll still end up stuck in this house and the only headway I’ll make is the satisfaction in not having to ask my dad for money.

That’s if I can get hired somewhere. The job hunt has not been positive up to this point.

So I’m broke, living at home, and struggling to turn an unsuccessful writing career into a successful one.

I take responsibility for that. I take credit for it. I had choices to make, I made them, and it led me to this point.

Now I have new choices to make. And I only hope I can make the right ones that get me out of this mess.

I’m ready to take responsibility for some victories now.

Suffering Seasons

~ Kiki Writes ~ Leave a comment

The Cubs had a disappointing 2010 season and so did I. It has nothing to do with being a Cubs fan. It just so happens that we both had a similarly crappy year.

Like the Cubs going into Spring Training, I came into 30 so full of hope and ambition and promise. This was supposed to be my year, THE year, and I was going to make my waves and get things done and 30 was going to be a success. And like the Cubs getting hammered in their Opening Day game in Atlanta, it was very quickly apparent that was not going to be the case for me or them.

Very early on this year I realized that one of my worst fears had come true and that I had gained back most, if not all, of the weight I’d spent four years losing. I took a moment to berate myself and then I got myself a new exercise schedule, getting back into the moving groove that I had gotten out of the year before. It worked before; I was confident it would work again. Only it didn’t. Like Derrick Lee and Aramis Ramirez hitting 3rd and 4th in the line-up, my go to guys just weren’t producing. It wasn’t until August until I started seeing a change in my body and very tentitively thought that maybe I might have lost a few pounds, but because it took this long to lose so little, I’m not really encouraged about the long-term. I’d really rather not spend the next few years losing only ten pounds in 12 months. I need better production than that and it bugs me that I’m not getting it from my established methods.

The Cubs went into the season with four rookies, three of them in the bullpen and one of them on the bench. And they just kept adding them as the year dragged on.  I started off with a few rookies of my own; new short stories that I would send out. Success for all of us was pretty limited. “Land of the Voting Dead” was my Starlin Castro (it was the only story I sold); “Such a Pretty Face” is my Justin Berg (it had a little bit of success placing in a contest, but continues to struggle in getting properly published). But, I know that like rookies, you just keep sending them out there because they will benefit from the experience.  Meanwhile, I agonize for them and over them.

In July, Carlos Zambrano had a meltdown and ended up on the restricted list. My laptop beat him to the punch by a couple of weeks and my Internet beat him a few days. While Zambrano was off getting anger management therapy, I spent a month negotiating Christmas/birthday presents to get a new laptop, waiting on a hand-me-down desktop from my mother, and trying to wrangle an Internet service. After two false starts and nearly three weeks, we got it all straightened out. Unfortunately, as a result, I missed a couple of submission deadlines. The lack of computer also through a serious wrench in my writing mojo (though I did get caught up on my reading) that took me two months to reestablish. Zambrano made a much better comeback than I did.

Missing out on the deadlines hurt the worst because it meant I was missing out on potentially making some money. Like the Cubs with their expensive contracts, I got myself into my own monetary mess but not having a regular income since February of ’08. I know and accept that and I’m trying to work with what I have. The Cubs shed salary by trading Derrick Lee, Ryan Theriot, Mike Fontenot, and Ted Lilly (of all of these trades, losing Lilly broke my heart the most, even if we did get Blake DeWitt out of it). I ended up selling my action figures to make a buck, but still ended up borrowing money off of my dad more times than I’d like to make ends meet.

Without a doubt, the year has been rough and disappointing, but there were some bright spots. Where the Cubs had some promising rookies like Castro, Tyler Colvin, Andrew Cashner, Casey Coleman, and James Russell, surprisingly good returns from Carlos Silva and Marlon Byrd, and a strong finish to the season under Mike Quade, I got to meet up with family that I haven’t seen for a long time, spend lots of time with my young nieces, and cash in an early Christmas present from my mom: a trip to Wrigley to see the Cubs play.

Naturally, they lost 1-0 to the Giants.

But, that’s okay. It just further adds to my argument of how sympatico I was with my team. We suffered in different ways, but we suffered together. The 2010 Cubs will always have a special place in my heart because of that. Because of them, I didn’t have to suffer alone.

I appreciate that.

NaNoWriMo Update:

Total Word Count: 22,063

Chapter 1 Word Count: 2,239
Chapter 2 Word Count: 2,084
Chapter 3 Word Count: 2,163
Chapter 4 Word Count: 2,108
Chapter 5 Word Count: 2,100
Chapter 6 Word Count: 2,083
Chapter 7 Word Count: 2,032
Chapter 8 Word Count: 2,041
Chapter 9 Word Count: 2,342
Chapter 10 Word Count: 2,870