Bo-Bo Knows

Bo-Bo Knows I'm Toast

2011-12-12T00:18:00.001-05:00

Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah-bity-blah blah.
"Blah?"
"Blah," blah blah.
Blah blah blah blah-by blah--blah blah-dy blah blah!

The novel and all those other Big Ideas (not the capital letters) I had for December? They're making about as much sense as this blog post.

Bo-Bo Knows Mama Has No Business Making Wagers

2011-12-05T09:47:00.001-05:00

After the first week of operation wacky writing wager (the use of the word wacky has more to do with my addiction to alliteration than anything wrong with the wager itself) I'd like to report that Stephen and I are locked in an epic horse race, but what we're actually in is more of a snail's race. We've both got a trail of slime stretching behind us that we've made an empty peace with calling our works in progress, and as you might imagine, neither snail is exactly hearing the Chariots-o-fire theme song as we ~~race~~ INCH toward what seemed like such a skimpy goal when we made this wager oh so casually in the comment section of this blog not so long ago.

You can read about Stephen's dark night of the soul (aka his wicked writing woes--more ws!) here in which he whines that he's only got 7 pages finished. Only. Oh boo-flippin'-hoo, Stephen. Poor you.

You know how many pages I got if you only count the stuff that's pretty and perfect and ready to go?

Zero. As in none, nada, and if I knew how to spell it, bupkis.

But what I do have is a 20-page long hand page first draft of the first version of my revised (read that totally gutted and absolutely new) opening scene. It detours and tangents in the way my first drafts always do (I can't be the only writer whose first instinct is to take her characters from Boston to Cambridge by way of Timbuktu), but somewhere in the detours my imaginings have wrought, there's a faint heartbeat that tells me this might work. Keep chipping away at it. And please ignore the tantrum that your inner child is currently throwing about why oh why this convolutedly crazy craft style of yours (note the cs!) remains your process.

Because you have a wager on. And right now you're losing. Except in the one way you're winning: before the wager, you were stuck, and now you have a pile of prose poo (ps!) with a beating heart. Which means this wacky wager you've made has shaken you out of your revision paralysis and put you safely on the revising path.

So, no, Stephen. No fist pumps and booyahs here. But in my own way, I do think I'm winning. Even if I end up buying you a drink and toasting your superior output, I've won.

Bo-Bo Knows It's On...

2011-11-28T11:28:00.001-05:00

I threw down a gauntlet and it was...picked up? Matched? Accepted? Whatever it is that the person being thrown down in front of does when accepting a challenge (and let's just say it's pointing a finger in the air and wagging it with all the nuance of a silent movie, cause that makes me happy), my friend Stephen Dorneman over at Barking at My Shadow has done it, and the race is on:

First person to 30 pages by the end of the year gets a beer on the slower writer's dime.

Except Stephen says beer isn't special enough.

So if I win he'll buy me a Boston Cream Pie Martini (if you think those letters should be lower case, obviously, you've never sipped such heaven) over at the Omni Parker House, and if he wins, he picks. And if you could hear the sports announcer doing the play by play in my head, Stephen is the front runner.

This weekend he let me know he was already five pages in while I was still navigating the family loop that is the long Thanksgiving holiday in my house.

And today's no more auspicious. Because I didn't just tell him 30 pages. I said 30 pages of the new opening of my book. And so far the new opening has arrived still born. But not much because there's a martini at stake. And a little something called the future of my novel. Right. I'll just get right on that and, um, mmmmm chocolate-cocoa-lined rims....

Why is it so much easier to picture the martini than it is to dream up an opening for my book?

Bo-Bo Knows Dirty Limericks

2011-11-21T08:54:00.000-05:00

Metered Angst
A Limerick by Catherine Elcik

When tracking my writing it's hard to ignore
when my hours shrink back to less than half four.
I say that I'm fighting
To prioritize writing
But then dole out my time like I can simply make more.

Bo-Bo Knows Beginnings

2011-11-14T11:30:00.001-05:00

Thirteen hours and 8 minutes this week. Could I have pushed out two extra hours? Sure. But it would be make work for the sake of hours. Because Monday through Friday I spent rereading the opening, making notes about how to revise, and just generally getting myself to feeling like I knew where to start. By Saturday I needed to let it simmer for a couple of days before starting in on the actually redrafting. Simmering is work, too, but it's hard to quantify. So I don't. I just know that I had at least two hours of simmering and I leave it like that.

Also, a blog note: watching hours tally does not exactly make for the world's most riveting blog, so I'll just keep count in a little column at the right. I'll add the hours weekly, though I suspect I'm the only one who will care much.

Happy writing!

Bo-Bo Knows Limbo

2011-11-07T01:15:00.001-05:00

My inner librarian slave master is well pleased this week. Not because I punched in my time plus some--15 hours and 48 minutes this week!--but because those hours brought me to the end of the draft I've been struggling with since I finished the rough draft longer ago than I can admit without embarrassment (I only missed the three-year mark by 48 hours).

Does this mean if I hit my 15 hours work week again this week I'll finish the third draft? No? Well, what fun is that?

Tomorrow, I dive into the third draft. As a person who feels anxiety in the limbo between completing one chapter and breaking ground on the next, I'm expecting to experience some fear at the start a new draft; to counter the anxiety, I've earmarked Friday as a writing retreat with a fellow ~~sufferer~~ writer.

In "On Writing,' Stephen King offers a permission slip for wary writers:

"You can, you should, and if you're brave enough to start, you will."

Change that 'if'' to a 'when,' and I think I've got myself a new mantra...

Bo-Bo Knows How to Earn a 'C' (and be right pleased about it)!

2011-10-31T11:44:00.003-04:00

11 hours out of 15 this week. Thought of one way, that 73.3 percent. A 'C' grade.

Thought of another way 11 hours is 5 more than the 6 I managed in week one. That's an 83 percent increase, or a solid B!

Thought of in yet another way, 11 is 183 percent of 6 which is like and Attttt!

So while 11 is not 15, it's closer, and that's a good thing.

Now if you'll excuse me, I have a job to do...

Bo-Bo Knows A Period of Orientation

2011-10-24T10:09:00.002-04:00

Inauspicious. That's the word that springs to mind when I sat down this morning to see that I worked on my book for only 5 hours and 54 minutes of the 15 hours I just hired myself to put in every week.

The inner mean boss likes that word. Because inauspicious has just the right blend of pretentious haughtiness, don't you think?. It brings to mind the image of a nasty old lady, arms crossed, eyes staring at me over the world's ugliest reading glasses. Everything about the posture of this woman tells me I'm a failure. And when I calmly explain that work got crazy, that I took two days off to spend time with my husband, that I managed to do an hour a day on my busiest days to compensate, she just sniffs at me:

"And how many episodes of Dr. Who did we watch, hmmm?"

Fair point, I guess. Though I would argue that one of the episodes was "Love and Monsters," a fine example of bloody brilliant story telling.

But although I'm no stranger to treating myself as a metaphorical whipping post (do better, do more, you suck you suck you totally suck!) I've decided thinking like that is just not helpful. Pas de tout! Which if I remember right means not at all, but even if it doesn't, so what? What are you gonna do, little librarian boss lady that lives in my brain? Stare at me to death?

Did I have the kind of first week I was hoping to have? No. I had just a little south of 40 percent of the week I was hoping to have. But it's a start I'm deciding to think of as "orientation." And it was useful time! I entered last week stuck on the epilogue. This week I got six pages in, realized it was totally wrong, berated myself for (yet again) not getting it right the first time, and then pulled out a fresh piece of paper and planned out a new take on the scene that (miracle of writing spoiler alert) works better! Yes, I wrote pages, scrapped them, and ended the week with "just" an outline of what to do this week. But that's kind of why the revision process is all about putting the time in and not the page count. I could have done more--perhaps I should have done more--but I've decided that as far as orientations go, it was a brilliant first week:

Eased myself into a new habit? Check!
Created a plan of attack for moving forward? Check!
Generated excitement for the possibilities of the new ending? Check! Check! Check!
Ready to commit to finishing the epilogue this week? Well, no. Not check.

Because though I'm committed to getting my 15 hours in this week, who knows what that time will bring. The scene I'm working on now will likely thrive, but the scene after that? I'm done with the crystal ball sorcery of writing goals I can't control, like "finish a scene" or "write an epilogue" or (gulp) "finish this draft." Because after looking into my future (read that as glancing at my day planner), I can be reasonably assured that I'll eke out 15 hours of work this week. If that brings me to the end of this revision, fantastic. But if it doesn't, some other week's hours will. Because progress, however slow, will lead to a finish line eventually. Isn't that the first commandment in the church of writing or something?

Plus, if I don't pull my shit together this week, my inner librarian will come at me with this message:

And nobody wants to die at the hands of a Dalek sucker thingy because--let's face it--death by Dalek is kind of lame.

Bo-Bo Knows Accountability Mondays

2011-10-17T12:53:00.000-04:00

So a little more than a year ago, I ran a marathon. Let's ignore for a minute that I've gone totally soft since then and can't actually remember the last time I ran (today's as good a day to begin again as any, I say).

The important thing about this marathon is that I did it. Me. With a body that has almost always looks better suited to competitive eating than running did it for one simple reason: I found a training program set up like a to-do list that was like crack to my type-A step-by-step mentality. It helped that I loved my cause (Grubbies 4 eva, and all that) but having the heart to do something only gets you to the starting line. To cross the finish takes a clear understanding of the neuroses you have to co-opt for your cause.In my case, an addiction to crossing things off a to-do list in exactly the same way I'd cross off four training runs a week.

You know what you can't cross off a to-do list?

Finishing the (expletive deleted) novel, that's what!

I'm not talking about your daily email-so-and-so-and-pay-the-mortgage-and-call-that-client-and-go-get-groceries list but the larger to-do list in your brain. The finish-the-novel line item just sits there, taking up space, like a house guest that made you giddy the first year she stayed with you, but is still there years later, sitting around, like an un-cross-off-able lump.

I know the solution is breaking the novel down into drafts or chapters or pages or word counts. But then the to-do list monster rears its head, and the math seems painfully clear: if you write you'll cross off one thing, but if you send that email, pay the mortgage, call that client, and get your groceries, you'll not only cross off FOUR things, but you'll also eat.

You know.

At a table in a house that isn't heading into foreclosure.

The thing is, the writer in me is sick of being shuttled to the bottom of my daily to-do list. So I'm doing the only thing that I know has worked in the past. No, not page counts. When you're working on revision, a full day's work might end in a negative page count. Page counts are evil for revision. You can't see it, but I'm holding my fingers up in a cross at the words "page counts" on the screen.
Nope. I'm doing something a little more weighty. I'm taking on writing as a part-time job.

What's that you say? Hasn't writing been a part-time job for me for years? Well, you'd think. But have you ever known me to blow off a job--freelance or salaried or what have you--because I needed to go grocery shopping? Have you ever known me to blow a deadline when someone--besides me--was actually waiting for something? No. Because I'm a doormat when it comes to the promises I make. I need to work on that, I really do. But not before I co-opt that doormat attitude for the one project I'll tell anyone who listens is the nearest and dearest to my creative self.

So I'm signing a contract today:

I, Catherine Elcik, on Monday, October 17, 2011, agree to take on the position of part-time writer, defined herein as 15 hours a week for 50 weeks (a girl's gotta have a couple weeks vacation!) for a total of 750 hours in a year. Kay. Thanks. Bye.

Some part of me looks at that number and thinks 15 hours seems like such a drop in the bucket compared to all the other things I do with my time (my full-time job, walking Bo-Bo, watching Dr. Who like a freshly converted addict...) But if having a tangible goal actually gets me to add drops into the bucket, I just might have something at year's end. If not a finished novel, perhaps a finish line in sight. The part of me that's wondering if I really want to publish this post at all knows that it's not only going to work, but it's what I need. Deep breath. Hit send. Write. Wish me luck!

Catherine Elcik is a writer in the Boston area. Watch for "Accountability Monday" updates here or on her Twitter feed (#accmon) every Monday.

Sweat Scholarships Ripe for the Picking

2010-10-06T01:21:00.006-04:00

Since I crossed the finish line of the first annual Run for Grub about two months ago:

my running regimen has been downgraded from militant to pleasant,
I've reminded myself that music is more than just a collection of beats driving my feet, and
that toenail I was so worried about losing? Totally lost.

What HASN'T been lost is the four Grub Street scholarships I ran this race to fund in the first place (make some noise for the generosity of all our sponsors, please!)

If you're looking to join a family of writers in Boston.

If the writing project nearest and dearest to you could use a gentle kick in the pants.

If your writerly spirit is willing but your bank account is weak, the Run for Grub Scholarship may be for you:

WHAT: Run for Grub is a set of four scholarships covering the cost of a 10- or 6-week Grub Street workshop of your choice.

ELIGIBILITY: You must either be taking your first multi-week workshop at Grub Street OR taking your first multi-week workshop in a genre that is new to you (i.e. you are a fiction writer taking screenwriting for the first time, or a poet taking a memoir class, etc).

APPLICATION: Send runforgrub@grubstreet.org a one-page, single-spaced letter in 12-point font. The letter should detail how you'd benefit from taking a Grub Street class and include your bio and your familiarity with writing workshops (at Grub or other schools).

DEADLINE: Applications must be received by October 15th, 2010 at 5pm EST.

A letter, people! Just a letter! You could have this whole application wrapped up faster than it takes to fill out one of those silly Facebook questionnaires. And really. If I can run 26.2 miles, you can certainly write one stinking page.

We'll even let you keep all your toenails.

For complete scholarship information, visit the Run for Grub Scholarships page on the Grub Street Web site.

Bo-Bo Knows Marathon Hiatus

2010-04-14T14:39:00.002-04:00

I'm taking the next 16 weeks to blog about my training for the marathon I'm running as a benefit for Grub Street Inc, an independent writing center in Boston, MA.

I'll return to Bo-Bo Knows in August, but in the mean time, check out the Bo-related post at Run for Grub!

Bo-Bo Knows He's Top Dog

2010-03-04T22:03:00.009-05:00

File this one under surreal.

Earlier this week, I got an email from Dogster in response to my December blog post about losing Bo. The email started like so:

Hi Catherine,

I was just browsing through your blog, and wanted to send my condolences for your lost of Bo-Bo.

I too have lost a dog once, and it was horrible, but a very rewarding experience : )

Any-who, I work for Dogster.com, the top pet community destination on the Internet. We have a breed page with over 2800 greyhound members...

The letter goes on to explain why my linking to Dogster.com is a good idea. And I'm not saying it's not. I want to be clear here: I have no problem with dog sites--love them. But I do have a problem with this letter. Two, in fact:

It would appear this gentleman hasn't actually read more than a line of my blog. Because that particular post wasn't about losing Bo--bite your dog-wagging tongue, Mr. Dogster!--but about how my husband and I, through a Herculean overhaul of out diet and exercise plans, have literally shed the equivalent of a Bo's worth of ugly fat.
If my post HAD been about Bo going to that meaty cornucopia in the sky, and this was an actual, live condolence email, in what universe would a smile emoticon have any place in that note? Not to mention changing topic to his request with a flippant "any-who." Seriously?? He might as well have written:

Hey, I know you just lost the only thing that ever loved you more unconditionally than your mother, but ANY-WHO could you do me a solid and link to my Web site? You know. Between sobs.

And then today. Same sweet, but misguided, guy sends a second email. Today he's writing to tell me that I've won an "award of recognition for being an awesome resource for dog owners/lovers!" Well, that's sweet. And yes, my blog may touch on things greyhound occasionally, but in recent memory, I've also spent a month groaning about boot camp with Jillian Michaels and promising to blog my way through Walden before losing the plot somewhere amid the holiday hustle. In other words, my blog's about me, and enjoying my dog just happens to be one of my favorite things about being me, so he comes up from time to time.

So given that I've done nothing to earn this award, I clearly can't actually accept it for myself, but I will accept it for Bo. Because since retirement, the only other prize he's received was a first-place ribbon for softest fur at the Greyhound Expo a few years back, and I have to tell you--that thing screamed consolation prize (he was simply too dainty to be anything resembling a threat in the hot-dog-eating contest).

So congrats, Bo! Dogster.com recommends you for reasons that have nothing to do with me or the content on my blog, I'm sure. Though I have to warn you, they might strip your award when they see how I've chosen to present it to the world. Except they won't. See it, I mean. Because they're not actually reading my blog. We've been over this.

Find more dog info here!

Bo-Bo Knows We've Lost Bo

2009-12-05T21:49:00.003-05:00

Mike and I lost Bo this morning. Not all at once, of course. It's been a long and brutal farewell. But it's finally official. Bo's gone, gone, gone.

As of this morning's post Thanksgiving weigh-in, my husband and I have lost the equivalent of the heft of our sometimes sulky greyhound, Bo. Today Mike and I officially passed the 75-pound mark. Next stop? 100. Then 125 after that.

Any of our skinny friends out there weigh a buck and a quarter? I find it oddly inspiring to think of the weight left to be lost as a person person instead of a disembodied number.

Bo-Bo Knows The Necessaries (Walden, 267-281)

2009-12-03T22:29:00.008-05:00

The bare necessities of life are way barer than we think they are.

All we really need, Thoreau says, are food, shelter, clothing, and fuel. Maybe a few tools and books, but then again maybe not. Anything beyond these basics—even just too much of these basics—is a luxury, and luxuries get in the way of a simple, independent living. If you're happy, fine, he says. But if you're unhappy—if you think that life is hard, hard, hard—then stripping away the distractions might turn the tide of of your discontent.

The Thoreau chestnuts gleaned from today's excerpt:

LIVE IN THE NOW by standing "on the meeting of two eternities, the past and future, which is precisely the present moment" (pp 272).

BEAR WITNESS to the unsung miracles that are impossible to ignore and yet taken for granted by that mass of discontented men—why stay in bed when there are sunrises to be breathed in?

CONSIDER THE TRUE REWARDS. "For a long time I was reporter to a journal, of no very wide circulation, whose editor has never yet seen fit to print the bulk of my contributions, and, as is too common with writers, I got only my labor for my pains. However, in this case my pains were their own reward" ( p 273).

Any writers out there hearing that last one loud and clear? He goes on to tell the story of an Indian—Thoreau's word, not mine—who decided to make his living weaving baskets only to discover to his shock that the villagers had zippo interest in buying. The solution seems like a dismal choice: either squander energy convincing the world that we've just made what they never knew they always wanted or—can I get a collective shudder from the writer's out there?—make the goods we think will please others.

"I too had woven a kind of basket of a delicate texture, but I had not made it worth anyone's while to buy them," Thoreau says. "Yet not the less, in my case, did I think it worth my while to weave them, and instead of studying how to make it worth men's while to buy baskets, I studied rather how to avoid the necessity of selling them."

For those of us who hobble together professional life support for our creative body of work, our progress on that work is the antidote to the sacrifices we make so we don't have to suffer traditional 9-to-5 jobs. But what if we could cut a little deeper and need that professional life support a little less? What if we could all pare back to the simple necessaries of life and log our own hours in the woods of our own design?

The call to Walden, then, isn't about reporting to a cabin on a pond at the outskirts of Concord, but about reporting to the call we hear to our own endeavors—a call to create each our own private Waldens in the lives we're living now. Lately, there have been a rash of books published about experiential living— the guy lived a year following every Biblical rule it was possible to follow; the gal who outran her demons by globetrotting for a year. I totally get the impulse to be better, to be disciplined, to strike out on an adventure. But I'm not convinced that being better or disciplined or adventurous can't start where we are now with a simple, simple shift in our thinking.

But maybe that's just as naive as thinking the answer is in taking to the woods as a hermit for a couple years.

Bo-Bo Knows Hosers (Walden, 258-267)

2009-12-02T23:02:00.005-05:00

Jobs are for hosers.

That's the clear takeaway in the opening pages to the "Economy" section of Henry David Thoreau's Walden. After introducing the concept of his experiment and inviting readers to take away the principles that suit them best, Thoreau points his authorial finger at his readers and warns that they're killing themselves in pursuit of society's bullshit expectations of the shape of well-lived lives:

"[You're] making yourselves sick, that you may lay up something against a sick day" (p. 262).

"The mass of men live lives of quiet desperation. What is called resignation is confirmed desperation" (p 263).

"It appears as if men had deliberately chosen the common mode of living, because they preferred it to any other. Yet they honestly think there is no choice left. But alert and healthy natures remember that the sun rose slear. It is never too late to give up our prejudices. No way of thinking or doing, however ancient, can be trusted without proof" (p. 264).

But all this striving, striving, striving is nothing but a collective nightmare that Thoreau's desperately trying to wake us up to escape. The messages in this opening, then, are clear: Draw your own conclusions, and direct the course of your life through deliberate choices:

"What a man thinks of himself, that it is which determines, or rather indicates, his fate" (p 263).

"We are made to exaggerate he importance of what work we do; and yethos much is not done by us! ... So thoroughly and sincerely are we compelled to live, reverencing our life, and denying the possibility of change. This is the only way, we say; but there are as many ways as there can be drawn radii from one center" (p. 267).

Bo-Bo Knows Suburban Walden

2009-12-01T21:55:00.009-05:00

So I've never actually read Henry David Thoreau's "Walden" from start to finish. Excerpts in high school, sure. Different excerpts in college, OK. But mostly I'm guilty of

falling for the seduction of the merchandising that's sprung up around Thoreau's soundbites (don't the mass of men own magnets rah-rah-rahing them to advance confidently in the direction of their dreams?¹) and
constructing an opinion of the man and his plan based on an idyllic portrait cobbled together from my dip-in-and-out acquaintance.

In spite of my spotty Thoreau scholarship, lately I've been thinking that the world wouldn't be such a bad place if people took a page from Thoreau and lived more deliberately. I'm not saying that we should all trek out to the nearest pond and set up camp for the next two years and two months. Just that if we adopted even a handful of Thoreau's tips for living, we might all have a little more peace. Maybe even a collective utopia built upon the sum of a million suburban Waldens created not by dropping out of society but by living the lives we intend within the fabric of our existing day to day whirlywoo. ²

Big thoughts given that I've never read the book from cover to cover. Ever. So I will. This month. Right here. Scholarship be damned. Each day I'll read a chunk of pages and figure out what they're saying to me.

I'm guessing Thoreau would approve. At the end of the second paragraph of the book, he writes of his hope that his readers "will accept such portions as apply to them." I read that as the author himself clearing the world for a buffet-style approach to "Walden."

If you want to join me in my little Suburban Walden project, I'll be reading from "The Portable Thoreau" pictured above. So read along. Comment. Please. Because if nobody joins the conversation, it'll be me yammering on about what I think, what I feel, what I, I, I...

Forgive me.

"I should not talk so much about myself if there were anybody else whom I knew as well."³

SUBURBAN WALDEN ENTRIES

Bo-Bo Knows Hosers (Walden, 258-267)

Bo-Bo Knows The Necessaries (Walden, 268-281)

¹ This is a mangling of two quotes we'll get to in time, I promise.

² Or maybe I'm just enjoying an extra helping of delusions to complement my annual late-fall re-evaluation of the state of my union.

³ Page 252.

Bo-Bo Knows Gratitude for Losing Scratch Tickets

2009-11-22T12:19:00.000-05:00

I buy a scratch ticket maybe once every three years, so you know it was a bad day when, exhausted, I convinced myself that the answer to all my problems lay behind a silver film I could scratch away with a quarter. Surely, the fates would be kind to the woman who believed—even for a second— that the urge to buy a ticket was a clear sign that freedom could be bought for the price of a garishly colored dream.

Alas, no.

But I've decided this is a good thing. Because as Emily Dickinson once said in her halting nineteenth century way: "success is counted sweetest by those who ne'er succeed." Never mind how much that line reads like the sour grapes of a hermit woman who spent her life pushing society away. Because really, where's the sport in scratching your way to a brighter tomorrow? Had I won that million-dollar prize, I'd have been elated, sure. But what would that have taught me? A winning card might bring me a fortune, but my loser card gives me a chance to become the kind of scrappy person who doesn't need a stinking scratch ticket.

So screw you, Massachusetts State Lottery! Screw you, mom in Stoneham who scratched off a $10 million prize at Fast Freddies in Wakefield last week. Money? That's nothing. The real prize is the epiphany that comes from banging your head against the grind until a new solution presents itself. You know. Teach man a fish and all that happy horse shit.

Bo-Bo Knows Gratitude for Old Wisdom

2009-11-21T06:22:00.000-05:00

Long before Nike slapped their just-do-it slogan on billboards and buses, some of the world's best thinkers were teaching that true happiness lies in yanking our thumbs out of our asses and taking action. Loosely translated, of course.

