resolve: verb

1 : obsolete :  dissolve, melt

the frozen feeling that stays me, the resistance that is not resistance but is fear and not a reference to a Disney movie and not a reference to the weather although it could be and I want that too.

2a : break up, separate ; also :  to change by disintegration

that which I do not want, which is calcification: I will be vinegar when I must, and scour.

2b :  to reduce by analysis

I observe. I assess. I proceed.

2c :  to distinguish between or make independently visible adjacent parts of

myself: I do not need to be all things to all people. I do contain multitudes, but let me know which and when and splay us out like cards from which I choose my own hand or slide us all together, neat edges all decked and whole.

2d :  to separate (a racemic compound or mixture) into the two components

alchemy in reverse: is separation an act of creation?

3 :  to cause resolution of (a pathological state)

This I don't fully understand. I am a novelist. I can lie. I understand. This is resolved.

4a :  to deal with successfully :  clear up

I teach communication in varying ways. I should learn from me, who is more often definition 3 than 4a, which is, at best, B+ work.

4b :  to find an answer to

I tell my students to ask and ask and ask. I am good at the finding, which is far, far easier than the asking.

4c :  to make clear or understandable

myself, to myself

4d :  to find a mathematical solution of

hours and pages and how many more because I want to do more and 1 was the first thing on the list so check it off and solve for x because you knew once how to do that, how to calculate your own algebra and doubt was not a factor then.

4e :  to split up (as a vector) into two or more components especially in assigned directions

can be achieved through trigonometry. draw boxes. know what goes in each. hold only one at a time, except when it is better to hold two or three or stack them into a ziggurat because the edges are square where you've drawn them to be. the angles are true. they don't have to remain two-dimensional or separate because this is only a metaphor and you only need this reminder sometimes.

5 :  to reach a firm decision about

caffeine / running / why I keep trying to like broccoli / what happens at the end 

6 :  to declare or decide by a formal resolution and vote

that I'll make metaphors that will hold water, even inverted, that are as solid as the seams of a freshly careened ship, and it's gotten away on me again

7 :  to make progress from dissonance to consonance

in all aspects

8 :  to work out the resolution of (as a play)

for play is the thing.

achieving some greater better

Earlier this week, my commute-music shuffle dropped Southeast Engine's "Try" on me, and so I'm stealing their lyrics for a title and a jumping off point here.

Because I graduated from Ohio University in 2005, it wasn't possible even for me to miss that Southeast Engine existed, and I saw them play live, I think at Casa Nueva. More importantly, I left Athens with one of their CDs, Coming to Terms with Gravity, and though I haven't really kept up with them since, I'm always glad to hear them (like on NPR's Mountain Stage). 

While I was driving, it was misty, as so many of this autumn's mornings have been, and I thought a bit on my time in Athens, where the fog rolled in off the Hocking in similar white waves. As an M.A. student, I definitely did my work and kept my head down. While there, I certainly had some great classes and professors and some marvelous colleagues, some of whom are still among my favorite people, but I stuck to my comfort zone, wrote the short stories my workshops expected. Despite having the opportunity to take workshops in creative non-fiction and poetry, I just couldn't take the chance at doing so. What if I was terrible? I'd written essays and poems as an undergraduate, had gone through rather rigorous workshops with exacting and inspiring professors, but I definitely didn't identify as an essayist or as a poet, and so I couldn't gather up the bravery to make the leap. I was only there for two years; what right did I have to encroach on another genre's territory?

When I got to my Ph.D. program in Binghamton, I did stretch myself at least so far as to take a poetry workshop, but it was largely generative, rather than with an intense critique component. So I wrote poems, and I shared them aloud, and when the semester was over, I put them away and didn't think about them again. 

Then I got a job in Wyoming, and maybe because I was teaching multiple genres of writing to my students, maybe because I didn't have to answer to a workshop anymore, maybe because no one was going to grade my attempts, maybe because of the high altitude—whatever the reason, I wrote a few poems. I wrote some essays. I found the guts to pitch a few essays, and then to simply submit, and someone even asked me to write a piece. 

And so I've gone along, up to my elbows in two novel manuscripts (one finished, one not), and still sometimes writing other things, while the novel percolates, while a draft rests, or when I simply can't not write the somethings else. 

In the past several days, it's been the somethings else that have brought the most exciting news. 

