This week, I got a certain little present that I’d been wanting for a long time. The kind of little present I had to go and pick up.

From the dentist’s office.

I have pretty straight teeth overall, but turns out I have this thing called a tongue thrust. (Say that again, P asked me when I told him about it.) That means that every time I swallow, my tongue pushes out against my teeth, eventually leading to this:

Artist’s renditon

According to the wikipedia article, most people grow out of tongue thrusting (I think P just asked me to say it again from the other room) by age six. I am aged thirty, so apparently I was absent that day in class.

It’s only gotten worse, so I eventually bit the bullet and spent the tax return to get the braces.

Except, you guys, throughout this entire process, talking to my dentist, all the hygienists in her office who have them, all the people I know who have used Invisalign in the past — not one person saw fit to let me know, gently, that braces HURT.

I didn’t think much about it, honestly. I figured legions of teenagers get braces every day. Sure, it hurts them, since the nice orthodontist has to go in and tighten some screws or something.

I’m not really clear on what happens with traditional metal braces, to be honest. P had them when he was a kid for like three years and he likes to tell me horror stories of headgear and this contraption in the roof of his mouth that had to be cranked open. I just… I don’t even want to know, okay? His teeth are nice and straight now so I pretend that they started out that way. But I was going to be different! My invisible braces were going to make my mouth feel like it was filled with clouds and sunshine. That is why I paid the premium.

When the dentist went to snap the first set of trays in, I stopped her. “Is the pain anything like traditional braces?” This is, true, an awful time to ask that question, since the braces exist and were paid for.

“Oh, no,” she said. “There’s a low-grade pain, but it’s actually better than metal braces. Then you have a lot of pain all at once. Here it’s spread out a little.”

Then she snapped the clear plastic trays on my teeth.

“Oh, that’s not so bad.”

“That’s because these are the trays that are just like your teeth are now.” Then she proceeded to put these chunks of ceramic or something on my teeth which are what hold the braces in. So now I have lumpy teeth. Luckily they are hidden.

Then we got to the real thing. It was a little sore, true, but I was okay. I would soldier on. I grabbed lunch on my way home and pulled the braces out first thing. This was going to be great! I ate my food that had texture and everything was wonderful. Braces were awesome!

Then I had to put them back in. As if I’m already not obsessive-compulsive enough, I have to brush my teeth every time I take them out. So I sang the brusha brusha brusha song and I shoved those bad boys back in place.

How I howled. My teeth did not want to go back into this new place! No, they were quite happy before the new regime. Eventually I heard the reassuring click and gulped down a handful of Advil. Did you know that stuff takes an hour to kick in? I do, because I watched the clock.

Things only got worse as the day went on. As soon as I went on break in my fiction workshop, I popped the braces out so I could eat a protein bar. This time, when I put them back in, I got tears in my eyes involuntarily. My teeth were clearly plotting against me.

So pretty much every time I’m faced with food, now, I have to make a decision: is this worth taking my braces off for? This is important, because every time I have to put them back on, I go through the seven stages of grief:

Shock or disbelief: My god, how can this hurt so much? I had them off for ten minutes!
Denial: There’s no way that my gums are going to put up with this. Maybe I should take them off.
Bargaining: If I take them off now, I will just have to add another day to the back-end. That gives me an extra twenty-two hours to be free!
Guilt: I can’t believe I spent all this money to be in so much pain.
Anger: Why are straight teeth so prized, anyway. I bet there are cultures in the world where picket-fence mouth are considered incredibly beautiful!
Depression: I’m never going to eat anything that’s not pudding textured again.
Acceptance and Hope: This really isn’t so bad! It’s only for a year and the soreness is much reduced.

The only problem is that when I get to acceptance, it’s time to eat again.

School started again last week and, oddly enough, I was really ready. As I walked up Michigan Avenue to the building where the Fiction Department is located, I felt less apprehensive than I usually feel when I start new classes. Instead, I was, dare I say, actually excited, face-melting cold notwithstanding. I feel like I’m finally getting on my feet in this program.

The irony is not lost on me that it’s my second-to-last semester.

(Seriously, it’s cold. Who thought that building a city on the banks of what I’m told is a REALLY BIG lake was a good idea? I’m not from here! I don’t know how winter works!)

I’m really looking forward to doing the steeplechase again. The steeplechase is a twelve-step exercise, performed in the Advanced Fiction workshop, that aims to stretch a story in many different directions: point-of-view, form, etc. Since I write novels that generally have a first-person or close third-person point-of-view, this exercise doesn’t give me a lot of material that I can use, flat-out, in my stories, but last semester I figured out that it’s completely excellent for building novel backstory. It’s a love it or hate it kind of exercise, but I know I’m taking the steeplechase with me after I leave the Fiction Writing program.

