The other big D, the one that can vary from a little cloud of gray to a suicidal malaise, the one that doesn’t make any sense, isn’t attached to anything upsetting, can be harder to deal with.

And yeah, I know. Cause by nature, I’m not all that chipper. I’m not perky or pleasant, generally speaking. And I’ve had those days (and weeks and months) of sitting in my cubicle, tears streaming down my face, wondering if there’s anything in my desk sharp enough to slit my wrists. Not because I was upset about anything specific. Not because I had a good reason, per se. Which, of course, only makes it worse. Because it’s not like you can explain away that overwhelming urge to have the floor open up and swallow you.

I know some people right now who are feeling their way around in that hole, who’ve tried coping in different ways. Some turn inward, quiet, trying to sort it out on their own. Hallmark Southern, there. Don’t ever let anyone know there’s something wrong with you unless you can “testify” at Revival about it. Some try to fill the void with drugs (legal or not) or video games or gambling or food or sex.

I also know that works better for me than all the pills doctors have ever tried to shovel at me is also way harder to do than popping a Prozac or a Lexapro or Abilify. Because what works for me, what keeps my little head demons at bay, is exercise, and apparently the more of it the better. (Though, I can get a little obsessed, too. Probably because I know how easy it is to lose the habit, to go back to staring blindly at a spot on the wall wishing for the energy to take a nap.)

Which is not to say some people don’t need real medical and therapeutic assistance. Or that what works for one works for all. I’m just suggesting that if one thing isn’t working, try something else.

Fictional characters, however, maybe shouldn’t get too much help. They’re more fun damaged and crime fiction characters in particular are often very damaged. Some are hard drinking, drugging destructive types, trying to hide their sorrows in a chemical haze. Some channel their energy into kicking bad habits, some have overly-defined exercise routines. And while female characters sometimes get a bad rap (especially outside of the cozies) for being too damaged, male characters don’t seem to get off too lightly either. They’re guys who’ve seen too much, lost too much, or raised in the kind of family that’s much more interesting on paper than life.

When putting my own main character down, I may have damaged her a little too much. Not because it seemed fun, but because I spent a good number of years working with damaged kids and some of that seeped in. It’s also interesting to see what happens in one of those dysfunctional families. Often, all the kids have the same life and end up sharing similar fates. Sometimes, though, you have the “good kid” who escapes circumstances, or you have kids who end up thrown into a parental role way too early, which can have its own damaging effects. Sometimes, it’s just a matter of different personalities meeting adversity in different ways. Which is why the things I had happen to my three sisters, I had happen with my thoughts on these possibilities. 

Davis, by far seems the most resilient on the surface. I’ve had students a lot like her. They use violence to mask internal pain and they sometimes seem to start fights if for no other reason than if someone punches them, they have a physical manifestation of that pain. She is, no doubt, a hot mess. Nik, the oldest sister, is the best held together by all outward appearances. She’s the most stable with the best approximation of a normal life that doesn’t hint at their upbringing. She’s using that veneer of normal, though, as a salve and anytime it’s threatened, she tends to lose it in unpredictable ways. The youngest sister, Lane, is younger by enough that her version of the things they lived through together are colored and she had her own hard times after the other two moved away. She’s also still young enough that her coping mechanisms are still forming, and aren’t always the best. She’s very much a product of my last job and she’s probably the most stereotypical of the bunch, which is sad to say.

For NaNoWriMo this year, which I started doing because I needed an aforementioned kick in the pants, I was torn between going back to the three sisters and getting to know them a little better or another character that’s been living at the periphery of my brain for a while now. Thing is, I like him, but I still can’t quite figure out what to do with him. And I kind of wanted to see what would become of the sisters the way I left them at the end of the last manuscript.

Which doesn’t mean I’m managing to make the word count every day. Not through lack of staring at it, mind you. But because no matter how many times the website and nano cheerleaders tell me to write “with abandon” and to just write anything, even “hobo foot cheese” a million times, I can’t seem to bring myself to do it. So I keep opening old files of notes on the sisters and plucking stuff out, throwing it down and playing with it. Or writing part of a scene and then tweaking the dialogue for another day. Or writing a couple of scenes out of order and then deleting part of one. Or… this would explain why earlier today my daily word count was -37 and now it’s up another 10,000. Because I dumped something from another document, that I plan to splice with something else. In the end, it might get whittled down to 1667.