Today I'm grateful for the philosophical cheerleading squad that reminds me that there's no substitute for sweat. Hopefully my favorite quotes will inspire you as much as they do me:

"An idea that is developed and put into action is more important than an idea that exists only as an idea."
- Buddha

"We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act, but a habit."
- Aristotle

"Advance confidently in the direction of your dreams and you will have success unimagined in common hours."
- Henry David Thoreau

"If you have built castles in the air, your work need not be lost; that is where they should be. Now put the foundations under them."
- Henry David Thoreau

"Whatever you can do or dream you can, begin it. Boldness has genius, power, and magic in it."
- Goethe¹

"What I must do is all that concerns me, not what the people think."
- Ralph Waldo Emerson

"Take the first step in faith. You don't have to see the whole staircase, just take the first step."
- Martin Luther King, Jr.

"Just do it" sounds so vulgar by comparison, doesn't it?
¹ OK, technically nobody said this exactly as it's written, but it gets attributed to Goethe on quote magnets, so that's good enough for me!

Bo-Bo Knows Gratitude for Vicarious Vacation Bliss

2009-11-20T23:19:00.006-05:00

Just when I think I'm getting the hang of this gratitude thing, I go and bury my thankfulness beneath the rubble of some seriously ungrateful griping. Today it was about feeling worn down to the nubs but somehow not quite full-on sick.¹ About how green it makes me that, as of 7 p.m., my husband's officially on vacation until November 30. About the shitstorm I have to get through before I can take my (much shorter) Thanksgiving break with him next week.

But in the aisles of our local Stop & Shop tonight², the radio launched into the Chaka Khan version of "I'm Every Woman" and Mike busted into an impromptu dance down the length of the natural food aisle: Get-out-of-jail-free giddiness? Legs jerking like they're in a conga line? Fists drumming the air like he just don't care? Impassioned falsetto sing-a-long? Check, check, check, and check.

It's hard to stay grumpy when someone's bliss has bubbled over into dancing-in-the-supermarket abandon. And while vicarious bliss isn't quite as sweet as actual bliss, it's something to hold onto on a swamptastic day. I may have spent most of today feeling ungrateful and grumpy, but I'm choosing to end the day grateful that my husband's vacation high spreads faster than the swine flu among runny-nosed toddlers. It's all in me, baby. It's all in me!

¹I absolutely credit this to my dramatically improved nutrition of late.

²We've found that if you can stand shopping amongst weirdos, closing time on Friday is the easiest time to navigate the grocery store.

Bo-Bo Knows Gratitude for Grub Street

2009-11-19T10:04:00.011-05:00

After the initial shock of the September 11^th attacks wore off—once it became clear that the nuclear bombs I'd been bracing for weren't imminent—it became even more clear that my well-intended plan to satisfy my urge to write with a career in journalism was absolutely cock-eyed.

I wish I could say that 9/11 had stirred my inner heroine. That I'd been called to enlist or become a firefighter or paramedic or grief counselor. But the only calling I felt was the same old call to write fiction that I'd been ignoring for years. It was time to write for me— not just a paycheck. So I bought a notebook and started what would turn out to be failed novel number¹, but my problems were bigger than a second failed book: the journalism skills that helped me tell true stories were letting my fiction fall flat.

Enter Grub Street, the Boston-based non-profit creative writing center extraordinaire.²

By December, 2001 I was scribbling away in a beginning fiction class at Grub Street.³ That first class gave me the most precious of gifts: access to a community where like-minded individuals didn't need me to explain why the writing itch I felt went deeper than journalism's ability to scratch.

At Grub Street, I was welcomed as a writer as long as I showed up willing to learn. And that welcome took the form of established writers who had clear memories of what it felt to be just starting out, peers who knew what POV⁴ stands for, seminars on topics I wanted to wade around in for an evening and workshops on topics I wanted to immerse myself in for weeks, opportunities to read my work and hear others read theirs, encouragement, commiseration, and a safe place to take risks, build confidence, foster friendships, and line myself up for the all-important, if occasional, kick in the ass.

Last night I met with a couple of Grub-Street novelists to swap scenes from our novels-in-progress, chat about what's working and what still needs work, and just generally refill the well that drains down to nothing by unchecked solo-time spent blinking at my computer screen. I walked away feeling jazzed—for their books, for mine, and for the process in general.

For the most part, the non-writing world only recognizes writers once they've got an Amazon sales rank. But Grub Street recognizes writers in the fast-talking breathless ways we speak when talk turns to writing, in the beautiful turns of phrases that shine like daffodils among our beginner dandelion sentences, and in our Herculean ability to nurture a willingness to stick to the page in the face of long, long odds.

For the guidance, friendships, and all the ways leading to ways⁵ I can trace back to finding my own way into that first Grub Street class almost eight years ago, I'm more grateful than I have words to describe. Maybe some Grub Street someone will help me with that, too.

¹ Out of four failed novels. Five times is hopefully the charm...novel number five is the only one that graduated to revision stage, so it's already more successful than all the others combined.

²I think it's only fair to disclose that I'm an ambassador at Grub Street. Though I want to be clear: I'm not writing this piece because I'm an ambassador, but I'd bet I got tapped to become an ambassador because I love Grub enough to think to write a piece like this.

³Novelist Lisa Borders was at the helm. I couldn't have asked for a friendlier, more doggedly enthusiastic first face of Grub.

⁴Point of view.

⁵With apologies to Robert Frost.

Bo-Bo Knows Gratitude for Unexpected Visitors

2009-11-18T09:37:00.006-05:00

This morning I can't stop looking at the horse—yes, horse—in my neighbor's backyard. I stumbled from my bed a bit groggy but not so out of it that I failed to wonder what use my neighbors had for the horse trailer camped in their driveway. Their dobermans aren't that big. Then I glanced over at their slice of the American dream—a grassy area that would be too cramped for most trailers to sit on—and there was my answer. Horse. Horse. As in a country-mouse-lovin', in-the-flesh, honest-to-god horse. In Winthrop.

For those of you that don't know Winthrop, Massachusetts well enough to be sufficiently slack-jawed, our town shares a border with East Boston. We're not exactly a community known for its big lawns. The lot our condo sits on, for example, has no grass. Not one blade. And the most open space our town can claim is a handful of parks I'm totally grateful for and the beach. In other words, there are rich parts of town where the houses are off the hook, but no one 'round these parts is using the size of their lots to compensate for anything, if you know what I mean. In other words, this ain't horse country.

So I can't stop looking at my newest four-legged neighbor. Which is kinda sorta putting the neighbors off. Which maybe serves them right. Because unless the zoning laws in this town are arcane enough to hearken back to a time when sheep and chickens weren't oddities kept in petting zoos you have to pay to see, that horse's tail swishing in the cold November breeze is probably flipping off the guidelines for acceptable land use. So when I threw open my window to share my gleeful moment with my historically less-than-gleeful neighbors (there have been run-ins with them and the first floor over the barking, barking, barking of the aforementioned dobermans), the first thing they said was:

"It's just a visit!"

Me: "What's her name?"

Neighbor dude: "HIS name!"

Me, laughing: "Like I can tell that from way up here."

The guy gave me a look which confirmed my suspicions that they think the lady who regularly stands at her window watching their pack of dogs romp (that lurch would be me) is a little off her rocker. Then he turned to the horse who had itself turned in such a way as to put all its horsey manhood on enormously obvious display. The guy shook his head and turned away, but I wouldn't be deterred.

Me, louder: "So what did you say his name was?"

Neighbor dude: "Cigar!"

Because the annoyed glance neighbor-dude shot in my direction seemed to translate roughly to why-the-hell-are-you-still-there, I closed the window and receded a little bit. But I wouldn't go completely away. Not before I took pictures and ate breakfast while standing in the window! Because it's not every day I get to share my morning oats with a horse. And I'd still be watching if this majestic beauty hadn't turned his majestic hiney in my direction. My imagination projected to the majestic dookie I wouldn't want to watch get made while I was eating, and the spell was temporarily lifted.

But majestic dookies aside, I'll be enjoying the view from my kitchen window for a few days. And if that makes me a lurch perched behind a second story kitchen window, so be it.

Bo-Bo Knows Gratitude for Tea

2009-11-17T09:46:00.010-05:00

Some fanatics will tell you it's all about the ritual, but I think tea's simpler than all that. When I make my daily cup(s) of Bigelow's Plantation Mint black tea, I boil water and plop a bag in without ceremony. Unless, of course, it's ceremonial to use the same hand-painted, orange-and-yellow paisley mug with every sitting. I use it in part because it's the most beautiful mug I own, but mostly because it's big enough to dilute the tea just the way I like it, not so insulated I can't feel the warmth of the water within, and its slick sides roll with ridges my fingers run up and down while my mind drifts elsewhere.

OK. Maybe drinking tea's about personal ritual after all.

But it's also a diet drink. Some people claim that caffeine stimulates the appetite, but tea's been nothing but a calorie suppressant for me. I replaced the caffeine in two cans of soda a day with the caffeine in two bags of tea. Then I replaced a sweet treat after dinner with a healthy yogurt concoction and tea. And if the first waft of spearmint makes me smile as I pour it, or the heat from the water holds the winter cold at bay, well, bring it on.

Forget wanting to buy the world a coke—what kind of peace and harmony can I buy with a few billion mugs of black mint tea? About as much as that coke did you say? Aw well. The way I see it world peace is less about sweeping global change and more about a pandemic of individuals taking responsibility for their personal peace.

I'm no statesman, but even I'll raise a steaming mug to that.

Bo-Bo Knows Gratitude for Dogs

2009-11-16T12:38:00.012-05:00

Forget halos and snow-white wings—if angels exist they're dogs.

How else can you explain universal delight at the sight of a puppy, the calm that comes over you as you pet one that's chosen to lean against you for a spell, or the the silly joy that comes with realizing that the long list of things that can get a dog's tail thumping includes the slop they call dog food, being reunited after your long trip downstairs to get the mail, and the prospect of an opportunity to take a poo?

Bo will lope along beside me whether I take a 20-minute walk or a 60-minute walk. When I'm on a deserted road and the music inspires me to dance for a few measures, he hops along beside me with his head turned to look at me, his tongue lolling in a doggy smile that says "you go mom." And I'm convinced he's been trained to detect and counter my moods.

When I found out one of my best friends had been diagnosed with an aggresive and untreatable cancer, the news came over the phone, and though I was at the extreme opposite end of the condo from his favorite dog bed, Bo got up, came into my office, and put his head on my knees while I figured out how to balance sadness and bravery. How to stay in the moment I had with my friend right then instead of fast fowarding to future moments that had just been ripped away.

Dogs do that so well, don't they? Stay in the moment? The sun is shining, he's stretching his legs, there's an old friend visiting the house, a new friend on the street, a treat being offered, the smell of meat cooking, a toy that needs tossing, a pillow that needs a good claw fluffing, and on days when he eats a little too fast, a burp that needs tending to (he patters to my side and stands there while I stroke his chin and neck until he, well, burps).

There are angels among us. They may keep you up by licking their winkies throughout the wee hours, but they're angels nonetheless. I know I'm grateful for mine.

Bo-Bo Knows Gratitude for the Dawn

2009-11-15T07:12:00.003-05:00

Some days it's enough to be grateful for the dawn. Especially the morning after a night that found me cocking my ear toward the dragon lady who lives in a cave in my mind, lying in the dark, patiently waiting for me to stumble so she can spring up and assure me, her voice a cocktail of spurious sweetness, that it's not too late to swap my dreams of a creative life for some easier, simpler, more practical future.

Because while the dawn isn't the antidote to doubt exactly, morning light exposes that dragon for the vampire she is. And because even though the dragon spent last night pointing to all the years I've written in obscurity as proof of my total failure, in the light of day those same years look a bit more like tenacity. And though I may have drifted to sleep convinced I was a washed up wannabe, something in the dawn reminded me that failures fuel spunk, that there's fight in me yet, and that even when the sun takes the weekend off, it's out there, doggedly fighting to burn its way through. That the dawn is the dawn is the dawn. Even when it's gray.

Bo-Bo Knows Gratitude for Kitchen Marvels

2009-11-14T08:22:00.004-05:00

The scale ruined a gorgeous stormy morning for me today. My grand experiment in spreading out the pounds left to be lost and being less obsessed ended this morning when I stepped on he scale (a Saturday morning ritual) and discovered that instead of a enjoying a smaller loss, I was suffering a big gain: 1.4 pounds.

My husband reminds me there's no way that I ate 1.4 extra pounds this week, that the gain probably means I ate too much salt this week or pooed too little poo or stood on the scale differently than I did before. And believe me. I know all about the caprice of fluctuations at the scale. But knowing doesn't make it feel any less like a bitch.

If you've never battled with your weight and can't imagine why I'm (still) whining about this phenomenon, consider this: 1.4 pounds represents 4% of the weight I've lost. Now imagine that you're trying to save $6000 for a dream vacation to Tanzania/Australia/Aruba...wherever. You're so motivated to save , that you actually look forward to going into the bank each week to tally that week's new balance. I mean, you wanted to go out and celebrate when you hit the halfway point, but celebrations are expensive, so you did a little dance instead.

Last week your balance was at $3400, and you're hoping that this week's deposits have put you up over the $3500 mark, but no. When you get to the bank, you see there's only $3260 in your account. What the hairy hell is that about? Wouldn't you make a beeline for the customer service line and demand that the manager explain where your $140 popped off to? And wouldn't you be a little miffed if that manager told you, oh, there are a lot of places it might be. Maybe the money was stuck behind someone else's wads of cash. Or maybe the teller spilled soy sauce on it from her take out and sent it out to clean it up. Or maybe the money's really right where you left it, but you just can't see it because the computer's touchy--that thing can range anywhere from $300 over or under your balance, you know.

If your bank worked like your body, you'd be nuts not to withdraw the cash and deposit it in the sane bank down the street where $3400 is always $3400. But losing weight isn't an exercise in capitalism,* so I'm stuck with a body that acts like a clueless bank manager every once in a while. And there's nothing for it but to keep depositing the money (exercising, eating well) and hope that the dweeb behind the counter (that would be my metabolism) gets his act together. And preferably before the big Thanksgiving meal, please.

So today I'm grumpy. And while that may not be the exact opposite of grateful, it comes pretty damn close. So in the interest of clearing my metal constipation around the idea that my weight detoured in the decidedly wrong direction, I'm going to force myself to catalog a few of the kitchen tools that make healthy eating as simple--or simpler--than I used to think take out used to be. Tools you might even say I'm grateful to have discovered:

THE STEAMER. Forget that set-it-and-forget-it rotisserie thing you see on TV. Pop a few chicken breasts into the steamer, press on, and in about 25 minutes, you're good to go. I steam a ton at the start of the week and pull from them for the rest of the week.
A SET OF CHEAP PLASTIC MIXING BOWLS WITH COVERS. I think we paid something like $2.50 for a set of three of these at Shaw's years ago, and I use them all the time. I throw my favorite cut up veggies into the big one, drizzle them with so little olive oil onlookers (like my husband) are sure it's not enough to coat them. Then I cover the bowl and shake-shake-shake. The veggies are coated beautifully.
THE ROASTING PAN. A recent purchase. Got tired of trying to stir roasting veggies on a shallow cookie sheet. The roasting pan has high sides that practical scream stir in me.
A FEW GOOD POTS. We used some of our wedding money to invest in a very set of pots and pans. You would think the price we paid for the set would cause us to choke on whatever food comes from them, but it's OK. The cost included a self washing feature. You just think about putting them in the sink, and they're clean. They also have an anti-burn feature. The pan tells the food to move to a cooler spot of the pan when burns are imminent. The pans are also guaranteed to turn passable cooks into speedy gourmets and inspire the uninspired chef to experiment with a variety of close-enough approximations of recipes you want to eat without the hassle of actually spending all that time making.
CHICKEN BROTH. The cooking oil of the gods. Stir fry can be moist without all the oil, and dipping sauces can be whipped up with just a little creativity. Want honey mustard without all the calories? Dilute mustard with chicken broth and sweeten with a touch of sugarfree maple syrup. Want Indian without the calories and total time sink? Splash a little chicken broth and margarine into fat free plain yogurt and season with curry powder and salt and mix into lentils. And for a plan stir fry, toss basil and oregano into the broth as you cook. If you're feeling really adventurous, add a dash of thyme.
FAST FOOD ALA TUPPERWARE. And by Tupperware I mean plastic containers from Rubbermaid. My mom spent a few of my formative years as a Tupperware lady, so every plastic container is Tupperware forever and always, though I think Rubbermaid and Gladware are just fine. Anyway, cook too much food. Like, way too much and then portion it out. I do this with chicken (as you can see above) and lentils and soups. Then I grab a base for lunch--lentils and a little chicken. Pick a fruit to spice it up and go. No thinking. No fuss. Just go. I have quinoa and roasted veggies waiting to come with me to work today.
TRAVEL COFFEE MUGS. For tea on the go so I don't get tempted to get my caffeine the nectar of the gods way: Coca Cola in a can. I keep plantation mint tea bags in my pockets pretty much at all time for such emergencies.
SPONGE WAND. Two people living with one set of dishes and a dishwasher means you run out of spoons and bowls long before you have enough dishes to merit running the dishwasher. Enter the dish wand--a sponge with soap in the handle. This makes it easy to use the wash the same bowl and spoon and mug again and again quickly.
DIGITAL SCALE. Touch-button portion control. Enough said.
HIGH QUALITY KITCHEN UTENSILS. They don't melt if you leave them on the edge of of a pot, and speaking of the space-age no stick, they won't scratch the coating. These get used so much they see wand cleaning more than dishwashing action.
PRETTY STUFF. Our wedding brought us a bonanza of beautiful kitchen things that make dining at home a bigger joy than dining out. Great news for the calorie count.
ICE CUBE TRAYS. I hate ice cubes, but the trays are great to help me with cookie portion control. I mix up my cookies, space out 36 cookies and freeze them. Once frozen, I put them into Tupperware (!) containers and keep them in the freezer. If I want cookies I can thaw a couple and treat myself without going overboard. And since cookies are the world's best food, I can use my stash of frozen treats to fend off cravings: will I enjoy this chai latte more than I'd enjoy a chocolate chip cookie? If the answer is no, I tell myself I can have a cookie when I get home, but usually I don't want one by then. And because the dough is frozen, there's no chance of mindlessly indulging. It's my ace in the hole where dieting is concerned.

And no, my 1.4 pound gain had nothing to do with number 12 and everything to do with the caprice of the body. I know I'll be down two pounds tomorrow, but mostly I know that because I reminded myself about all the kitchen marvels I'm grateful to have figured out. Let me know if any of them work for you, or better yet, share your kitchen marvels.

If you have any tips you'd like to add, comment away!

*Let's ignore the multi-billion dollar weight loss industry that begs to differ with me

Bo-Bo Knows Gratitude for Groom Gripes

2009-11-13T09:17:00.008-05:00

Maybe it's because his tie cut off circulation to his brain yesterday when he was required to wear a suit to be granted an audience with the world's squarest client, but this morning my husband woke up inspired to pair the handsome paisley tie he'd bought for the meeting-o-stiffs with a shirt that rocks a swirl pattern best described as rich-people wall paper.

"How's this for awesomeness?" he said with a goofy grin as he showed off his outfit before he left for the day. "And why are you laughing?"

I told him the same thing I'd said when he asked me why I was laughing the night he brought the shirt home: I'm giggling because those blue loop-de-loops might as well spell out Mike.

It wasn't always this way.

The first real fight we had as a couple* was over the shirt he was wearing to dinner. I can't remember what the thing looked like, but I remember my very visceral certainty that it was ratty enough he needed to change into something respectable, like now. He wondered what the Man had done with his girlfriend, and could he expect she'd be returning any time soon?

At the time I believed that the secret to love and friendship was some strange calculus that involved figuring out the least painful way to morph myself into that person's ideal friend or partner. Because of that, I wasted a lot of my college years positioning myself as the brunt of the joke and lost track of the me pursuing we after we.

But Mike was different.

He turned my head the first time because he begged off of a lame Pink Floyd laser show at the Museum of Science. Later he said he just wasn't interested, and I was floored that he'd a) think it was better to be alone than do whatever the rest of the gang was doing, and b) actually choose to be alone. And yes, I do realize it's a testament to my extreme late bloom that college me needed to be reminded that spending an evening alone is always a viable option.

Fast forward to Mike and me as a new couple. Every bit of our early friction stemmed from my backward idea that to love someone was to change and be changed--the more drastic the shift, the deeper the passion or some such horseshit. I was a slow to grasp the radical idea that real connection was about finding the person who loved me enough to leave me space to find my life while also staying close enough to embrace the life I chose.

I was so used to letting people tell me which way to turn that being with a man who lobbed that choice back to me again and again and again was terrifying. But you can't be a partner without standing on your own. And if you come into a relationship young and superbly confused, you can't learn to stand on your own unless your partner loves you enough to trust that you'll figure it out. It took me a ridiculous amount of time for it to dawn on me that though Mike will carry me through nothing, he'll walk beside me through anything. And it took me even longer to recognize that for the priceless gift that it is.

So now, married a year and a half, when I get frustrated with him about some little stupid something, I'm grateful. OK, maybe not in the exact moment that he's using my nerves as a trampoline, but in the bigger picture, I'm thankful for the gripes I have with my groom. Because if he's annoying me, that means we're partners, not clones. It means I've married someone who understands that true partnership is about the health of its individuals and that the health of its individuals is about loving a person enough to let her figure out who she is for herself. The best I can do is offer the same gift to him.

Even if that means a closet full of wild and wacky prints.

* Have my husband and I really been together more than twelve years??

Bo-Bo Knows Gratitude for New Music

2009-11-12T09:20:00.013-05:00

Yesterday I fell in love with Harper Simon's debut CD while walking Bo through the crisp fall night. The folksy guitar hearkens back to the kind of rolling musical lines that would feel at home among haunting folk phrases from the sixties, but the slide guitar on many of the tracks makes the album feel like an heir to true old country. You know, before Nashville sold out the twang in its pursuit of winning hits about saving horses by riding cowboys.

I'm guilty of buying Harper Simon's CD because I'm a huge Paul Simon fan and the tracks on Harper Simon's My Space page sounded remarkably like tracks Paul might have written. And after a quick look at the liner notes, I was delighted to find that Paul Simon actually had contributed lyrics for a couple of the songs. But the album's a gem of its own making. The faster songs bounce you even as bittersweet lyrics rip at your heart, and the melodies soar and soar and soar. The final track, "Berkeley Girl," has a musical phrase in it that's such an echo of a phrase from "The Dangling Conversation" (Simon & Garfunkel) that my heart stopped a second, then raced to catch up to the song. That's not to say it's ripped off, oh no. The son's song is the son's, but there's some of the best of the dad in there, too.*

"The Dangling Conversation" was a track off of Simon & Garfunkel's "Parsley Sage Rosemary and Thyme" album. A high school friend had told me Simon & Garfunkel was the bomb, so being the sheep I was then, when I saw this cassette in a bargain bin nestled between "Bridge Over Troubled Waters" and "Greatest Hits," I bought all three. But I didn't really turn onto the music until my grandfather finally broke down and went to the doctor about his aching back only to find the pain was liver cancer and that the liver cancer was--so sorry--actually lung cancer that had already spread. As rocker Warren Zevon would tell David Letterman years later on the show Letterman devoted to Zevon a few months before he died of lung cancer himself: "I may have made a tactical error in not going to a physician for 20 years."

For me, the winter of 1992 was a blur of weekend trips to Lisbon Falls, ME to watch my last living grandparent wither a bit more each time I saw him. I got through it with a Walkman--remember when that was cutting edge?--and it was those Simon and Garfunkel tapes that serenaded me as I wore out the asphalt in laps around Grampy's block. I'd listen to those same tapes on the long trip home when my sister and I folded down the back seat of the station wagon and lay down in what we called the way bag, eyes trained on the clouds I could see through the rear window, ears trained on "The Dangling Conversation" and "The Only Living Boy in New York" and "Flowers Never Bend with the Rainfall" and "Kathy's Song" which in my teen brain was clearly about the way the music kissed me as I started my days and who cares if the Kathy of the song spelled her name the stupid way because it was absolutely and undeniably about me, dammit.

The point is when music seeps in as a handmaiden to sadness, that music tattoos itself on your soul and sets your musical levels forever. So even if the adult I became enjoys bouncing around and laughing to goof pop, my heart will always be tugged by the soft lilting melodies that have an uncanny ability to carry sadness at the same time they buoy hope.

