Anti-Resolution

I know this is going to sound pessimistic as hell, but I'm no longer a fan of New Year's resolutions. People swear that they will exercise, that they will no longer eat fast food, that they will get back into a specific hobby or passion and really go for it this time. But if/when it doesn't happen exactly how they pictured it going down, they feel like failures, which obviously means you might as well forget about the whole thing and stop trying until next year.

It's almost like the midnight chimes and cheers and kisses and sparklers are expected to materialize into super ambitious body invading aliens to carry the resolution out for us.

This time last year, I was feeling pretty dang fine. I had just had a baby, and was confident that my first novel, The Tortures of Blight, was very close to going on submission. I made my New Year's resolution to get it sold.

That didn't happen. I didn't even get to submission, and while I was relieved to be able to step away and put the year long treck through revisions behind me, I did feel like a little bit of a failure.

What does this have to do with New Year's resolutions?

At the end of the old year, the prospect of a new untouched one seems so wonderful and refreshing. Endless possibilities, right? YES. But I think that I, as do many others out there, sort of expect some of the stuff to fall into place. You lit your heart on fire making the damn resolution to begin with, then you had a party in its honor...isn't that enough? NO. And if you end up "failing," you will get the exact opposite feeling of that adrenaline fuck-yeah-I-can-do-this rush you felt when you officially decided what your resolution was in the first place.

And when a feeling of that intensity comes over you, it will often affect how you continue living after it goes away. You'll naturally want to protect yourself from feeling that way again, and a lot of times the easiest way of making that happen is to shoot lower. Please don't do that.

There are endless possibilities for all of us, friends, no matter what day of the year it is.

Still, I don't treat this time of year like any other. I still love the New Year state of mind, but I've decided this year that instead of a resolution, I will simply evaluate why whatever resolution I would have chosen feels too difficult/scary to jump start without the advantage of the drug like anything-is-possible feeling the holiday brings.

I want to get a book deal this year. It is my dream. When I'm bored in bed at night, I fantasize about the moment it happens, I fantasize about deadlines, I fantasize about stressing the fuck out to meet them. But instead of leaving it at that, like I did last year, I'm going to put forth that focus into doing what I can to make it happen, instead of just going through the motions to get closer.

I'm not going to even think about the fantasies of being published while I'm actually writing, which I believe I did while revising Tortures and which I believe I haven't done while revising Take. And after only 3 drafts, as compared to the 9 or so Tortures endured (that could be totally off, I feel like I lost count lol) my agent is telling me that my *final* notes for Take will be on their way to me right after the new year kicks off.

For me, this new year brings hope with it, and I don't want to confine myself to a single resolution or count my success around it. There are many things that I'd like to accomplish this year: move further ahead in my career, lose some weight, save enough money to move to Oregon, yada yada yada.

But tonight as I'm counting down the final seconds left in this year, I will raise my glass and cheer and be happy about looking forward. I will be ready to take on obstacles, I will be ready to try my hardest. Giving up on a resolution is easy, giving up on a well thought out and deeply rooted goal is not.

So cheers to the new year!!! Let's go kick it in the ass, instead of just making a polite wish to do so.

-A.

Dinner

It’s dinner time and we are eating Chef Boyardee Ravioli and coleslaw from a large plastic deli cup. The coleslaw sits between us, and the smell of the sickly sweet slop is much too heavy.

I’m suddenly overwhelmed with a sense of dread. My father has stopped eating. Stopped moving. He looks like a mannequin, hunched over his plate with his thick glasses magnifying his eyes. I’m terrified to move or speak.

My father, in one lightning quick movement, sits upright and slams his hand into the coleslaw. It flies everywhere, huge clumps sliding over his forearm and fist. His eyes shift from the coleslaw to my face like magnets.

“I KNOW WHAT YOU ARE, BITCH.” He bellows and is suddenly wearing all black and I think no, no, it was just plain workday clothes…

Under the table, I press the fingers of my right hand into my left palm. The fingers slide through it like water. The reality test has failed and I am definitely dreaming. While part of me is relieved, my terror is making the air thick. I can’t move normally, I’m in slow motion and my father is just sitting there, spitting with rage, coleslaw running in between the fingers of his clenched fist and gathering in beads on his arm hair.