Their reasoning? Lots of teachers have degrees in “education” which are easier to get than degrees in other fields.  (This is in part because legislatures and boards kept upping the bar on people who’d been in the field for years or offering petty “bonuses” to get a degree, bonuses that never really offset the cost of the degree. And, of course, universities are profit centered so they offer what they can get cash for. Part of the reason they’re so easy, by the way, is because they’ve been rehashing the same basic research since around 1965 but because there are too many hoops to jump through to get new research done — and the money’s in textbooks and testing anyway — the status quo is cutting edge.) Their other main reason is that teachers, on average, apparently score lower on standardized tests than private sector employees. Their numbers are that teachers come out around the 40th percentile.

Now, sure they have a caveat about teachers, and they single out math and science, who might have degrees in other subjects or higher scores. It’s a throwaway thought, though, and it even comes across that way in the article.

Before I get into the rest of my rant, let me just say that I don’t have an education degree, something that gets me looked down upon in education. I have a BS in business (and spent nearly a decade working in them) so when people tell me education should be run like a business, I know what I’m talking about when I call them a doofus or worse. I have an MS in a branch of sociology. I have no recollection of my SAT score other than the first time I took it, I fell asleep during the math section because I’d had to get up at 4 and drive two hours to the test. I do know the last time  took the GRE, I scored in the 97th percentile on the verbal section, the 75th percentile on the quantitative, and the 84th percentile on the analytical writing section. I was a little disappointed in the math and writing scores. I’d totally take it again if I had an extra $160 or so lying around. My LSAT scores were a little more dismal as I was only in the 74th percentile there. I knew it when I was done with the thing, too.

I’m not throwing that stuff out there to brag, but to illustrate a point. When you talk about an average percentile, you’re putting your statistics in a blender to begin with. You’re also leaving the “I suck at math” people with the idea that all teachers are dumb. Some of us pull the average up and my reading coach pulls it back down.

But, see, I didn’t get into education because I wanted the easy way out of a “real job.” I left one of those so-called real jobs to teach. I was more curious than anything because of my sociology research and it was more secure than the other industry I was in at the time.

And don’t think I’m not frustrated with the people around me who make more, know less, and couldn’t get out of a wet paper sack if offered monetary and food-based motivations. Don’t think I’m also not irate that they’re the ones who get the cushy assignments and promotions because they’re the best at playing games and knowing all the right catch-phrases. Then again, isn’t that how all workplaces work? The lady who has to count out the days of the week on her fingers to figure out if it’s Tuesday yet gets the corner office where she won’t be doing much because that way she can’t screw anything up while she’s screwing the head of sales. And the odd little intern who’s memorized all the SKUs and recoded the database from scratch gets laid off because she rarely made eye contact and refused to buy designer shoes. See, education is run like a business.

And maybe, like business, the people who aren’t so bright are drawn to easy degrees and jobs that garner little respect and that’s caused all those numbers to fall over the years. If a person can get a job as a biologist, his chances are probably better at actually getting to do biology and getting payment and recognition than if he teaches it. (And I don’t just mean attaboys at work. I mean he doesn’t get that look of pity from people at social gatherings when he mentions what he does for a living and he’s also less likely to be attacked repeatedly in the media and by halfwits on Facebook for being in a scapegoat profession.)

The NYP meanwhile, goes back to the tried and true tactic of assuming teachers should only get paid for the time they’re actually in front of a classroom teaching. Not for the time spent planning elaborate lessons; or calling parents to explain why Johnny refused to participate in the elaborate lesson; or researching ways to get Johnny to finally learn phonetic blends or division or the parts of a plant cell. This is a little like saying a lawyer should only bill his or her client for the time he or she was actually in a courtroom. (And yeah, there are lawyers who don’t litigate and there are teachers who don’t work directly with a classroom full of kids. Pay attention.) Sure all that trial prep was time away from family and friends and playing golf or reading or whale watching, but hey, the client didn’t see it happen so it must not have.