It's rare for me to love an album inside and out--I consider a record a find if it includes just one song that wiggles its airy way into my ear and won't let me let it go. But I love Harper Simon's debut. My heart felt ripped at the beauty of the softer songs like "The Shine" and "Berkley Girl," and when there was nobody coming along the dark street that winds between the gulf course and the cemetery, I danced down the center of the road to the "Cactus Flower Rag" (you'd be amazed how much the cross over step your coach used to make you do can feel like dancing when done in time to a melody).

Don't try to share any new music with me in the next week, maybe two. I'll be bathed in the hope and sadness of Harper Simon's debut and remembering how thankful I am for those rare and glorious times when I stumble across music that helps reconnect me to wonder.

* The echoed phrase is on the lyric "And she drives a Karmann Ghia" in Harper Simon's "Berkeley Girl." To me, this sounds like "And you read your Emily Dickinson" from Paul Simon's "The Dangling Conversation." Maybe not a direct match, but close enough to take my breath, anyway.

Bo-Bo Knows Gratitude For Trees

2009-11-11T12:11:00.015-05:00

I'm obsessed with trees. Or I guess I should say I'm obsessed with admiring trees—I can't be bothered to spoil the mystery by memorizing names out of a guidebook. But in the photo albums for every trip I've ever taken, there's at least one random tree photo. My husband doesn't quite get my firm belief that the way a tree curls in some new somewhere is every bit as much the point of a trip for me as noting (yes, yes, very nice) the exact spot where idiot one slew idiot two during a heated argument about some peccadillo you can be is no where near worth dying over . And he absolutely can't understand why I'm totally bored by the thought of visiting Chicago and absolutely charmed by the idea of flying across country to California and renting a car to drive along coastal roads for hours to reach a Redwood forest so I can stand at the base of trees I can't even come close to putting my arms around and stare up in abject wonder at just how small I really am.

"But monkey," he says. "They're just big trees."

"You are SO not getting the point," I tell him as I make a mental note to put the Redwoods on my wish list of solo vacations. Because the only thing worse than not seeing the Redwoods at all would be seeing them with someone who glances up for a second, nods, and says: yup, big trees.

This morning, Mike got to see just how passionately (and perhaps frighteningly) attached to trees I can be. Today, the big tree behind our condo building (oak, I think) was scheduled for a trim. Our condo association has been waging an annual battle against a troop of squirrels who treat the branches of that tree as a causeway to the relative luxury of our warm attic space. After deciding that the cost of rehabilitating our squirrel squatters has grown too high, all of the condo owners agreed it was time to shut down the rodent expressway above us: the tree would be trimmed.

So it wasn't a surprise to me when the chainsaw chorus in my backyard stirred me awake this morning, but what floored me was the discovery that the genteel pruning I was expecting looked more like an amputation. One of the main boughs had been stripped of every spider limb, and there was a hard-hat-wearing guy in a bucket seat chopping the bony branch down piece by piece.

My hand flew to my head which felt immediately hot. To say I flipped out would be an understatement. There were curses. Impassioned pleas to my husband to stop the slaughter, a frantic call to the condo association president during which I managed to relay that whatever she'd told them to do, the butchers had gone tree-toppling mad, that a quarter of the tree was gone, and there were neighbors on the ground looking up at the workers with their hands on their hips.

The condo association president tried to tell me that all was well, explain that we had a legal right to cut the branches that affected our property, that a tree can and will survive the loss of one or more main boughs, that she'd come back to check on things. But she seemed to be missing the headline: a big and beautiful branch had been sliced down in pieces.

All I could think about was the permanence of this mistake. All I could do was watch helplessly as the wood that used to be a bough was being turned into mulch, and, when I hung up the phone, I cried. Hard. Because a beautiful branch that yesterday had wended its way out and up, reaching and reaching and reaching, had been cut down and erased in less time than it took for me to snap fully awake.

What is it about trees that's so primal for me? Is it the way they yield to the wind on one day and stand tall again the next? The way they radiate natural beauty in every season whether people bother to notice them or not? The way they still my breath and mind when I take a second to stop and watch? The way they start in the mess and the muck of the dirt to burst forth and patiently, patiently grow into this spiderweb tangle that reaches higher and higher and higher? I don't know the right reason any more than I can tell you the name of the short and gnarly trees that line the path in the park on Crest Avenue in Winthrop that I go out of my way to walk under every day. I just know that I like the way liking trees makes me feel. That I'm grateful that something so simple can please me so much.

Now that operation tree top is done, I can see that the end product isn't as brutal as it looked like it was going to be while the chopping was taking place. Something about seeing the branch fall brutal bit by brutal bit was too hard to take. I can see now that the tree is fine, or mostly fine. That all will be well. All will be fine. Still the visceral reaction lingered, so I calmed myself with a tour of the trees I've captured in my travels around the world, and shared a handful. There are a couple from Australia (Watson Bay in Sydney and Uluru in the Outback), another from a gorilla habitat at the Bronx Zoo, one from a farm in Northern New Hampshire, one from a Folk Festival in the Berkshires, and another from the lovely Llanberis, Wales. I bet you can't tell for sure which is which. And maybe that's the magic of the trees— their growth and striving is absolutely borderless.

Bo-Bo Knows Gratitude for Fall Heat Waves

2009-11-10T09:24:00.003-05:00

It's 9 o'clock in the morning, and I don't want to be here today. Nope. No way. Because it's November 10 and 61 degrees outside, the third of three days I would have been happy to enjoy in early May. I want to leash Bo up and go for a long and —here's the key—coatless walk. There's not as much bright and shining sun as there was yesterday, but I'll smile as if there was.

Because when I got back from a fantabulous visit with friends in Los Angeles in July, I came home in a funk. Not because the trip was so good it made me want to live there, but because I knew that we Bostonians had five more weeks of summer left to enjoy before the fall heralded the beginning of the l-o-n-g winter season, while my California girls never, ever have to think about rationing their warmth.

As if on cue, November in Boston came on the back of a particularly ferocious cold front that had me digging through closets in search of hats and gloves for those early morning walks. But in my envy for constant sunshine, I forgot about the special brand of euphoria that comes with an unseasonable reprieve. The absolute high of hearing your ipod click to Katrina and the Waves when you are quite literally walking on sunshine yourself and by all rights shouldn't be. This is November, people. November!

So today I'm grateful for the warming trifecta. And to my friend who pointed out that it made her think about polar bears stranded on chunks of ice that had broken free, I say Bah Humbug! I hate the thought of a forlorn polar bear as much as the next person with an ounce of compassion, but there's nothing I can do to help him from Boston, so I choose to go out and enjoy Boston's impression of November in LA. God knows we'll all need the sunny memory when the mercury drops below zero in a few months...

Bo-Bo Knows Gratitude for The Next Ten Minutes

2009-11-09T08:58:00.003-05:00

My husband has a theory about the mercurial nature of happiness: unhappiness sprouts in minds stuck in "big time" while happiness blossoms in those that understand how to use "little time" to reach big-time goals.

Big-time thinkers—aka the miserable ones—focus on the year it will take to finish the project; the hundred-thousand good choices that need to be made to reach a healthy goal weight; and the thousands upon thousands of hours it will take to write a book, revise a book, shop and sell and pub a book.

Little-time thinkers focus on the next small step they can take right now to move toward the big goals they want to reach. And never mind that moving forward is inching forward. Forward is forward is forward.

The year I spent as a freelance writer I understood this. I took on way more than I could reasonably finish in an eight-hour workday. Scratch that. I took on more than I could reasonable finish in a twelve-hour workday. I realized quickly that focusing on the the many deadlines advancing toward me like the push of humorless troops armed with pocket watches and metaphorical whips was a recipe for hyperventilation, so to preserve a regular breathing pattern, I developed a system: I filled my to-do list with 30-minute project chunks and set an alarm. Each time the buzzer bleated, I crossed an action item off instead of waiting a month to cross the whole project off a much more stagnant list. I was still ridiculously overstretched, but I wasn't hyperventilating. That's the second ingredient in a happy life, I think. A distinct lack of hyperventilation.

So I know that little time works in theory. Set a realistic goal and then forget all about the big project as you focus on the little chunks you can do now. Little time isn't exactly a new thought. Some thinker that came before both my husband and I coined the idea that the only way to eat an elephant was one piece at a time. But I need the occasional refresher course.

Yesterday, for example.

I've been so focused on sprinting to the healthy me, that I didn't notice the storm brewing--all of a sudden I realized that there's very little wiggle room for human frailty in my diet. Cookies. There's no room for cookies. Or hand-cut french fries. Or yellow cake with buttercream frosting from Party Favors. Or chicken tikka masala. The cravings were likely a figment of the period that started this morning (and there's mention of that again, boys), but the thinking that I'd never have any of these things again was very real. Wrongheaded, but real.

Enter Mike's little time theory. He pointed out that I've been locked into big time on this, and so obsessed with getting to the first weight-loss benchmark by Christmas that I've pumped up the exercise and pared back the calories so far that there's not much wiggle room for anything but perfection. And two pounds a week is a lot when you've already burned off 34 pounds.

"Just make good choices for the next ten minutes, and everything else locks into place."

So in that ten mintues, I recalculated my daily calorie range based on a more humane goal of losing 27.5 pounds by January, 2011. Pushing the date 14 months into the future makes big-time me a little crazy, but little time me will be all the happier for it.

How much more happily productive would I be if I could remember to be grateful for the next ten minutes in all my projects? If organizing the house was a series of little time triumphs. If revising the book was a series of ever-smaller chunks: sections or scenes or paragraphs. Can I get a word by word? A letter by letter?

Today I'm grateful for Mike's reminder that life is too big to be squandered in big-time anxiety. That life is lived, moment-by-moment, in the little-time now. Today I'm grateful to focus on what I can do in the next ten minutes.

Bo-Bo Knows Gratitude for the Lesson

2009-11-08T22:49:00.000-05:00

Mary had a heart attack yesterday.

She was walking her spotted dachshund along the Boston Common side of Beacon Street when the dread of what was to coming crept over her. A tightness of the chest? A tingling of the arms? I don't know. I couldn't see her face from my side of the street. The only reason I can be sure that she knew it was coming at all was because she was screaming at anybody nearby: "Will you take my dog?!"

Ahead of me, on my side of the street, a crowd of men I took for tourists started talking in French that was too fast for me to understand anything but the word "chien." Dog.

Mary, screamed again, more insistent this time, clearly distressed as she took another step into the street. One of the French men glanced at the stream of traffic zipping up the hill. The tension in the air was palpable. Dread mingled with an electric charge. She started sobbing as she inched toward the middle of the street. My stomach bottomed out. Alarmed, I called to her, meaning to ask if she was all right, but before my second word was out, Mary was down. A heavy woman, solid, and yet her strong legs swayed, then buckled as if they held all the strength of limp noodles. She folded first to her knees, then to her hands, and then she rolled over onto her back right there in the middle of Beacon Street. Someone yelled, call 9-1-1, so I did as I beelined for the center of the road.

One woman grabbed the dog's leash as I waited for the phone to connect. In the road, Mary lay on her back, her rouged cheeks puffed up on a face that was upside down to me, her hand over her chest. No shortage of people had rushed out, but everyone was hanging back; nobody was talking to her. So I told her my name was Cathy, asked her hers, the dog's. Her name was Mary, she told me. The dog was Happy. When I told her I was calling for an ambulance, she stretched her fingers toward me, her voice childlike:

"Will you hold my hand, please?"

The traffic veered around us. I dropped the pack I was carrying, laid my binder beside that. I put the GPS unit I was using to direct me to a client's house on the ground in front of me beside my purse. Then I took her very cold fingers in mine as I tried to relay information to the 9-1-1 operator. The traffic swerved behind us.

I looked over my shoulder to see how close those cars were. Too close. "Could someone wave the cars around so I don't get hit?" I asked. So I don't get hit. Not we.

Mary's fingers squirmed in my hand. I assured her that help was on the way, and asked her questions the 9-1-1 operator was asking of me. Did she have nitroglycerin? Not on her, she said in a child's cry. A history of heart disease then? A keening, then a drawn out yes. How old was she? Sixty.

A biker stopped, introduced himself as a physician, and went to work loosening the coat around Mary's chest. My hand still in Mary's, I noticed my GPS was gone, and I asked after it. The woman with the dog told me it was just here somewhere. It was mine, I told her. Beside Mary, the physician called out to passersby—did they have nitroglycerin? Aspirin? Someone came forward with a bottle of Bayer. Someone else a bottle of water. Mary choked it all down. The 9-1-1 operator assured me help was coming, then my phone buzzed and the connection was gone.

My GPS got pulled out of Mary's handbag. I took it from the woman. "That's mine," I told her again. Like it mattered. Like I thought she might think I was stealing.

Mary's fingers were still in mine when she started crying about her dog. Where was he? Where was he?

"Here," the woman holding the leash said.

The poor dog was shaking hard enough his collar tinkled, but when I reached my right hand toward him and called his name, he inched closer. I sat like that a few seconds, a minute maybe, my left hand in Mary's, my right hand stroking Happy.

The fire truck arrived first.

As the medics poured on the scene, I remembered I was late, pulled my hand from Mary's, collected my stuff, and slipped back into the crowd without sticking around to find out what happened to Happy, what became of Mary. The only sign that something out of the ordinary had happened was my hands. They shook as I climbed the stairs to my appointment a few minutes later.

I'm sure Mary's gonna be fine. The fact that she was lucid enough to answer questions seems like a sign of survival to me. But what shook me up was the three strikes I racked up quickly. When Mary needed someone to be present with her while her heart ripped her world open, I let myself be distracted with thoughts of preserving my safety, my electronics, my schedule.

What kind of person does that make me?

I don't like any of the answers I came up with yesterday. I like the answers I've come up with this morning even less. But deeper than that, I feel like the message that keeps surfacing from all this is "be present"—not that I have any idea what that might mean in terms of my day-to-day life. I guess today it's enough that I'm grateful for the invitation to the lesson. Maybe that's enough period.

Bo-Bo Knows Gratitude for The Beach

2009-11-07T07:23:00.003-05:00

Last night I walked Bo on—not along—the Winthrop Beach outpost. The tide was low enough to let us pass between the crashing waves and the craggy rocks that are too treacherous to travel through in the light—never mind the dark. The people of Winthrop call any movement along the water a wave, but I grew up near the New Hampshire seacoast. I know a real wave has the power to hold you upside down just long enough that you're still laughing when you sputter back to the surface. In Winthrop, the waves are beautiful and calming, but they're nothing more than ripples from some restless mermaid's bath.

The outpost—that's just my name for it, nothing official—is my favorite part of the beach. To reach the water here requires a climb down two staircases, and, once there, you're annexed from Winthrop Beach proper by several impassable jetties. Not many people bother with this little spit of seaside, so because of that, descending to the shore here, particularly when the packed sand is glistening, unmarred by anyone who walked there before you, is descending into another world. An easy transfer to a calmer country, a quick trip to the dark side of the moon. Here, you remember things you'd thought you'd forgotten, allow your brain to turn away from whatever thoughts had you low down, as if what was bothering you just needed communion with the tide to remember how to ebb and ebb and ebb. And at night, when the only light comes from a dim streetlamp, an even dimmer moon, and whatever of those two is reflected on the baby white caps lolling in toward the shore, it's as if the whole purpose of the crash and hum of Winthrop's wee waves is this reminder: the only thing that will really matter tomorrow is remembering to breathe today.

Bo-Bo Knows Gratitude for Physical Strength

2009-11-06T11:04:00.000-05:00

So picture me running this week, my ipod cranking up the goof pop, my feet flying, my muscles making quick work of the five inclines on my running route, laughing when I realize that I'm sailing--as in easily--by the restored Victorian house that used to mark the part of the run where my face turned blood red, my legs screamed, and I could hardly catch my breath.

But no more!

I've flown through my runs so fast this week that I have muscle soreness. Not cramps! Soreness. As in I ran hard enough to build muscle. As in I had the steam to run hard enough to build said muscles.

And best yet? My handy Nike/ipod/pedometer thing tells me I was averaging 1o minutes and 52 seconds per mile. So, no, the international Olympic committee isn't exactly beating my door down, but in June it took me more than 50 minutes to run a 3.5-mile road race. And when I started the race, the time clock wasn't even on! Now granted, the field was so packed that there were some points in that race that I had to jog in place and others when I was being passed by pedestrians on the sidewalk, but any way you cut it, 50+ minutes is slow. A pace that has all the fleetness of a garden slug.

Now I've cracked the 11 minute mile! Happily. With a grin on my face! I am the bionic woman: sh-nuh-nuh-nuh-nuh--nng! I think people recognize the new bionic me, too. There have definitely been a couple of double takes as I pass that I'm choosing to believe have everything to do with people recognizing my new steel core and nothing to do with the fact that I'm a runner with a goofy grin plastered on her face. I'm further choosing to believe that those second looks have even less to do with the fact that, on occassion, I answer the lyrics of my goof pop running selections. Out loud. Like when the song my husband and I chose for our last dance at our wedding comes on and serenade me with"Wow! Look at you now!" and I giggle and say something that sounds in my head like you're damn right, look at me now but I'm sure comes out more like "pant, pant, yeah, giggle, pant, hee-hee!"

So I'm grateful for the clear proof of the added muscle mass, I am. But if the scale wants to start heading back in the right direction (aka DOWN), I'd be grateful for that too.

Bo-Bo Knows Gratitude for Sickening Dread

2009-11-05T09:35:00.006-05:00

If you've never ridden in a car with a GPS device to help you navigate your way from point A to point B, you may not know that when you miss a turn—either deliberately or because the jerkwad in the next lane wouldn't let you in—the machine will turn the little car on the map (the icon is GPS-speak for "you are here") before realizing that you are so NOT here. Then, there's a hiccup and a robotized female voice says recalculating as your trip remapped to accommodate your detour.

I'm sure the engineers who programmed the GPS to say "recalculating" intended it as comforting shorthand for we'll get you back on track in a jiffy, but the drop in the timbre of robo woman's voice combined with the way she lingers on the long vowel sound in re-caaal-culating makes it sound for all the world that the person in the driver's seat (AKA me) has been nothing but a colossal disappointment to her, and could I please follow simple directions for once in my sorry little life.

I realized recently that I have an internal GPS.

As models go, I can't recommend it for mass production because the thing has yet to offer me step-by-step instruction on the best route to any of my goals. But it's aces at telling me when I've gone off track. I'm not so crazy that I actually hear some robotized female voice, but I do feel it as a black hole in my stomach that, if left unchecked, will creep up my body to my neck, then up and over my chin, my face, my eyes and hair. And though it's often way wrong about the little things—did I leave the oven on? did I remember to attach the file to that email? will that whacko whose trunk I slapped when he almost ran me over while I was out running yesterday track me down and shoot me at point blank range?—it's pretty much never wrong about the big things. The things that matter.

At the end of my day off yesterday, the dread swamped me—my inner GPS was recaaaaalculating all over the place–and I was glad. Not because having my head swallowed by darkness is such a pleasant experience, but because on a day when I had nothing but time, I only saved an an hour for my writing. My inner GPS can't tell me the best way to finish the novel I'm revising, but it's smart enough to send up a flare when I only use one measly hour of the twenty-four I had free to work on it.

There are times when putting aside an hour in a day is an act of faith—it's all the time I have so I use it. But yesterday wasn't one of those days, and I'm grateful to the vortex of my inner GPS for reminding me that all my excuses disguise the truth: that I'm scared out of my ever-loving mind.

But given that I believe that fears stand up to scrutiny about as well as the Wicked Witch of the West stood up to a bucket of water, I'll say it right here, right now: I'm afraid I don't know how to revise this book.

Any minute now the green skin of fear will start pooling around my feet. No?

How about if I voice this fear: If you don't get your thumb out of your ass, like right this very minute, you risk never finishing a revision at all.

Now there's a fear that feels like a bucket of water tossed in the face. What a world! What a world! Who would have thought a good little girl like you could destroy my beautiful wickedness?

Bo-Bo Knows Gratitude For Days Off

2009-11-04T08:49:00.005-05:00

Yesterday may have been an exercise in reminding myself why my job is working for me, but today's my day off and there is nothing--nothing--like waking up with an empty day yawning out before me--no scheduled appointments, no expectations. Bliss.

Sure there are things I want to do, and plenty more things I should do (hello, laundry!) but this day's mine all mine, and when my day's my own, wondrous things happen. Like piling up revised pages. And the pancakes I'm eating as I type. The healthy, wheat kind, but pancakes nonetheless. You know. The breakfast we love to eat but never have the time to make? Yeah. Pancakes. Later I might go a little crazy and roast me some veggies for lunch. It's like I'm made of time! Here's my current wish list for today:

walk my dog on the beach (an extended walk on this gorgeous fall day),
run a 5K (the equivalent distance, not a race),
shower (I'll need it after number 2),
laundry (because it's nice to have clean clothes on busy days),
three writing goals (two scene revisions and the start of a new scene),
reading (I'm currently loving "The Patron Saint of Liars" by Ann Patchett),
wedding photo sort (I need to decide which wedding photos I want to print before my prepaid card at Ritz expires),
blogging, and
pancakes.

And with this post, numbers 8 and 9 are done. Let's see how this sunny of sunniest days shapes up, shall we? Yes. Yes, we shall.

*Except maybe waking up on the morning of the first of TWO days off. Like in a row. Like normal people. And with that, my 2010 resolution list has officially begun.

Bo-Bo Knows Gratitude for: Gratitude

2009-11-03T08:15:00.008-05:00

I know, I know. True gratitude springs from an overflowing heart. It's supposed to be as pure as icy mountain air and as warm as the patches of sun that woo cats to while away their quiet afternoons. And that's all good--a fine ideal to strive for--but for me gratitude is a tool. A powerful tool, but a tool.

Despite all the blessings in my life, I aspire to gratitude. By that I mean that my full understanding of the many things I have to be grateful about are too often--and too easily--eclipsed by complaints and worry. But I've found that I can scratch the needle off the record of complaint by transforming it to gratitude.

An example: When I get down about my job, I count the hours I spend from the time I leave my house until the time I get back, I focus on how my work schedule--evenings and weekends--means I can't take classes, teach classes, spend time with friends who work traditional hours, or even do something as simple as blow a Saturday farting around with my husband. The complaining doesn't change any of that, of course. It just makes me feel like I'm going through my day with weights sewed into the lining of my clothes. But I've found I can switch my thinking quickly by focusing on grateful realities:

In the shakiest economic downturn of my lifetime, I'm grateful to have steady income.
Though it's true this schedule is social kryptonite, I'm grateful for the opportunity to reconnect with friends who have non-traditional schedules.
I'm grateful that this job leaves my mornings free to write. By being able to prioritize my writing on my daily to-do list, I finished a first draft of a book and am hard at work on a revision.

If I just remember to trade complaints for thanks, my no-good-terrible-very-bad-days* are absolutely bearable. Gratitude is a bit like magic that way. And if that's not something to be thankful for, I don't know what is.

* With apologies to Judith Viorst

Bo-Bo Knows Gratitude for: Low Tech, Too

2009-11-02T08:24:00.005-05:00

Stacks of books, an old iron spoon my mom used to teach me how to cream butter for cookies, a cup of tea—no cream, no honey, just tea—old-fashioned twist can openers, slippers, the warmth of the voice that comes from a record, the smell of turkey roasting in the kitchen, the peace of the silence between my husband and me that's our tacit rejection of society's dictum that we should be talking or doing or striving at all times, purple tulips, singer-songwriters who aren't afraid to write songs that are just guitar and voice, tap water, and the carpet of leaves on lawns that belong to people who understand that rakes in the fall are like yuppie tyranny against nature. But above all else, my favorite low tech lovelies are pen and paper. Specifically, any pen with black ink and a hefty grip and simple paper (spiral-bound notebooks from CVS, composition books, legal pads—anything unassuming will do, though I much prefer college-ruled sheets). But the paper is really secondary to the pens.

Oh my pens.

There's nothing quite like the pleasure of long hand in a type, type, type world. Nothing like sprawling across the bed in my office-slash-guest room, staring at a blank page, pen poised to fill it. Nothing like the smooth, cool plastic of the barrel of a Pentel RSVP pen against the skin at the tips of my thumb and index finger. Nothing like the sound of the scratch of the fine point scribbling across the page. Nothing like the sour, nutty smell of black ink that grows stronger the longer I write, the smell wafting up like low tide for writers. Nothing like the bumpy Braille of the inked words beneath my fingertips as I brush my hand over a page full of fresh writing. Nothing like the way inked pages crinkle when I turn to the next, fresh page.

