Journal Crazy

~ Kiki Writes ~ Leave a comment

My mother gave me a journal as part of the now defunct “Aunt Kiki” holiday. Pretty and purple, the script on the cover says “Me, Myself, and I: An Instrospective Collection of My Innermost Thougths and Feelings” and the design features three faces in a knotwork ontop of a silver diamond, and it sat for a month before I wrote in it.

In that first journal I admitted that part of my hestance wasn’t just marring a pristine page; I was afraid to remove my innermost thoughts from the safety of my brain. Out of my head, they could be exposed to prying eyes with no respect for privacy and judged harshly. Worse, out of my head, they could be real.

The reluctance is evident in that first journal. First of all, I didn’t use it much. The entries begin July of 2003 and end January 2008. Nearly five years. Secondly, there’s a sense of holding back in some of the earlier entries. I was too scared to put down everything into words, all the thoughts, all the emotions, all the crazy bouncing around in my head.

You can see me get more comfortable with opening up over the course of the entries in that first journal. I got better at it and I did it more frequently.

My second journal I believe Carrie bought me as a birthday present. It’s rainbow colored, cheerful and simple, and I’d say it has about as many pages as my first one. The entries in it cover from January of 2008 until December of 2009.

Yeah, I got a lot better at writing in it more often. I started using it more as it was intended. Instead of being afraid of putting my thoughts down on paper, it became THE place to put my thoughts to get them out of my head. It became the refuge of my frustrations, mostly. It let me get the things off of my chest that other people wouldn’t, mostly because the ensuing arguement would be pointless and solve nothing.

It also became the locked box for the mushiest part of my heart, allowing me to explore those sweet, vulnerable feelings I don’t like to admit I have. There are some romantic ideas in those pages. Ideas that would absolutely shock the people who know me as the horror loving hard-ass that make men cry for their mothers and make women try to befriend me so I won’t eat them.

My last journal was red. That’s it. Just red. The entries cover from December of 2009 to January of this year. This is the journal I got truly comfortable in. This is the journal I put my craziest thoughts in. I gave myself permission to be absolutely ambitious and hopeful and unrealistic and unrestrained. There is some serious, wild insanity on those pages and to date, if there were any journals I’d burn before my death, that would be the first one on the fire.

Since that first journal, I’ve moved from being reluctant to dependent. I did my last entry in my red journal on my birthday with no new journal waiting for me. I’m slowly moving into frantic mode. I have things to write down, thougths that need ink! I’ve gone from not even shrugging at the idea of missing a couple of months to feeling guilty if I only have two entries for a given month.

Right now, I’m thinking about all of the things, good, bad, and crazy, I want to put in my new journal as soon as I get it. I fantasize about marring those clean pages with the inner workings of my mind. It’s going to feel so good to get all of that out.

And with any luck at all, in thirty years I’ll be able to read back over those stored thoughts and marvel at how I functioned, coped, struggled, and felt during those important years, some of which may be lost to the sands of time by then.

More likely, though, I’ll just shake my head and laugh and think, “Wow. You were really kinda nuts back then, weren’t you?” before putting down my old journal and picking up a new journal to scribble once again.

Recipe: Pickle Wraps

~ Kiki Writes ~ Leave a comment

When I announced on Twitter that I was making pickle wraps for my New Year’s Eve celebration, I got quite a few comments asking what they were and a couple of requests for the recipe. I decided posting the recipe would make for a good Friday Funtimes post.

And since I do like to cook, I figured that posting my recipes from time to time would be a good go-to for the Fridays that I’m not feeling particularly fun.

Food is fun.

Pickle Wraps

Ingredients
1 jar of small, whole dill pickles
2 90 calorie packages of Budding’s Beef (any deli thin sliced corned beef will do, really)
1 8oz container of cream cheese (I like the low fat kind)

Use a paper towel to dry off the pickles. Spread a thin layer of the cream cheese on one slice of the beef. Set the pickle on the edge of the cream cheesed beef and roll it up. Slice up the pickle into rounds no more than quarter of an inch thick. Serves several people at once or one person over several days (at least that’s my experience).