A poem I wrote while at the American Antiquarian Society was selected as the Writer's Block Poetry Contest winner. The judge was Rebecca Morgan Frank, founder and editor of Memorious, and I'm just so pleased about it. The poem will appear in a future issue of Memorious. In the meantime, you can read an interview about the poem at the Louisville Literary Arts/Writer's Block blog.

An essay I'd been working on for more than a year, too, was published at The Rumpus. "Leaving Early" was churned out of an experience I had while actually gathering material for my Brandon Nimmo/Sand Gnats piece. The essay is about baseball, sort of, though it's more about fear and living in the world. "Leaving Early" also makes use of something I read while I was at Ohio University in David Lazar's History of the Essay course, which seems strangely fitting, given my own cowardice when it came to actually signing up for one of David's essay workshops.

I'm still pretty peeved with myself for not taking better advantage of those other writing experiences I might have had when I was younger, simply because I didn't want to fail, didn't want to risk a B on my transcript. But I don't have to be myself at twenty-two or twenty-five anymore, and I'm glad I sent this work into the world. I'm glad it's getting easier to simply write without worrying about what it means that I have written X or Y or Z. I'm glad it's easier to simply write. I'm glad, too, that these things found homes. I'm starting to feel the same. 

"such is the bread of an everyday life, from morning till noon, to the shadowless night"

In having an actual commute again, I'm listening to more music than I've done in a long time. My general inability to read or write while listening to music is something I may have mentioned here before, so I tend not to listen to much of anything except while driving or working out and sometimes while cleaning or cooking. Now, I have at least an hour each day to listen, which means mostly that I put my entire collection of music (which is not very large, admittedly, only something like two thousand songs) on shuffle and let it go. Most days it means a pleasingly varied bump from Dvořák to The Dreadnoughts, Mediæval Bæbes to Melody Gardot. Sometimes, my iPod seems to want to make a point, slipping from the random algorithm to something that feels suspiciously like surreptitious DJing, playing two or three songs from a single artist in a row, settling in on a genre for most of the drive. Friday morning was one such morning, when the device settled in on Flogging Molly for a bit, and I kept coming back to this track, "Rebels of the Sacred Heart."

It's been a long time since I listened to Flogging Molly with any singular verve. I thank them for being my introduction to something kind of like Celt-punk, which I continue to love, for being the first live show I attended with a mosh pit, for being a band that traveled in my ears when I went to Edinburgh by myself more than a decade ago. I don't even have their newest album, though I might have to get it after this post, which has made me miss them. 

"Rebels" isn't even one of my favorite tracks, but on Friday morning, Dave King's blunt imprecision charmed me. Most of the words have a broad finial of -ah, perhaps best heard in the opening lines, no matter whether it seems to make sense, and there's not a clean th- to be heard, all of them rounded into d-. Even after the playlist carried on, my mind repeated, ah well—such iz da bread uff an evryday life, with the kind of obsessive return that I couldn't help but think of Anders in Tobias Wolff's "Bullet in the Brain." The sounds were wonderful and almost silly and from so far away in memory and experience, from a much younger and more naive self, albeit one who was a little more attuned to popular music, who bought albums on their release dates (not the me who missed the last two albums from this band entirely). And those sounds were from right then, that second, when I was also literally thinking of bread, thick, good, brown bread, full of a dozen kinds of seeds and grains, which I'd had for breakfast, which I would also have for lunch. And I was thinking of the expectations of whatever one's everyday life might be. 

For me, on Friday, my everyday life brought me my morning writing, some student conferences, some scholarly reading, and administering the reader review session for the student papers I'll spend this week grading. I assigned the work to my classes; my only expectation must be that I will also read and comment and return that work. I think also of expectation as it is tinged with hope: that my students will surprise me, again with their care and their insight; that my writing projects will find homes. It is, on the whole, incredibly evryday, incredibly predictable.

I was also thinking about hockey and the expectations therein because on Thursday night, when Pascal Dupuis was struck on the back of the neck by a Kris Letang shot, expectation and fear and all of that came crashing together. Mostly, I was worried. Dupuis was taken off the ice on a stretcher, and no matter his thumbs-up to the crowd on his way out, it was scary. I remember last season when he was taken off the ice with his destroyed knee, and this season how he started, somehow, with every bit of the expected hop in his skates. That made the possible outcomes sadder: how unfair to be injured again after most of a year spent rehabbing another major hurt. Early on Friday morning, though, my concern was mostly about general wellness—there'd been no update at all. Yes, Dupuis had moved his legs. Yes, he lifted his arm. Neither of those things constituted anything like real reassurance.