Bo-Bo Knows Gratitude for: High Tech Lovelies

2009-11-01T07:22:00.002-05:00

I was born in 1975, grew up during the eighties, and was a high school student during the high-waisted nineties. The first national news story I remember clearly was the assassination attempt on Ronald Reagan. I had two very clear sense memoriesfrom that day. The first was guilt. During our kindergarten election, I had fallen in love with Carter (something about his background as a peanut farmer charmed the 5-year-old in me and I drew haearts around his photo on the mock ballot Mrs. Valardo handed out). Could my love of the peanut man have hurt the jelly bean man? Such is child logic.

The second was utter impatience. We were in the car driving--this was prime music time given that turning on the home stereo was a rarity--and the men on the air were just yak, yak, yaking about this shot in the arm when what I needed--most desperately--was my daily fix of Olivia Newton John or Air Supply. But an illustration about the evolution of my musical tastes aside (and I'm a firm believer that you cannot hold a 5-year-old responsible for something like musical taste), the point is that during this national crisis, the radio was my primary source. Not the television, not the Internet, not the blogosphere, not tweets, not Facebook, not YouTube. And while we're at it, when I did get to play a record at home it was a record (I think at that time I had one from Lionel Ritchie and one of Olivia Newton John in workout gear, but my memory is hazy). And if I wanted to take my music with me to my grandparents' house, I was all out of luck (ha!) because ipods weren't even a twinkle in Steve Jobs's eye. And let's not even talk about how it would be ten years before my family bought its first desktop computer--a 486.

I think it's fair to say that since 1981, technology has prolioiferated. The VHS released us from the tyranny of first-run movies, the DVD opened the door for netflix and freed us all from the patchy selection at our local video stores which have gone quietly out of business as more and more people get red envelopes in the mail. Tivo has released us from anything so quaint as a programming schedule, and the 30-second skip button has pardoned all of us from ever having to watch any commericals we don't want to see (though in our house, we will often rewind to catch the latest Mac vs. PC commercial--but only once, and then we skip it after that).

On the highways, I have a GPS to keep me from getting lost without having to carry a piece of paper in my hand, and if I want a cup of tea, I can tell the GPS to find me the nearest Starbucks or Dunkin Donuts. And when I'm on the highway, I have a transponder that links my lincense plate to my credit card so I can zip through the tolls while the rest of the saps wait to pay their actual dollars to an actual person. I'm grateful for the time that little plastic square saves me, of course, but I'm at least equally grateful for the sense of awe I feel as I peer at the drivers who still haven't gotten a fob knowing that the highway department gives them away for free now.

And last night I went jogging with my new nano which means I had a mix tape of goof pop I love without having to spend hours making anything so silly as a mix tape. And that nano was connected to a pedometer attached to my shoe that tracked my mileage. Actually, it did one better than that. I punched in how far I wanted to go and at the halfway point a robot woman interrupted the song to tell me I was halfway there. Then in the home stretch she (it?) let me know when I had 400 meters, 300 meters, 200, 100 to go. When I was done she (it?) congratulated me on finishing my workout. The five year old I was would sum all this wonder up with apt lyrics from one of her least favorite Olivia Newton John songs: You have to believe [this is] magic.

But electronics aren't magic. What's magic are the advances in medicine. After the run, I got a migraine (my seocnd in a couple of weeks, and I have to think that the aspartame in my gum isn't as innocuous as I thought it was). And though I lost the rest of the night, a couple Imitrex (a blood-brain barrier medicine) and a good night's sleep and I'm ready for a long day. Well, a bit tired, and a little shaky, but as a kid with migraines I used to lose days. So this is magic.

And with that I got to run. But when I hook up my ipod to my car stero and punch in my GPS route and zip through the fast lane with a head that's good as new, I'll be thinking about how grateful I am that it's 2009 and not 1981. For technilogical upgrades, yeah, but the political upgrades aren't too shabby either. Reagan to Obama in one generation, baby. Now there's a post
all by itself!

Bo-Bo Knows 30 Days of Gratitude

2009-11-01T06:36:00.014-05:00

I had so much fun writing about shredding in October, I've decided to experiment with monthly themes. And because this is the month with the Thanksgiving holiday in it, I figured gratitude was the timeliest follow up. That and lately I've had a Goldilocks-like fixation on everything in my life that's either too hot or too cold and thought it was high time to start thinking about all the things in my life that are juuuust right.

If you're worried about high-minded sappiness, well, that's a valid concern. The only thing I can tell you is that while there might be some grand ideas (freedom of speech springs immediately to mind) and some heart string ideas (my peeps spring immediately to mind here), at the other end of the spectrum I can't imagine writing 30 mini essays about the things that make me go yay without at least one entry about fresh-from-the-oven chocolate chip cookies (the Ghirardelli recipe because it kicks Tollhouse's ass in the tasty goodness category which is really the only category that matters with cookies).

Here's how this will work. Every day I add a blog entry, I'll come back to this jump page and add a link here so at the end of the month, the links to all the entries will be right here on this one page. Ready? Here we go:

Bo-Bo Knows Gratitude for High Tech Lovelies

Bo-Bo Knows Gratitude for Low Tech, Too

Bo-Bo Knows Gratitude for Gratitude

Bo-Bo Knows Gratitude for Days Off

Bo-Bo Knows Gratitude for Sickening Dread

Bo-Bo Knows Gratitude for Physical Strength

Bo-Bo Knows Gratitude for The Beach

Bo-Bo Knows Gratitude for The Lesson

Bo-Bo Knows Gratitude for The Next Ten Minutes

Bo-Bo Knows Gratitude for Fall Heat Waves

Bo-Bo Knows Gratitude for Trees

Bo-Bo Knows Gratitude for New Music

Bo-Bo Knows Gratitude for Groom Gripes

Bo-Bo Knows Gratitude for Kitchen Marvels

Bo-Bo Knows Gratitude for the Dawn

Bo-Bo Knows Gratitude for Dogs

Bo-Bo Knows The End (Shred Day 30)

2009-10-31T08:02:00.002-04:00

Done! Finished! The End! Woot! Woot!

And though taking my measurements made me feel more like a lumpy sofa than a triumphant athlete, here are my fitness numbers after 30 days of shredding:

Weight: Down 3.4 pounds
Bicep: Down 1 inch
Thigh: Down 1/2 inch
Hips: Down 1.5 inches
Breast: No change (My B-cup girls are grateful for the net zero here.)
Waist: Down 1 inch*

I look at these numbers--by all measures, a success--and I think every number here should be bigger, much bigger. And yet, I've lost 34 pounds since the start of the summer--that's like rubbing out a whole leg, only the weight loss is more evenly distributed. It's only right that my weight loss should slow to a pound-a-week trickle (though the foot-stomping three-year-old in me is pouting--are we there yet?)

Getting fit's a hairy mind trip, isn't it?

I remind myself that my go-to pants were in storage a month ago, my clinging shirts no longer have a spare tire to cling to, I can take the groceries up the stairs without getting winded, my mood is better in general, and--perhaps most importantly--I believe there's a healthy fit body waiting for me at the end of this journey. And maybe even more importantly than even that last one, I also recognize that getting to that healthy body is the end of the first leg of a lifetime journey, not an end in itself. For now, though, I'm choosing to be psyched to report that on this Halloween Day, I'm dressed as a slightly more shredded version of myself.

Werewolves are sooo overrated.

* Some of you may be wondering why my waist measurement increased an inch in the last week. I did have a frozen yogurt, but I suspect it has more to do with forcing my sleepy husband to get up and help measure me before 8 a.m. on a Saturday. First he tried to measure me from a prone position. Then he tried to, keeping his eyes closed against the light, measure me half-heartedly. When I pointed out that I was getting measurements at or in excess of my readings at the start of the month, he measured again:

Me: If you go all tourniquet, you're not doing me any favors.
Him (grinning): I know where my bread is buttered.
Me (laughing): Just do it right!
Him (getting up like the sleeping bear he is): Your name is mud.

So the results may be a bit hairy, but fitting into old clothes is real. And the subjective truth is this. I feel stronger. I feel amazing, actually. I feel ready to take on those last (sigh) 27 pounds. Maybe next month I'll be ready to scratch the sigh.

Bo-Bo Knows Shred Day 29

2009-10-30T11:54:00.004-04:00

So with each day we're one day closer to great tape measuring ceremony that is Day 30. I've made peace with the fact that I (very likely) will not be able to finish the final circuit of level 3 strength at the advanced level—the muscles are willing, but the wrists poop out. Leave it to me to be held back by limp wrists.

Limp wrists aside, I do know I'm working hard because Bo-Bo tells me so. Today he watched me jump and kick and lift, lift, lift with his twitchy little eyes until I collapsed into my final ab workout—then he jumped up with more spryness than he's exhibited of late and padded over to investigate my general well being. You try doing your ab work effectively with 75 pounds of hound hovering over your chest and a cold wet nose pressed into your sweat-soaked face.

Then at the end of workout three—in a move I can only attribute to finish-line giddiness—I decided it would be cool to do the level one workout. Yeah, cool. I think the relentlessly impractical optimist deep inside me actually believed level one would be a cake walk by now. I knew I was in trouble when my arms started shaking during the first set of military push ups. When I fell from my toes to my knees during the second set, I got the giggles. Some cakewalk.

But! Initial strength circuit aside, the cardio was a breeze and the final ab workout—the bicycles—were no sweat at all when I know the first time through I was excited to graduate the level having done just one good set. Now, I was pushing through them like they were nothing. OK. Not nothing (particularly by the end). But pushing through them in a way that I'd feel comfortable modeling them for a newbie like I was 29 days ago today!

So this may be just a little more finish-line giddiness, but I'm gonna go ahead and call it: I will absolutely finish this 30-day program tomorrow**. Results will be posted. Celebrations will take place. If there was a "Jillian Michaels shredded my ass!" bumper sticker to be had, I'd so be affixing it to the back of my car.

* For those of you who shred and are wondering how I could be on my back during the final ab exercise, I've modified it. The exercise she recommended was causing shooting pains in my elbows. I decided this was a sign I was doing it seriously wrong and swapped out an exercise that has my shoulders on the ground flat and my legs bent so I look like a lowercase b or d and then crunch away.

** Barring natural disaster or power outage, of course.

Bo-Bo Knows The Shredded Mind (Day 28)

2009-10-29T08:17:00.002-04:00

In much the same way that my muscles are starting to assert their presence beneath the fat in my body that's still waiting to be burned off, the shredded head I dreamed about on day 6 has whipped out it's gardening shears and started pruning back the wrongheaded thoughts that had sprouted up and were threatening to strangle my mind.

Yesterday--a day with showers so heavy that I had to drag my dog on his walk (he refuses to believe that he won't melt in the rain) and a dental hygienist who went at my gums with sharp and shiny metal things--was still hands down the best day of my week. Before you fret about the quality of my life, let me explain.

Yes, it was a day off from work. And yes, I'm working six days a week. But it was more than that. It was about a shift in my thinking--my head was clear, the world was my playground, and nothing was impossible (if you read the "fitness is funny" post I put up yesterday, you'll get an idea of the mindset I'm talking about) . Because yesterday fitness was funny, writing was the primary goal of the day, my husband was working for home which meant we got to laugh and joke with each other when he took the breaks, I wrote 6 pages I was happy wtih, had a healthy thai meal, met with writer friends for a killer workshop, one of my best friends shared dance-when-you-hear-it good news, and I topped the day off with a little hot-fudge covered frozen yogurt that I savored while talking shop wtih one of my newest friends.

It wasn't that any of the individual parts were life-changing,* but the mood was. It was the first time in a long time that all of the moving parts seemed to be clicking along nicely. I want to be healthy, and I made healthy choices. I want to be writing, and I blogged and wrote fiction without worry. My desires and my actions synched up like they do that all the time (they don't, believe me, they don't), and for the first time in a while my head felt as strong as my body's becoming. If that's not a shredded head, I don't know what is.

* OK, my friend's news was absolutely, positively, probably going to be completely life altering in the best way possible--yaaaaaay!!!!-- but we're talking about me now. And didn't I set you up for that one? Yes. We're always talking about me here. Funny. Very funny.

Bo-Bo Knows Fit is Funny (Shred Day 27)

2009-10-28T10:38:00.005-04:00

Feel the burn. No pain, no gain. Work it, work it, work it. Even Jillian has a little section during the level three workout where she dwells on the pain of exercise: "Right now, I know you want to quit; you want to stop; you want to turn this DVD off..."

Well, no I don't, and how is it helpful to plant that toxic little seed in my brain?

Is it just me or does the fitness industry seem hellbent on conveying one simple message—fitness is hard, so suck it? I mean really. Who in their right mind actually wants to suck it? So on shred day 27, I'm here to tell you three things that are fun—scratch that, funny—about fitness:

1. Pretty much everything—I just cracked up—and I mean, belly-laugh-level guffawed—over a commercial for salsa (see below). It's not just silly little commercials, either. I laugh way more easily now. It's as if exercising my heart and lungs has reminded my whole body how to open up.

2. Indecent exposure—This morning I discovered I've lost so much weight I can pull off my jeans while they're still buttoned and zipped. Is it wrong to look forward to the day they drop to the floor unassisted?

3. Sit-com-like conversations with your husband—There are few things funnier (ok, the salsa commercial below comes close) than watching a man try to commend a woman for losing weight. The following are actual compliments my husband has given me so far:

On my slimmer hips: "You've totally lost your shelves."
On noticing my legs in yoga pants: "Your calves used to be ginormous."
On the tightening of my tummy: "There's so much less monkey to love."
On my thinned face: "I'd say you're down half a chin at least."
On the whole package: "Look at you!" Then he turned sideways, ran his hand over his own abridged belly, and shot me the puppy dog eyes that were my cue to say: "And look at you."

We all know fitness can peel off pounds, melt away inches, and strengthen our cores, but why don't don't more people talk about the way getting fit can make you laugh and laugh and laugh? I'm gonna say it here first: giggling is maybe the best unsung benefit of the fitter life (though runners up include dashing for the train without feeling winded and an unexpected 27-day blog streak).

And now, without further ado, the salsa ad. Enjoy.

Bo-Bo Knows The Last Half (Shred Day 26)

2009-10-27T11:49:00.003-04:00

Crossing over into the second half of my time at level three makes me think about all the other last halves I'm working on just now:

My weight loss—I have less to lose than I've lost

My eating—I'm eating way less than half as much junk as I used to eat.

My thinking—I've grown so accustomed to healthy eating that I no longer feel like I'm eating less than half as much food as I used to. It was never true, but it certainly felt that way at first. Not any more.

My clothing size—Last night I tried on some clothes—like in an actual store—to see what was what. I could button the pants up in my dream size, but I felt a little guilty doing it—stressing the button for the true owner and all that. I could definitely button the next size up, but they were still so tight I wouldn't buy them. But the size after that, now THAT was too big to buy. Which I realize means that if I needed to buy new clothes for something important, like, right now, I'd be shit out of luck, but we're missing the point, people! The point is that the size that was too big is two sizes smaller than where I was when I started losing at the start of the summer which means I'm exactly halfway between my old shape and my goal shape.

It took me a good night's sleep to figure out that last one out. Because when I came out of the dressing room and had to give back all those rejects, my newly cut shoulders were a bit slumped; I kept thinking: all that work and I'm only down two sizes??

Only my skinnier little ass.

To cheer myself up, I bought a bright pink-and-orange striped sports bra and a pair of yoga pants, that, while mostly black, have a hot pink stripe around the waist. Because though the jeans were a little out of my league right now, I know the TV lady in me (see day 25) knows how to rock workout clothes.

For me, though, color is an acquired taste. As I've been adding clothes back into my closet (and there's another last half—I'm more than halfway through my piles of don't-fits), I've noticed that I've got the kind of fixation with black that might be appropriate if I were a goth, but unfortunately that particular adolescent stage passed me right by. And yet my closet is more than half black. And most of what's not black is brown or maroon—in other words, dark, dark, dark.

There are a few bright spots—I have a white shirt here, a blue shirt there. And apparently, in one particularly Polyanna-ish fit of shopping psychosis, I deluded myself into thinking a coral shirt (that's fashion for pink, people, pink) was something I might actually want to wear. Which begs the question: do the colorful islands in my closet really count among the members of my wardrobe if I pretty much never take them off their hangers? So I bought myself a splash of color. I'm wearing it now, in fact. And while the shade is awfully cheery (note the emphasis on the word awfully), I can't help but wonder who the hell thinks a bright pink splash around your equator is a good idea. Or horizontal, bright-colored stripes across the breast, for god's sake.*

I choose to believe that my fixation with black is all about camouflage—I dress like a ninja because the dark color makes me feel less like I'm walking into every room flab first. And I've been wearing black so long it's the only color I really feel like me in (my compromise has always been black near the face and whatever I want on the bottom—with some exceptions, of course. I mean, seriously—is it me or do most women look just plain goofy in plaid?).

The point is I bought myself some color last night to commemorate my progress. Would it have been better to reward myself with something that didn't make me feel like a clown? Perhaps. But it's my keen hope that one day I'll wear color and prints happily.

Who knows? Maybe there's a "Bo-Bo Knows 30 Days in Technicolor" somewhere in my skinny-me future—I have a friend who would probably let me borrow her pink wig. For now, though, I'm just glad that I've finally moved into the last half of this healthy-me journey.

* Yes, men. Oh, ha, ha, ha!

Bo-Bo Knows The TV Lady (Shred Day 25)

2009-10-26T11:41:00.008-04:00

Who is that woman reflected in the shiny charcoal of the resting television? All she's got on is a purple sports bra and a pair of leggings--tight leggings at that--and yet her attention's completely focused on the computer on her lap and not the urgent need to pull a t-shirt on--quick, quick!--before anybody notices. In fact, that bra-clad TV lady just went into the kitchen for water and the kitchen in question has a big picture window on one side and twin regular windows on the other that look down on a guy who pretty much always seems to be out there training his dobermans or tinkering with the black muscle car that a nube like me can't identify from above.

Oh. Nope. Now I've done it.

Watch carefully and you'll see the miles-to-go-before-I'm-thin thinking in the frown that eclipses her face. And yup, here comes the long-sleeve t-shirt, and just like that, she's covered again. But believe me when I say that this little bauble's a case of being down but not out because if we steal a peak over her shoulder, we'll see she's writing about how amazed she is that she's reached a place in this fitness journey where every small set back (in this case a return to self consciousness despite being the only human in the living room just now) seems to be paired with an equal and opposite victory (a realization that this stretchy t-shirt stretched over a little too much to wear comfortably a few short months ago).

Chin up, TV lady. The thing about tiny victories is how the way they pile right up.

Bo-Bo Knows Shred Day 24

2009-10-25T22:54:00.003-04:00

The clock beat out the shred this morning which left me with two choices:

break the streak or
shred after a 12-hour day.

So now I'm sweaty and wired right when I should be thinking about bed. And if the way my leg muscles shimmied and shrieked through the whole thing is any indication, I probably could have used a day off, although my inner drill sargeant says that's what day 31 is for.

Which brings me to life post shred.

A couple people have asked me what happens after day 30. I've given it a lot of thought, and I honestly don't know. I understand the science that insists that strength training boosts weight loss. But I can't help but feel that shredding when I've got 30 pounds to go to get to my goal is like putting on a party dress and never leaving the condo. Seriously, what's the point?

Yes, I know. The science. But doesn't the science also say that the fastest way to boost fat burning is to boost cardio? My instinct says to keep the walking up, but swap the 30-day shred for 30 days of jogging-- there are only so many minutes a girl can exercise in a month.

I do know this: I'm keeping the 30-day blogging format, though I'm thinking November needs a new theme. Some kind of Thanksgivng tie-in? Or maybe love letters to my favorite goof pop songs? The possibilities are endless. You know. In a 30-day kind of way.

Bo-Bo Knows Shred Day 23

2009-10-24T23:37:00.004-04:00

I have just five things to say at the end of a very long day:

Despite my dismay that level three has turned shred into a torture chamber of vigorous jump, jump, jumping, I hauled my slightly more muscular ass out of bed and pushed through.
I'm holding out hope that by day 30 the torturous nature of this level will just feel like a healthy bouncing workout.
My muscles remain as broken as they were yesterday. Maybe more so.
I suspect that the Coca-Cola company has reintroduced cocaine to the Coke classic recipe. Yes, it's true. Today I had my first soda since May 31. In my defense I was in a caffeine panic because traffic patterns prevented me from getting my fix not once, but twice today. So at the first sign of the kind of ice-pick headache that ended with me puking in my car last week, I panicked and darted into a Shaw's for a 20-oz bottle of Coke. I thought about going with a Diet Coke because of my current commitment to a low carb diet, but given how few migraines I've had in the two years since I gave up my once legendary Diet Coke habit, I figured that refined sugar was a lesser evil than that gnarly naughty nutrasweet. But back to the cocaine. Maybe it was the fact that my husband and I are experimenting with a return to South Beach phase one this week so the only carbs I've had have been dairy, legumes, and vegetables, but drinking that coke felt like mainlining sugar. I had bought the bottle with the idea that I'd only drink what I needed to keep the caffeine beastie at bay--I can stop at anytime. But then there I was, halfway through the bottle, feeling better, and eyeballing the rest when I did what any good soda junkie should do: at the next available red light, I popped open my car door and splattered what remained of the crack water across a tiny stretch of Watertown pavement.
There's a good possibility that I have a bit of a caffeine problem.

Bo-Bo Knows Shred Day 22

2009-10-23T15:55:00.003-04:00

So yesterday I was all, "isn't this a cake walk"; today I just want the cake.

My muscles are so fatigued that when Jillian told me to jump, my brain said, "yes ma'am," but my muscles were all like, "that's easy for you to say."

Now I know that behind every wall-o-fatigue is the world's tiniest masons, laying the brick in the new addition to my muscle mass. But what the head knows is a far cry from what the body feels, and this old body is pooped.

Pooped! Pooped! Pooped!

I blame the nano. Oh yes. Mike brought on Christmas a couple months early* disguised as a skinny purple nano and a Nike attachment thinger** to measure mileage. The idea is to inspire me to jog more happily, and maybe if I start tackling the long walks I keep imagining I'll use it for audio books. But while I'm shredding, jogging is right out. It's all I can do to manage a medium-length, 40-ish-minute walk with Bo every morning.

On this, my first nano morning, that walk was all about the tunes. And not just any tunes. My collection of 29*** of the bounciest goof pop songs known to my ears. Goof pop is my name for those silly songs that people can’t understand why I love except that they make me smile like a loon and want to dance, or in this case, walk about 14 percent faster than normal with a giant here-comes- the-escapee grin on my face.

You think I've exaggerated how much these simple beats make me bust my hump? Even Bo noticed it. My new pace forced him to power walk beside me for so long that he kept looking up at me with that tongue-lolling expression that can only be translated into "what is she on?" And during the portion of the walk where Bo frolics on the beach while I sprint like hell to keep up with him? I may have sprinted so long he actually stopped frolicking.

Yeah. My unresponsive muscles during the shred today were soooo the nano's fault.

*And no, smart ass, I did not write 200 new pages or lose 14.8 pounds in the past two days (see day 20)

**Yeah, I know. Real technical.

***A sample from today's shuffled selections (I dare you to sit still while you listen):

"Hungry Like the Wolf" by Duran Duran

"The Ballad of John and Yoko" by the Beatles

"Flowers in the Window" by Tonic

"Waterloo" by Abba

"Keep the Customer Satisfied" By Simon and Garfunkel

Bo-Bo Knows 30 Days With the Shred

2009-10-23T15:18:00.006-04:00

On October 2 I decided to do the 30-day shred and blog about it. Here are the links to the whole journey on one page:

Bo-Bo Knows Shred Day 1

Bo-Bo Knows Shred Day 2

Bo-Bo Knows Shred Day 2 - Addendum

Bo-Bo Knows Shred Day 3

Bo-Bo Knows Shred Is Dangerous! (Day 4)

Bo-Bo Knows Shred Day 5

Bo-Bo Knows Shred Day 6

Bo-Bo Knows Shred Day 7

Bo-Bo Knows Shred Day 8

Bo-Bo Knows Shred Day 9

Bo-Bo Knows Shred Day 10

Bo-Bo Knows Shred Day 11--Level Two!