One word of caution: This recipe is not for everyone. I know it sounds terrible and even some pickle lovers have a hard time trying it. Rarely does it work out well for someone not fond of pickles. In fact, my roommate Carrie swears it’s the most vile thing she’s ever put in her mouth.

I’m going to take her word for that.

Enjoy!

What Do You Do When Thousands of People Die On Your Birthday?

~ Kiki Writes ~ Leave a comment

A year ago today I turned 30 years old. While I did that hundreds of thousands of people died in a devestating earthquake in Haiti.

Unlike most other people, particularly the people around my age, I actually had been looking forward to turning 30 and deep down I wished I could have been able to do something really spectacular to celebrate. I wanted my 30th to be memorable.

I should have been more specific.

No matter what I do on my birthday, it’s my special day. I’ve been sick on my birthday (more than is fair, in my opinion). I’ve worked on my birthday. I’ve had parties. I’ve spent it alone. But no matter how I spend the day, in my head it’s always special because it’s mine.

My 30th was no different. I went to the DMV to renew my license. It’s never much of a hassle in a town of 7,000, but that day it was almost enjoyable. My new picture is the first ID picture I’ve taken in my life that didn’t look like a mugshot following a night of booze and a misused pool cue. Lunch was just a trip through the McDonald’s drive-thru, but that was one delicious chicken sandwich. It was all due to the charm of my birthday and the glow of turning 30.

And then there was an earthquake.

I saw it first on Twitter. Initially, it was just another earthquake in a country I never planned to visit. Earthquake reports come across my Twitter feed all the time about other countries, one tweet maybe retweetted by two or three different people, and that’d be the end of the earth-shaking news.

But Haiti didn’t disappear.

More and more news came over my wire, mixing the birthday wishes with death toll numbers. The shine of my birthday had no affect on that kind of devestation. Turning 30 couldn’t compete iwth the destruction of pretty much an entire country.

So I didn’t try. I didn’t speak Haiti’s name all day and though I was aware of the news and kept up to date on the rising numbers and mounting wreckage, I kept it in my peripheral view.

Because it was my birthday, dammit! My day! And the Earth had no right to go heaving up and crushing people on my birthday. Really, it shouldn’t be doing it on any day, but this day in particular. I felt bad enough when Maurice Gibb died on my birthday. But a huge percentage of a country’s population? That’s a black cloud that lingers. Even if  I wasn’t do very much to celebrate it, my 30th birthday was now tainted, haunted, by the deaths of thousands.

I ignored that fact. I really did.

In a move that was purely and unabashedly selfish, I stuck my fingers in my ears and LALA’d in the face of a natural disaster and the dead people it brough with it. I averted my gaze from teh tragedy and focused my eyes on the glory that was the anniversary of my birth.

The rest of the day proceeded as planned. I made shrimp pasta for dinner. I wallowed in the birthday wishes from friends and family. I got a few presents. I ate cupcakes that my mother had gotten for me. My friend and roommate, Carrie, took pictures of me while I ate one, goofy, smiling pictures that belied the bizarre kind of survivor’s guilt that I felt.

Here I was celebrating a day that was seen by the rest of the world as a tragedy. And I was going to celebrate that day in teh years to come as a day of birth while everyone else would see it as an anniversary of death.

Against my will, I find myself a member of a very unique club. It’s a club of people who share their birthdays with 9/11, the Oklahoma City Bombing, the Columbine shootings, the Christmas Day tsunami, Pearl Harbor, and other notorious days known better for death than life. I’m not sure how to deal with that.

It’s a silly thing, I know. It’s a selfish thing, I know. But it’s my first birthday since this huge tragedy, so I’m still working out how to share my birthday with death.

I admit that last year I hid my head in the sand and really indulged in my selfishness, but I think I redeemed myself a little bit at the end of the day.

My birthday money went to Haiti.

