I am officially becoming paranoid

I have been unintentionally reading way too many stories lately about insect infestations and very ill children (not necessarily in the same story). Thanks to Cassidy McFadzean, I have begun checking my bed for bugs before I go to bed at night and am afraid to go to garage sales. Thanks to Alexander MacLeod, tonight, while I was at the Backyardigans with my children, all I could do was stare at strangers' heads and worry about the likelihood that one of the thousand children there might have lice that might attach to my own kids. Yesterday was cowboy day at the elementary school and I was unnaturally fearful that they might share hats. And all the stories about ill children are only exacerbating my own fears about losing my kids. I've been having enough trouble sleeping already this semester, and all of this is not helping.

Just hanging out with my main character

I'm sitting here at my computer right now, hanging out with the main character of my next story. I've been having a lot of trouble with this one because I really want to write it, but I want to be respectful and fair, and I want to understand her, even though I'm not at all convinced she understands herself. It is based on a story I heard a few years ago that has been haunting me ever since, and I really want to do it justice. My main character has been hanging out in the back of my brain for a few weeks now and I feel like I'm getting to know her a little bit. I'm starting to like her more than I expected to and I'm starting to feel empathy for her, which I wasn't really expecting. She doesn't even have a name yet and I don't know if she's going to. Right now I kind of want to give her a hug, and also a slap. I feel frustrated with her, like she's a friend that I just can't get through to.

But I've left her long enough. I'd better get back before she gets lonely.

I came across some interesting advice about writing

This summer I was reading the 1991 version of Orson Scott Card’s novel, “Ender’s Game.” In his introduction, he has some great insight about writing. He talks about how he had a great idea for his Battle Room, but “[he] hadn’t the faintest idea of how to go about turning the idea into a story…the idea of the story is nothing compared to the importance of knowing how to find a character and a story to tell around that idea.” This sentiment really inspires me, because ideas come to me all the time, but trying to figure out how to turn them into compelling stories is always the hard part. He also says he “learned to separate the story from the writing, probably the most important thing any storyteller has to learn – that there are a thousand right ways to tell a story, and ten million wrong ones, and you’re a lot more likely to find one of the latter than the former your first time through the tale.”

Card goes on to give his opinion about why we read in the first place. He says, “why else do we read fiction, anyway? Not to be impressed by somebody’s dazzling language – or at least I hope that’s not our reason. I think that most of us, anyway, read these stories that we know are not “true” because we’re hungry for another kind of truth: The mythic truth about human nature in general, the particular truth about those life-communities that define our own identity, and the most specific truth of all: our own self-story. Fiction, because it is not about somebody who actually lived in the real world, always has the possibility of being about ourself.”

I don’t always read introductions, but for some reason I read that one and I think it was fate. My husband says all the time that he doesn’t understand why I like to read things that aren’t true. Card explains it here more eloquently than I ever have.

Welcome to today's self-pity party

A few days ago I read the short story "Miracle Mile" by Alexander MacLeod. While it's actually about competitive running, I was distracted by a particular passage that reminded me of writing and exacerbated my fears that I will never be a real writer. His narrator says, "You have to make choices: you can't run and be an astronaut. Can't run and have a full-time job. Can't run and have a girlfriend who doesn't run. When I stopped going to church or coming home for holidays, my mother used to worry that I was losing my balance, but I never met a balanced guy who ever got anything done. There's nothing new about this stuff. You have to sign the same deal if you want to be good -- I mean truly good -- at anything."

That's what I'm afraid of. I'm afraid that if I don't throw myself wholeheartedly into writing, at the exclusion of everything else, I will never be successful at it. The problem is that I'm not willing to do that. Like MacLeod's narrator suggests, I feel like I am a balanced person who never gets anything done.

In my husband's defence

For those of you who have cared enough about me to read the "about me" section, particularly the part where I talk about my husband's flabberghasted/downtrodden facial expression when I come home with more books, I am posting pictures of my collection so that you can truly empathize with him. But before you feel too sorry for him, please keep in mind that he has at least as many tools as I have books.

