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Perhaps you’ve noticed: I have a time machine.

It’s a lovely little gizmo manufractured by WordPress, designed to allow wily writers to schedule blogs for future dates. But beware, it sometimes goes awry! More than once I’ve accidentally sent a blog into the next millennium. (If you read something from me in 2415, will you please send it back? I miss it.)

Tardis Love PoemBut what’s really cool is that the scheduler can be fooled into sending things back in time, too, . . . like to those quiet Sundays when you’re far too busy doing absolutely nothing to have time to write. Or after an unexpected Procrastinators’ Holiday. Yes, of course, they’re actual holidays! They just never got around to putting them on your calendar. But you’ll know them when you see them . . . usually in retrospect, like I do.

On days like this I sneak in and fire up my handy time machine. Shhhh . . . Don’t tell anyone, but I’m using it right now. ~giggle~

So . . . if you’re ever disappointed I haven’t written something on a given day (hey, I’m allowed to dream, right?), but then feel silly a few days later when you see a lovely little blog in what was once an empty spot, . . .  it has nothing at all to do with me tearing a gaping rent in the space-time continuum so I can sneak a post into the past to fill in my blog-a-day world. It just means you’re silly.

Because It’s my job to spread silliness whenever I go: past, present or future.

[ Tardis love poem belongs to http://laura-tylluan-draper.deviantart.com/art/Tardis-Love-Poem-341952036. So there. ]

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My awesome university, the one that is helping me to reinvent my life–to finally follow my passion as a writer–is hosting a contest to celebrate fearlessness on campus. It’s a lovely campaign to instill pride in our strive, to recognize in ourselves that we can follow our dreams and succeed, that we can be the best possible version of ourselves if we but believe in ourselves.

For my part, going back to college is the keystone of a lifelong passion to write, a dream that once sat on a shelf to make room for a career that seemed more “successful,” but was not my dream. Thanks to another hiccup in my life (which I don’t want to talk about . . . yet), all kinds of wondrous things spilled out of my heart to be collected, rediscovered and placed back in the focus where they belong.

Writing is my passion, my dream. It is who I am. I am fearlessly, doggedly reaching for that dream again. There is no more motivating place to do this than on a campus surrounded by thousands of people following their dreams. It is here where my mentors and teachers and peers come to goad and teach and learn their craft. It is here where my dream will take shape.

Help us celebrate our fearlessness. Visit www.fearlesspsu.com and click like for those of us who are making our dreams come true. (And here is mine). =)

Perhaps we can inspire you to find the life you’ve always wanted, too. Join us on a campus near you!

There’s room for everyone’s dreams.

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I spend a lot of time in coffee shops.

It’s not the coffee that keeps me coming back . . . If you’ve seen what I do to coffee before I drink it you’d call the CDC (Coffee Defamation Committee). The sheer amount of dilution I instigate on a cup of coffee will make you wonder why I even buy the stuff in the first place. I’m addicted to it, of course. But it doesn’t mean I have to enjoy it. Sheesh!

I love the smell of coffee–I will go out of my way to walk through the coffee aisle at the grocery store just to inhale the lovely pungent aromas wafting about playfully there. But pour a little water through it and it tastes like yesterday’s soggy Amazon shipping box after it fell out of the FedEx truck, got run over–twice–peed on by a wombat, rained on for three days, gnawed on by a rodent destined as tomorrows roadkill, pecked on by a chicken on its way across the road, and finally rescued and served to you in a cute plastic cup that tastes just like a cute plastic cup.

But, to stop making a short story long, it’s not the coffee that brings me here.

It’s the table. That long smooth expanse of polished wood just crying out for the warmth of a laptop, hard drive thrumming excitedly, the sheer delight of a stack of books to be joyfully riffled and absorbed, the orgasmic joy of a mechanical pencil set upon its ready surface, or–OMG–a couple of Pilot G2’s. Sure, splash it with coffee, get coffeecake crumbs on it! It can handle the degradation for the sheer joy of feeling someone create upon it’s trembling surface.

funny-squirrel-drinking-coffeeOkay, maybe I need to stop drinking so much coffee . . .

Actually, the table is nice, but it’s the people I’m truly placating my addiction for coffee shops: I may seem shy when you encounter me, deftly staking out my corner of the table, but I need my daily people time to fuel my creative reserves. I guess that’s why I call myself a shy extrovert.

Not only does the energy of fellow humanity inspire, but they’re friggin’ hilarious to observe, too. They do all kinds of silly things when they don’t pay attention to themselves. And it’s my job to duly note these things and write a blog about them . . . or include it as character seasoning in a movie screenplay, coming soon to a theater near you!