Bo-Bo Knows Shred Day 12

Bo-Bo Knows Shred Day 13

Bo-Bo Knows Shred Day 14

Bo-Bo Knows Shred Day 15

Bo-Bo Knows Shred Day 16

Bo-Bo Knows Shred Day 17

Bo-Bo Knows Shred Day 18

Bo-Bo Knows Shred Day 19

Bo-Bo Knows Shrinkage (Shred Day 20)

Bo-Bo Knows The Twilight Zone (Day 21)

Bo-Bo Knows Shred Day 22

Bo-Bo Knows Shred Day 23

Bo-Bo Knows Shred Day 24

Bo-Bo Knows The TV Lady (Shred Day 25)

Bo-Bo Knows The Last Half (Shred Day 26)

Bo-Bo Knows Fit is Funny (Shred Day 27)

Bo-Bo Knows The Shredded Mind (Shred Day 28)

Bo-Bo Knows Shred Day 29

Bo-Bo Knows The End (Shred Day 30)

Bo-Bo Knows The Twilight Zone (Day 21)

2009-10-22T10:38:00.005-04:00

During my first first level three workout, I kept wondering one thing: Where the hell is Rod Serling?

Because level three was hard, sure. A challenge, yeah. But I was through the first half before I realized I wasn't doing the modifications. Didn't need the modifications. And while I had to stop the walking push ups several times, that had nothing to do with strength and everything to do with figuring out if the breakdancing I was doing was the right move (it wasn't). And yeah, I took the mods on the rockstar jumps, but that was about coordination, too--I figure I can't exactly complete the 30-day circuit with a broken face. And that last ab thing, well, I felt nothing which pretty much makes it a one hundred percent probability I was doing it wrong.

But on balance, the workout was OK. Doable. So doable, in fact, I could hear Serling's deep and dulcet voice over the tacky workout music:

You unlock this door with the key of determination. Beyond it is another dimension: a dimension of strength, a dimension of endurance, a dimension of will. You're moving into a land of satiety without deprivation; exercise without pain. You've just crossed over into:

The Fitness Zone.*

* with apologies to Rod Serling

Bo-Bo Knows Shrinkage (Shred Day 20)

2009-10-21T12:39:00.006-04:00

And with this workout, I completed level 2 of the 30-day shred. It may have been touch and go there at the start, but there really is something to be said about pushing through. And though I'm not supposed to measure myself until day 30, I couldn't resist--the husband is taking a work- from-home-day and was right there for the assist with the ribbon and the measuring tape.

Drumroll please....

There is officially one less inch of my middle to pinch. One and a quarter less inches in fact. In other words, those 1.25 inches have been cut from my gut, chased from my waist, and whittled from my middle. I'm dismantling my handles, burning flab from abs, and flushing yummies from my tummy.

If I could come up with a rhyme for stomach, I would.

Tomorrow, it's on to level three. I've already decided to ease in as a beginner for reasons I've already mentioned (see day 16). I've also stepped up walks with this blog's furry namesake to 40+ minutes. As of this morning I was a bit more than 32 pounds down from my starting weight, and I have 14.8 pounds to go to reach a weight that would put me at the tippy top of the normal BMI range for my height. So close I'm hatching grand ideas about presents I can give myself this Christmas:

To be at a normal weight for the first time since 1997 and
To write 200 new revised novel pages

Is the wishlist above a recipe for ho-ho-ho or humbug? I've got 66 days to figure it out...

Bo-Bo Knows Shred Day 19

2009-10-20T23:18:00.005-04:00

What' s my coordination prognosis if--despite swinging an imaginary rope--I struggle to accurately execute double-jumps?

The trouble is I'm trying so desperately to swing my arms in tandem that I forget to breathe and my neck starts aching from the tension. So I compromise. I allow myself to swing just the one time as long as I jump as high as Jillian does. And really, this is safer for everyone involved. Wouldn't want to maim Bo-Bo with an invisible whip, would I?

Bo would thank me for my kind consideration, but he's busy licking the paw I tried to flatten during our walk this morning. Nothing like the yelp of an innocent first thing to remind me just how many pounds I'm still packing.

Bo-Bo Knows Shred Day 18

2009-10-19T23:23:00.004-04:00

Busy day. No time for blogging. Not that the blog is the point of this 30-day experiment, afterall. The point is balance, and I had it...for today anyway: writing, walking, shredding--the balance trifecta.

And yet. And yet. I'm staring down the barrel of my Tuesday schedule and wondering if I'll have time for any exercise at all, never mind writing.

That's the trouble with balance. Look over your shoulder for one measly second and and wobble, whoa, and it's gone. A work in progress, this balance thing, huh?

Bo-Bo Knows Shred Day 17

2009-10-18T13:52:00.008-04:00

Exercise-induced out-of-body experiences mean one of two things:

You've either bounced yourself into unconciousness (and really, it's a minor miracle there isn't a shred fainting pandemic given how often this workout asks we workout-ees to jump around with our heads hung low ), or

You're about to have a serious light-reaches-your-cave-brain moment.

So I'm bouncing around (head hung low over shaking arms while my bottom half does jumping jacks) when I realize three things:

I can shred muscles all I want, but I'll never be shredded until I lose the 30-pounds I have left to lose.

I probably need to boost my cardio to burn through the fat.

As excited as I am that I get to put on a fitted shirt I could have never worn three months ago, if I keep prioritizing exercise over all else, I run a very real risk of getting to the end of this, fit, healthy, and bookless.

Bookless. It thudded in my ears as the DVD--and me a half-second behind the ball--transitioned to double jumps.

Normally I opt for the the single-jump modification, and today is no exception. But my head was back on epiphany number three, and I was through the set before I realized that my single-jump modification had been more like a demi-jump modification.

Here's the thing: Fit and healthy are great things--fantastic things!--and I've dropped 30 pounds with the express goal of getting healthier (sub-basement-low cholesterol and trigliceride levels--check!). But all this focus on physical milestones isn't really a focus on health. Because while I'm absolutely grateful for the current status of my phsyical health, true health is really about balance. I want to be fit and trim, yes. But I've wanted to be a writer long before I packed on all the weight I'm in the process of unpacking (I'm the blonde on the horse). And yet I've put the revision of my book on hold while I tackled my physical self by fostering healthful habits. I think it's fair to say those habits have taken root. I think it's also fair to say it's time to broaden my focus from physical health to true health. It's time to remember balance.

Which is not to say that I'm bagging the shred. I'll finish it, I swear. In the past I've piled on the pounds as I've piled up the pages. For once in my life, can't I integrate writing and healthful living? If I kick the devil slug to the curb, won't there be plenty of room for dual priorities? And what's the matter with promising myself that the cardio I want to add won't come at the expense of renewed focus on the book? Here's what I figure: If I can animate characters with nothing but my brain, 26 letters, and a handful of punctuation marks in my toolbox, I can figure balance out, too. And if I can interpret the wave above as a salute, it's looking like my skinny-me, baby-faced self agrees.

Bo-Bo Knows Shred Day 16

2009-10-17T21:50:00.005-04:00

Better late than never. And it was almost never today. So instead of turning off the DVD and congratulating myself for pouring salt on the devil slug*, I decided to preview level three.

Big mistake.

Even bigger mistake? Deciding to get onto the floor and try out a move I have little confidence in my ability to pull off. Jillian was in a plank pose, but instead of having her hands on the floor, she had them curled around dumbbells. The movement was deceptively simple: Lift one of your arms into a row. So there I was, up on my toes, hands curled around weights, staring at the floor and willing my arm to lift. Lift! Jedi Cathy says liiiiifft. Please?

My muscles have been more responsive in full-on pins and needle mode.

New goal: move from staring at the floor and laughing at home completely my weak body is failing my willing mind to successfully mastering these torturous things. At least once.

*In actual fairness, I had a killer migraine last night and was in a post-migraine fog most of today--think of the fog as an earthquake's aftershock.

Bo-Bo Knows Shred Day 15

2009-10-16T11:31:00.005-04:00

Today marks the halfway point of these 30-day shred shenanigans. I'd do cartwheels to celebrate, but I'm running on E. And that's E as in empty--not energetic or enthusiastic or ebullient. It's not even E as in Elcik.

Less than five hours sleep last night. I expected to crumble, and I did. But not until the last three seconds of the last ab exercise. Literally. When Jillian said "last three" my arms actually collapsed. Ever see footage of a building crumbling during an earthquake? Sub my arms and you've got the picture. I took utter collapse as a sign to quit a few seconds early, and yeah, I actually have considered that mutinous arms may be the work of the devil slug (see day 14), but when the arms mutiny, you listen. Particularly when not listening could end up breaking my nose.

On the uptick, I did get through the final cardio section without a break. I was still rocking one exercise advanced and one beginner, but maybe in a few days I'll blow through it all on the advanced. Maybe in a few days.

Bo-Bo Knows Shred Day 14

2009-10-15T11:18:00.005-04:00

I almost bagged out this morning. On my walk with Bo, my mind ran through the workout ahead today in light of the sad little workout behind me yesterday, and the thought of doing plank anything kicked my bargaining brain into high gear:

Devil Slug: You know they say you're supposed to rest for a day between workouts.
Action Angel : Who's this they you keep talking about? Besides. this is a 30-day program.

Devil Slug: But 29 days out of 30 is still an A+.
Action Angel: But you'll feel better if you workout. You always do.

Devil Slug: You feel better when you buy yourself cake from Party Favors, too. You so love their coconutty yellow cake with butter cream frosting...
Action Angel: Out, out damn demon! You know the Cadillac of cakes is for birthdays ONLY!

Devil Slug(at home now): Wait. You're changing into your workout clothes? Why are you changing into your workout clothes? Hey, wait! Stop! Look at your knees! No more knee dough! You totally deserve a break.
Action Angel: Holy shit! I really don't have any more fat on my knees. All the more motivation to work out!

Devil Slug: Or all the more motivation to pull out the box of really small clothes under the bed and see what fits.
Action Angel: Holy shit! I can zip up my interview suit. That's, like, a size ten!

Devil Slug:It's so break time!
Action Angel: Screw you, buddy! I'm keeping on keeping on.

And so the angel won again. She's happy to report that today was way easier than yesterday, though she still can't quite make it through the final circuit.

Devil Slug:Maybe if you'd listened to me you might have--
Action Angel: Oh, shut up. There's always tomorrow.

Bo-Bo Knows Shred Day 13

2009-10-14T12:01:00.003-04:00

A brief interlude to prove that I'm not exagerrating about how hard this all is:

This morning I called my husband into the room to check out my form, offer me tips. Not a smart move. You see, I failed to take into account how brainwashed he's been by this doorstop of a fitness book he ordered--something like the "Men's Health Bible?" He looked from my walking plank push up to the one the three women on screen were demonstrating and then back to mine.

Then he said: "I guess you're doing it like they are, but their form isn't right either."

If I had the breath to do it, the primal scream aimed at him would have shook houses a town over.

Always a glutton for punishment, I called him in to be my eyes on another plank pose a few minutes later. The verdict?

"Passable."

Later, during a move that had me panting, he poked his head back in and in a voice that can only be described as one he ripped off from the monster truck commercials (think: Sunday! Sunday! Sunday! ) and said: "Feel the buuuuurn!"

The aforementioned panting preventing me from voicing a witty comeback, but I shot him a look that caused him to back out of the room, saying: "Nooooot int he mood."

He boomeranged back into the room again a few minutes after that, just as I'd finished the last round of cardio and collapsed into the final ab pose, panting. He offered the following not so constructive criticism:

"Well, you look like you're going to die."

Thank you guru Mike. Thanks a lot.

Bo-Bo Knows Shred Day 12

2009-10-13T16:10:00.004-04:00

How tough am I? Despite projectile vomiting in my driveway last night (I almost didn't even make it that far), I still did shred level 2 this morning. To be fair, I think the vomiting was due to an unchecked lack-of-caffeine headache--not a flu. And after a 10.5 hour sleep, I was feeling great, so I ate something, took the dog on a walk, and when the DVD cover caught my eye, I said: why the hell not?

As it turns out, why the hell not has nothing to do with vomiting and everything to do with Jillian Michaels being a crazy lady. The amount of cardio she asks me to do while supporting my entire body weight on my arms is just short of torturous, and am I really getting the right benefit when the plank ab twisted things set my arms on fire and do nada for the tummy region? I think it goes without saying that I'm taking advantage of Jillian's very generous offer to stop and catch my breath for five seconds. Sometimes two to three times in the same stupid exercise. My goal for level one was one measly set of military pushups. My goals for level two are a bit loftier:

Not dying.
Keeping up.
Finishing strong. At least once.

Yeah, pretty much in that order.

Bo-Bo Knows Shred Day 11--Level Two!

2009-10-12T07:53:00.002-04:00

I have just three things to say about level two:

Owwwww!
I did as much as I could by alternating between the advance moves and the beginner modifications.
I could have done way more plank jacks* if a certain furry someone hadn't chosen that exact moment to mosey on over and give me a what-the-hairy-heck-are-you-doin'-mom sniff.

* Plank jacks are done by leaning on your arms in plank position while doing jumping jacks with your legs. On reflection, that's way less impossible than it sounds in written form.

Bo-Bo Knows Shred Day 10

2009-10-11T23:11:00.004-04:00

How is it that I can go from feeling like my arms were weak as Twizzlers to seventeen military push ups in the first set and eight more in the second? That's zero to 25 in four days. Soon dropping and giving someone twenty will be an actual possibility.

Tomorrow I move on to level two. Last night I previewed the workout--probably a good idea. I've never seen half the moves before, and they don't exactly look like a cake walk. But if my push up progress is any indicator, I'll be good to go in a few days. My triceps, on the other hand, will not be good to go.

This morning I stood in front of the full-length in my sports bra and yoga pants, thinking that although I've got miles to go, I could see contour in my shoulder and bicep. In a rare moment of postive body image, the Vitruvian man flitted across my brain. But a split second later, my eyes were on my floppy triceps--what does it matter if my biceps and shoulders are inching toward da Vinci if my triceps are wagging away? From what I can tell level two has no tricep work. Let's see how it feels.

I do know that it will feel like a big relief to have the trainer move on to new things to say. Quipping that "the neck is not invited to the party" was clever the first time I heard Jillian explain proper form for the ab exercises--not so clever the tenth time.

And finally, it's been brought to my attention that I launched into this whole odyseey without proper introduction. The 30-Day Shred is basically a circuit training DVD that combines strength training, cardio, and ab work into an intensely efficient workout. You want more details? Click here and start shredding!

Bo-Bo Knows Shred Day 9

2009-10-10T07:52:00.003-04:00

The trouble with scale bobbles* (official weekly weigh-in today has me up .5 from last week) is this: no matter how much non-scale-related progress I make (15 military pushups in my first set; 4 in the second), any uptick on the scale feels like my boss telling me that even though I've re doing everything right she's not gonna pay me this week. No wait. It's even worse. It's like she's making me pay her to work.

I think it might be time to get a second job. And in this grossly extended metaphor, a job is extra cardio. And here I thought a daily walk and circuit training would be enough. Silly Cathy! Let me start small. Sometime in the next week I'll find time to jog twice. Which will be an adventure given that I'm working seven of the next seven days. And trying to eke out time to revise my book. As my dad famously said during a family vacation after we'd been lost in Washington DC traffic patterns for hours: Balls! Balls! Balls!

Here's what I'm thinking: If I'm adding running back on top of everything else, I figure I've punished myself long enough for sending my ipod shuffle through the wash. I may have drowned all the single ladies, but I'm just one snazzy purple nano away from bringing them back to life. I hear the new ones have built-in pedometers and everything! This is me putting my hands up! Up! Don't pay me any attention! Oh! Oh! Oh!

Yup. I lied about not talking about the scale. Deal.

Bo-Bo Knows Shred Day 8

2009-10-09T07:29:00.003-04:00

Here's the conundrum: I believe that the DVD is working wonders at the same time I believe that it's holding me back. I was a bit heavier again on the scale (never mind mitigating factors described in gory feminine detail yesterday) and yet today I went from four toe push ups on my first set to nine--9!--and from three on my second set to four!

How is it that I can believe two conflicting thoughts at the same time? I'm sure some Greek has something to say about that. Wasn't Pyrrho the guy who said we can know nothing for sure so we can only earn peace by questioning everything? Then again, didn't Cicero say to consider everything and chose the beliefs that make the most sense to you? You philosophers are all so damn philosophical. Embracing the questions is good and all, but physiological questions need definitive answers, dammit!

And so I reach deep into the shallow well of training bromides for this bon mot: trust the process. I'm eating right, doing this circuit DVD, and walking the pooch every day. I'm not gonna freak out about scale bobbles again until November 1. This I swear.

And you don't think I can see you making the universal face for I'll-believe-that-when-I-see-it but I can. So stop it. Now, please. With sugar on top. And I got plenty of sugar to throw at you because I'm eating none of it these days. But South Beach is a topic for another day.

* Yeah, I know. I've warned about my penchant for puns in other posts, so deal.

Bo-Bo Knows Shred Day 7

2009-10-08T13:52:00.004-04:00

Now hear this! These old chicken wings of mine are SO not up to military pushups! Today I followed the advanced moves that Natalie-the-cheater demonstrates, but I only got through four pushups on my toes before I dropped to my knees (just three on the second set). Deep lunges were fine, and by fine I mean burning and wobbly legs that actually completed the task. My goal is to get through at least one set of pushups on my toes before I move up to level II in four days. Not bad for one week, huh?

Oh. And the mystery of the .2 pounds? A certain blogger may have started her period today, and--for the boys who may or may not be reading this--periods mean bloat. And with that little chestnut, I think I've solidified my place among the bloggers who go beyond sharing things that nobody cares to hear to dive deep into the realm of things people take an active interest in NOT hearing about. But that's an if-a-tree-falls-in-a-forest-with-no-one-but-a-very-devoted-cousin-to-hear-it-does-it-really-make-a-sound-at-all question. And if you ARE reading, drop a line! Make your presence known! I'll even lob a question for you to answer: what's your favorite exercise DVD?

Bo-Bo Knows Shred Day 6

2009-10-07T08:03:00.003-04:00

So yeah. Still feeling strong and all that but here's the thing: the scale this morning tells me I've gained .2 pounds since I started the shred. I know, I know.

Point-two pounds is nothing, and
It's probably muscle.

Believe me, I know. I also know, for example, that I'm not supposed to weigh myself more than once a week. And here I was. Weighing myself. And feeling--just a bit--crestfallen, which is kind of exhibit A in the case against weighing myself at all.

Other things I know? I've been tracking my diet and I've been eating healthy foods in healthy portions. So I also know that this is not a real gain. There's a victory in talking myself down from that. Hell, I take it as a victory that I still did the video this morning given my disappointment AND the fact that I had a house guest sleeping in the next room.

The truth is this--my body does feel stronger. And I feel like I can already see places were the shredding is happening. I guess what I'm wondering is this: where is the DVD that trains the brain? Throw in a few cognitive crunches in between the lunges and the jumping jacks maybe? A shredded body is one thing--an important thing, yes. But what I'm looking for is a shredded head. A body that lifts is strong, sure it is. But pair that healthy body with a mind that's shed the emotional baggage of the weight? Now that's what I call strength.

Bo-Bo Knows Shred Day 5

2009-10-06T10:48:00.004-04:00

Five days in and I'm noticeably stronger. I did the pushups without feeling like I was going to die. Yay for feeling alive and able. Though I wonder:

Can dogs shred?

Because I want Bo to get strong with me. Yesterday his vet said he was showing signs of stiffness in his hind legs and gave him a supplement to help with that. As if on cue, yesterday afternoon Bo did the old man rock to get up from his bed for his afternoon pee break. He rocked once and looked up at me. Rocked twice and did a weak whimper. Rocked a third time, whimpered again, and lifted up. Then he limped to the door where he...went apeshit and jumped in his excitement. Mayhaps the soreness can be linked to exuberance??

In any case, I will start stretching his old man legs. If only to mitigate the guilty feeling I have for getting strong while he's just getting old. Happy, but old.

Bo-Bo Knows Shred is Dangerous! (Day 4)

2009-10-05T11:34:00.003-04:00

So my dog, Bo-Bo, has no idea why I've been lifting these curvy things and bopping around so much the past four days, but apparently he picked today to set his canine brain to puzzling it out. During a particularly enthusiastic set of jumping jacks, here comes Bo sniffing around. Damn near got his pretty nosed bashed in. First a trip to the vet for well-dog check up (shots were involved but so was a delicious pig-ear treat) and then a near-miss sneaker to the brain?

Screw you, human, Bo said.

OK, what he actually did was flop onto his bed with his butt facing me, but the translation seemed obvious to me. Couldn't have been too mad, though. He didn't actually go to his bed in the other room. And yes. Our dog has two beds. Three actually if you count the reject we keep by his food that he only uses in the summer after a walk when he needs water, stat.

Speaking of water, I could use some myself. Though before I go, I will report that the shred ab section is getting easier--I almost did bicycle crunches correctly today! And given THAT level of celebration, you can tell that I had nowhere to go but up when I started this program. Also, strength was a little more tolerable today, too. There will be no shampoo fiascoes today (see day 3), but I don't think I'll be able to get off my knees for push ups any time soon.

Correct form and showers free of shaky limbs. It's all about the baby steps, people. Baby steps.

Bo-Bo Knows Shred Day 3

2009-10-04T13:24:00.003-04:00

I'm pretty sure I did both sets of shoulder press lunges with my right leg today. If I don't start keeping track of my starting leg, my thighs run the risk of doing their impersonation of the incredible-demi-hulkette, which might might not be a bad Halloween costume actually:

normal woman from the left;
monster who makes young kids cry from the right.

At least I know I'm working my arms fairly evenly--during my post-workout shower, neither of them had enough pep to shampoo and condition my hair without shaking. I can't decide what's more amazing--how tough a workout a set of 3-pound dumbells can give me or that I'm weak enough that lifting a measly 6 pounds over my head repeatedly can turn me into jelly.

In other matters, I do wish Bo would stop watching me workout with such disdain--head down, eyebrows dancing. I tried explaining that I'm not taking any guff from a dog who doesn't have the back-length strength to climb into the car without an assist. He just raised that doggy eyebrow, harumphed, and went fetal. Sleepers never win, Bo. Sleepers never win.

Bo-Bo Knows Shred Day 2 - Addendum

2009-10-03T16:29:00.005-04:00

I think it's fair to say this circuit training thing is boosting my energy.

Exhibit A: Today one client asked me why I wasn't tired on such a rainy day.

Exhibit B: Later, when I received word that my day was going to be cut short by 25% due to a cancellation, I hung up the phone and bust out into an impromptu rendition of Handel's Hallelujiah Chorus. When I caught myself thinking, well, isn't this repetitive, I actually giggled.

Exhibit C: All this endorphin-infused, high octane me on less than six hours sleep.

That is all.

Bo-Bo Knows Shred Day 2

2009-10-03T07:31:00.001-04:00

I don't want to alarm anyone, but if the rubbery, loose feeling in my shoulders is any indication, my arms may separate from their sockets at any time.

Really and truly, the man who invented plank pushups should be drawn and quartered, though I'd be willing to let him off with an arm transplant. You know. Should mine snap off.

No rush on the transplant though, pushup man. I'd like enough time to parlay my impending arm deficit into the mother of all sabbaticals.

Bo-Bo Knows Shred Day 1

2009-10-02T00:18:00.000-04:00

Like so many, I have a problem with comfort eating. A big problem. A problem that landed me in a weight center discussing food issues with a nutritionist, a psychologist, and a physician who specializes in obesity issues. Happy, sad, worried, mad--you name the emotion, I fed it.

Note the past tense? Fed, not feed?

Today I had a no-good, miserable, very bad day. Basically, I forgot to take my gratitude pill a few days in a row and I was letting things get to me. Grumpy? Check. Pissy? Double check. Feeling like the world owed me something? Normally a recipe for a bit of a binge.

So I caved. But did I buy myself copious amounts of chocolate? No. Wendy's french fries? Uh-uh. An army-size portion of pad thai? No.

I stopped at Best Buy and bought myself a copy of Jillian Michaels' s 30-day shred video. The best part is this: I didn't realize I was reaching for comfort until after I was halfway home. So get this: I subconsciously made myself feel better by making a healthy choice.

That's not to say Jillian didn't kick my sorry ass (afterward my arms shook when I reached for the spices to mix a vinaigrette for my salad). But shaking arms aside, I feel like I'm in control, maybe for the first time ever. Now there's something to be grateful for.