I don't think players and fans consider injury "expected"—not major injuries, anyway. The little ones, like bloodied mouths and missing teeth and puck bruises and soreness, fall under some other heading. They're inevitable, which is not the same as expected. In some ways, those little things are part of the "everyday bread." Soreness comes of working hard; puck bruises might mean a successfully blocked shot. And those kinds of small hurts are the ones fans celebrate. I'm as guilty of it as anyone, feeling somehow proud of the late October game last season when Dupuis popped two teeth out of his own mouth while sitting on the bench between shifts, and on Saturday night, when Evgeni Malkin laid out to get a stick on the puck carried by a breaking Travis Hamonic. 

Thankfully, by lunchtime on Friday, the news was that Dupuis was skating already, well enough to be under consideration for Saturday night's lineup. On Saturday night, he logged nearly sixteen minutes of solid play against the Islanders. It wasn't a four-point performance like his work against the Ducks in the Penguins' opener, but it was really all right for a player who'd been stretchered off the ice forty-eight hours before. What I'd expected from that image wasn't what I'd received, and I find myself incredibly grateful. More and more, each time I watch a sporting event, I am grateful when nothing catastrophic happens. I willfully forget what I know can happen, so I can celebrate the good that I am seeing: Patric Hornqvist in front of the net, Malkin finding his shot, Pascal Dupuis standing beside Dan Potash between periods on Saturday night, upright, catching his breath, awkwardly accepting well-wishes from his favorite target for jokes. 

On Friday, I put bites of cheddar on small chunks of bread, and I read the updates from practice at Consol Energy Center. I played the song again at my desk, and for a little while, I chewed, and I listened, and I was grateful.

Travel Light: A book recommendation & a November impossibility

Several years ago, the inimitable Linda Koons sent me a book: Travel Light by Naomi Mitchison. It's a short, sharp tale, a Norse fairy tale, rubbing up against allegory in a way that reminds me of The Little Prince, but the unrelenting, marvelous Norseness of Travel Light also means it is nothing at all like The Little Prince. It's been years since I read Travel Light, and it's on my campus bookshelf, so I can't really turn to it now and dig you up a quote or anything like a proper review, and that's not what I'm doing here this morning, anyway. It's simply that I'm on my way to the airport quite soon and I was thinking of it and I wanted to say so. It's a beautiful little book, hard around the edges, the way stories of its kind are, and it's also a wind-bitten, incredibly sunny November morning. How can I avoid thinking of it?

And I am thinking of practical details. I'll be in Corpus Christi from Wednesday until Sunday, and I'll be attending the National Learning Communities Conference. As a new Learning Communities program director, this conference is an excellent opportunity to learn a great deal, and, having looked at the schedule, I fully anticipate shuttling from session to session for three days straight. This is a very good thing. But I'll also be in four different airports, twice, on six flights all together, and there are mornings and evenings and stray bits of time between events, and it's hard to know what to bring.

Writing wise, it seems I've never been better equipped: I have a few dozen small projects to work on. But because this wouldn't be a post on my blog without me whinging about my novel, there's that, too. There's always that, looming (and companionable) in the back of my mind, and it's ridiculous to even think about traveling light. (That Corpus Christi also requires me to add a rain jacket to my suitcase, too, adds a material dimension.)

...Middlemarch is also going with me. The edition I'm reading is a Norton Critical, which means it weighs more than it should because there are so many of those onionskin pages jammed between its covers.

I want, very badly, to take knitting along. The best project for it, though, is getting too large, and it's something that requires multiple colors of yarn, which means multiple balls, taking up more space, and I am dedicated to a) not checking luggage on a trip like this b) actually respecting the dimensions allowed for carry-on items. I also am not-taking the knitting because it's an excuse. It is always an excellent excuse: I can neither read nor write while knitting, and I know myself. During my five-hour layover in Houston, when I could probably finish a draft of a short story or finally get to the back cover of Middlemarch, I would knit (and listen to hockey). And it isn't that I don't love knitting; it's that it's always too easy to love.