Writing–Social Anxiety Network

~ Kiki Writes ~ Leave a comment

A big part of a writing career these days is networking. Getting to know fellow writers, making connections with them that could lead to making connections with other people in the business, other writers, agents, publishers, editors.

Networking is also how writers today build a fanbase and attract attention. Through Twitter and Facebook and other fabulous internet socializing tools, writers can sell themselves and their work to the readers they’re hoping to attract.

This is all well and good. It’s a great way to connect with readers and it’s a great way to connect with others in the writing business. It brings down walls and makes the writing feel less lonely. Many writers, even the most shy ones, thrive doing this sort of thing.

However, I am not one of these people.

As ridiculous as it sounds (particularly if you follow me on Twitter), I have social anxiety on the Internet. For most people, the anonymity of the Internet allows them to be more outspoken, more bold. While that does apply to me in certain situations (again, Twitter), that anonymity doesn’t cover them all.

For example, other blogs. I read other blogs, but unless I know the person, I rarely comment. Even if I do know the person, that doesn’t mean I’ll comment. Sometimes I have nothing to say and I really don’t want to force something just for the sake of conversation. Most of the time, I don’t feel comfortable with commenting. I don’t feel smart enough, established enough, or legit enough to share my two cents. I feel awkward coming out of lurkerdom to comment as there is no established rapport. I’m just a stranger stopping by and saying a few words without introduction.

Which is just silly because I don’t feel that way about people who comment on my blog (or reply or retweet me on Twitter). Once I get over the shock that people are actually reading and not everything I babble just disappears into a void, I’m cool with it. I don’t know why I’d feel differently with the roles switched.

It takes me a while to warm up, I suppose.

I’m focusing on blogs because I’m a little more vocal on Twitter, but there’s still a certain amount of anxiety and awkwardness in following people and responding to certain people’s tweets. As much as I’d like to be one of the cool kids, I never have been, never will be, and I still get nervous, even on the Internet, when it comes to talking to them.

It’s a silly little thing, but it’s one that’s holding me back and is going to continue holding me back unless I overcome it. Naturally, that’s what I intend to do.

I prefer to have making an ass of myself on Twitter be my biggest social problem.

Stories By The Numbers

Stories Submitted: 3
Stories Ready: 3
Acceptances/Rejections: 0

Plans for 31

~ Kiki Writes ~ Leave a comment

On Wednesday, I’ll be turning 31 (or as I prefer to say, 30 bonus year because it sounds less dull). I don’t have big plans to celebrate my birthday. First of all, it’s on a Wednesday and Wednesdays are rarely good for rockin’ parties. Secondly, by this point after the holidays, people are tired of celebrating.

Lastly, it’s supposed to be really cold this week. Nothing kills a partying mood like the potential for sub-zero windchills and frostbite just going out for dinner.

Even though I don’t have grand plans for my birthday, I do have plans for being 31. I had plans for being 30 and I admit, most of them fell through. I had really high hopes for being 30, too. I’d been looking forward to it for years. Yet, despite all the high hopes and goals and plans and trying, being 30 wasn’t as great as it should have been. Actually, it was pretty disappointing.

But, with my birthday looming, the disappoints of being 30 fade in the light of the freshness of turning 31. I’ve got new plans, new hopes, and an unblemished optimism.

31 is going to be great like 30 wasn’t.

I plan on selling a few more stories this year. I plan on getting a novel ready to submit. I plan on fixing my finances. I plan on getting out and socializing more. I plan to continue to work on getting healthy. I plan on having a good time. I plan on improving my existence.

These plans actually don’t vary much from the ones I had for 30. They’re also not all of the plans I have for 31. As open as I’d like to be with this blog, some things are just too personal to mention. But even so, they could easily fall into the categories of either having a good time and/or improving my existence.

At the very least, I hit the high points.