My elective course this time around is called Small Press Publishing and, I swear, I could not be more thrilled that I decided to take it. It’s essentially an independent project course — at the end I’ll have a book, magazine, zine, or website that I created on my own. The teacher is a guy who runs a small press himself, and I’m hoping to learn a lot about the business end of small presses.

Combine this with a sekrit project that I’m working on, and I’m feeling pretty good overall about this semester. Someone remind me of this when I’m mired in despair in about ten weeks, okay? Tell me that, for once, I felt content. Maybe this time it will stick.

for my break from school. Really, I did. I was going to write five pages a day and clean my basement and get a proper sleep schedule and and and…

Yes, well.

I can’t help myself.

I looooove watching food/cooking shows. P and I are Top Chef devotees, and now that it’s off the air we had to fill the time somehow. Food Network and BBC America stepped, ably, into the breach. I think I watched ten episodes of Chopped this weekend. I’m also smitten with one Gordon Ramsay and his nightmarish kitchen beat-downs. Imagine my delight when I realized that I could record the British version, too! How I’m entertained when I google a restaurant after it’s been on the show and see that it’s closed. How I’m reminded to cook at home when he sticks his hand into a box of rotten tomatoes and pulls them out, speared on his fingertips like olives. I love when he sneaks outside to bounce on his heels and predict that the restaurant will fall apart if the snotty executive chef doesn’t get his act together. Then, miraculously, everything turns out awesome. A restaurant in the American hinterlands has been taught the valuable lesson: people want to eat fresh food.

I like reality TV drama, maybe especially when it’s staged.

The thing is, though, I’d never eat ninety-five percent of what the contestants cooked. I have some food, shall we say… intolerances, true, but the heart of the matter is that I’m an incredibly picky eater. It’s easier to make a list of what I will eat than what I won’t. Last night, I ate the dinner of a four-year-old: chicken nuggets, cut-up bell pepper, slices of cava cava orange. I did this while watching people make dessert out of grits.

I have grits in my kitchen. They’re to kill fire ants.

P swears if a real chef ever cooked for him, he’d eat everything on his plate, and maybe that’s true. I wouldn’t know, because I’d be at home watching America’s Test Kitchen, eating a bowl of dry cereal. I don’t drink milk, either.

I’ve never been a big fan of New Year’s Resolutions. My birthday is January first and I’m not keen on spending the day thinking about all the ways I’m an awful person and how to change immediately. I’d prefer my birthday to include opening presents, taking naps, and eating a lot of cake instead. That is also how I would describe Saturdays.

As I’ve mentioned here before, though, this year I’m turning thirty. Listen, I know I should stop whining about it. My older friends have done everything from tell me I’m being a jerk to threatening to squirt me with mustard if I didn’t stop squawking. The way I see it, though, I only have a few hours left. After that, I’ll be too busy being thirty to worry about it anymore.

I was going to do this decade round up thing, where I talked about how different I am since the day I turned twenty — Chicago, seriously? And married? Would not have guessed — and how I am trying to be a more proactive person rather than reactive and I think organizing my stuff might actually be fun! and blah blah boring blah. Instead, here are the things that I know, as an almost thirty-year-old.

Creativity is multiplicative. The more you work, the more you get out of it. You’re never going to run out of ideas.

Creative anxiety never goes away. The trick is learning to work around it, not giving in to it.

The internet was actually invented for the disbursement of cat pictures.

It’s never too late for a fresh start.

And finally, from my patron saint, Kurt Vonnegut: There’s only one rule that I know of, babies—God damn it, you’ve got to be kind.

Now I’m going to spend the day with P, eating delicious Middle Eastern food (another new thing I got this decade) and listening to The Postal Service, which is my favorite record of the last ten years. Later today, I have the promise of an adventure. Tomorrow I will have my traditional birthday dinner with my family — chicken fried steak, mashed potatoes, black eyed peas (for luck!) and the fried okra my mom is trying to track down.

There will be presents and cake and it isn’t even Saturday.

I am so blessed. Happy new year.

I’ve had trouble getting into the holiday spirit this year. I finished class a week ago and I’ve been more than a little melancholy about it. I’m always so relieved at the end of a semester, of course. But all of my classes, especially the workshops, turn into little ad hoc communities and it’s sad to know that I won’t work with those people, in that configuration, again. Add to that the fact that, when I came up for air, I’d done absolutely no shopping and that I was in the middle of reading that Columbine book (totally recommended but totally heartbreaking, by the way,) I was the least Christmassy person in any given room.