Bo-Bo Hopes Michael Jackson is Resting in Peace

2009-06-27T11:29:00.009-04:00

I'm not a big Michael Jackson fan--I only bought Thriller album because I was tired of turning on the radio and catching Vincent Price talking about the mortals who can't resist the evil of the thriller at the tail end of the song--but the oldies station in Boston is spinning tributes all weekend and I seem to have no desire to turn off my radio. Which is odd given that I really can't overstate how much I hate high tenors as a general rule (just one of the many reasons I don't feel people like Justin Timberlake and--good god--Robin Thicke). But I'm enjoying the odd Jackson song I know and appreciating the vast catalog I've never heard and oh my god the radio just launched into "We Are the World" and holy man alive does that take me back.

But back to the business at hand. If it's not the music fascinating me what is it? It's not the spectacle, either, though the media--even NPR--is certainly not glossing over the weirdness of Jackson's life. I don't pretend to understand anything about this man who knew an isolation that rivaled Elvis's famous bunkering up, and really, if you consider the way the pedophilia scandal compounded Jackson's reclusive ways, the King of Pop was probably more alone than the King of Rock ever was, so what then?

When the world is calling in to talk shows and eulogizing Jackson around choking sobs; when we learn that the call to the ambulance was delayed because the people around him were trying to handle the crisis; when Jackson himself seems to be choked up during the spoken section at the end of "Will You Still Care"* that reads like bad middle-school poetry,** the human in me tries to understand the human in him, the guy beneath the controversies, the eccentricities, the bone-crushing insecurity we saw played out in the transformation of a sweet face the child in me crushed on into something so hideous that it's impossible, I think, to underestimate just how much Jackson loathed himself.

As an ordinary American inundated with a media culture that seems to--when it takes notice of the arts at all--lionize the myth of the artist instead of the art itself, it's easy to start believing that the bumpy, potholed creative road transforms into a freshly-paved, bucolic byway once the world gives you the nod. But that's just not the case. The creative road shakes its travelers by design--smooth sailing makes for boring art, after all--and for some unfortunate few (Jackson among them) the road detours onto a little-used, muddy dirt road where they just sink.

The next time I find myself shouldered with a flat tire and I'm watching in the rearview for signs of the truck Triple-A sent out to rescue me, I'll take a look at myself and remember that everyone--even the crowned prince of Neverland--has to start with that man in the mirror.

* AKA the Free Willy song

** In our darkest hour
in my deepest despair
will you still care?
will you be there? (etc. )

Bo-Bo Knows I'm No Runner

2009-06-21T23:20:00.005-04:00

But I've been playing one for the two months I've been training for my first 5K race. Tonight I ran my second consecutive 30 minutes. Unfortunately, during that time I only traveled 2.4 miles. For those keeping score at home, those are 12.5-minute miles.

Here are a few words that don't come to mind: lightning, flash, zippy... I'll stop there.

The 5K that I'm running is actually 3.5 miles. That means if I keep up at my present pace, I'll finish just under the 45-minute mark. Here's a word for you: blistering. But only in the sense that I've been rocking a hairline blister ever since I hit my first consecutive 20 minutes. I can't help but wonder what possessed me to sign up for this business. I also can't help but wonder why the running nightmares haven't started up. Maybe because my conscious mind is terrorizing the inchoate runner in me just fine, thank you.

My biggest fear isn't the shame of having to walk--the adrenaline will be pumping and I know that I will soar (though I guess coast would be a better word given my pace) right through those 43-45 minutes. My biggest fear is death by trampling. If you think I'm overreacting, you haven't read the literature JP Morgan sent to the registered runners. They ask runners to separate themselves into two groups at the starting line--those who pace between 5 and 6 minutes per mile and those that pace at 7 minutes per mile or slower. If I'm reading this correctly, I'm pacing so slowly that even if a fast runner and a slow runner took turns on the course, they would both beat me to the finish line. Easily.

In this case, it's really not about whether I win or lose, it's about not getting flattened during my first 5K. Following the details about where the slow runners can stick themselves, comes this helpful tip:

"Please note that a slower runner at the front of the race could potentially be injured should they not be able to keep up with the pace of the faster runners."

Should they not be able to keep up? Should? What the hell do you do when you run five and a half minutes slower than the slowest of the slow?

OK, fine. These speed demons are probably too skinny to actually flatten me, but if I get in front of a pack of them--even the 7-minute slow pokes--it seems quite possible my heart might explode.

OK. New goal. An image of me at the start of the race waving every last runner ahead of me. "No, no, after you." Maybe I should factor in some self-preservation chivalry points and aim at finishing in 60 minutes. Yes. That seems doable. And since it's quite likely that all the good people from J.P. Morgan will be packed up and home by the time I cross the finish line, I'm recruiting a cheering section. So if you know the words to "The Final Count Down" or can approximate the sound of synthesized trumpets and feel like serenading me down Charles Street along the Boston Common on Thursday, you'd be welcome.

Da-da laaaa da
Da-da lah dah dah
Da-da laaaa duh da
Da-da lah dah dah dah dah, etc.

Bo-Bo Knows "Dancing in the Dark"

2009-06-16T21:04:00.005-04:00

I'll admit that I've had Oldies 103.3 as a radio preset as long as I've owned my car (2003). I'll also admit to tuning in and motor mouthing to whatever surprise I found there when NPR took a turn down a story alley I didn't feel much like following. But today it happened. The oldies station has finally caught up to my childhood: 103.3 played "Dancing in the Dark."

"Born in the USA" wasn't my first album. It wasn't even my album. My sister was the one who bought that glorious square of man butt posed before an American flag. But the summer that record came out, I was 9-years-old, she was 6 going on 7, and albums were rare enough in our house that mine felt like hers and hers felt like mine. So we spun that one over and over and over again, singing at top volume to lyrics we didn't understand:

"Born in the USA" was just its anthem of a chorus;
"I'm on Fire" was a pretty lullaby; and
"Glory Days" and "Dancing in the Dark" were just as happy as their bouncy guitar riffs and upbeat drums said they were supposed to be.

What did we know?

Since that time, I've laughed at myself--and Ronald Reagan--for how wrong we all were about that album. I've become aware of the creep in the bad desire, recognized the clarion call in "Glory Days," and appreciated how "Dancing in the Dark" is really about climbing the walls of your life. But I'd never really felt those things until the song slapped at me through my shitty car speakers today. Exhibit A and B:

"I ain't nothing but tired, man I'm just tired and bored with myself.
Hey there baby, I could use just a little help."
"They say you got to stay hungry.
Hey baby, I'm just about starving tonight.
I'm dying for some action.
I'm sick of sitting round here trying to write this book."

I've long believed that old age isn't about chronology, but state of mind. This is why an eighty year old who shows off her neon pink tennis shoes is in fact younger than her 18-year-old great-grandson who won't dance with her at a wedding because he's afraid people will laugh at them. We're all Merlin's that way, if we're lucky: age makes us bold and boldness keeps us young.

So why is it that the line about being tired and bored with myself popped out at me? Why did I hear the lyric about being sick of my book? Why did I feel the twenty five years between that summer and this one like vertigo? Why did I for one fleeting, but painful, minute feel about my life that crush of let down you get when you reach for the door to some restaurant only to see you've missed the closing by five minutes or so? Why indeed when I have so, so, so much to get grateful for?

No idea. But I'm comforted by the questions.

Regret may be an inevitable part of life. There are too many choices--big and small-- in this life to ever hope we'll get them all right. Tonight at dinner with friends I was talking about the one and only time I was in a restaurant ritzy enough that the desert menu offered chocolate souffle on the menu, but I passed. To this day I've never tasted a souffle. Not the world's largest regret, and completely fixable. And truly, if I come to the end of my life without ever trying a souffle, I'll live. Well, actually, I'll be dead, but you get my point. Or maybe you don't because I'm only just now getting to it myself.

The point, I think, is this:

If I listen to a lyric about being tired and bored with myself and that resonates with me, I better damn well be asking myself some hard questions. If not I really am sitting "around getting older; there's a joke here somewhere and its on me."

Bo-Bo Knows Movie Montages

2009-06-09T22:32:00.007-04:00

I'm in training for my corporate 5k. I'm the karate kid. I'm gonna be your man in motion!* I'm on the highway to the danger zone.** I'm Rocky freakin' Balboa.

Alas, when I'm doing the actual running (and not romanticizing the jogging into a cheesy eigthties movie montage) I feel more like the fly in the karate kid's chopticks. Like all I need's a pair of wheels.* Like I most definitely have the need for speed.*** Like Rocky's swollen pulp of a face when he screams, "Adrian!"

I've concluded that jogging is for the birds, and birds FLY everywhere, so what the hell does that tell you? I have a theory that the only way seemingly sane people turn into joggers is by addicting their bodies to the endorphin release at the end of all that knee-pounding goodness. The afternoon following my first consecutive eight-minute jog* since college, I giggled like I'd been drinking wine. The next day, my legs felt so strong, I choreographed a little soft shoe while waiting for my tea water to boil. And as the number of consecutive jogging minutes increased (I'm up to 25 now**), I found that my personality split while I ran.

To the part of me that bent my head down and grumbled about the ridiculousness of doing something that made my legs feel like Rocky's swollen pulp of a face, the burgeoning endorphin junkie reminded me that a few minutes of dead legs and searing lungs were a reasonable price to pay for a general sense of laughing-like-a-loon well being. To the part of me that wondered how I could possibly be making progress when I felt so bad, my inner Richard Simmons was pointing out how I'd gone about a tenth of a mile further than I had during my second 25-minute run.

To that I say, oh whoopy.

Tomorrow I will get up, walk Bo for 25 minutes then go out and run for 25 more. And by run I mean jog. And by jog I mean a bouncing-like step that clocks in at roughly ten minutes per .9 miles. The corporate team I'm running the 5K with is well aware of my (lack of) jogging prowess, and though I've joked that my loftiest goal is to come in dead last, I'm starting to think about how bad dead last will actually feel. Maybe I'll be laughing too hard to notice I suck as badly as the jerk that swept Danielson's leg.

* Lyrics from "St. Elmo's Fire" by John Parr

** Lyrics from "Danger Zone" by Kenny Loggins

*** From Top Gun

**** Condescending marathoners need not comment on this post, thank you.

***** Ditto, marathoners.

Bo-Bo Knows "Death's a Breath Away"*

2009-04-30T10:11:00.006-04:00

As Bo and I left the beach and turned toward home this morning, I was gunning to get home and write a post about how bittersweet a sunny April 30 is (Winthrop kicks pooches from the sand from May 1 to September 30, the jerks). But tramping toward home and working up a good lather, I saw something that short circuited my grousing.

On a porch about a block from the beach, a couple emerged, each holding a handle in a sagging, circular blue tarp supporting a mound wrapped in yellow plastic. Behind the couple, a tall man I recognized pressed his arm against the doorway and leaned. This was a guy who was always walking a few steps in front of an elderly, yellow lab who followed him in loping, slow steps. A dog I'd marveled at before because she could be trusted to lie out in the lawn without a tie, even while Bo was sniffing her over. The yellow plastic went electric. When the owner caught me gaping, I looked down and hurried away; I wish I'd said something, but any comfort I offered would have been swallowed by the healthy dog at the end of my leash.

Bo will be seven years old in June. How many years does that leave him? Five? Seven? Eight? My nephew, Ryan, is 6 years old now. It's quite possible that Bo has less time left than Ryan has lived, but then again, he could go tomorrow. I don't like thinking about it, of course, but I figure that maybe if I let my heart break a little now, the part that Bo has curled up in won't shatter when the time comes.

As I turned the corner, an Alastair Moock song called "Lovely Day" danced through my head:

"And it's a fast paced life;
death's a breath away.
I'm so glad that you could stay
on such a lovely day."

To be fair, this song is not about losing dogs--it's more a gentle giant of a song that'll coax a response hum from the tuning fork of your soul. But I'd been listening to this album (Let It Be) on a loop in my car for days, and so it was there for me in this moment. In its still way, "Lovely Day" is an anthem. And really, there's this: A part of your world could be carried away on a round stretcher tomorrow, so you better enjoy today. Even if it is the last day you can frolic on the beach for six months.

* From "Lovely Day" off of Alastair Moock's album Let It Be. Listen to it here, and be sure to click on "Unwanted Guest." That one's an anthem for anyone who ever struggled with depression...at least to my ears.

Bo-Bo Knows Crazy Bitches

2009-04-27T19:14:00.004-04:00

I'm no dog whisperer, but I'd like to think that during my 2.5 years of doggy mommyhood I've learned a thing or two about canine body language.

Wagging tail = best day ever
Dog face in my face = I got needs, man.
Stiff as a statue and drooling = Terror that leaves shitting a brick in the dust.

But learning about dog behavior by watching Bo is about as instructive as analyzing literature via Spark Notes--I get the general gist at the expense of deeper meaning.

If Bo had his way, he'd gallop toward every dog that crosses paths with us on our morning walks. I don't know what kind of hippy commune the tracks were running during Bo's racing days, but apparently those kennels were all about all-for-one and one-for-all and peace and love and all that hairy horseshit. Because Bo sees no difference between a dog wagging his tail so hard it blurs and a snarling, nasty punk spoiling for a fight.

Which leaves me to clear the dogs we meet for a little nose-to-butt action. But while I've become skilled at steering clear of dogs giving out the Cujo vibe, spotting crazy bitches is harder than it seems. The craziest bitches present themselves as happy-go-lucky loves. Their tails are going, their ears are up; some even echo Bo's whimpery hello-o-o-o! Everything about the way these dogs carry themselves says normal and healthy until something trips the bitch switch and the love bug turns scorpion. Gnashing teeth, snarling, and just general bad manners. I'm fine with it when the owner is surprised in a whoa-what-just-happened kind of way. But I can't stand it when the owner looks all sheepish and says, "yeah, she gets that way sometimes."

If you own a crazy bitch of a dog--and you know who you are--when the nice lady with the goofy greyhound asks for a green light for a meet-and-greet, do NOT give it to her. Because if your dog can go from hyper tail wagging to snarling faster than you can say pooper-scooper, the only correct answer when you're asked if your dog is friendly, is not always. So to all the owners of crazy bitches in the world: when I ask you if your dog's friendly, say no.

Because let's face it: I'm all the crazy bitch Bo needs.

Bo-Bo Knows the Obamas Can Name a Dog

2009-04-12T21:12:00.004-04:00

Bos of the doggy world unite!

When reports started coming in that Daddy Obama was going to make good on his election night doggy promise with a visit to the pound, Bo-Bo crossed his paws in hopes that the nation's first dog would be a greyhound.

And really, who could blame him? It was a lot of fun to picture the lankiest president since Lincoln walking a lean-but-not-so-mean ex racer.

But it wasn't meant to be. The Obamas went with a Portuguese water dog, a breed that made more sense for allergy-suffering Malia. But although we were disappointed that some deserving greyhound didn't get his chance to run laps around the oval office, we were thrilled to hear that the Obamas have named their puppy Bo. And while it's an honor to share the First Dog's name, Bo-Bo would NOT turn his nose up at a an invitation to sniff Bo's presidential butt.

Though I do wonder how long it is before the Obamas start to call their dog Bo-Bo, too. We started out with all intentions of calling our dog Bo (short for his racing name, Bohemian Hoosier), but Mike called him Bo-Bo a few days in and the nickname for the nickname stuck.

So Bo-Bo salutes Bo. And he's serious about that invitation. He'd love to race you once around the Rose Garden (though with the excitement of all those cameras around, Bo-Bo would most likely just stand there with his head down and drool).

Bo-Bo Knows Mom Writes from the Twilight Zone

2009-03-22T18:19:00.006-04:00

I met a character from my novel on Friday. It happened while I was catching a quick bite to eat and writing long hand about a character who's not coming to life the way he should.

In strong fiction, every character should be like the Gingerbread Man--writers can mix and roll out the dough all they want, but if their cookies never jump up and dance, they'll never taste quite right to readers.

As writers, we know our dead-dough characters when we we see them. They're the ones we cut extra perfectly. The ones we ice with tender care. The ones we save our edible gold sprinkles to decorate. But our characters always taste better when we go back to our bowls and mix up a more convincing collection of character traits and motivations. If our characters aren't dancing gingerbread men, no one wants to know them long term, icing and gold sprinkles be damned.

So on Friday afternoon in a Boston Market somewhere off I-495, I was hunched over my purple journal with my lovely, new roller ball pen, scribbling away about my dead gingerbread man of a character. I was in that special, writing place. You know. The one where you let your hand gallop ahead, messy as she pleases, in the hopes that she'll outrace your preconceptions about a character you've known (or thought you've known) for years. And it was working, too. I'd settled on a new name, and I had that lit-sparkler-in-your-blood feeling that heralds a potential solution. When I looked up to catch my breath, there he was: a man of spry wit and doddering body, and he was lowering his tray in the booth next to mine!

This is the point where a sane person would expect Rod Serling* to step out of the men's room and start narrating her day. But writers aren't really sane. I swapped my seat so my back wasn't to my flesh-and-blood gingerbread man, kicked my phone into video mode, and took footage of this guy's slow, bow-legged steps and the way he held his fork like he was hugging his plate. Apparently I enjoy being a creep in the name of better fiction.

I don't believe in muse as goddesses a la the ancient Greeks, but I do believe in the muse as spirit. Turn away from your writing blocks, and your muse is likely to feel like a fickle, fairy bitch; dive toward your writing blocks and your muse is the giver of sparklers and dancing gingerbread men. So go ahead. Shove your hand into that mixing bowl and make your cookies dance.

*The Twilight Zone. Come ON, people!

Bo-Bo Knows Neapolitans Are Dangerous

2009-02-23T23:46:00.005-05:00

Restaurant. Mike and I. Our default neighborhood dive. Same stupid worst-Italian-songs-of-all-time CD they spin every time we're there: the theme from "The Godfather," a song with a chorus I swear goes "bippity boppity boo," and Dean Martin's "That's Amore."

Ever get turned around when you suddenly really hear a song you thought you knew well? For example, there was a time I thought the narrator in Simon & Garfunkel's "The Boxer" was coming home from the WARS on seventh avenue, and The Police's "Every Breath You Take" was a sweet, little, love song. Turns out Paul and Art were whoring it up on seventh avenue, and Sting was a crazy stalker creep watching every breath some sad sack of a girl took.

Tonight it was time for "That's Amore" to catch my ear in a new light.

"When the moon hits your eye like a big pizza pie
That's amore."

All I've got to say is this: If the folks in old Napoli really think that love's about getting hit in the eye with a pizza, I'm staying the hell away from Naples. Because if Neapolitans sling greasy pizza at their loved ones, I don't want to know what they're catapulting toward the people they don't like.

When the oil burns your skin like you screwed up again
That's our hatred.

Everybody!

Bo-Bo Knows His Valentine

2009-02-14T00:00:00.003-05:00

Today Bo asked me to deliver a singing telegram to the ladies (two people and one dog) who live in the condo downstairs: Caringheart, Windy, and Chasey. Their names are actually Corina, Wendy, and Casey, but no matter how many times I correct Bo, the change just doesn't stick. In Bo's defense, Casey does love to chase him up and down the stairs--Chasey must seem like a perfectly reasonable name for a dog whose energy stores make the Energizer Bunny look like a slacker.

But back to doggy valentines. The perfect gift for that cockapoo love of your life? Sharing some of your precious Vitalife jerky and a little Suzanne Vega:

My name is Bo-Bo
I live on the second floor!
I live upstairs from you!
Yes, I think you've seen me before.

I know. I know! I tried telling him that a song about child abuse might not send the right message, but he just sang the "my name is bo-bo" bit again and again.

"You're not listening carefully enough, " I told him. "This song's about a knocked-around kid."

"Just sing it, OK?" Bo said. "My Chasey's gonna love it.

Fine. Fine. Have it your way, but mommy and daddy will be listening to our song instead:

Happy Valentine's Day everybody!

Bo-Bo Knows Barack Obama

2009-01-20T11:23:00.003-05:00

On September 11, 2001, the world stood by our side in recognition of our nation's great pain. Today, I hope, the world stands beside us to celebrate the promise of great change. Just 16 minutes before he would shed forever the word elect in his title, Barack Obama stepped onto the platform where he would take his oath of office.

The crowd waved flags. They chanted, "Oh-bah-mah. Oh-bah-ma."

A lesser person might have grinned and waved, but Obama maintained a gravitas that demonstrated how deeply he understands the enormity of the work at hand. Today he takes on the mantel of crisis, the mantel of a nation's hope, the mantal of great expectations.

By order of the constitution, the president-elect is officially the president at noon on January 20th. When noon came to Washington D.C., Yo Yo Ma, Itzhak Perlman, Anthony McGill, and Gabriela Montero were playing a John Williams arrangement of "Air and Simple Gifts":

'Tis the gift to be simple,
'Tis the gift to be free,
'Tis the gift to come down where we ought to be,
And when we find ourselves in the place just right,
It will be in the valley of love and delight.

When true simplicity is gained,
to bow and to bend, we will not be ashamed
To turn, turn, will be our delight,
'Til by turning, turning, we come round right.

My greatest thanks to Obama for kindling a national hope I thought had burned to ash. I ask only this: lead the country with an integrity that never makes me doubt the hope I feel today:

"With hope and virtue, let us brave once more the icy currents, and endure what storms may come. Let it be said by our children's children that when we were tested, we refused to let this journey end, that we did not turn back, nor did we falter; and with eyes fixed on the horizon and God's grace upon us, we carried forth that great gift of freedom and delivered it safely to future generations."

-President Barack Obama, Januray 20, 2009

Bo-Bo Knows Archaeology

2009-01-17T14:28:00.011-05:00

Although it may look like the work of a writer is nothing more than a glorified romp with a cast of imaginary friends, the writing process is more like sorting your clutter into two piles before a cross-country move. In the first pile is the junk you're embarrassed that you ever paid good money to buy. In the second pile is the stuff you actually like. When you realize you have to whittle that second pile to a volume that will actually fit into your dinky little car, things get really hairy. Suddenly every dress and knickknack you ever owned is on trial defending its continued relevance, and the judge is a notorious hardass: your inner archaeologist.

In "On Writing; A Memoir of the Craft," Stephen King put the writer-as-archaeologist issue this way:

"Stories are relics, part of an undiscovered pre-existing world. The writer's job is to use the tools in his or her toolbox to get as much of each one out of the ground intact as much as possible...No matter how good you are, no matter how much experience you have, it's probably impossible to get the entire fossil out of the ground without a few breaks and losses. To get even most of it, the shovel must give way to more delicate tools: airhose, palm-pick, perhaps even a toothbrush..."

I like the idea of writer as fossil-loving archaeologist, but King makes it sound like it's mostly a process of patience. Like all he has to do is find the dig site in his imagination and chip away.

When I spy an idea in the writerly corner of my brain, I become excessive. If a story idea is the flint arrowhead little Jack finds while digging for nightcrawlers in his own back yard, then the responsible writer/archaeologist ropes off a biggish square of that yard and digs oh so neatly.

Not me.

I'd evict the family. Or maybe the whole street. Nope, the neighborhood. Better yet, let's just oust the entire town. In my zest for ensuring I don't miss anything, I write everything. And I do mean every blessed thing. This is how the first draft of my novel clocked in at 922 pages.* My first go at my prologue? Forty-two pages.

Fortunately, my paunchy prologue was the perfect place to practice cutting and combining and condensing. All those C-words that get batted around when your novel needs to lose half (and maybe two-thirds) of its pages.**

I pasted my prologue into a new document with every intention of getting to work. I knew two things: the first was the point I would like the prologue to make, and the second was my desire to get that message across in eight to 10 pages. Watching me during my first revision session, you'd have thought I'd developed an allergy to my wordprocessing software. I googled, facebooked, texted, and surfed. I flossed. I cooked. I cleaned. I called friends. What I didn't do was write for any more than five minutes at a time.

I was looking forward to a more manageable prologue. I knew that cutting was in order. I was jonesing for the slashing. And on the first pass, I did cut more than 10 pages. The trouble was the fossil still wasn't really showing itself. On the second pass, I pared the prologue to 20 pages and was still jumping away from the job. I just wasn't seeing it.

I reminded myself of my narrative goal and went through a third time, cutting even more deeply. I walked away with 12 pages and the arc of the prologue--my fossil had a skull, a tail, and ribs between the two. I knew what I had to condense, I knew which scenes to combine, and I knew what needed to be added. Only when I saw the fossil taking shape was it at all comfortable to get in there and dig.

The final(ish) tally of the prologue is 10 pages. A coup by any stretch, I know, but I can't help but feel that it's still too long. That maybe the fossil I was after is actually in the belly of the one I uncovered. For now I'm on to paring back part one. I have to believe that belly fossil questions are really the stuff of third drafts. My future as a writerly archaeologist depends on it.

