Caroline's Blog of Woe

Gentlemen, we need to talk.

By this I mean, I’m going to talk and I hope you’ll listen.

A lot of you out there are good guys. You love the woman you’re with. You support her in the things she thinks are important. You share the housework. You share the burdens of your lives together.  

Let me say, “Yay!”

You get it. You understand that the woman you’re with is a person in and of herself and is not just an adjunct to you.

But there’s still a problem.

Now I’m not going to bore you with a litany of facts about the culture we live in. I’m not even going to point out that there’s still massive inequality between the sexes despite over 150 years of struggle by women because you know all that. Patriarchy hurts us all.

The problem is when you get defensive and worn out with hearing about these things from your partner.

I understand.  It sucks.  You’re a good dude and there’s world of crappy dudes out there.  I get that you just want to say, “But that’s not me!  I’m not like those other guys.  Look, I hate rape and rape culture.  I hate that women get paid less than men.  I hate all the same stuff you hate!”

And that’s when you’ve missed the point.

See, when your partner – or any woman for that matter – shares with you her frustration with the society we’re in, she’s not talking about you.  She’s talking about herself.  She’s talking about the grinding frustration and daily assault on who she is because she’s walking around with a vagina instead of a penis.

This isn’t about you.

And no matter how frustrated and annoyed you are with hearing about yet another shitty thing that some other dude did, trust me, it’s not even a fraction of the frustration she feels on a daily basis just living in the world.

This is for my writer friends. Is it just me or does everyone have the problem of getting close to the end of a story/book and finding it more and more difficult to get work done?

I know this sounds idiotic, but I find myself staring at the screen (after much work avoidance) dreading the end of whatever I’m working on.  I mean it’s almost Lovecraftian the horror I feel as I slog to the conclusion of a story.

First world problem, I know, but about two thirds of the way through any length project and I start having great ideas for The Next Thing I Want To Write.  Or I suddenly need to research the flight speed of swallows.  Or the cat box needs to be cleaned.  Right.  Now.

When I complained about this to Brad Denton he called it “shaving the cat.”  As in, “Hey, I think the cat needs to be shaved.”  Because that’s a thing.  Let’s face it writers are Jedi Masters at work avoiding.

In fact, this blog post is just another work avoidance tact.  And there’s laundry that needs to be done. (Seriously, I’ve been sick for almost two months and the laundry situation is pretty dire. I think Warren is using old gym shorts for underwear.)

See what I mean?  I’m getting to the end of this and . . .

I’m going to make a confession. I suck at spelling. My handwriting is also appalling. I actually flunked handwriting in second grade. I had As and Bs in all my other sections, but yeah, flunking the handwriting. (And I blame those enormous pencils they gave us. Yes, a pencil with a circumference roughly the size of a sequoia in the tiny hands of a second grader. What could possibly go wrong?) I can’t remember if I flunked spelling, but I know I didn’t do well in it.

I bring this up because of Christmas cards. Many years ago, I did the whole sending out Christmas cards thing. I can’t remember how many I would send, but it was a metric crapton. And even though my handwriting is horrible, I would hand-address each envelope, try to write something personal, and then try to sign our names legibly enough so that the recipient wouldn’t spend fifteen minutes saying, “Do you know someone named Marvin Spencer? And his wife is called Squiggly line?”

Over the years, I’ve managed to develop slightly legible writing. I can only do this if I write slowly and use a certain kind of pen. (Pilot V Razor Point Extra Fine) And even then its not actually cursive. I have to use mostly capital letters. Indeed, my “real life” signature is little more than a scrawl, but (at the behest of Maureen McHugh) I created a somewhat good autograph for those four times I’ve needed it. (Okay, that was a little lie. I’ve done a couple of mass autographings over the years. There comes a point after about the 100th book where your name ceases to have meaning. It’s both Zen and terrifying.)

The last couple of years, I haven’t sent cards at all. Not because I didn’t want to, but because there were extenuating circumstances. This year, I was sick for all of December. Last year, I was monumentally depressed. Like a lot of people, the holidays for me are a mixed bag. Also, sending cards always felt filled with an endless opportunity for my sad spelling state to be revealed.