When I worked in advertising, we didn’t push one of those little chess clocks whenever we were working direction on an ad and then stop it when we were waiting for information from a buyer or waiting for the printer or sitting in a pointless meeting. Why would teachers be different?

Or maybe we’re just having all the wrong conversations. Maybe instead of arguing over whether teachers get paid too much, we should start worrying about if everyone else is getting paid enough. (And by everyone, I don’t mean the CEOs living off capital gains and interest.) Instead of blasting teachers’ unions (some of which are admittedly corrupt but at no greater rate than any other sizable organization), maybe the copy-editors and IT gurus and accountants and nurses need to start forming their own unions, to start arguing for a piece of those pies that keep getting eaten by the top. Maybe instead of worrying about whether teachers are working enough of each twenty-four hour period, we should start turning our Crackberries and iPhones off while we’re eating dinner with the grandkids, stop answering banal work emails at midnight, stop tossing and turning over some widget proposal. Because America seemed to run better back when it knew when to go the hell home already.

[end rant]

Carry on.

Why November?

Well, I’ve run out of October for one thing. For another, November is far enough into the school year that I feel like I’ve got a handle on it. And I apparently get a whole week off near the end up it due to the school district screwing up its budget. Plus, I’ve learned some things about myself and one of those things is that I am not a slow-and-steady wins the race kind of girl. Not with my running and not with my writing. Not with much of anything. I’m an all or nothing, balls-to-the-wall, mired deep, obsessed or lounging and chillin’ and distracted by shiny objects girl. I’m a write in every free moment, churn out an average of 2500 words a day during a “writing spree” or down to a trickle of 100 a day in a “living spree.”

They serve their purposes. Don’t get me wrong about that. I need those “living” spells to inspire me, to give me people and places and ideas to write about. Which usually ends up being those 100 or so words, scribbled in notebooks, jotted on napkins, left in an Evernote file. Things that might one day become a character or a plot or a snippet of dialogue. Or might not.

So, November, right? November. To kick my own ass, I could do NaNoWriMo. I’m not all that concerned about “winning” so much as I need another Draft Zero. It’s a matter of which character(s) I want to spend the month with. And then I’d have something to spend the winter expanding, contracting, editing, rewriting.

Jungle Reds have their own version of a pre-holiday sprint. They make it sound more doable. But then, we’ve established that “doable” isn’t really the question. It’s a matter of getting my head back in the game.

It’s also a matter of finding myself a workflow for writing that works as well or better than what I’ve got sorted out for the day job. I was using Dropbox. Then Dropbox went evil. Neighbor swore by GoogleDocs. Tried it. Worked great for two days, then wouldn’t load any of the document changes for 48 hours. That was rather inconvenient. At this point, I could just use my phone if I had a keyboard I could hook up to it. I don’t really want to run out and buy a fancy one just yet. First, I want to see if it’s feasible. *stares at desk* Hmm…I have an adapter. I have a desktop keyboard at work. Could unplug that and give it a whirl during lunch one day.

Now, all I need is a decent Cloud. Anyone? Ideas?

“Money is like a child—rarely unaccompanied. When it disappears, look to those who were supposed to be keeping an eye on it while you were at the grocery store. You might also look for someone who has a lot of extra children sitting around, with long, suspicious explanations for how they got there.” (Lemony Snicket)

“Yes, there’s been some class warfare going on all right, if you want to call it that.  It looks a little bit more like the Mai Lai massacre – the rich machine gunning the poor in the ditches and then whining about how it’s the poor’s fault. 

So, if you’re wondering what this Occupy Wall Street thing is all about, maybe forty years of economic rape might be part of the answer.” (Silver-tongued Dan O’Shea)

Yeah, there’s a common theme here aside from “just” class warfare” and the “we have to stop them before they eat us, too” ideas. See, the country right above the US on the chart?

Remember how Chomsky mentioned Third World countries and the disparity that’s apparent if you drive through, fly over, see it on the news?