* I submit the following Freudian typo: the first time through this sentence, I wrote "pounds" instead of "pages." My novel clocked in at 922 pounds, indeed.

** While overwriting is a very viable first draft form, the jury is still out on OVERoverwriting. So far, I do NOT recommend it.

Bo-Bo Knows Road Rash

2009-01-15T20:54:00.004-05:00

Not that any one's keeping score, but my care of Bo-Bo has resulted in his spilled blood on three separate occasions.

1) I slammed his freakishly long monkey tail in the door on his second day in the Elcik & Kelly household.

2) Instead of letting him find his own way up and over the craggy jetties on Winthrop Beach (as he had been doing successfully until this point), I pulled him along a path that was good for me. Bo pinballed through a particularly jagged crevice and our walk ended in the doggy ER with a vet stitching his leg back together again.

3)Yesterday, Bo-Bo went for a face plant on pavement and came away with a chin full of road rash.

Yep. Five minutes from the end of our treacherous, arctic morning walk, I let my mind wander from the task at hand: helping my stilt-for-legs dog navigate sidewalks so icy I'm pretty sure my neighbors are hosing them down. So there's me in la-la land when, bam! A colossal crack of the decidedly sickening variety, and Bo's standing with his his front legs set in an unusually wide stance, and he's staring down at the ground, licking, licking, licking. I'm thinking sprained legs, pulled ligaments, broken legs, broken teeth, broken jaw, or concussion. Blood poored on his pretty, little chin. It looked the way rabies might if the foam was red.

At home, I put Bo through the paces. A lesser dog might have snapped at me for putting my hand anywhere near his hurty bits, but Bo looked up at me with his why-oh-why eyes. He didn't so much as whimper while I cleaned his wounds. And though the tape recorder in my mind had the sound of the thwack, thwack, thwack on endless repeat, it was clear road rash was the extent of Bo's injuries. His teeth were neither broken nor missing, and the crinkle of his sack-o-treats still inspired him to race down the hall with his reallyreallyreally grin at the ready.

This morning, Bo went into his morning winky-licking routine only to recoil with a yelp and a reprisal of his why-oh-why eyes. I dug out the medicine they gave him the last time he had an open wound, put the slightest little bit on a cotton ball, then dabbed it on. He jumped when I touched his pizza patch and his eyes went deep into their why-oh-well well, but still he followed me into the next room and curled up at my feet.

If causing doggy bloodshed--not once, not twice, but three times--is cause to question devotion, someone ought to let Bo know. In the meantime, take it from me--trust in the face of every contraindication is one of the little miracles of life.

Bo-Bo Knows Elvis..."Hound Dog"

2009-01-08T14:36:00.008-05:00

Today, in honor of what would have been Elvis's 74th birthday, I launch the official Bo-Bo Knows singalong feature. I submit the clip of Bo-Bo dancing to ambient "Hound Dog" as evidence that he approves of the move (kindly disregard Bo's yawn and the hand behind the camera wiggling his leash to keep him dancing).

So what exactly is a Bo-Bo Knows singalong? It's a space for talking about how we connect to music: song by song via the lyrics, riffs, and melodies that work their way beneath the skin, refusing to let go until we're sung at the top of our lungs or shaken what our mama's gave us (even if that's just tapping toes).

I launch with "Hound Dog" because it's Bo's favorite (clearly), but any song is fair game. Though I should warn you that I'm currently editing a novel about identity told through three unlikely Elvis impersonators, so the singalong is likely to head to the end of Elvis's lonely street quite often. And if you don't like that, you can just return to, oh, never mind.

So "Hound Dog." Hit play on the embedded copy of the song below to listen while you read:

OK, yes. This song may be one of the most overplayed Elvis songs of all time, but the raw gravel in Elvis's voice gets me with every listen. Elvis has my attention by the time he says "ain't." According to the handy counter provided by our friends at Youtube, that's about 1.5 seconds into the song.

But just because "Hound Dog" never gets old doesn't mean it couldn't have been better. Though I respect what Elvis was doing with quartets, I could have done without the Jordanaires in the middle of this song. Unless of course Elvis was trying to sanitize the ripped--my-heart-out feel his raw vocals brought to the song. Maybe that's why Elvis is Elvis and I'm just plain Cathy--he knew that the clean harmonies of the Jordanaires would make his voice seem all the grittier. Well played, Elvis. Well played.

"HOUND DOG" AT A GLANCE

RELEASE DATE: July, 1956

SONGWRITERS: Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller

TRIVIA: "Hound Dog" was Elvis's eighth single. Though I'd like to take credit for choosing to highlight the eighth single on the eighth day of January, I wanted to lead with a dog crossover. This is Bo-Bo knows, after all.

COVERS: Big Mama Thornton's version was likely Elvis's introduction to the song, but it's probably the version that Freddie Bell and the Bellboys performed at the Sands casino in Vegas that got Elvis excited about recording "Hound Dog" himself. The singers who have recorded this song read like a list of rock royalty. Here's a small sample:
Eric Clapton (on Journeyman)
The Everly Brothers (on Rock n Soul)
Jimi Hendrix (on The Jimi Hendrix Experience)
John Lennon (live--click here to have a listen)
Robert Palmer (on Drive)
James Taylor (on Covers)
Be warned. The James Taylor version sounds a bit like a love child between soul and jazz, but it still counts as a cover.

Bo-Bo Knows Flotsam and Jetsam...take 2

2009-01-06T22:05:00.004-05:00

This morning, Bo paced the hallway, lingering at the bathroom threshold, his eyebrows dancing the way they do when he's stressed. He had beach on the brain and his human ticket to a trot in the sand was cataloging junk she wished had washed down the drain with all her sloughed off skin.

Today I dove into my travesty of a linen closet. It's really more of an orphanage for all the things in my life that don't have any place else to go. Nestled in among the sheets, towels, light bulbs, cleaning supplies, and a pharmacy-for-two that could medicate a small nation, I found my long-lost Charlie Card (aka subway pass), my business cards, the rosary made from rose-petal beads I bought in Rome (complete with a trashy plastic case adorned with Pope John Paul II's grimacing mug), and a palm-size Ghiradelli tin containing three high-school writing medals I thought I lost eons ago. Apparently in one of the twelve moves I've made since leaving for college, these medals mingled with all the hair stuff I don't use (can we say electric curling brush, people?) and decided they were good, thanks. Clearly the rosary scores the what-the-hell-is-this-doing-here honors.

Anyway, here's what I'm happy to say goodbye to today:

Number 13: Oil of Olay face cloths.
Numbers 14: Noxema pump cream
Number 15: St. Ives pore cleanser
Number 16: Industrial-sized generic "mouth rinse" that I remember having in my linen closet two moves ago.
Number 17: Nail polish remover
Numbers 18: Rusty shower caddy
Number 19: Deconstructed wire hanger. I cringe to think about the company this may have once kept.
Number 20: Greyhound magazine. Proof that I'm a pet-store, magazine-rack sucker.
Number 21: Plastic brush with hard plastic bristles. The iron maiden has nothing on the torture inflicted by "the tangler."
Number 22: Plastic purple pick. This was Mike's instrument of choice when his hair was longer than mine. I still don't get it how it was useful.
Number 23: Random button.
Number 24: Turquoise scalp brush. Runner-up to the tangler.
Number 25: Single white napkin. A waiter at a restaurant wrapped bread in it and sent it home with us for no discernible reason.
Numbers 26: Goopy pen.
Number 27: Stridex pads circa 1987. Remember Stridex?
Number 28: White knit scrunchie. Remember scrunchies?
Number 29: Purple plastic hair elastic. Please.
Number 30: Cheap, white plastic banana clip that never really got the hang of holding my thin hair in place.
Number 31: Fitted sheet circa 1972. This was one of my parents' wedding gifts. The set would be serviceable if Bo hadn't thrown up on the flat sheet at the start of a four hour trip home. We left the sheet in northern New Hampshire, so the fitted sheet can go, too.
Number 32: No More Tangles spray detangler. I honestly think this might be the bottle I bought in middle school in response to the special brand of panic caused by the combination of spending the morning in a heavily chlorinated pool and the afternoon riding in a car with the windows rolled all the way down. This was the closest I ever came to dreads.
Number 33: The "Easy Braid." A contraption designed to make French-braiding my hair a breeze. It did not.
Number 34: Arbonne International Ginger Citrus sugar scrub. This was a part of a three-part gift I received from a client a couple of Christmases ago. According to the directions, I was supposed to use the scrub first, wash the oils away with the wash second, and follow the whole thing up with the body butter. The butter was love at first sniff--on the days I'm wearing it, I look for every excuse to get my hands near my nose. The body wash seemed pointless until I discovered it doubled as a bubble bath that smelled like heaven. But the sugar scrub was a big, sloppy mess. For those who have never had the pleasure, apparently a sugar scrub is equal parts oil and sugar so coarse it feels like you've traded your washcloth in for sandpaper. Even better, the oil coats you in a slime that makes water bead up on your skin. I reached for the body wash in a blind make-it-stop panic, but the slime layer was heartier than that! I'm pretty sure fancy scrubs are not supposed to be washed away with my favorite over-the-counter soap. This tub 'o fun can rest in peace.

Letting go of the sugar scrub has made me bold. Next I'll tackle the piles of make up I've accumulated despite my apparent allergy to making myself up. Like, ever.

Bo-Bo Knows Flotsam and Jetsam

2009-01-02T13:05:00.008-05:00

Bo-Bo doesn't horde the flotsam and jetsam of life. No trinkets collecting dust, no clothes he hasn't worn in years, no crazy contraptions designed to help his hopeless fingers weave his hair into the French braid he never quite got the hang of. Maybe it's the whole being-a-dog thing.

I, on the other hand, collect more than I need of just about everything. Too many pages in the rough draft of my book, too many pounds on my bones, and too many products in my home. Talk about an embarrassment of riches. As someone prone to excesses, New Year's is always a dodgy time. Instead of resolutions I usually write manifestos (and if you know me personally at all, you know I'm not kidding). But 2009 will be different--one resolution instead of a dozen. I mean it! My 2009 manifesto clocks in at one, measly word: Reduce.*

Because I find that public humiliation is a good way to keep myself on the straight and narrow (in the inimitable words of Johnny Cash, "because you're mine, I walk the line"), I'm going to do an occasional post detailing the items I'm tossing, recycling, or bequeathing to the world in the form of charitable donations or gifts to people who will appreciate it more than me.

Now. Who wants a thing-a-ma-bob to help you French braid you hair?

FLOTSAM AND JETSAM...TAKE ONE!

Number 1: 68 pages of other people's writing. Usually I file them away and keep them long after I've given them my two cents. No need given that I keep the electronic copies. Gone!
Numbers 2-9: A veritable bonanza of expired medicines, creams, and prescription medicines. **
Number 10: A 3-inch, thin metal rod with u-shaped pitchforks on either side. The best I can tell is it's from the center of a hair clip that's missing in action.
Number 11: Stretched-out brown plastic hair tie.
Number 12: Old plastic zippered pouch thing. No idea.

And that was just from the medicine cabinet. Oy! It's gonna be a long year...

* OK, yes. Reduce is shorthand for reducing pages during a second draft, pounds through healthier habits, and products in a room by room overhaul, but the way I figure it, even a three-for is progress. Baby steps, people. Baby steps!

** The expanded list:
2. Generic Ben Gay that expired in December...2006
3. expired tooth ache numbing "stuff"
4. expired canker cream (lovely)
5. sunblock that apparently stopped deflecting rays in 2006
6. expired cold and sinus medicine
7. expired decongestant (like that stuff doesn't make you feel loopy enough already)
8. expired prescription for penicillin from Mike's wisdom teeth extraction.
9. allergy itch cream my mother-in-law suggested I buy for the great mosquito attack of '05. The package was unopened...and expired.

Bo-Bo Knows Books Can Bite

2008-12-06T21:23:00.013-05:00

I have officially shed blood for my book. This isn't some ain't-writing-
a-slog metaphorical blood--we're talking honest-to-god hemoglobin. There I was innocently re-reading with an eye toward the next draft when--bam! The fucker bit me.

In all fairness, this heinous attack may not have been entirely unprovoked. During a writing class last night, I might have comically eulogized my decision to demote one of my point of view characters. And while I'll admit I should have done it out of the book's earshot, I certainly gave Maura (said demoted character) a fair trial. But after spending two long nights deliberating until three in the morning, the evidence was clear--Maura had to go.

But Maura's a fickle bitch. I should know. I made her. So I guess her vindictive streak shouldn't exactly surprise me, but here in the real world, we get a little blindsided when figments of out imaginations go for blood. Inspiring sweat? Sure. Frustrating us to tears? you betcha! But characters leaping from the page and drawing blood? That's the realm of Stephen King's The Dark Half, isn't it?

Maybe not.

I want to take the high road, here--I really do. Particularly given I'm human and Maura's just paper and ink. But the bitch cut me, man! Right across the tip of my favorite finger! And messing with a writer's typing fingers? That ain't right, yo!

So Maura? Here's my bandaged salute. This shit is so on.

Bo-Bo Knows Whiplash

2008-11-25T21:51:00.007-05:00

When I finished the rough draft of my novel, I expected to go out of my mind. Tears maybe? Dragging Bo to the beach so I could run off some energy? Bowling over Mike with the atomic force that comes from crashing through a lifetime spent telling myself I just don't finish what I start? Blinking at my computer screen as my brain came to the surreal realization that the fifth book was the charm?

I did feel joy, and I did celebrate. But there were two celebratory obstacles.

The first was the easy one. The end of the rough draft means the start of the revision. While embracing a forward-ho! approach did wonders for powering through this draft, it left quite the mess in its wake. Think of it like hosting a literary block party in your living room--all cocktails and music and fun--only to wake up with so much cleaning to do you have no idea where to start. Not to mention the gaping holes in the wall...

The second obstacle was harder.

On November 5, I learned that one of my closest friends has stage four pancreatic cancer. I heard the news the way a sister might take such news about her brother--hard. But when I started to shut down, I rallied myself. My friend is a brother-in-art who helped me embrace the pioneering spirit of creative living in a largely apathetic world. He believed I was a writer before I believed it myself. His enthusiasm for this novel was and is unconditional and constant. Shutting down was just about the best way to spit on everything he taught me. So I rallied. On November 7, I finished the draft. It was fucking done!

But with exhilaration came whiplash.

That first weekend, spikes of joy alternated with the flatline of loss. I finished the book with a stubborn insistence that putting it off was to dishonor all the ways my friend has supported my writing, but any joy I felt about reaching "the end" gave way, eventually, to guilt. A wise friend told me this guilt was natural, but I had to let it go. That life is too short to waste worrying. That I had to embrace joy when it comes.

People say life is a roller coaster--you're up then you're down, screaming and scared one minute and laughing like a loon the next. But there's got to be more to life that strapping yourself in and bracing for the loop-de-loops. We have more control than that. We have to. Life is more like a see saw--one minute you're riding high and the next you're on you're ass, but you have the power to stay on the ground or launch yourself back skyward. And no. I'm not quite on board with my life-as-see-saw metaphor, either, but you get what I'm saying about our hand in pushing ourselves up and away from the ground. What I'm trying to say anyway. Embrace joy when it comes? I did. I tried. I'm trying.

Bo-Bo Knows Hope

2008-11-05T14:16:00.003-05:00

I didn't walk Bo on this this near-60 degree November morning; I bounced. I smiled so much, people smiled right back at me.

For the first time in my lifetime, the United States elected a president that gives me hope infectious enough it spread from my mind to swallow my heart. I know electing President Obama doesn't fix the many hurts of this country. I understand that electing President Obama means the work is just beginning. But I also understand that the prospect of the right kind of work beginning, finally, brings a national hope I've never known.

My morning walk takes me right along the ocean. The sea was calm today, lapping like a lake, and I couldn't help but feel like that was the earth itself taking a deep breath and saying we can, we will, we must.

Bo-Bo Knows to Vote Yes on 3

2008-11-02T17:11:00.010-05:00

I admire people who rant tirelessly in support of the great issue of their lives and metabolize their sense of justice into activism. But as much as I would like to have a missionary's spunk, my heart beats to a less warlike rhythm. I see twelve sides --at a minimum--to every story. Choosing just one can be problematic.

On Tuesday, November 4, Massachusetts voters will have a chance to ban greyhound racing. A yes vote would make racing illegal as of January 2010.

Although the kindly and curious people who stop Bo and me in the street used to chat about Bo's top speed, these days they all ask me how I think they should vote on question 3. They're looking for a hell, yeah! A passionate cry! But what I tell them is this:

I think the tracks in Massachusetts are better than the horror shows that pass as racetracks in other countries, but I didn't like what I've seen given my experience with Bo. I'm voting yes.

Don't get me wrong: I understand that adopting one greyhound doesn't exactly make me an expert on this issue, so here are the links to the arguments from both sides:

YES--The argument for ending racing.
N0--The argument to keep it going.

That said, here are my Bo-infused reasons for voting yes on 3:

1. Scrawny Bo--When we adopted Bo, he weighed ten pounds less than his current svelte--but healthy--weight (the photo above shows Bo-Bo's fresh-from-the-track, xylophone ribs).

2. Wormy Bo--Bo came to us with a pooper full of worms.

3. Abandoned Bo--We adopted Bo through the Wonder Dogs adoption program at Wonderland Dog Park. The staff was very responsive to our requests for information, the program pays to spay and neuter adoptive animals, and the adoption director allowed us to visit the kennel to choose our Bo. They even helped us identify the dogs that were gentle enough I wouldn't have to worry about him around friends and family--particularly my then-3-year-old nephew Ryan. We narrowed the choice to an as-yet un-spayed female dog and the dog-who-would-be-Bo. When we couldn't decide, the program organizer had a solution: take the neutered dog for the weekend and see how it went. He sent us home with Bo, his papers, and instructions to call if we had a problem. No one from Wonder Dogs ever called to see how we were managing.

4. Nameless Bo--Bo's kennel name was Ricky, but he never once responded to it, yet he started responding to to "Bo" and "Bo-Bo" after living with us a week.

5. Stretchy Bo--At our house, Bo spends most of his day sprawled out to his full length across one of three of his ginormous pillows. In his more spaztastic moments, Bo will co-opt one of his many squeaky toys for a rousing game of pounce-and-toss. In the kennel, Bo lived in a crate lined with shredded newspaper. Though he could stand and lay down, a full sprawl was out of the question. He had no toys.

6. Skittish Bo--Bo shies away from strangers holding canes, crutches, surfboards, clipboards, or balloons. When I took him to a fun run at Wonderland last spring, he shook. I know that the shaking was probably about being in a building with hundreds of people around him at once, but the image of him with his head drooped in his alma mater is one I can't get out of my mind. During his race, Bo clocked in at 27 miles per hour out of the gate, but by the time he reached me, he had slowed to a trot and started whimpering. His eyes had the same haunted look he gets when I'm getting ready to leave. Hey, I know that there isn't exactly a one-to-one relationship between what it looks like a dog might be thinking and what he's actually thinking. But crying is crying.

The thrust of a commercial being aired by the opposition to question 3 focuses on the 1,000 Massachusetts residents who will lose their jobs if racing is banned. But if question 3 passes, these employees will have more than a year to choose an alternative path. Greyhounds never had the luxury of choice. On behalf of my favorite retired racer, I'm choosing yes on question three.

How will you vote?

Bo-Bo Knows How to Keep His Ass in a Chair

2008-11-01T00:00:00.006-04:00

There's an old truism that successful writers know how to keep their asses in their chairs and write. I used to think this was pretty straightforward--the secret to writing as simple as finding the time to write. But there's a little more to it than that.

As I near the end of the rough draft of my novel, I'm finding that I paid so much attention to braiding the main storylines together that I failed to notice all the loose hairs I dropped along the way. I know that stray hairs are supposed to be tamed by the hairspray of revision, but you try ignoring a shrieking chorus of the what-about-mes and see how much progress you make! I would be galloping happily along and then--bam!--fallen tree. Sure, I could leap over it, but every time I tried that, the chorus only screeched all the louder: What about me?

These brain banshees made the nails on a chalkboard sound like Mozart.

These were the moments I most wanted to check Facebook, play with Bo-Bo, study Greek, clean the toilet, torture myself with articles about Sarah Palin, and just generally invent hours of distraction under the guise of letting the fiction problem percolate at the back of my brain. But detours cause delays, and every day I'm still--still, STILL--working on this (expletive deleted) rough draft, I'm in grave danger of inappropriate laughter (yesterday, I laughed at a student when he told me how bummed he was that the only win his team logged during the entire football season was the result of a forfeit).

So for the sake of my sanity and social niceties, I kept my ass in the chair and forced my fingers to keep moving on the keys. And then the weirdest thing happened. Out of the corner of my eye, a character I hadn't realized was even in on the present dilemma showed up on the screen in my head and started hauling off that tree (oh, just stay with me a minute because telling you what he was actually doing would make very little sense given that you haven't read a lick of my book). I started to describe what the character was doing, and soon the tree was gone, and I was back to galloping.

In her novel, "T he Fiction Class," Susan Breen says writing description is "like watching a Polaroid picture develop--first come the blurry shadows of the central forms, and then the details emerge slowly."

Yeah. What she said.

But I will add this. Our job as writers, then, is to keep our asses in our chairs long enough that our Polaroids make themselves known to us. Because once those Polaroids appear, you're not going to want to move your ass until your fingers have done their keyboarding thing.

Bo-Bo Knows Mom's Got Mixed Feelings About the End of Her Column

2008-10-22T22:33:00.015-04:00

On October 22, the Boston Globe published my swan song. Since 2006, I have enjoyed writing a weekly column for The Boston Globe Sidekick section ("Campus Calendar" during the school year and "Road Trips" during the summer). This edition of "Campus Calendar" is my last.

As of Friday, October 23, Sidekick will be no more. In fact, many of my favorite parts of the paper will be no more. Or--more accurately--most of the non-hard news content will be crammed into a single section. While it sucks to get a column yanked away from me before I was ready to let it go (I liked collecting the extra paycheck and keeping a big toe in the newspaper world), I'm sadder about what this means for journalism.

I'll grant that the kind of journalism I liked best isn't exactly the kind of stuff that was ever going to shortlist me for big awards. Hell, the kind of journalism I like best wasn't ever going to shortlist me for any awards. And I'll admit that all my proudest journalism moments came from focusing on meatier issues:

an investigative magazine article about the surge in homeless families in Massachusetts,
a reporter-at-large profile of the Million Mom March for gun control in Washington D.C, and
an interview with a local World War II prisoner-of-war who trusted me enough to break down as he told me his story.

In fact, I have a friend with a PhD in chemical engineering (the last I understood of his work, he was researching strategies for growing bananas infused with vaccines) who called my recent profile of bestselling novelist Jodi Picoult a "gimmick article" because of its "hanging with" premise--Picoult agreed to have a tarot reading done with a few million Boston-area public looking on via my article.

I say a good gimmick has its place. The standard profile asks a writer about the issue raised in the current book, offers information about the writer's local readings, and describes any interesting detours the writer took along the road to publication. The trouble? Most fans know all this. Enter gimmick journalism--give these fans a look at the question their favorite writer asks a tarot reader and take a snapshot of how she responds when the news isn't good, and the fan gets to glimpse one of the writer's previously hidden sides.

Will this kind of journalism win a Pulitzer? Hardly. But as I said before, it does it have it's place. Oh, yes, yes, and yes.

I know that the longer I go on here, the more it sounds like all this is just sour grapes. This couldn't be further from the truth. As a former journalist, I really liked keeping my skills honed and my bank account infused with extra green stuff. Yes, I'm sad to see this chapter close, but I embrace it as an opportunity to spend more hours on fiction.

And I'm finding that the universe agrees.

I'm within a week or two of finishing the rough draft of a novel about three misfit Elvis impersonators. When I walked into the Sidekick wrap party at Lucky's on Congress Street, where had the soon-to-be-ex Sidekick writers gathered? At the table under this Wertheimer photo of Elvis on a motorcycle. And within minutes of my arrival, the bee-bop band at the back was singing Frank Sinatra's That's Life. Salient lyrics?

"That's life
I tell ya, I can't deny it,
I thought of quitting baby,
But my heart just ain't gonna buy it.
And if I didn't think it was worth one single try,
I'd jump right on a big bird and then I'd fly

I've been a puppet, a pauper, a pirate,
A poet, a pawn and a king.
I've been up and down and over and out
And I know one thing:
Each time I find myself laying flat on my face,
I just pick myself up and get back in the race."