I shouldn’t talk about it, but that’s a well-kept secret* of how writers can make such quirky characters you can identify with so well . . . by watching you!

Keep up the good work!

[ * My editor called and ragged me out for letting the cat out of the bag. Actually I think it was a wrong number, I’m not sure why they had a cat in there in the first place. People are so weird. ]

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Welcome back to Foible Monday!

This one is about a thing I call my “speech impeddlement,” because certain words seem to jump on a bicycle and pedal away whenever I go looking for them. I’ll catch them yet . . . then they’ll be sorry. Oddly, it only seems to happen when I’m speaking–not when I’m writing.

Apparently my fingers are smarter than my mouth (big surprise there . . . not).

Most of my friends already know about this. They laugh and laugh and laugh. Okay, maybe I just imagine they do on the inside. I admit it is pretty weird. I don’t want to talk about it . . . so I’ll type it instead. It’s safer that way . . .

Word Finding D— … uhm

Disorder.

swiss-cheese-brain-150x150If most human brains resemble a glob of overcooked spaghetti left to drain too long, then mine more resembles swiss cheese: it has big round holes in it that words fall into. There aren’t that many holes, though I’ve never tried to count, but there’s no telling which words will trip and fall into them.

The first holed-word I remember not remembering is “backhoe”. I know right? It’s not like this is a word I use often in daily life, but when I saw one parked in my neighborhood one day, all I could tell you was that it was a big yellow hole digging machine that began with a “B”.

This is another weird side-effect of this phenomenon: I can almost always tell you the first letter and a nice definition of the lost word but, for the life of me, I cannot tell you the word itself.

In programmer-ese: It’s an indexing problem.

The latest victim seems to be “passport.” I only know this from a curious teenaged member of my family–at the time–who periodically quizzed me on the green and blue bird with the amazing tail feathers that begins with a “P”, or the place where they put dead bodies that begins with a “G”, or the sparkly round things sewn on dresses that begin with an “S” … or that thing you need to cross an international border that begins with a “P”, which apparently I have already forgotten.

All this good-natured quizzing actually helped pull an abused word or three out of its hole into the light of day. I can remember that big yellow machine now, sometimes. But I’ve found as soon as I help one distressed word out of its hole, some other poor hapless word will fall into it.

Memories …

If only my brain holes kept themselves to my speech centers. Occasionally an entire memory falls victim to this indexing problem, as well. Take a common, ordinary occurrence we both partook in the other day, such as meeting an interesting person at a local park. hdd-crashingA few days later you may wax poetically about this chance meeting and notice my brow furrowing. You’ve caught me attempting to query my index.

Another memory has gone AWOL.

But if you happen to mention the strange rutabaga earrings she was wearing that day—bing, flop, “index match complete,”  bonk, ping!—suddenly it all comes flowing back in HD Technicolor with special features and deleted scenes!

Don’t ask me to explain it, as if it made any sense to me; especially since I’d probably lose a word or two in the process. I’m not terribly motivated to try to fix it anyway, because it keeps my friends amused.

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I’m not sure what in my karma has caused me to be host to so many insane felines during this life. But it seems unnatural to be without them. There’s something about a cat that reminds us not to take life too seriously. This little story is set just after I graduated from high school and set out on my own. It goes something like this . . .

Notso

The first roommate I ever had who truly understood me wore a beautiful fur coat every day of the year and owned the two-story townhouse we inhabited in Annapolis, Maryland, although she allowed me to pay the mortgage, since she had not an inkling of how money worked. She had beautiful green eyes and a lovely regal expressiveness. We had special dishes from which only she ate, and did so very deliberately from the kitchen floor. Her name was Marble, after the swirling gray and black coat she wore. She’d known me from kittenhood and thought she pretty much had the entire relationship worked out by the time my first big, human relationship had broken down and we were left to our own devices.

She would keep an eye on the place while I was at work, far above being troubled with doing the dishes or cleaning—she despised the vacuum cleaner. She never cooked a single meal, although she spent a lot of time sitting on the stove; but I was always happy to see her at the end of the day. She seemed likewise as happy to see me, too, as long as I kept up on the state of her food and water dishes.

After a while I began to worry that she might be getting lonely staying home alone so much, so one day I stopped by the pet shelter and surveyed the foster mammals there. A dog was definitely out of the question; both Marble and I were both confirmed cat-people, so it had to be another cat. I’m not usually superstitious, but the last thing I was looking for was a black cat; my vacuum cleaner wasn’t ready for a long-hair; and for reasons of my own, there was no way I wanted a male. How that crazy, jet black, little furry guy talked me into bringing him home is a mystery to this day.