Yeah, I point out Venezuela in particular because almost twenty years ago I had the chance to spend a day in Caracas. I was with a tour group and a teacher who would’ve put a leash on us if she could have. They wanted us all to see the pretty architecture and the Fancy Government Approved Statues and the Tourist Approved Shopping Venue. They wanted us to look out of the bus windows at the tall glass towers and be Impressed. Properly Impressed. (Kind of like school tour groups today looking at the monuments and not the mass of people picketing in front of it.)

Which is to say, most of us saw the little shacks at the base of the mountains, crawling up the hills. The ones constructed out of leftover or stolen construction materials. The ones the Big Bad Wolf could have blown down without taking his vitamins. They were everywhere. Thousands upon thousands of families. This was before Chavez. Before poverty rose 10% between 1998 and 2003 alone.

Outside the Proper Shopping Venue? Hoards of kids trying to sell their worthless currency to some dumb American tourists for less than you’d pay for a pack of gum. Mostly small bills, because the kids had more product that way. $10? Yours for $1US if you were savvy enough. Why? Because the exchange rate was 114:1. A soda at a fast food joint? For $1US, I got change. Lots of change, in Venezuelan currency. Old women selling imported cheap jewelry for a buck or two to tourists. Tourists who thought they were getting a bargain, because in their eyes, they were.

This was back before most of those tourists woke up to find themselves the barrio-dwellers in their own land. Before they found poverty on the rise in their own country. Before some of them wished they had the option of selling their battered greenbacks to dumb visitors. (Course, we all know that’s no option both because they aren’t all that pretty and because boatloads of the things have already been shipped anywhere and everywhere.)

How did we allow ourselves to become a Third World country? How did we we let the super-rich steal at a rate of more than 400:1? How did we allow our politicians to get away with this?

How do we fix it? Can we? (Cause Venezuela sure isn’t fixed.)

Which initially leads me to wonder about the hygiene for fashion — because most of these tags are not a kind that can be reattached after washing. Beyond that, it’s interesting, in a sociological kind of way, this mentality of proving monetary worth in a world where everyone except the except that one “I still care about the neighborhood” politician/developer/athlete and the top drug dealer are on the same rung.

The real rich? That one percent you hear so much about these days? Even the top five percent? You think they’re wearing labels on their clothes so you know they paid $19.99 for that pair of socks? You think they even consider cost when they dress? You think thoughts like “Well, I’m planning to do something messy so I should wear the tee shirt from Wal-Mart” or “I’m going to a nice lunch, better wear the casual Chanel” even crosses their minds? For some, sure. Usually the newly rich or the ones who get their money on a public stage like entertainers. Old money? Yeah, I got the occasion to watch some old money with regards to that. Lunch at the moderately-fancy restaurant? The one where the bill ended up being around $400? Khakis and a sweaty tee shirt. Never even considered what anyone else would think. Not even sure she thought they had thoughts. She had nothing to prove and didn’t even seem to realize other people did. They were there to serve her. We were there to serve her.

And on the surface, all they, in the restaurant, cared about was her not blinking at the bill because that’s all their bosses cared about. Underneath, maybe they wondered about the obviously-washed-a lot (by the house staff) capris. Maybe dressing better is how they prove themselves better when they go home. Maybe they think having money isn’t the same as having class (one of my mother, the daughter of a sharecropper’s favorite gems). Maybe they seem her the way she sees them: a piece of the puzzle for better or worse. Maybe they don’t think about her either.

Maybe I’m noticing all this and wondering because of the increased attention on the Occupy Movements, the 99% cries, the obvious sense of unrest etched into most faces these days. That feeling that something has to eventually give or break. Maybe I’m just trying to distract myself from my students’ abysmal test scores.

And then, I notice the trend of education “reform” still obsessed with testing and “accountability” for the people in the classrooms but not the people in the delivery rooms or the board rooms, who at this point have just as much control over the outcome. Children in poverty? They don’t tend to test well. Children with undereducated parents? They don’t tend to test well. Children without books in their homes? They don’t tend to test well. Parents who can’t afford housing and food because they’ve been laid off or because their job went to India or who can’t pay for both with the slave wages their being allowed to borrow for doing the jobs they could find? They have kids in poverty. Some of them are undereducated because they couldn’t afford school, and some of the younger ones because paying for more school to still be in a bread line seemed dumb. They can’t afford books. Or they don’t have any place to keep the ones they can get from church groups and thrift stores because they live in their high school bedroom with their family or they live under the overpass or they’re trying not to get evicted from the Section 8 apartment with the bullet holes in the wall.