And that weighs on me. (Every breathing moment I am not writing or reading weighs on me. I intended to write this morning. Instead, I cleaned some things because I'm going to be gone for four days and I went to buy toothpaste because I didn't have a TSA-approved size in the cupboard and I had a bunch of angst about how I did those things instead of writing.)

And that's ridiculous.

It's a constant struggle to balance good discipline (which leads to good craft) and masochism for the sake of it. Ten minutes ago, I decided that I'd rather be the person in a suit carrying a be-patched and be-buttoned backpack because it's just a lot more useful to hold my stuff than the laptop bag I have for work. And that's going to be fine. There's more room, for one. There's a pocket expressly for my indispensable, unspillable travel mug.

And because there are a few minutes until I have to leave, I reserve the right to change my mind about the knitting.

Travel light.

It's an excellent book. I still take everything too literally.

now what?: on writing I don't know how to share

On Wednesday, October 30, at 10:15 a.m., I received the new issue of The Classical Magazine (issue six) in my inbox (as a PDF because the only iDevice I own is an iPod so old that it can sing along with most of the music on it). The premise of this issue is econo, short pieces of prose and poetry and the things between, and it is full of work by writers I enjoy and admire. But I haven't read any of it yet.

I have work in this issue, too, a short nonfiction piece called "First Star," my first published hockey-writing, a piece woven around Sidney Crosby's broken jaw, a Predators-Avalanche game I went to last season, and Lokomotiv Yaroslavl. A piece hinging, in many ways, on Semyon Varlamov and his play with both Colorado and Yaroslavl. I wrote the piece in the first third of October, about events from last season.

On Wednesday night, I was having a Twitter conversation about Varlamov, his kickass season so far, his apparently affable nature. Half an hour after that, the news broke that Varlamov had turned himself in to Denver police and was arrested on domestic violence and kidnapping charges. I turned my attention to the Penguins' game in-progress, I circled social media warily, I tried to focus on new writing tasks. Mostly, I felt sick to my stomach. Mostly, I didn't want to read anything, anywhere, at all.

***

It's been a few days since then. I don't want to think he's guilty, but I also refuse to assume he's not because already the crows are calling the alleged victim a liar. (Women are just like that, lying about terrifying and humiliating things for money and attention.) Already the heads are shaking and saying that it's just not possible that Varlamov could do such a thing. (Everyone knows nice guys don't do bad things.) Avalanche head coach Patrick Roy gave Varlamov the start last night in Dallas because he didn't see any reason not to. Varlamov has yet to be officially charged with any crime; he posted his bail; he is, legally, quite free to play. The slow unfurling of legal procedures proceeds apace, and it's unfair of me to assume guilt or innocence in any direction until that process is completed if I believe in this legal system.

I do. And I don't.

As someone who wants everyone, under all circumstances, to have the right to real due process, not just torches and pitchforks, I must believe in this legal system. As a general optimist and person who attaches affection easily to people, places, and things, I cling to that benefit of the doubt. I want this goalie whose play I appreciate and whose career took a path I found conveniently symbolic to be innocent. And I mean squeaky-clean, photographic-and-eye-witness-evidence-plus-retinal-scan-that-the-accused-was-instead-volunteering-at-a-trick-or-treating-event-for-at-risk-youth-at-the-time-of-the-events, evil-impostor-committing-crimes-in-my-stead innocent. Except not exactly that either because I also do not want, at any time, for anyone to be guilty of domestic violence. Of violent crime of any kind. Because I don't want people to commit acts of violence. Ever.

I want desperately for the system to work, too. If he's guilty, I want every possible book thrown at him, preferably by Aroldis Chapman (metaphorically, of course: the weight of guilt should feel like that fastball in the unprotected ribs).

As a human being who's walking around this world with eyes open, too, I know that the system often doesn't work. I know that many cases like this (domestic violence cases, cases involving high-profile, wealthy persons) don't reach trial stage. They can be settled out of court, charges can be dropped (and not because they were invented but because of a host of larger, frightening reasons), and the very idea of the system can be collapsed before one even gets to the part I think of as that proper due process. I know that due process doesn't necessarily lead to justice, either, and that more people want to believe that the victim is lying than to deal with the wages of a culture that excuses and masks violence.

I want an impossibility: I want Semyon Varlamov to be innocent and I want Evgenia Vavinyuk to be telling the truth.

