It’s Like Christmas

Campfield tried to get $1000 plus expenses out of a Hollywood dude to debate his Can’t Say Gay Bill. This seems to violate the state ethics code, the state senate ethics code, and possibly campaign finance law.

I almost feel bad for how gleeful I feel and then I remember that it’s Campfield we’re talking about and I laugh.

Also, I am getting a new washer, which the Butcher paid for.

And my other brother and I are going to this thing.

Updated to add: Oh lord, and Tony Gottleib weighs in. I swear, if only David Fowler becomes ensnared in this, it will be perfect.

Nervous Energy

Instead of feeling paralyzing anxiety and dread about the impending arrival of my family at the end of the week, I’m feeling a lot of nervous energy. I’m also feeling weirdly unfocused, because, since K. is in Turkey w/the manuscript and the other person who is reading it can’t really dig in until next week, I’m trying honest to god hard to leave it alone for the whole month of April, not look at it, not think about it, not mull it over, just let it be over there and me be over here.

But I miss writing it! I miss fixing it! I know, I should just start to work on something else. Did I tell you I have this idea for a ghost story, the premise of which would be that a woman keeps coming into her office to find things moved around. She blames the janitorial staff. They claim it’s not them. She locks her office and forbids them to enter it. The trash piles up. The office starts to smell. And still things are moved. She puts in a camera. On camera, in the middle of the night, she can watch things move seemingly under their own power around her office. She wonders if someone has rigged her camera or what. And, lo and behold, when she burst into the office in the middle of the night, she discovers that there are indeed fishing lines tied to everything, so that someone just off camera can tug on stuff and make it move while remaining out of sight of the camera. So, she 360s the office with cameras.

And yet… stuff still moves.

Ha ha ha. I’m kind of in love with the idea of ghosts faking a haunting.

Anyway, I’m kind of beside myself. I realized trying yesterday to come up with a post for Pith that opening up my brain to let a book slide out was opening up a lot of energy for that, too. And now I’m kind of like “Um… well, maybe some stuff happened I could blog about, I don’t know.”

It’s weird.

But it’s okay. I’m not on any deadline but my own, with my own being that I don’t want to turn 37 next month (jesus) without being in the process of looking for an agent. I want to have done everything I can do to get this book published and get to the part of the process that is beyond my control before my birthday, as my gift to myself.

I can remember when I was 16 sitting in the basement of the first parsonage at Pawnee and writing up a list of goals for myself. The only two goals I remember were to have a pet pig (does a dog that snorts like a pig when she’s really excited count?) and to publish a book before I was 20.

I kept revising upwards and not writing a book, but I feel like I have to try to reach that goal someday, you know?

Things that Make Me Laugh

1. The conclusion to the getting-the-camper-out-of-the-ground saga, which ended up involving a truck, a car jack, approximately forty-seven pieces of wood, three or four gentlemen, and a baby. No tomatoes were harmed! And the trailer is up. I had to hide in the house and watch from the kitchen window because it is impolite to laugh at people who are trying to help, but I was calling my dad every twenty minutes to report on the progress. I was sad I didn’t have a webcam to livestream it over the internet.

2. The weird lily of the valley that Liz gave me before she abandoned Nashville. Remember how it refused to behave like a lily of the valley all last year? It never bloomed, but it never wilted like it was supposed to? It’s back! And it has buds! I cannot wait. I hope that thing spreads all over that bed. It is literally the only wanted plant in that bed.

3. I learned my first chapter was read out loud to someone’s neighbor! That delights me.

4. I’m excited for how the flowers are going to be in bloom when my mom gets here.

5. Just the mere mention of John Rich’s name is usually enough to make me angry, but when I read him talking about Obama needing to be more of a servant–“Which is the problem with Obama — he is not acting like a servant of the American people; he’s not doing what we want to be done, pretty much across the board.”–I’m going to admit, I howled with laughter. If ever there was a dude who could honestly benefit from asking himself “Am I going to have to call my black/gay/women/etc. friends and say ‘Oh, man, you know I didn’t mean it that way!'” before he opines on anything, it is John Rich. In this case, especially being this close to Easter, I think Rich was trying to get at some Christian notion of servant leadership. I honestly do.

But this is the problem with being such a tremendous and ongoing asshat–you have no store of goodwill from which people can draw to ask “wow, that was weird phrasing. Is he trying to be an asshat or does he mean something else?”

And so I’m going to laugh when he gets deservedly raked over the coals for this, because I am not a nice person.