I was immediately informed of my mistake from Marble’s incredulous look and the way she avoided both of us for the next few weeks. He was not worth thinking about and I was clearly in the doghouse. But I stuck it out, thinking she was just being stubborn. She stuck it out, thinking I was just being pigheaded and stupid, even for a human.

In the meantime, the little black hairball began to explore his surroundings, insinuating himself into every fold of both of our lives at home until he could be ignored no longer. At first she considered him to be a nuisance, when at last she tired of hissing at him and only getting a dopey kittenish look back, then something to be discouraged—which was impossible, since discouragement wasn’t in his vocabulary. Finally one day I saw her waking up to find him snuggled up against her. She looked ready to bolt in disgust, but then seemed to say “oh, the hell with it,” and went back to sleep. He’d done the same thing to me and it was surprisingly warm, all that fur.

It was a hard thing at first trying to figure out what to call the little bugger. Hairy, Hairball, Fuzzball and lame attempts to find words that alluded to black or darkness were all too obvious and lacked originality. I was sure that once I witnessed enough of his personality a proper monicker would soon present itself.

And witness I did. I ended up naming him Notso, by how often the term fit him.

Where Marble loved to play with string, laser-dots and play ping-pong with tiny bits of balled up paper, Notso preferred to make up his own toys. I once found him attacking a wooden spoon he had rescued from the kitchen counter, spinning it under furniture and flicking it into the air like a projectile. He also favored dust bunnies, sunbeams, and a few things that seemed not to exist at all. Life was a great adventure to him, instigating yoga poses and attack sequences even Marble found incredible.

Not so normal, this one, although his inventiveness was a privilege to behold. Marble tried her best to feign disinterest as much as possible.

Soon I realized how often I had noticed her staring at her once pristine litter box, deep in thought. Where once she kept a fastidiously managed facility, everything properly covered and regraded, these days there would often be a single deposit in the center—emphatically not her own—perched upon a desert island of litter, while the rest of the litter had been strangely pushed over the edge of the pan and onto my shag carpeting. A challenge my aging vacuum cleaner was growing tired of. No amount of coaxing could get Notso to realize he was burying in the wrong direction. I could almost imagine he was attempting some kind of art. Marble was not impressed.

Where Marble kept her coat perfectly groomed, Notso always had at least two or three nasty snarls of hair protruding from his carcass—not that it seemed to faze him whatsoever. I regularly ended up taking the scissors to him. Not so well-groomed.

On more than one occasion, the three of us would be watching a show on television when Notso would spontaneously invent a game during a commercial break, usually involving attacking something furiously evasive and just as nonexistent running across some vertical part of the sofa. Invariable he would end up pitching off the back unexpectedly and landing with a thump behind. I’d turn to Marble and say, “Not so well coordinated either.” Marble usually returned a look that said, “Ya think?”

Over time Marble and I tallied all the ways he lived up to his name: Not so well coordinated, not so neat, not so predictable, not so dainty, not so normal, not so easy to ignore. While his distractions were often entertaining to me, Marble’s orderly world had become a nightmare, although Notso would try his best to cheer her up or include her in his adventures. After a time, she would finally break down and chase him, which he loved, although I don’t know exactly what her intentions were. I would get used to her looking at me in a “what were you thinking, bringing that thing into the house?” way.

It was just my luck that I tend to fall in love with people who are allergic to cats, and it was a sticking point to the advancing relationship for a while. This happened a couple of years after Notso came on the scene, but halfway through Marbles life. Becoming closer to this person and our respective jobs meant selling the townhouse and moving to an apartment, one that did not allow pets. Although the relationship was long and wonderful, I still regret the necessity of finding new homes for my feline family. One day a man answered my ad and asked to see the cats, showing up with his shy tiny daughter. Marble, the more beautiful of the pair, who now looked at me with disdain, quickly disappeared. But Notso was immediately mesmerized by the little girl, following her everywhere, talking to her in his mysterious cat language, playing and impressing her father with his silliness. It turned out they were only looking for one cat, so Notso found a new, happy home almost immediately.

Marble was more of a challenge. Although she tried to hide it, she moped around the townhouse, revisiting his favorite haunts, his odd toys, barely bothering to arrange the litter box so carefully as she once had. It was obvious I had let her down once more and she almost seemed relieved to be carted off by another family after a few more weeks. A decade later, I still wish I could have kept them together. Although I can only hope they both prospered in their new homes, I’m pretty sure Notso, for one, had no problem keeping himself happy.

Another pair of felines, Bunny and Teddy, adopted me soon after I moved back to Portland. The kitten I sadly left behind in Hawaii (I don’t want to talk about it) must have sent them a text, since I was forced from the beginning to make a pact with them to never ever let another relationship get between me and my furry family.