“Come here bitch,” he says, “so I can smell your hair.”

“S…stop!” I try to command, I should be in control, I should be able to make him go away go away go away.

He doesn’t go away. I can’t control the dream. I’m just aware, like a prisoner in someone else’s mind. His mind.

He grabs the meat cleaver that has appeared on the table and hacks off his own hand, the blood bleeding into the coleslaw, the smell of copper and mayonnaise. “I KNOW WHAT YOU ARE!”

I wake up mid scream and throw my hands over my mouth. How long was I screaming? Did he hear me? I scramble to sit up and grab for the alarm clock that is resting on the edge of the bathroom sink. It’s 3:23 AM, I see right before the clock falls and smashes into the tile floor, the sound loud and echoing. The green glow from the clock flickers. I know it's over.

My bedroom door was open and I think I can hear movement on the carpet in my room. Then the bathroom door cracks open and I jump a foot. My father pokes his head in.

“Is everything okay, Pumpkin? I thought I heard a crash.” This is the first time he has seen me sleeping in the bathtub but he is showing no signs of any sort of realization. He gazes down at me, concerned.

“I’m okay, Dad. I just had a bad dream.”

“Oh, I’m sorry to hear that.” Soft voice. He starts to leave, closing the door behind him. “Just remember that I’m always right across the hall if things get too creepy.”

But they have, I want to say. And now Mom is dead.

I wait until I hear his bedroom door click shut and swing my legs over the side of the tub. I fly for the straight bleach that I've poured into a plastic spray bottle that is stashed beneath the sink. I saturate the tiles near the door where his toes overstepped the carpet, the wall where his hand rested, the door knob of the door even though it's on the outside. My nose and eyes and throat burn with a scary intensity, but I welcome it and don't attempt to move my face away from the fumes.

Within twenty minutes, I’ve written every detail of the dream into the journal and crawled back into the bathtub. Sleep comes after three pills.

*

Gemmaland teaser, not for lovers of coleslaw. ;)

Currently listening to: Young Men Dead by The Black Angels (Alan Wake soundtrack ftw)

Currently reading: The Silence Of The Lambs, Thomas Harris

Currently feeling: Pumped as hell to finish this book.

The Squidling Turns One

Today is a Squidling post.

I have never really explained why I refer to my daughter as The Squidling, and now is as good of a time as ever: When she concentrates on something really hard, her hands and feet all start doing this crazy wavy thing, and she moves all of her fingers like tentacles. I haven't had any exclusively squiddy posts in a very long time, so I went to my blog archives and read through some of the stuff from 2009. Many of my '09 posts were about my pregnancy, and reading all that stuff totally brought it all back to me. Things like:


-The moment I knew I was pregnant. The next morning, I woke up to Sir Edmund the Hotness looking at me with the slightest smile on his face. Amazing feeling, that was. (And not at all stalker-creepy like it sounds, haha!)

-The random crying, followed by a three month period of absolute hell that was defined by saltines and Sprite. Funny morning sickness true story: when Joanna called me for the first time to offer representation, I was battling puking the whole time. I just could not bring myself to ask her to hold on, because holy-shit-a-freaking-New-York-City-literary-agent-IS-TALKING-TO-ME. The second I hung up with her, I sprinted past Eddie and promptly threw up in the bathroom. THEN I told him that I had just gotten an agent.

-The crazy ass, horrifying dreams that I seemed to have every. Single. Night.

-Finding out that I was going to be having a girl Squidling. We knew her name for a year before even getting pregnant: She would be our sweet Lily Mila.

-The incredibly bitchy hormonal random ramblings I posted on my blog.

-Being excited to balance pie on my preggo belly.

-The despair of getting "gestational diabetes" and having to STOP EATING CANDIES. *shudder*

-The super special memory of going to the hospital and finally meeting my perfect Squidling on Christmas Eve.

So since her birthday is on Christmas Eve, we had her party a few days early and she had a blast. (And ate LOTS of cake.) Today, she crawled over to the coffee table, saw something she wanted on it, and STOOD UP. As I type this, she is asleep in her own room, and we won't all be sharing a bed anymore. (She slept in her room for about a month or so when she was three or four months old, but then teething struck and we felt bad so she moved back in with us.) The fact that the transfer back to her room took only one try/night and she didn't even blink an eye makes me proud and sad at the same time.