This testing obsession seems designed to get rid of the teachers willing to work with the poor kids. To punish the rapidly-sliding middle class kids. To keep closing all but the wealthiest schools so profiteers can get into the latest frontier. And the testing, electronic “learning” methods don’t seem to encourage a lot of actual “thinking,” of the real, critical thinking sort that questions what’s going on in the world. That looks around and wonders. That solves big problems. That knows when its being lied to.

I makes me fearful that we’re going to end up with a generation that doesn’t even know it’s in the 99%. Makes me worried. And sad. And furious.

Eh, at least they’ll be dressed well.

When I was younger, I didn’t have a lot of friends so I had to either stay home or learn to entertain myself and enjoy my own company. I’ve heard women tell tales about learning to embrace their singlehood or whatnot by dining alone without a book or without pretending their waiting for someone. To that, I say pbbht. Although there is something to be said for people watching. Frankly, I think those are the women who think only bookish nerdy girls dine alone. In reality, some of us are dining alone because we’d rather be reading than wasting time arguing over where to go with the six other people involved. We’d rather be reading than listening to that story about the latest fad diet, who won the latest has-been celebrity show, or about that time you think you saw Kirk Cameron eating yogurt back in high school.

If we couple this with the fact that there don’t seem to be any jobs in South Florida (no, those job fairs offering minimum retail slave wages don’t count unless you’re more desperate than I am; that’s what we call underemployment), we realize I’m going to be stuck teaching forever. FOREVER. I mean, retirement has become a more fanciful concept than unicorn farts and once you’re in for a while no one believes you were ever capable of anything else anyway. Supermodel for three years? Oh, sure that coke-addled grape vomiting waif looks like she could run a Fortune 500 company. Teacher for six months? Oh, well, it says you’re a teacher. Can you do anything else? Why are you leaving teaching? Don’t you care about America’s kids? Is this because all teachers do is steal from the government all summer? I can’t hire you. You don’t seem trustworthy.

*head desk*

And I mean, sure, I want to “make a difference” and all. That’s actually one of the draws to law school because lawyers seem to be the only people left who can get a word in edgewise in this screaming circus we call a society. Except “making a difference” doesn’t pay all that well and I already owe $60K in student loans and I can’t afford to be a full-time student and I already have a shit-paying job that expects too much. And “making a difference” is not defined as spending days covering a relatively simple topic only to spend night after night after night grading papers that show the disrespectful, talking-over-you, no consequences-allowed kids have about as much understanding of integers as a puppy has of the hadron collider.

Which leads to my whole terror of being trapped forever in this broken institution called “education” (or at least until that elected criminal we call Governor Skelator, who honestly seems too much like a cartoon villain for this three-dimensional world, sends us all to work chain gangs or something). Teachers? They have no say anymore. About anything. Governments steal our hours, our retirement money, our tenure, our pensions, and our time. School boards dictate what we say and the order we say it. Textbook companies dictate the order we teach our subjects. The students are allowed to dictate how teach. Yet, we’re lectured on our “professionalism” as though we should think of ourselves as experts and we’re required to take “professional development” classes in our spare time to “further our knowledge” of whatever asshattery the boards and legislatures have deemed valuable. They want us to behave like robots but expect us to be “accountable.” We’re told the “value added model” will account for things outside the classroom (never mind the whole “value added model” being dismissed as junk statistics by leading researchers in public policy), yet then we’re told the model won’t include socioeconomic status. So the thing that’s supposed to account for what’s outside the classroom doesn’t account for the biggest indicator of test scores outside the classroom?

Basically, I’m just tired of people peeing on my leg, telling me it’s raining and then getting mad for pointing out that no, clearly you are peeing on my leg. The sky is blue, there are no clouds, but your penis is fully visible and a stream of last night’s beer is aimed at my leg.

