I Hate the Way You Lay On My Tiger Sunday

Right after we opened my current show, over seven years ago, I took a creative writing class in the city. It was the first time in my adult life that I knew I would be in the same place for the next ten weeks and available every Monday night, so I took advantage of it.

There was a woman in the class who had one of the best short story opening lines ever:

“I hate the way you eat your sandwich.”

It did then and continues to now serve as the basis by which I measure good dialogue in fiction.

Good dialogue in fiction comes from real life- our instructor, author Matt de le Peña taught us that. A statement like the one above can only come from someone stuck in a situation with another person that feels so interminable that they’re either going to kill the other guy, escape in the dead of night, or sell their soul to Satan to make it stop. It immediately sets tension and speaks volumes, with very few words.

When you’re with someone your whole life- or what feels like your whole life- you can fixate on the way they take their socks off, the sound they make before they answer the office phone, how they always move your coffee mug. It can make you crazy.

mytiger — I hate the way you lay on my tiger. Just to mock me. Not even playing with it.

What do you fixate on? I’m looking for some good lines.

Here are your links.

My favorite description of a first encounter with foie gras: Duck, Duck, Gross on Friday Night Casserole.

A courageous post about mental illness: The Clothespin Theory on Going Round and Round.

I love this. From the about page: Honoring natural selection’s most baffling creations. Go home, evolution, you are drunk. WTF,Evolution?

I dug this post about taking a couple of teenagers to NYC for their first trip, and losing an audition: You Can Learn a Lot From Losing on Running On Wine.

Heart Disease is the number one killer of women. February is National Heart Month. This is a great post from Darla about her mother: What the Heart Knows on She’s a Maineiac. Please do also watch the really eye-opening and funny video at the end of the post from Go Red For Women.

Happy Sunday.

What’s that Sound?

I was in our bedroom writing. The kids were all downstairs and CC was at work. Casey was sacked out on the bed behind me.

And there was this sound. . .

One of those sounds that’s just on the edge of your consciousness. You don’t really notice it at first, but it keeps repeating. It repeats enough and you suddenly realize you can’t identify it, and that’s a problem.

Because unidentified sounds at home fall into one of two categories: Things That Will Kill You – think: burglars, bears, or bombs – and Things That Will Cost You Money like, say, maybe a tree falling on the house. Or a toilet overflowing for so long before someone mentions it that it floods the garage. Not that I would know anything about either of these.

This sound was a little knock-knock, a little tap-tap, with a bonus suction sound.

“What the hell is that?”

I said this out loud. I talk to myself out loud a lot. I am not bothered by this. It’s only a problem when another person is in the room and they go, “What?” and I get all indignant and say, “I wasn’t talking to you!” because they just interrupted me when I was talking to me.

I walked out of the room to investigate.

In one of many moments as a pet owner in which I have regretted not having a camera on my person, I found that a single dish had been left on the table when the kids cleaned up after dinner: the top to the tupperware cake keeper.

The cake keeper in our house serves only one purpose: to keep people from eating the cake between the time it is made and the time it is served. We never have “leftover” cake. Thus there was no need to replace the cake keeper top on the cake, since there was no more cake. Like many other things in my house, because it was unable to fulfill one of their immediate needs, it became invisible to the kids.

But not to Jack.

The knock-knock, tap-tap, suction sound was the sound of Jack having wedged himself entirely inside the lid as he licked out the little bits of icing stuck to it. He was moving himself all over the table as he shifted side to side, licking the edges. Kinda like one of those balance boards at the gym. Except with icing. And sides.

It reminded me of a similar experience when the one dish that had been left on the table was a measuring cup half full of gravy. I came out to find Jack, head jammed down in that cup, drinking for all he was worth before someone discovered him, gravy all over his ears.

Do you think there’s a market for cake-keeper-as-small-dog-hamster-wheel?

What’s your dog gotten into lately?

Wordless One & Done

Hey. It's One & Done Sunday. — Hey. It’s One & Done Sunday.

Here are your links:

There’s a lot to be said for feeling the fear and doing it anyway. Go Jules Go writes about posting a video clip of her singing on her blog: Hitting The Right Note Please do click on the clink in the post of her singing- it made me really happy.

Renée A. Schuls-Jacobson wrote this really cool and disturbing piece that stuck with me. Not a Tale for Children.

Darla always makes me laugh: Top Fifteen Signs You’re Old– She’s a Maineiac

Another badass post from Melissa Stetton on Pretty Bored: Bikini Auditions, Ugh.

I loved this post too– it’s funny-yet-poignant-but-not-in-a-way-that-makes-you-want-to-strangle-kittens-or-kick-babies: Life- The Yelp Reviews on Byronic Man. I gotta work on my own review.

Happy Sunday.