I mention this because for a long time, I was terribly ashamed of my spelling. And indeed, I didn’t know that there are lots of people who are perfectly bright and capable, but who are also shitty spellers. The reason I didn’t know this is because a lot of people who are good spellers think that if you’re a poor speller, you’re a moron. And the Internet has allowed this soft bigotry to multiply.

In fact, good spellers are often quite smug about their spelling despite evidence that good spelling isn’t related to intellect at all. Perhaps I’m resentful because, yeah, I was the kid who was always the first out in spelling bees. (And, oh, the pitying stares. From kids who weren’t at half my advanced reading level and who cheated off me on math tests.)

Over the years, I’ve become a slightly better speller. But I still don’t trust myself. I have first readers for everything because I know I’m going to get stuff wrong. Yes, I’m obsessive about spell checking, but spell checkers are stupid devices. By that I mean they will often make suggestions (or even auto-correct) that aren’t right.

The bitterest irony is that I find I often see spelling errors in other people’s writing. And there have been moments when I’ve judged what they were saying because of misspellings. And how douchey is that?

So, I guess what I’m trying to say is, I’m really sorry if you didn’t get a Christmas card from me. But at least you didn’t have to wonder who the hell sent that weird card with the terrible spelling and the mysterious squiggles.

This past summer,  I went to Houston to get my eyes checked by the pros from Dover.  I had to wait about six weeks because one of the doctors is the Greg House of eye doctoring and there was no room in his schedule to see me.  Needless to say, the wait to get my eyes checked was awesome. (By that I mean, terrifying, nerve-wracking, and panic-making.  I tend to err on The Worst Thing That Could Happen side of things.)

I was down in the swamplands because I’d complained to my regular eye doctor about this problem I’d been having with my eyes.  I’d noticed that it was taking an inordinately  long time for my eyes to adjust from light environments to dark ones.  She looks around in my eye, leaves the room for about ten minutes, comes back in and says, “Here are directions to Austin Retina.  I’ve already set up an appointment.”

Perhaps my look of utter panic made her say, “I don’t think you have retinitis pigmentosa.”  Well, good.

So I hop into my car, zip off the Austin Retina, and go through a battery of tests.  One of which was injecting dye so they could get better pictures.  They didn’t warn me that it would color everything red like a low-budget horror film from the 50s.  For a moment, I expected there to be a giant shadow of a knife-weilding maniac on the wall behind me.  So disappointed.

More tests. More pictures of my adorable eyeballs. Finally, I see the doctor who immediately starts using massive amounts of medical jargon while explaining that he has no idea what’s going on with my eyes.  (And I love, love, love jargon.  Normally, I would have been tickled. Not so much this time.)

And that doctor sends me to Houston to see the pros from Dover. More tests. Hilariously enough, the new tests involve being stuck in a tiny dark room with a lab tech and the person she was training, jamming my face into Hammer film torture device that flashes lights in your face while your eyes are dilated, and at one point having suction cups attached to my eyes.

The suction cup thing didn’t hurt a bit, by the way.   Really, I was anticipating a Ludovico experience, but, instead, it was completely benign. 

The test results come back while we’re waiting. There’s nothing organically wrong with my retinas. So, we continue on the final appointment.  I answer a lot of question, my eyes get dilated again (now there’s torture), and the result is: I’m a medical mystery.

That’s right. Nothing wrong with the retinas, but right underneath is a layer of cells that are mysteriously (and symmetrically) discolored. No idea how it happened. I’m not going blind. The weird problem with the adjusting between bright and dark isn’t going to go away, but it’s not a serious issue.

What I discovered was to not freak out until you have all the facts. (I know, it is my usual go to position.) When there’s weird shit going on with your body, get it checked.

I say the second because in the last year, I’ve lost two friends. They both died because they were worried about going to the doctor because it might be expensive. (I’m lucky. I have insurance right now so this is easy for me to say.) But believe me when I say, your friends and family would rather help you pay your damn bills than put you into the ground.

After discovering that bits and piece of my website were broken, I decided fix it. Somehow, I swear I was looking, I ended up with this snazzy new blog instead.

Look!  It’s all fresh, clean and doesn’t have a bit of snark on it.  I’ll be fixing that soon. (When I was writing with the other loons over at eatourbrains, I was known as the Queen of Snark.  Now if I can just find my damned tiara…)