I’m tired of being told I’m responsible for everything in a society where I look around and find I’m with a handful of other people on this responsibility island and everyone else, including those calling all the shots, are free to do whatever the hell they want to.

I’m sick of worrying about why I never got a “real job” in a third-world country where the rich have stolen all the money and run off to leave us bagging groceries and handing out fast food from a window.

Maybe I just need to learn to surf and take up selling Sanuk sandals all day. Those things are unbelievably comfortable.

There are so many reasons to examine or re-examine one’s diet. Too few people do. Too many people tell me I should STFU and leave people alone. But, it’s not like I’m trying to sell a sky fairy or Harry Potter powers. And frankly, it’s not my health in jeopardy if you don’t believe me. (I’m old enough that the planet should limp along for at least the rest of my lifetime and I never had kids.) But I tend to be a bit anti-corporate, so the more people who think any one thing is a bad idea, the less likely giant retailers like Walmart are to go along and they seem to be the economy at this point (which is another rant altogether).

Here’s the thing: I know about shitty food. I know about meat. I’ve had fried chicken. I was born in the South for Eff’s sake. I’ve tried “Sweet Tea” (hated it), chicken biscuits (fine before, but now the thought turns my stomach), NC BBQ, stuffing with mystery by-products in it, bacon fried in the fat leftover from last week’s bacon, salad that was nothing but iceburg and a puddle of thousand island dressing… I’ve tried lamb (was gamy and fatty and gross). I’ve had goat (gamy, fatty, gross). I’ve tried chitlings (vomit) and fried pork skins (double vomit), and venison (so not my favorite). I’ve had sushi and sashimi and maki. I’ve had raw conch and apple pie copious amounts of MSG.

(For the record, I’ve also been to a Baptist church, a Methodist church, non-denominational Christian, Inter-faith, Greek Orthodox, Catholic, Protestant. and Jewish temple. Same thing: been there, done that.)

To me, the meat-eaters and the Christians (and since I grew up in the South, there’s a lot of overlap there in my life) treat me the same way. If I’d just try it one more time, with an open mind this time, things would be better. On the other hand, I should shut up about my opinions because they’re just wrong and no one wants to try that or hear about it.

Which leaves me wondering: HUH?

Look, in high school, I was the fattest skinny person ever. By that, I mean, I couldn’t have run more than ten feet without passing out. Part of this was lack of eating because apparently I wasn’t crazy about my choices then either I just A) didn’t know any better and B) didn’t have any money I didn’t put in my gas tank. Part of this was lack of desire to do anything resembling physical fitness because I’d been taught that was the same as sports, which all involved a team, which I wasn’t welcome on, which… Yeah, team sports and I weren’t compatible. I only stuck with band to make the band director mad. *rolls eyes* I lived on ramen, iceburg lettuce, cookies, and the occasional partial slice of school “pizza.” Not good.

If we compare this to religion, I guess what I did then would be whichever version of organized faith you think lacks the most substance and is heaviest in crap.

In my 20s, I still had no money and no one bothered suggesting that eating anything other than fast food and ramen was a bad idea because I was a size four (which back then was skinny) and even doctors have a tendency to associate size with health. Skinny people can still be at a high risk for all the same diseases and complications as not-skinny people, but no one tells them and few even realize it. (You know, because heroin-chic was super-healthy back in the day.)

(If we wander back to religion, I guess this is the super-pious person slowly dying from fasting and flogging or who says all the right things in public and fondles small boys at home or who thinks the seizures from snake-venom poisoning are the Lord talking. At any rate, it’s delusional, but maybe not everyone sees it.)

In addition to eating poorly, I also had a habit of falling into states of depression. The kind where I’d sit at my desk crying and trying to remember if anything in my desk drawer was sharp enough to kill me because five o’clock seemed too far away and it was only Tuesday. Apparently some doctors along the way thought this seemed more serious than my diet so they prescribed all sorts of anti-depressants that made me gain weight, lose weight, feel sleepy, high, wired. So, I quit them all. Because I didn’t want to go through life as someone else. I heard working out would help, tried it, and found the symptoms subsided.