Oh, also, I’m turning thirty in a little over a week and while I’m actively NOT THINKING ABOUT IT, it’s always floating in the back of my mind.

But tonight’s different. The snow started in earnest just about the time P came to pick me up from work this afternoon. We were able to make a grocery run together, to pick up the ingredients for our Christmas morning dinner and for some other last minute things, dodging harried parents and other cranky shoppers in that crowded supermarket dance. I took a nap when I got home, falling asleep to the sound of ice clacking against my windows, snug and warm in my bed. Now we’re watching The Wizard of Oz, which I tivo’d a few months ago and saved for an occasion like this and which P has never seen. (I know!) I’m wrapping presents and they’ve just reached the poppy fields. My annual Chex Mix is in the oven. My yard has turned into an icy wonderland.

And I’m thinking maybe I could do this holiday spirit thing after all.

Hope you have a lovely time, whatever you celebrate.

So I’m trying (again!) to take a photo every day for a year. I’ve tried twice before, but managed to miss a day a couple of months in. (Oh hai I am a perfectionist.) I have a better system this time — shiny iPhone with camera and also handy alarm that says TAKE A PICTURE at 10.30 every night as a reminder — so I feel better about my chances of finishing.

Over the last month, I’ve had time to think about precisely WHY I’m doing this project. It’s not to be a better photographer, beyond incidental improvements. I take a decent enough snapshot but I’m not interested in fiddly technical bits, though if someone wanted to give me a digital SLR I’d be willing to learn. The iPhone camera has enough quality for me, even if I do pull out my point-and-shoot once in a while.

It comes down to two things, I think. First, I want to gain some creative discipline. I know that interesting things happen when I try to create something every single day — I think it’s some vestige of the Julia Cameron fangirl in me. Plus, I want to document this year. Starting in October. No, I don’t know why. Maybe that crazy back brain of mine knows something I don’t.

The pictures I’ve posted above are the ones I like best so far. Here’s the entire set. If you’re the feed reader type, here’s the RSS feed. Or you can follow me on Twitter, where an automagic tweet appears every time I post a picture.

Last weekend, P and I went on a little trip to Madison, a belated anniversary celebration. The twist, though, (there’s always a twist!) was that I didn’t tell him where we were going. For two weeks, I made him guess what we were going to do.

Unfortunately for that big old corner of my soul that loves pranks, P could care less about anticipation. He figured we’d have a good time wherever we went, so he was pretty meh about guessing. “A cabin?” he offered. “A boat ride?” I’m pretty sure his next guess would have been “a three-ring circus?” So of course I spent the remainder of the two weeks asking him again and again where he thought we were going. After a while, he just stopped answering.

Since I spent the two weeks before our trip taunting my husband, I forgot to plan anything for us to actually do. I’d booked hotel rooms; we spent Friday night at Hotel Ruby Marie, a Victorian themed bed & breakfast and Saturday night at Arbor House, where the focus was on being eco-friendly. (Advantage, by the way, to Arbor House, and not just because they had a dual-flush toilet.) And thanks to Erica, I knew we were going to eat at the Eldorado Grill. But other than that? Nada.

Well, there was one thing I wanted to do. A few weeks ago, Christine Merrill posted about going to see dioramas of stuffed albino squirrels in the basement of a funeral home in Madison. I immediately became sick with jealousy. I wanted to see those squirrels and there they were, less than two hours away. So when we woke up on Saturday, I called the funeral home, since the squirrels are appointment only. Sometimes there’s an actual funeral, I guess, and they don’t want giggly, gawking tourists wandering through. So I called up at 8.30 Saturday morning and found out the terrible news.

The squirrels weren’t available on the weekend.

I know, I was shocked too. Who closes their tourist attractions, especially one in such demand as albino stuffed squirrels, on the weekend? I wiped away my tears and grabbed my phone to find the nearest used bookstore, as used bookstores are guaranteed to cheer me up. We spent a pleasant couple of hours at Avol’s Books, got cupcakes (and failed at transporting them,) went to the SERRV store (fair trade heaven, and I got some more tiny bird sculptures,) had an indoor picnic, took a nap, and ate fried macaroni and cheese with BACON at Bluephies. It was a busy day!

The next morning, we were kind of at loose ends. We weren’t ready to head home, but it was cold that day, and I’m afraid of nature, so we skipped the ten-minute walk to the arboretum. Instead, we decided to go to The House on the Rock. Apparently this place is super well known throughout the Midwest, but I never heard about it before I read Neil Gaiman’s American Gods, where it’s the setting for a pivotal plot point.