And now as I'm looking at these old pictures, I'm crying. A lot. She was so tiny. One of my favorite memories is the first night we brought her home from the hospital and she looked too tiny in her big ass crib. We were afraid to bring her into our bed, because...*embarassed nod* we were just certain that our soft mattress wouldn't provide adequate support and she would inevitably die from SIDS if she slept on it. Hey, we were majorly sleep deprived already at that point. (Sleeping in the hospital was impossible for both of us.)



So...we slept on the futon in our living room. All crunched together. Eddie and I were both terrified of rolling over her so neither of us moved a muscle. In the morning, I found them like this:



God. I seriously can't even handle that picture.






Then she kept growing and growing, just like everybody promised. (Even though we didn't believe them.) We shot random ass YouTubes of her and took pictures on a daily basis.






























Even now, I know that one years old is still a tiny baby. But to me, it feels like she's sixteen. Which makes me wonder what I'll be thinking when she really is sixteen. I'll probably freak the fuck out then come to this blog to write about it and link this exact post.

So, Lily Mila Lukavics, I know that one day you are going to be old enough to read this, and when you do I hope you can tell that your Mama would burn the world down for you. I hope you can tell that you've brought the purest form of joy to mine and your Dad's life from the second we found out I was pregnant with you. I hope you can tell that we wanted you, that we tried for you, and that no matter what you are doing in life we will be there for you.

Here is my sweet Squidling enjoying her birthday cake:





And here is what a baby who has overdosed on cake looks like:





HAPPY BIRTHDAY LILY!

Read It Again

I read a post recently over at YA Highway by Kaitlin Ward on the topic of rereading and it definitely caught my interest straight from the title. To be honest, when I was younger I reread all the time, because it wasn't as easy to get a new book anyway and I loved the books I already had.

Then I realized that I could tell my life in stages as to which books I loved- starting with

Peter Rabbit and Mother Goose and Frog and Toad and How Spider Saved Christmas and How Spider Saved Halloween and The Teacher From The Black Lagoon (my kindergarten teacher had to pry those headphones away from me with that one,) and The True Story of the 3 Little Pigs and Freckle Juice and The Chocolate Touch and A Begonia For Miss. Applebaum and Are You There God It's Me Margaret and Amelia Bedelia and Mrs. Piggle Wiggle and Goosebumps, and Little Women and Fear Street and Scary Stories To Tell In The Dark (the art in that book is beautifully terrifying- see pic,) and the Wayside School series, and few Stephen Kings (Carrie, Pet Semetary, and The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon were my faves and the only ones I could stay with for the whole thing.) And of course, some life changing Harry Potter.

Also, um....I may or may not confess to have also been in love with The Baby Sitter's Little Sister series somewhere in there. (KAREN BREWER FTW.)

Then I got to high school and could drive to Barnes and Noble. Between the store and my school's library, I got a kind-of-wide-but-not-really variety that also constituted heavy rereading. There was Speak, and Crooked, and more life changing Harry Potter, Fierce People, the Jessica Darling series, and Running With Scissors, and The Lovely Bones, and Memoirs of a Geisha, and Hairstyles Of The Damned and How The Light Gets In and The Perks of Being a Wallflower and The Virgin Suicides (do not even get me started on rereading that one. I USED A FREAKING HIGHLIGHTER.)

Anyways, the point of all this reminiscing was that lately I had forgotten just how essential rereading is for the both the book lover and the author in me. I had only really reread Ballads of Suburbia. Since I was really new to the whole "YA" thing, I just tried to read a huge variety to drink it all in and observe and enjoy myself. Then I reread Beautiful by Amy Reed and it's like a light bulb went off. (The pages of that book are starting to get worn, seriously yo.)

I love that book so much now, way way more than I did when I first read it, even though I liked it then and read it in two sittings. It's a super-haunting-super-beautiful type of book, true to its name.

So the moral of the story is, for me anyways, rereading is just as important if not a bit more so than reading a bunch of new books right in a row.

Okay, it's time to go get ready for holiday baking day with my aunt. We are making caramel corn, peppermint bark, and sugar cookies. Mmmmmmmmm.

What about you guys, though? What are your favorite childhood/high school rereads?

-a.