This is the part where one either gets all “go tell it on the mountain” or decides he/she doesn’t trust the results and shouldn’t discuss it for fear he/she seem a flake. At the time, I went with the latter. I still didn’t fully trust what happened. I was in my late twenties when it’s still too easy to be swayed by peers and it still wasn’t commonly accepted. I also still had “those days,” which I later figured out were situational depression rather than clinical depression. I just hated my stupid job and needed a new one.

What does this have to do with diet, you ask. Well, because a few years ago, I cut out meat. I did it gradually. It started off with the beginning of the recession, which seemed to hit FL faster than everyone else, much like it did in the late 1920s. Meat was expensive, so I started buying less of it. Then I read The Jungle around the same time the vegan presenter started showing up at school with his films and the more I researched matters, the more modern factory farming didn’t seem all that different from Upton Sinclair’s world, which skeeved me out.

I weaned myself off meat by buying less and then none. I tried eating fish (as sushi) once a month, but that was a hassle, so I just ate none. I cut out hydrogenated oils because I learned what they can do to arteries and because I saw what they look like before they turn into brownies. (Super gross.) After a few months, I couldn’t eat them again without feeling sick and wanting to shave my tongue to get the coating off. I cut out high-fructose corn syrup mainly for environmental reasons because I don’t have much of a sweet tooth, but it pissed me off that the HFCS ooze was in everything and the corn growers were lying to me about it. (I hate being lied to.)

Now, all this was fairly easy because I was the kind of person to eat all my veggies first anyway (you know, after I started eating food). I wasn’t a big red meat fan and hamburger and meatballs always kind of tasted like blood to me (very metallic, coppery). I guess my body knew better all along and I wasn’t listening.

I got excited about cooking and experimenting because… well, because unless something is creative and a challenge, it will bore me quickly. And, low and behold, I felt better. I had more energy. I lost a few pounds of fat. It got easier to put on muscle. I started craving weird things like spinach and hummus. I got excited about strawberries. I sometimes get the strange urge to just jump up and down or go run somewhere. I started thinking it was a good idea to walk, five and seven miles at a time, just because.

It was like discovering Buddha and Jesus square dancing in a Wiccan ring while Allah and God cheer them on.

Apparently there’s a reason CEOs, celebrities, athletes and former President Clinton have switched to a plant-based diet. It might sound awful if you’re eating McDonald’s fries right now, but I used to drive out of my way for McDonald’s fries and now I can’t eat them nor do I want to. I don’t miss them. (I swear it. I can bake fries at home that I like just as much.)

Not only do I have more energy, I’m happier and spend way less time contemplating the sharp stuff in my desk. (This doesn’t mean I’m not still ranty because that’s my personality, not my diet.)

I get flack for this. People say I’m pushy and weird and blah blah. But, part of it is defense. If I politely decline someone’s pork roast, I get berated. If I don’t want ice cream because I don’t have a sweet tooth, I get called out as not normal or told “you have room, you’re thin” or some variation. If I opt out of a group lunch at a meat-only diner or out of a meats and eggs heavy breakfast, I get accused of not being a team player. But if I go and just order a coffee or suggest bringing tofu scramble or vegan pancakes, the reaction is “what’s wrong with you” and “I’m not eating that weird crap.” What’s good for the majority is not good for the minority and vice versa.

But, see, after so many years of crappy eating, I want to do the right thing because I feel better and because I hate doctors. I don’t want scary surgeries if I can help it. (Hence all the yoga to avoid “spine specialists.”)

And it makes me feel less like a born again Baptist than someone who wants to warn friends and relatives not to walk into the open manhole cover just because it’s in the path everyone else has been taking.

What I am is a native of the east coast. And by coast, I mean I spent the majority of my formative years about an eighth of a mile from the Intracoastal Waterway. Which means I’ve grown up with Jim Cantore. I’ve been watching him stand in the surf telling me how dangerous it is while my sister’s future buddies surf behind him since back when he had a full head of hair. And one thing he and his colleges are good at is turning a single shot of a sorta-high wave and a flapping piece of loose sheet metal into The End of Time.