Here’s the basic history of The House on the Rock, told in dramatic form:

dramatis personae
Frank Lloyd Wright, super famous architect and a member of the Prairie School design movement.
Alex Jordan, Senior, total nutbar.
Alex Jordan, Junior, son of total nutbar.

ALEX JORDAN SR: What’s up, Frank Lloyd Wright? Look at this awesome building I drew, that I traveled all the way to your summer home, Taliesin, to show you.
FRANK LLOYD WRIGHT: I wouldn’t hire you to design a cheese crate or a chicken coop. You’re not capable.*
exeunt

Later:
ALEX JORDAN SR points at spire of rock.
ALEX JORDAN SR: I’ll show him! I’m going to build a house right there that he will have to look at forever.

Much later:
ALEX JORDAN JR: I will complete your spirit journey, father, and blast on that spire of rock, even though I don’t yet own it.
ALEX JORDAN SR: And to assist us, I will hire bums from Madison and pay them in bottles of whiskey and checks which I will later burn so it will seem like we did this blasting on our own.

*This line is, reportedly, actually true.
**I pieced this history together from the Wikipedia page. Any mistakes are the fault of that page’s authors.

So he built this house up on a rock. And, you know, from the outside it’s absolutely gorgeous, especially in fall.

And once I got inside, well…

It was completely terrifying.

There was this eerie, creepy music floating through this house, where the walls were made of rock and the carpet was red and looked original to the place. And it was a house — at least, there was a teensy kitchen and sunken living room and loft. But the music was from instruments — piano, violin, organs — that just played on their own; apparently these were one of Alex Jordan’s (many, many, many) obsessions. Throughout the tour there were lots of these automated music machines, some as big as ENTIRE ROOMS, that played on their own or started after putting in a token or two.

There were antiques everywhere! And lovely scrollwork and weird little nooks and let’s be honest here I got more than a little claustrophobic. Luckily we found a little open space in a place called THE INFINITY ROOM.

Here’s what I saw when we got to THE INFINITY ROOM:

Here is the picture on the wall we missed before going into The Infinity Room. Do you see something missing there? Yeah, I didn’t notice until we got out toward the end AND THE ROOM STARTED BOUNCING.

This is from the end of the room, where there’s a window IN THE FLOOR. Notice my Chuck Taylors — this is also the trip where I learned I’m too old to walk around for hours in shoes without appropriate insoles.

After we escaped, thankfully unharmed, from THE INFINITY ROOM (okay, I promise I’ll stop with the caps now,) we continued on with the tour of the house. There were lots of lovely antiques and books stuffed everywhere, which you know I approved of, and the walls were closing in on me so luckily, luckily we finished that leg of the tour and headed outside to end up right where we started, ready for leg number two.

Which I will get to next time.

To amuse you till then, here is the full set of photos I took.

Today we went back to the vet for yet another follow-up. The tech weighed Mabeline and she was down almost another pound.

This is bad.

Mabeline took this opportunity to hiss at the poster on the wall (“The Top Ten Reasons Cats Visit the Vet!” featuring a kitten with GIANT EYES) and then growl at me some. I gave her pets. I understood how she felt.

The vet then suggested that we leave her for the ultrasound that we cancelled yesterday. She warned me that Mabeline’s belly would have to be shaved. I got the only amount of levity I could out of the situation, hoping instead that somehow she would end up with a lion cut. Alas, it was not to be.

I spent the day checking my cell phone every five minutes. Finally I broke down and called the vet’s office, only to find out that they were just finishing. An hour later, I finally spoke with the vet.

Everything is completely fine. No blockages, no funny masses, no heart disease, no bladder sand. And no lion cut. Final diagnosis? She probably doesn’t like the new food she got six weeks ago from the CAT DERMATOLOGIST. Apparently Rabbit and Green Pea is also an affront to justice.

Yes, I just spent many hundreds of dollars to find out that my cat is a picky eater.

My mom ran by to pick her up and bring home the bag of new food that we’re going to try out.

She called while standing my kitchen. “Do you think I should put some of the new food in a bowl?”

“Well,” I said. “Usually with cats you have to give them new food gradually and –”

“She’s eating!”

“What? The old food?”

“I just saw her take four big mouthfuls of the old food. Now she’s licking her lips.”

You know how some people order the $500 hamburger, just to say they’ve eaten it?

Since cats have no inherent right to dignity, here’s a picture of her shaved belly. It’s no lion cut, but it will do.

Or, as I’ve taken to calling her, the world’s most expensive cat. My husband and I adopted Mabeline (and later, our other cat, Amelie) six years ago from Tree House Animal Shelter. Tree House is awesome because it’s a house tucked away in a Chicago neighborhood that’s filled with CATS. It’s a no-kill shelter, so you’ll see everything from kittens to cats so old they can barely walk.