Okay, so most people wouldn’t think my plans are very big. I’m not trying to run fifty marathons in fifty states or visit every baseball park in a season. Hell, I’m not even trying to skydive, rock climb, or go to Vegas. And I’m sure a few people would think there are some plans missing from my 31 To Do List. You know, like find a man or a “real” job or lose all the weight that offends other people’s delicate sensibilities.

In my defense, the plans don’t have to be big for me to be happy. So long as those plans are in line with what I really want and I make them happen, then that’s what counts. Maybe one year I’ll make an attempt to visit all of the ballparks in a single season, but this year is not the year.

This year can’t even be the year to think about it.

This year is the the year to get my house in order so next year I can think about those things.

As for the standard plans that most people make in high school and achieve in their twenties that I haven’t gotten around to yet, this year isn’t going to be the year I get around to those either. That’s not to say I’m not open to meeting someone or losing a few pounds while I work on being healthy. I plan on getting a “real” job just to help my financial situation, but I already have a real job, writing. But to be honest, I’ve just never been good at the traditional plans. If I were, then I’d already have the college degree, the career, the husband, the 2.5 kids, the house, the debt, and judging by the other people I know my age, a pending divorce, if not a finalized one.

I do better with the less-than-traditional plans and to a certain extent, I’m stellar without a plan at all.

My plans for 31 have been made and like with the plans I made for 30, I’m going to try to follow through with them.

Unlike 30, though, I’m going to put a lot more effort into 31.

Friday Five: Birthday Presents

~ Kiki Writes ~ Leave a comment

My birthday is next Wednesday and I, like so many other people, love my birthday. It’s my special day even if I don’t do anything more out of the ordinary than going to McDonald’s for lunch to celebrate it. It’s my day because it’s the anniversary of my birth and therefore, it is automatically a fantastic day.

Also, I like free stuff and birthdays are great for free stuff.

Here are five presents I would love to get for my birthday this year:

1. Tickets to a Cubs game. It’s a sin that I’ve only been to Wrigley twice in my life. Maybe they’d actually win the game so I could hear “Go Cubs Go” in person.

2. Books. I’ve got a whole wishlist of them on Amazon and I am desperately low on new reading material.

3. iTunes gift cards. I love music. I’ve got lists of songs that I’d like to acquire. Some of it recorded after 2001, even.

4. Monkees Present and Changes CDs. Yes, downloadable music is where it’s at, but they’re the last two CDs I need for my collection of original Monkees music (I’m not counting Missing Links vol. 1 and 2; I need those, too, but they’re all outtakes and alternative takes). I’ve got a great collage of the cover art going and I need those two pieces to finish. Also, the music.

5. Donations to The Dempster Family Foundation, Juvenile Diabetes Research Foundation, a local children’s hospital, or a local humane society or no-kill shelter. One of the biggest bummers to being broke is not being able to contribute as much as I’d like to charities. I think it’d be cool to have people do it for my birthday.

If you read my Christmas list, I bet you were expecting something just as wild and extravagant, huh?

Well, I’m a complex person. Get used to these sorts of surprises.

Writing–January Projects

~ Kiki Writes ~ Leave a comment

New month, new year, new projects on the whiteboard of my writing life.

The big project this month is revising The World (Saving) Series. I’ve been itching to get my revising hands on this first draft since I wrote the last word. I love this story and I want to make it better.

I’m re-reading it and making revision notes on it now and for the most part, there’s nothing major story-wise that I need to overhaul, which is nice. Most of the revisions now are just little story things like fixing some details and turning the telling into showing. I think this time I got the story right the first time.

I’m planning on this round of revisions to take two months. Planning. If I can get them done sooner, I will not complain. However, I know they won’t be done there. Not only will the technical aspects still need to be cleaned up, there are certain details I’m still going to be lacking. I’m writing about places I’ve never been to and in some case, never seen. It’s a challenge I’m going to have to overcome, but at a later date.

As I like to say, one catastrophe at a time.

With a big project that’s going to take me all month and beyond, it’s nice to say that I’ve already accomplished something in submitting three short stories. It’s nice to be able to wipe something off of the whiteboard.