I'm not the biggest fan of hoo-doo voo-doo, but even a person more cynical than me would have to take this cosmic coupling as a sign.

What really bothers me about losing the column is this: The Boston Globe decided to combine Sidekick, Living/Arts, Food, Style, Weekend, and A&E into one daily tabloid section called G. While the mock up looks beautiful, and I have to give the Globe props for trying to maintain coverage in all these areas at a time when fiscal realities are more like nightmares, it bothers me that smooshing all this content into one space emerged as the best option. If a readership can be mapped to sections of the paper, hard news is the brain, business is the bottom line, and sports is the heart (particularly in this town), but the sections they're cramming together into G? These are the soul. Stuffing them into one box is like:

slashing art funding in schools;
a generation who can buy a single song on itunes and is never enriched to find that the song they hated when they first bought the CD has become the favorite;
watching a movie before reading the book;
watching a movie and never reading the book;
never learning that the Beef-it's-what-for-dinner music is actually the "Hoedown" section of Aaron Copland's "Rodeo."

You get my point.

My husband recently bought a new piece of software that allows him to compose music and record a playback without having to record individual musical parts manually. Mostly that means he writes music with his instruments, translates it into line notation, and then has the computer play the finished score for him. He's been playing around with exercises that embrace his heavy metal teen years. I particularly like grooving to a song he calls "Pigs on Parade" (it's supposed to be a Nine Inch Nails homage), and I would share it here if I wasn't absolutely technologically useless. Suffice it to say it both rocks and rolls. Hard.

So Mike decides to share his little ditty with a few key people. The response? Accolades from the likes of me and a few others, a whole lot of crickets, and one particularly chilling response from a coworker:

Why would you do that?

Mike tried to explain about the creative urge.

Oh no, the coworker said. I'm am NOT a creative person.

Yikes.

We're all creative by nature, aren't we? I don't mean everyone's a musician or a writer, a painter or theoretical physicist. But when we decide to improvise our way to a scrumptious meal, invent plans C through Z when plans A & B fail, or dream up a perfect solution to mollify an angry client, we're being creative. We forget that at our great peril.

The value of the arts is not just about the poems or paintings or stories or novels or sculptures or plays or operas. It's about what these poems and paintings and stories and novels and sculptures and plays and operas make us think. So notice the arts around you while they're still around to be noticed. You'll be a little splash of technicolor in an increasingly black and white world.

Bo-Bo Knows the Idiocy of Fashion

2008-09-23T08:39:00.010-04:00

Bo-Bo is all about functional fashion. His year-round fur aside, he was perfectly happy with a simple collar in classic black (I was the sucker that upgraded him to a more handsome design). He doesn't care that when the winter hits he'll be wrapped up in a coat that makes him look like a stained glass window (it was the only one that would fit him). And even though Petco tries to tempt him with the latest and greatest in doggie chews, Bo always comes back to his as-of-late-disemboweled monkey we gave him on day one. He's quite sentimental that way.

Bo-Bo knows the idiocy of fashion, which makes him smarter than half the women in the world. Hear me out! Somebody--designers or magazine editors or some combination of both--decides what's in for the season and lemmings with more money than sense go out and buy it. I have a fashion-conscious friend who's always trying to tell me that certain things I like aren't "in."

Well, screw that! If I like something, I'm wearing it. You think I'm gonna retire all my peasants skirts when they finally go "out." Not even hardly. And really, just because somebody says it's fashionable to wear big shirts with a belt around them doesn't mean it looks anything but idiotic. No white after labor day? Fascism! Boots in the fall and winter only? Tell that to the cowboy boot wearing population!

Need further proof fashion is insane? Ever try walking the beach in those ankle socks eveybody's wearing now? They slip off of your ankle (because by design there's NOTHING to hold them there) and migrate to just beneath your heel. Because walking on the beach is SO much better when you're walking on a wad of cotton.

And no, it didn't bother me at all that my preference for walking the beach in crew socks led to a sock line during the height of sandal season. Oh, the horror! Believe me, the kind of people who care about my sock line aren't the kind of people I want to bother with. Bo-Bo--who once gnawed off the booties I put on him in a lame attempt to protect the pads of his feet from rock salt--agrees.

Bo-Bo Knows Recovery

2008-09-16T20:31:00.005-04:00

The squirts. The runs. The trots. The shits. Whatever your favorite euphemism for diarrhea, Bo-Bo has it. Every hour since midnight. Sure, new parents get kept up half the night, but at least they don't have to take their babies outside and whine at them to just poop already.

We called the vet. The tech at reception told us to collect a sample. We told the tech said sample was liquid. Very liquid. Tech assured us even a smear would do. We collected a sample. Scratch that. I collected a sample. Bo yelped as he went, as if to say, "the burning, oh the burning!"

I took the sample to the vet. Ever drive in a car with a plastic bag smeared with poo? Don't. The tech tested the smear for, I don't know exactly, but it came up negative. I drove Bo home. Bo's pooping went from chocolate fountain to just plain fountain. Shitting water is never a good sign. Neither is barfing bright yellow. I called the tech; the tech called Bo and me straight back into the office.

Injection of antibiotic. Pills. Food so expensive I took out a second mortgage. Fluids administered by IV. Did you know pooches get their fluids dumped under the skin? The effect is remarkably Quasimodo. Tech swore the fluids would be absorbed in an hour. And, although Bo was not to eat again until tomorrow, he needed more antibiotic tonight. Because there's nothing so fun as shoving a pill down a starving pooch's throat.

Bo retaliated by crapping in the house while I tutored. I'm pretty sure it was the aforementioned shits that caused this, though there's an off chance Bo's little gift might have been a critical response to the little song I sang to him while we waited in the vet's office (to the tune of the Oscar Meyer wiener theme song):

My Bo-Bo has a first name
It's B-O-dash-B-O
My Bo-Bo has a second name
It's G-O-T-2-go

He'd like to stay out all the day
And if you asked me why I'd say
Cause Bo-Bo has the shits today
And that is really not O-K.

In my defense, I got nothing but interrupted sleep last night. And when you think about it, who's fault was that?

Bo-Bo Knows Barks are Worse Than Bites

2008-09-12T23:26:00.006-04:00

If Bo-Bo were a kid, he'd be the boy raking in candy from strangers. He'd be the first to jump into the pick-up for a ride the rest of the way to school, the one who dives right into the skeevy van for an up-close look at those puppies the nice man promised were there.

Bo-Bo has done busted his radar for stranger danger. In Bo's addled brain, every dog we meet while walking's a potential friend, and never mind the owner straining to keep her 140-pound bear of a dog from launching at us; never mind that this little pug's doing his best impersonation of a snarling beastie. Bo-Bo loves--or at least wants the chance to love--everybody! His greet-the-world-with-open-paws approach is decidedly not cool when we're up against the kind of dog whose prime directive is collecting a piece of anything that crosses his path, but it does have its advantages against the loudmouths on our walking route. Oliver the howling, barking, demon Beagle, I'm looking at you!

Every day we walk by Oliver's house, Oliver summons a deep, hellish, howling bark. He jams his head betweent the posts of the fence when he can, but mostly he follows us, hollering and lunging, with nothing but a bit of white picket between him and Bo-Bo...and me. Now I'll admit it: I jump every time Oliver's hound-o-hell greeting shakes me from my thinks, but Bo just galumphs along, mouth open in his can-you-believe-I-get-to-walk smile. Oh, his ears may perk up, and on days when Oliver's voice is particularly strong, Bo may take a quick stutter step into the street. But mostly Bo-Bo registers Oliver's complaint with the classic ignore-him-and-he'll-go-away stance.

Bo's take on life is devilishly simple, right? Just ignore everything that doesn't matter and bop along with your day. Tell me, how is it that a dog who can't figure out when there's food in his dish can be so very wise?

What if I dealt with those dogs barking in my brain the same way Bo deals with the Beazulbulb Beagle that snarls at him ? What if I just ignored the fear growling around the back of my brain and--now here's a novel thought--wrote the damn end of my book already?

What. What the? Bad boy, Bo! Bad...? 3r8q dfd*&&*(fdafdj90

Bo-Bo here. Had to take over. Couldn't stand it. If my racing homeys talked about running as much as mommy talks about writing they'd have been shot. Well, maybe not shot, but same same. You gets my meaning. Racers race. Writers write. You gots five scenes to the end? Writes them, okay? I didn't win seven races by jumping out of the box and examining the track ahead. I ran like a mother lover. Once I even cutted off the big dog. You gots to take risks, okay? So get onto that stupid clicky thing that like so much and run your damn race already, okay?

Oh and while I'm here, I wanted to tells you that little rhyme you have when you're eating something yummers and I ain't getting any? You know: Nothing for you, Disco Stu? I know you're proud of it, but it ain't cool.

So anyways, type alright. One, two, three: theeeeeeeerrrrrrreeeee gooooooooeeeeess cliiiiiiiiickyyyyyy! Get it? There goes clicky instead of there goes swifty. Aw, forget it. Just writes already, OK? Just not so much you skimp on my walkseses.

Bo-Bo Knows Bad Poetry

2008-09-05T00:05:00.002-04:00

So many of you know that when a special occasion intersects with a certain brand of Cathy punchiness, you're apt to get a limerick in your (birthday, retirement, thank-you) card. This may seem like harmless goofy fun, but it's actually a sickness. I offer my March 7 "Bo-Bo Knows Weird Al Yankovic" post as exhibit one.

When Mike and I went to a wedding last month, we sent Bo to doggy jail. Oh, it's not much of a prison. The space is a big warehouse. There are no cages. Potential guests are screened to make sure mostly sane pooches like Bo don't have to deal with crazy, violent, idiotic dogs (so chiuahuas, Jack Russel terriers, and that demon Beagle who lives three doors down need not apply). This outfit is probably about as close to doggy nirvana as Bo's gonna get.

That is, until we have the colossal gall to abandon him there.

To retaliate, Bo does what any self-respecting, submissive sissy must do in this situation: he curls up in a ball for two days and doesn't pay any attention to us. His antics inspired the latest Cathy Canine romp to the tune of one of my favorite Elvis rockabilly songs, "Blue Moon of Kentucky." I'm imbedding the music video below for those who aren't familiar with the tune; Bo's lyrics follow.

Bo-Bo of Our Condo
(With apologies to Bill Monroe)

Bo-Bo! Bo-Bo! Bo-Bo pouts the day away.
Bo-Bo pouts all through the day;
'cause he thinks that'll make us stay
Bo-Bo pouts through the day!

I said Bo-Bo of our condo keeps on pouting.
Pouts on because we left him overnight.
I said Bo-Bo of our condo keeps on pouting.
Pouts on until his mama makes things right.

On a lonely Friday!
Mom went away!
Slipped through the door!
Orphaned forever more.*

Bo-Bo of our condo keeps on pouting.
Pouts on because we left him overnight.
Bo-Bo of our condo keeps on pouting.
Pouts on until his mama makes things right.

If the preceding doesn't convince you that my phonetic tinkering's a sickness, know this: I've moved on to bigger phonetic challenges. Behold my first (and likely my last) villanelle (this is the poetry form made famous with "Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night" by Dylan Thomas) :

The Critic

On days like this the sky's a burden, too.
Air pushes, pushes down until I'm small.
I choose to hold it up for me, for you.

It's not clear why they call this feeling blue.
My busy, cluttered mind slows to a crawl.
On days like this the sky's a burden, too.

The doubt that was a seed took root and grew
into a beast that hides all but his growl.
I choose to hold him off for me, for you.

My thoughts turn to a mottled, ugly stew;
the beast and reason ready for a brawl.
On days like this the sky's a burden, too.

The critic arms himself and starts to spew.**
Protect the dreams you don't want him to maul.
I choose to hold him off for me, for you.

And though I know the beastly barks aren't true,
they clog like dirt in motors and I stall.
On days like this the sky's a burden, too.
I choose to hold it up for me, for you.

Bo just grunted and rolled onto his side. That's Bo-nglish for "why don't you call this post Bo-Bo Knows Bad Poetry's No Way To Finish A Novel." I whole-heartedly agree. So I'll close with my Bo-inspired Haiku:

Bad poems are a
painful procrastination;
someone stop me now.

* The first draft of this line read "Mom's a dirty whore." I've decided the revision's more in keeping with Bo's character.

** This rhyme caused my husband physical pain.

***Alternate title: "Take THAT Writer's Block!"

Bo-Bo Knows that Sometimes the Things We Want Most Scare Us Senseless

2008-08-29T20:22:00.010-04:00

As previously mentioned, Bo-Bo is more of a whimperer than barker. And also as previously mentioned, Bo-Bo's hmm-hmm-hmm is often a signal that there's a canine someone lurking that Bo wants to say meet and greet. Bo's crying teamed with his pricked ears and prancing paws is what I've come to call Bo's I've-taken-a-vow-to-leave-no-bung-hole-unsniffed dance.

But about once a week, the ecstasy backfires.

Bo prances, prances, prances, but when he gets too close to the object of his affection, he decides, oh hell no! His spine impersonates an overgrown elbow macaroni, and he darts clear away. Sometimes into oncoming traffic.

There are times Bo's skittishness is warranted: when that dude in a wet suit decided two feet in front of Bo that right then would be a good time to swing his surfboard in a vaguely weapon-like fashion, when the man who looked so wholesome from across the street actually reeked of cigarettes and sized up Bo like he was a turkey in November, or when a button of a dog turned into a ferocious (but bitsy) beast who barked so hard he hopped backwards and bared his sharp (but pint-sized) teeth.

Most of the time, though, Bo cowers for no good reason.

What if Bo's apparent skittishness was really shyness? What if Bo finally worked up the nerve to talk to the brave and beautiful Cleopatra only to realize this Afghan Hound is so far out of his league Bo can't even remember what made him think this was a good idea a few seconds ago? What if he'd desperately like a turn with the red Frisbee that Meghan-the-cattle-dog carries in her mouth, only Bo can't figure out how to ask her to share? What if he sees a kid he'd love to fawn over but just can't get past that fearsome stroller the kid's trapped inside?

So often the things we want like hunger scare us into staying starved. Last week I set myself up as a literary Olympian, averaging roughly ten pages a day. I made peace with the "rough" in rough draft. In that mindset, I didn't have to remind myself that the journey toward a finished book started with finishing a first draft. I wrote without fretting, and I wrote a lot. I came off of that week with the end of the book clearly in sight. But embracing the "rough" in rough draft felt like an exercise in naivety when I considered the revision to come--jettisoning thousands (upon thousands) of extraneous words and condensing tens of thousands more. I may want a draft more than anything else in my world*, but I've slowed down because (let's not sugarcoat this, shall we?) I'm scared shitless about finishing. And really, I don't have to tackle the revision if I don't finish, right? Well, yeah, but living with unfinished business is so much worse than wrestling the mess. That hunger will start to feed on itself eventually.

When Bo cowers, I put one hand on his back and pet the other dog until Bo comes around. If the threat's human, I stand between Bo and the offending bi-ped until Bo creeps closer to check him out. The way Bo inches closer and closer still until his tail starts whipping around again is no different than the inching, inching, inching I have to do, first toward the draft, and then toward the revision.

Fear has its place (urging us to jump out of the way of oncoming buses, avoid darkly lit alleys, and keep medical appointments), but beyond physical fitness, fear isn't a call to retreat. When it comes to our psychological hungers, fear's a sign that we should press bravely on--no cowering or jumping into oncoming traffic.

*My wishlist for the world at large includes a McCain drubbing in November and a national education policy that recognizes that true intellect is a marriage of pedagogue and poetry, that scores of children get left behind when schools prioritize core academic skills at the expense of the arts.

Bo-Bo Knows That Way Lies Madness

2008-08-24T20:00:00.006-04:00

Bo-Bo hasn't really been curling up at my feet this weekend. I blame a mean case of the writing blues. The particularly nefarious, unwarranted strain.

On Friday, I shared my madcap triumph from last week. I also shared the fact that I had set August 28 as my personal deadline for finishing the rough draft of my novel. Unless I have another week like last one, I'm not going to make it. And I don't have the kind of schedule this week that will allow for another week like last one.

The completest in me is bummed about this. At the end of May, I bought a pair of cowboys boots while Mike and I were visiting Nashville. They cost more than my wedding dress (which actually isn't as bad as it sounds because I'd be damned if I'd pay that much for a dress I got to wear for about two minutes). The point is, the money I shelled out for the boots was the most money I'd ever spent on a single article of clothing, so I made a deal with myself: the boots stayed packed away until I finished my rough draft.

So I was picturing strolling into class on August 28 with these handsome babies complementing my favorite bohemian skirt. And being that I spend a good part of my day cooking up fictions, in my mind this grand entrance involved climbing onto the classroom table and doing a little victory boogie. Or maybe a Texas two-step, in honor of the boots.

Clearly, missing my deadline is for the best, because really, how would I even manage climbing onto a table in a skirt without flashing half the class and the students in the Emerson dorms next door? At this point I'll confirm that your suspicions about my fictional life being way more exciting than my day-to-day, real life are 100 percent accurate. Well, maybe 90 percent accurate. I once convinced a wee Scotsman to twirl around a bar with me, traveled to Vegas to research the skin trade, and braved my sister's wrath when I not only taught my 4-year-old nephew, Ryan, the word scrotum, but traumatized him with the intel that he had one, too (this after he pointed to Bo-Bo's recently-neutered floppiness and informed me that Bo had a poopy).

But back to the blues. Because of recent mania-level outputs this weekend's page total has fallen a little short: I only wrote 10 new novel pages.

Only? ONLY?!! There was a time when my weekly writing goal was 10 pages a week (2 pages every weekday). Measuring my progress against my 62-pages-in-six-days mania is like a marathon runner deciding that the only worthwhile training schedule is 26.2 miles a day. That way lies madness, indeed.

Especially when you look at the rest of my writing weekend. I wrote not one but two blog entries. And perhaps the most wonderful writing weirdness in a long time: a short story poured out long hand. I'd almost forgotten what it felt like to sit down, write for a while, and stand up with a first draft down.

So my failure to repeat my (ridiculously Olympian) goals this weekend is nothing of the kind, just as missing my (completely arbitrary) August 28 goal isn't really a failure. For a little while, I'll be switching back to a more manageable two-to three hours a day schedule (I'm not a full-time writer, after all) and see where that takes me. The way I figure it, getting to class on Thursday knowing that I have as few chapters to write as Bo has paws on his body is cause to go ahead and dance on that table...even if I have to do so without the boots.

Bo-Bo Knows That Sometimes He Takes a Backseat to Forces he Doesn't Understand

2008-08-22T21:53:00.012-04:00

It was a rare moment of calm. The ball was holstered. The kids temporarily paused in their never-ending marathon tracked in a loop from the living room, down the hall, and around the kitchen of our 1100-square-foot-ish condo. Bo-Bo chose this as the moment to merge from the den where he'd retreated after the kids started whooping somewhere around lap 213. The way he figured, it was finally time to return to the excessive fawning he enjoyed as guests arrived. He figured wrong.

People use the phrase, "it's a dog's life" to describe a lifestyle that falls somewhere on the spectrum between lazy and nirvana. Clearly the person who coined that phrase never watched the worried dance of a dog's eyebrows, never saw the bowed head of a dog who knows his place in the alpha-to-zeta pecking order is nowhere near alpha. The way I figure it, a dog's life is plagued by nearly constant worry. Bo can't talk, but I've been watching his body language carefully, and I've figured out that the top three thoughts rattling around that canine brain of his are:

Food now?
Walk now? and
What about me?

I say Bo can't talk, but that isn't because he's not trying. Barking? No. Bo only barks when I'm being lazy about getting him out to pee or he thinks we forgot to feed him because he wasn't actually present when we put the fool into the bowl—this particular canine code red requires a physical show and tell: we trek into the kitchen, rattle the doggy dish, and tell him, "it's in the bowl, stupid." No, barking is too normal for this one, but Bo-Bo's a champion whimperer. He whimpers when there's a person he wants to greet, a dog he'd like to lick inappropriately, a balloon he'd desperately like to run away from (this week he's been particularly traumatized by a parrot-shaped Mylar balloon tied to the sign of the ice cream parlor at the end of our street). He cries when we leave and when we're standing outside the door fumbling with our keys. And lately he's started to hmm-hmm-hmm when I take the turn for our 25-minute walking loop instead of continuing straight along the 60-minute loop he loves so. This has been happening a lot lately because Bo-Bo's mommy (that would be me) has been prioritizing writing her novel over just about all things—her health, Bo's sanity, housework, prompt personal hygiene, paying bills, sleep, and any work that doesn't have an immediately looming deadline.

Don't get me wrong. Bo's been nothing but supportive. So long as his bladder isn't ripe, he's at my feet, whether I'm at my desktop computer in my office, curled up with my laptop on the bed, or commandeering the kitchen table. But there's something in the way he watches me that screams, what the hairy heck is it you're doing exactly?

The trouble (or maybe it was no trouble at all) was I enrolled in a novel workshop this summer to inspire myself to make good on my promise to finish this novel (my first) by the end of the summer. But instead of being content setting a private bar, I announced what I had in mind during the introductions at the first class. The class ends on August 28, and I've been working in a fever, but it's unclear whether I'm gonna make it. But, dammit, I'm going down swinging.

In the last three weeks I've written 128 pages—62 of them last week alone. For those of you who don't know about these things, that's not just a lot, it's the fucking mother lode (at least for me, anyway). On my best weeks I usually do somewhere between 10 and 25 pages. Somewhere the literary police are plotting to test my blood for all manner of banned substances: speed, excessive caffeine, more sugar than iron in my blood, latent mania, etc. But really, the answer is simpler than that. I blame Michael Phelps. Here he was collecting medals like mushrooms after a rainstorm, and I was pretty much missing it all playing with my imaginary friends. To make up for it, I staged a literary Olympics of my own. Last week I challenged myself to write 70 pages in 7 days, and I came close enough that five days in Bo-Bo sat on his pillow with his paws over his ears, screaming, the clacking, the clacking, will someone stop the clackity, clackity, clack, clack clack? I chronicled the whole business via Facebook status updates. Here's how it went down (slightly abridged):

SATURDAY, AUGUST 16
10:26 am— Catherine is honoring the Olympic spirit by setting a ridiculous goal: 70 pages by Thursday night.
3:21 pm— Catherine has 3 pages done...67 to go!
4:23 pm— Catherine has 5 done...65 to go!
6:47 pm—Catherine has 7 done...63 to go!
10:25 pm—Catherine has 10 done...60 to go!
11:14 pm—Catherine has 12 done...58 to go!

SUNDAY, AUGUST 17
12:43 am—Catherine has 15 done...55 to go!
8:23 pm—Catherine has 16 done...54 to go!
10:29 pm—Catherine has 17 done...53 to go!
11:32 pm—Catherine has 21 pages done...49 to go!

MONDAY, AUGUST 18
2:18 am—Catherine has 26 pages done...44 to go!
1:27 am—Catherine has 31 pages done...39 to go!
2:00 pm—Catherine has 32 pages done...38 to go which means she's closing in on the halfway-to-goal point....

TUESDAY, AUGUST 19
12:16 am—Catherine has 34 pages done...36 to go (and she's boring of this update conceit but feels compelled)...
9:13 pm—Catherine has 36 pages done...34 to go.
10:45 pm—Catherine has 40 pages done...30 to go.
10:53 pm—Catherine thinks it's time for a change of venue...come on laptop, let's me and you find a new place to camp...

WEDNESDAY, AUGUST 20
12:37 am—Catherine is falling behind: 43 done/37 to go...
9:10 am—Catherine is falling behind: 43 done/-27- to go... (thanks to Lisa B for the catch!).
11:10 am—Catherine had 45 done/25 to go...
12:34 pm—Catherine had 48done/22 to go...
3:07 pm—Catherine had 51done/19 to go...
7:54 pm—Catherine had 54done/16 to go...slowing down only to outline the end...the END (which unfortunately still feels pretty far away)...

THURSDAY, AUGUST 21
11:13 pm—Catherine has finished her experiment. 62 out of 70 pages completed. That's roughly 89 percent. But I get bonus points for outlining to the end. Definitely A for effort.

Suffice it to say, I'm pretty damn exhausted. The trouble is that outline I mentioned on Wednesday? It was for six chapters and an epilogue. There are seven days before class. With round numbers like this, it's like the universe's egging me on. Bo-Bo just raised his eyebrows at me and released one of those doggy sighs he usually uncorks when he's pouting. The message is clear: Get on with it so we can get back to our regularly scheduled walks already.