And it's not going to stop here. This summer I almost hyperventilated at a garage sale where they had two long tables covered with boxes of quality books for only twenty-five cents each. The man was a retired University professor, so they were good books. I spent $11.

Writing as Art

It has taken me until my fourth year of University to finally fulfil my fine arts requirement with Art 100. Right now I’m contemplating Jackson Pollock and Michaelangelo, specifically how the artwork of the former is free and loose, yet not unplanned, whereas the art of the latter is very deliberate. I’m considering how this relates to my philosophy of writing. The written word is also art, so what kind of literary artist do I want to be, a Pollock or a Michaelangelo? A little bit of both, maybe. Right now, however, I am not even as good an artist as my six-year-old daughter who got frustrated with me for not being able to draw a cat.

Superstore, can I ask you a question?

What was wrong with green? In the words of Elle's friends in the movie Legally Blonde when she is picking a blue dress instead of a pink one to wear out to dinner with her loser boyfriend, Warner, I don't understand why you are totally disregarding your signature colour. I am slightly baffled (and, to be honest, unreasonably distressed) as to why The Great CANADIAN Superstore is re-doing its facade in AMERICAN colours. Really? Red, white, and blue? Do you have no English majors on your board of directors who could have alerted you to the misplaced symbolism of that decision? If not, I will be in the market for a job next September.

Assignment #2, I am not a fan of you

There is a song by Pink where she refers to “the breath before the phrase.” This is a good way to describe having writer’s block, except it would be the held breath before the phrase that refuses to be said.

Other than these times when it won’t come to me, I do enjoy writing. To quote the immortal words of Dr. Seuss’s Cat in the Hat, “It’s fun to have fun but you have to know how.”

My take on Kafka's "The Metamorphosis"

A few days ago I read Franz Kafka’s “The Metamorphosis.” What an awesome, crazy, fascinating story. I recently took a fiction class where we discussed the difference between story and discourse, and I think Kafka’s story is a brilliant example of this. On the surface, it’s a story about a man who is turned into a giant insect. But that’s just the story, just the what happens. The discourse, the what does it all mean, is where its brilliance lies and the reason I love to read in the first place. If stories were just about what happens in them, I wouldn’t choose to be an English major.

I love stories that aren’t obvious, where I have to do a little thinking to figure it out. I realized, while doing this thinking, that the title of this story is crucial to its discourse. I am of the opinion that I am terrible at coming up with titles (but my prof says I’m not allowed to say that anymore, so please forget you just read that sentence, Medrie). Kafka’s title, on the other hand, is brilliant and critical to understanding his discourse. If he had called it “My Life as a Bug,” the focus would have been only on Gregor and the depth of the story would have been lost. But calling it “The Metamorphosis” makes the reader think about the whole concept of one thing being transformed into something else.

On the surface, the metamorphosis seems pretty clear. The main character, Gregor  Samsa, wakes up one morning to find that he has been transformed into a giant beetle. But there are actually a lot of different metamorphoses going on, and that’s where the true power of the story lies. Gregor’s metamorphosis results in the less-extreme transformations of the rest of his family. His father originally sits around in a chair all day, but later stands erect in a uniform; his sister undergoes a metamorphosis from a girl of leisurely violin-playing to a self-sufficient person with a job; his father goes from being penniless to having money secretly stashed away. As soon as he is unable to bring home the paycheque that supports his family’s leisurely lifestyle, their feelings towards him morph from appreciation to disgust. In the beginning, his sister loves him, but in the end she wants to get rid of him. Strangely, even though he is the one who has physically undergone the most obvious metamorphosis, he is also the one who changes the least, because his feelings towards his family remain as loving and steadfast as ever. Even when they leave him to live in squalor and allow him to starve to death, he continues to love them. His feelings towards them are unchanging, even though physically he is completely changed.