Stories By the Numbers

Submitted: 3
Ready: 3
Rejected: 2 (“Game Night” and “Another Deadly Weapon”; both no response rejections)

Stories By the Numbers for 2010

Submitted: 14
Accepted: 2
Rejections: 23

No (Good With) Time

~ Kiki Writes ~ Leave a comment

I’ve got a wall calendar hanging on my closet door. I’ve got a day planner on my dressr. I’ve got a montly schedule written out on a whiteboard. The date appears in the lower right-hand corner of my laptop’s screen.

Now go ahead…ask me what day it is?

Odds are, with all of those dately things, I have no idea. I’d like to blame that on the lack of a regular job to help keep my days in check, but even when I had one, I might know the day of the week, but not the number of the month.

Not that knowing what day it is helps me in the grand scheme of things anyway because I have no concept of time. You hear people all the time say how events sneak up on them and how they didn’t realize it was so close. It’s usually because they’re busy. They’ve got their heads down, doing their thing, and when they look up, holy cow, it’s here.

For me, it’s a fact of my existence. I have no concept of time.

I can look at a date on the calendar. I can count the days from one date to another. But those days in between have no meaning for me. I have no concept of that distance.

For example, my credit card bill is due the same time of every month. I know this. When the first of the month comes around, I look at that due date and think I have plenty of time to scrape together all of the change I can dig out of couches and pick up out of gutters to pay the bill. In reality, it’s only about two weeks. And I’m ace at neglecting the timing of things like money transfers and deposits after three being processed the next day and other banking matters. I’ve cut it more than close on many occasions because I cannot grasp the fact that two weeks really isn’t that much time.

And I do it every single month.

For whatever reason, my brain will not learn this fact. It cannot process time any other way.

I say that I don’t remember birthdays and anniversaries, but the truth is, I do. I just can’t remember them in relation to the real world.

My stepdad’s birthday is December 7th. I know that. Ask me and I’ll tell you. I bought him a card. But that date means nothing to me on December 1st. I think I still have time to send him the card. Which is why I don’t mail the card until December 5th and it’s late. It’s why I hate sending cards. I have no concept of timing it so that it arrives in a timely fashion, not too early, not late.

Or I might know the date, but if I don’t know what day it is, there’s no way I can “remember” it. More than once I’ve been caught off guard by a birthday because I didn’t know the date.

My lack of skill with time has consistently caused me trouble. I’m better off not waiting on a deadling. The sooner I get something finished, the less likely I have the opportunity to screw it up. This is ONE thing that my brain has thankfully learned through repeated near-misses during my early school days. I’m sure it seemed nerdy and suck-upish by the time I hit college and I was getting my research papers done well before the deadline, but I didn’t go to college to be hip.

The approach works for academics. I can get it to work for writing, for the most part. It doesn’t work as well for buying Christmas presents or mailing things because for whatever reason, my brain insists that I have time.

It’s a constant struggle and it’s something I’m not sure I’ll ever be able to overcome or fix, and not for lack of trying either.

So until I can get the concept of time to click in this beat up brain of mine, I’m going to continue to be that guy that disappoints people with my late cards and cutting things far too close.

Sorry.

Happy birthday!

There. I’m not late.

New Year’s Resolutions

~ Kiki Writes ~ Leave a comment

It’s New Year’s Eve and today is the day that people all over make resolutions that they’ll probably keep until about Valentine’s Day if they’re really dedicated. I like to make resolutions, too, but I don’t like failure, so I like to make resolutions that are easy to keep.

Here are my five easy-to-keep resolutions for 2011:

1. Don’t get dead. This is my resolution every year and so far, I’ve done a fantastic job of keeping it.

2. Don’t lose too much weight. A little is fine, but I don’t want to go total transformation crazy.

3. Eat Oreos on occasion.

4. Don’t start smoking again.

5. Have a good time.

I’m pretty confident that I can keep those resolutions.

Easy or hard, fun or serious, what are your resolutions for the new year?