Tree House didn’t know Mabeline’s history when she arrived. She’d lived on the streets for a while, long enough to get a broken tooth in a fight and to have to spend some time in the feral room being rehabilitated before she was ready to move to the adoption floor. “I don’t understand why Mabeline hasn’t been adopted already,” the counselor told us. “We think she must have been someone’s pet, though.” We watched her follow a girl around, batting at the string that trailed off her floor-length coat, and decided she was the kitty for us. Incidentally, though she had been feral when rescued, her personality has never been anything but delightful. I suppose that’s why I keep her around.

I think that the time she was a stray probably wasn’t good for her health; she’s had to go to the vet much more than Amelie has — we adopted Amelie as a kitten from Tree House. But over the last two weeks I’ve spent more time in vets’ offices than I’d like.

She had to go to her regular vet for a check-up before she could go back for a follow-up at the cat dermatologist. (As an aside, yes, I DID feel like I should be featured on Stuff White People Like for taking my CAT to the DERMATOLOGIST. However we seem to have gotten to the bottom of the terrible ear infections that she’s been suffering from for six years and through five different vets (don’t get me started) so I’m grateful that they exist.) Then on Friday night she started having stomach troubles that lasted into Saturday. Her newest regular vet is literally five minutes away, luckily, so my husband was able to take her over that afternoon. She got a couple of injections and stopped vomiting.

And then we realized she wasn’t eating and we didn’t know the last time she had. It’s really, really bad if cats don’t eat for more than, say, a day — they can get fatty liver disease, which, left untreated, can be fatal. So on Sunday I went on a wild total freakout trying to get her to eat. I got advice to try and feed her baby food, yogurt, and kitten milk.

Of course, none of these worked. Have you ever smeared chicken baby food, which by the way smells like Satan’s flop sweat, on an unwilling cat’s face? First I had to catch her, though, which involved a chase up and down the stairs that would have been improved only by the addition of the Benny Hill song. I had to haul my mattress off my bed and pull half the slats up before I could grab her.

And then I fell down.

And then I finally took her downstairs and smeared disgusting stuff all over her face. For my troubles, I got scratched up. Mabeline then hid in the corner of the dining room, emerging only to glare at me balefully. I felt like my mother must have when I wouldn’t eat my vegetables.

Still, though, as much as I got a bit of food in her, she wasn’t eating. We took her into the emergency vet at 9pm. The emergency vet is never a cheerful place; one couple clearly had to put their dog down; another guy brought in a giant golden retriever who had eaten garbage. Later, I heard him on the phone — because I’m a terrible eavesdropper — say that the dog had eaten corn cobs. Corn cobs! From the look on the guy’s face, I surmised that corn cobs are not digestible.

While waiting for Mabeline to finish a round of subcutaneous fluids, we got to watch a show about how these deer broke into a liquor store and bad stuff almost happened. A family had gotten out right in time! The deer might have broken stuff, but they didn’t! The clerk could have totally gotten trampled, but he dodged them! I just looked the show up and apparently it’s called Untamed and Uncut. Just imagine how many people are disappointed when they tune into that one.

She perked up on the way home but still wasn’t normal, so yesterday we took her back to the original vet. For those counting, we’re now at three days in a row. The vet gave her an appetite stimulating pill and sent us home with a can of wet food that smelled, amazingly, worse than chicken baby food. Since Mabeline thinks wet food is an affront to justice and good taste, we also got three syringes with which to spray it down her throat. After being watered down, of course.

You see where this is going, no? It’s been a cat food apocalypse here for the last twenty-four hours. Have you ever tried to shove a syringe into a squirming cat’s mouth, with the hope that she’ll eat what you put there? At first she swallowed, but tonight she got crafty. She let the mess sit there and then spit it out everywhere. EVERYWHERE. She, of course, managed to do this before she was back on the ground, so both Peter and I got covered in it. This was about as pleasant as you’d imagine.

She somehow got food on the back of her head. No, I don’t know how.

There have been some small improvements. We plied her with cat treats until she finally deigned to eat some. I cried. She pretty much wants to eat just the treats, and only a few at that, but I caught her eating a few bites of kibble just now. We’re back to the vet for another follow-up tomorrow. I’m hoping we’re at the end of this little ordeal, if for no other reason than that she’ll somehow develop some other wallet-crippling malady soon, and I’d rather not deal with two at one time, please.

At my house, the rule is only one of us can go crazy at once. I’m thinking about extending that to the non-human occupants, too.