This is the way I want to write, so that the story is about more than it seems to be about on the surface. Which is so very much harder than it seems like it should be.

A Leisurely, Mandatory Stroll

I should really thank my professor for this assignment. It’s too bad all of my grades don’t depend on me getting exercise. If they did, I might eventually fit back into my pre-baby wardrobe, since I’m apparently more dedicated to my GPA than to my waistline. As assigned, a few days ago I took my camera (which usually accompanies me everywhere anyway) with me on a little stroll. As my biggest nemesis is time, I decided to take my leisurely stroll as I walked across campus to my vehicle after class. It was remarkably symbolic for a walk through a parking lot.

I usually walk along the road on campus because it’s paved and it’s easier to walk on than the earth which is pockmarked everywhere by gopher holes. But when an SUV hugging the edge closely seemed poised to hit me, I suddenly felt like an intruder on the roadway. I felt forced up onto the lip of pavement that separates the road from the expanse of field next to it. Where does the person belong on the campus pavement of life? On that narrow meridian between the natural and the artificial? So much these days it seems that the human body balances between those two opposing sides. The wide open field beside the road made me feel exposed. I felt conspicuous, obvious. I wanted to hide in the trees and be a surreptitious observer, rather than the observed. It often amazes me that someone who talks as much as I do can also want to be a recluse as much as I do.

The real me

They're not as far away from the rest of me as they look in this picture.

The pavement equivalent of what is starting to happen to my body since I stopped being twenty-something





My happy place

A flimsy bridge between the made and the unmade



Levitation crossing.



My short walk was surprisingly punctuated by much unexpected wildlife. As I was walking along, deep in thought about the symbolism of the pavement and the field, a grasshopper that looked like a leaf suddenly flew in my face. It had looked just like the other leaves on the ground, and its sudden flight took me completely by surprise. My body actually went momentarily numb because I have a sort of phobia when it comes to hybrid insects. They should either fly or not fly. Also, they should look like an insect or not look like an insect. Looking like a leaf is cheating. But it made me think about what it would be like to be able to have your body be so indistinguishable from the physical environment that you could exist completely unseen and unnoticed. Sometimes I yearn to be a hermit like that. But sometimes I don’t. How long would a person be content with the solitude before feeling compelled to leap into someone’s face just to be acknowledged?

Then there was the adorably rotund bumble bee taking tiny steps along the ground. That’s not where it’s supposed to be, not what its body is designed to do. What is the human body meant to do that it would be completely unnatural to see it not doing? The thin little garter snake that was slithering along a crack at the edge of the roadway was out of its element, too. After my initial shock, I had a moment of compassion for the little guy because I feel out of my element all the time.

Here goes nothing

So I’m starting a blog. You can blame my current English Professor. It was her idea.

Most of the time, even I’m not interested in all the thoughts that are going on in my head. And now I’m going to inflict those very same thoughts on you. Hopefully it’s like that saying I once heard, where if you eat a piece of cheesecake and your friend eats a piece of cheesecake, then neither of you ate a piece of cheesecake because one balances the other out. If I’m writing my thoughts and you’re reading my thoughts, then maybe I’m not thinking at all and I can stop waking up against my will at two o’clock in the morning. But I’m going off on a tangent. If you hang around long enough, you’ll get used to it.

Why ‘The Frazzled Ant’? Well, ants are industrious, hard workers, which I like to think I am also. When I watch them racing around frantically, knowing that there is actually method to their madness, it reminds me of myself on any given day. Also, there are apparently quadrillions of them on earth, just as there are almost seven billion human beings on the planet. In light of those stats, it’s easy to feel dispensable and insignificant. But it’s still better than being a grasshopper, right? (Please note: my knowledge of ants is primarily empirical as well as gleaned from such enlightening movies as DreamWorks’ Antz and Disney’s A Bug’s Life, as opposed to those little things called facts, so all symbolic relevance is thus limited). Also, I enjoy the assonance.

Welcome to the inner workings of my mind. Enter at your own risk!