I also know that no matter how boring the waiting is or how silly you feel boarding or shuttering up for a storm that may turn or lesson before it gets to you, it’s still a good idea. Canned goods don’t go bad. (By which, I mean they will but it takes a really long time. I also know there’s a difference between a slow-moving storm and a fast-moving storm as far as fridge/freezer foods go. A fast-moving storm means once it passes, you can safely fire up the generator and the grill and be serving feta-spinach scrambled eggs to the neighbors (and those friends who didn’t prepare because “that’s just silly, man”) in a half hour. (Trust me.) A slow-moving storm gives everything time to go bad before you get a chance to use it.

Which leads me to a sidebar on grill and generator safety. DO NOT use a generator or gas grill indoors. That includes your garage. Don’t do it. Just don’t. I know you’re afraid someone’s going to take it. I know you don’t want to stand in the sun (or, after Wilma, it was cold out — I swear), but every storm in South Florida, we end up with at least as many if not more people dying from fires and carbon monoxide as did in the actual storm. Whole families have been wiped out by generator exhaust. Chain it to a tree, flatten its tires, turn it OFF before putting it in the garage for the night. Whatever you need to do. Just don’t operate it inside.

I also know you don’t have to run a generator all day to keep food cold or part of your house cool. (Those box A/C units that people in the south don’t tend to have unless they’re poor? They run really well on small generators.) I also know you should probably unplug the other stuff before plugging in the coffee pot if you’re using a camp-sized kind of generator. Those things draw a crazy amount of power.

After a storm, your friends who told you preparing was dumb will either be waiting in five-mile-long lines for free water handouts or will be knocking on your door looking for a spot near the A/C and a soda. It’s cheaper to buy extra soda than to move so they can’t find you.

All images were taken after Wilma.

My goals for the summer were to study, figure out what to do after next year, and edit that stupid book I’ve been telling myself I’d get to for years.

I mean, I’ve written and rewritten the thing about twelve times. It’s not remotely the same story it started out as. I’ve scribbled a lot of other ideas and crappy short stories along the way. I’ve also quit writing off and on for a variety of reasons ranging from grad school to deciding it was like baseball and just something I was rotten at and should avoid. Except, I never have an urge to play baseball. When I’m working through something, when I’m processing something, when I’m bored, when I’m driving…my brain decides to tell itself stories and sometimes I just have to write them (or part of them down). Later I toss it all in a box, a drawer, the shredder. Usually, the shredder. Worms have made poop of a lot of my word poop.

I also realize the beloved Chuck Wendig questions those who’ve worked on the same thing as long as I have. Something tells me he believes in his work more than I’ve been prone to. Or maybe he just has a weaker shredder.

So, why have I gone back to the same thing (sort of) again and again after all these years? Am I mental? Likely. But more than that, I really like the characters who grew out of that earlier mess. I just hated their story. So I stuck them in different stories, tried them out in different settings, moved them all over the Eastern Seaboard. Worm poop.

I wrote about six hundred pages of two other “things.” Worm poop.

I tried some idiotic naval-gazing suburbia-is-crap sort of stories. You know, the kind you get encouraged to write in college writing classes with teachers who only read literary journals. You know, the ones you can find on the magazine rack at Barnes & Noble. Except, they also tell  you to write  what you know and I’m neither a gang member nor a bored house husband so I came to the conclusion that if that was “writing,” I’d pass on expecting payment and go back to scribbling down stuff for my own amusement.

Which is how I’ve lost some really good stories. There was one I wrote in my head on a treadmill. I was at the gym. A news story came on that got turned around in my oxygen-deprived head and was a terrific little tale of small town revenge. The right mix of violence and pathos. Except, instead of running back out to my car and writing it down, I finished doing weights first. And I have not been able to recapture it in a hundred tries since.

So, you know, I just suck.

I did, however, finish editing the novel. And I have the following notes on a Post-it:

• boat thing probably too crazy/stupid
• what the hell happened to AW?
• the thing with E is dumb – just dumb
• end is too pat – probably retarded