***

This post was never anything I ever wanted to write, but I also couldn't say nothing, even if no one even noticed the connection: "Hey, you wrote that thing praising that guy who might have assaulted his girlfriend." It's most of what I've been thinking about since Wednesday, and even as it strikes me as egotistical that I am in fact thinking what about my writing? in this context, we are inextricably tied to our work. Better to acknowledge that than not.

I loved writing "First Star." I loved that Predators/Avalanche game I went to. How I feel about that piece of writing now--I don't know. Rereading it doesn't make it more clear. What is clear is this: I don't know how the rest of this story plays out, and I know that it will absolutely matter to me when it does. I also don't know how to compartmentalize--hockey here, humanity there. There are enough talented and skillful people in this world that I don't think it's too much to ask that we be good at what we do and also simply good. Decent.

And if I'm feeling uncomfortable about my own work in the new issue, there's no reason that I should feel that way about the rest of Issue Six. So I'm going to go read that, and enjoy it, and wait.

another not-NaNoWriMo post

It's the six a.m. hour, and I've decided that the short piece I drafted at the beginning of the week is finished. So before I had a second cup of tea, I submitted it to two places, and it doesn't feel as unwise as maybe it should. (Of course, I trust my decision-making at this time of the morning far better than I trust it at two in the afternoon.)

At the same time, all over the world, NaNo'ers are leaping into beginnings, including my friend and colleague Jill. She came to dinner last night with notebook in hand, and it made me so happy to see that. Last night, at midnight (when I'd been soundly asleep for two hours), a local writing group had a NaNoWriMo kickoff write-in. I envy them. I envy their fresh starts sorely. I have never done NaNo, not in any way that is "correct," though I have made attempts of varying kinds to keep in the spirit. There is a buzz in the air about it, and anything that spurs one forward in any writerly way is a marvelous thing.

This, I suppose, is another of those keeping-in-the-spirit posts, though the last thing I can/should do this month is start anything new. My goal is more now in line with my 2010 November: do something that I need to do as a writer every day. Sure, that means sending out work, but more importantly, it means finishing.

I have folders of unfinished things, fully drafted short stories that don't quite work; half-written things that I'd forgotten I'd even thought of, let alone written; two-and-three word ideas that still blister and crackle no matter that I tossed them into a file years ago. I have kernels of pieces that can only become poems. I have a novel to be written, all furled potential; I have a full, old, old draft of another whose re-vision I'm starting to be able to see. More importantly, I have the novel I'm still working on, the manuscript I keep thinking is finished and keep understanding is not and the only right thing to do by that book that I love, the book that made me completely forget that there was a November last year, is keep working until it's right. Until it's as good as it deserves to be. And that is terrifying. It takes a kind of patience I don't have, that I have to make, and maybe I'm doing that kind of stepping back that Michael P. Nye wrote about earlier this week. I know good work takes time. I spent big chunks of my summer taking that time, considering things, and the revision I did in August did leave me with a better book than I had in July. I'm now understanding that "better" is no substitute for "right."

It's not right yet. I'm not sure what "right" is for it yet, but I know it deserves to be right.

So I will try to be patient and listen and if I can't do either of those things gracefully and contentedly (and I can't), I'll finish smaller works. They've been waiting longer still, and they deserve to at least get where they were going. I won't set another artificial deadline to finish another revision by a date or a time: I understand that my problem is not getting myself to work. It's not about spurring forward this time.

I do want it to be, though. I want to be part of the dash. I'm good at the dash--even elementary school gym class showed me that.

I loved gym class. The period was never more than forty minutes long, and in forty minutes, there was never enough time to get into the things I couldn't do. The longest we ever ran was a mile and a quarter. More often we sprinted. More often we dove after a ball, the goals quite clear, the scores clearer.

Novel writing is not gym class. Even my own process is not the one-size-fits-all yellow mesh pinnie, appropriate for all activities, no matter how much I want it to be. But there's something to learn from thinking about gym class--about exertion, in particular, because what is writing except exertion of one kind or another--no matter what shape I'm in, no matter what shape this novel or those drafted stories or those little poem seeds are in, I can do something. And so I must.

confessional mode: fear

Today was the first day of the new semester, the first day of my new year. (I have no truck with January. Mid-winter isn't a good time for me to start anything.)

Maybe it's because of that newness, the ripple of uncertainty over and under everything--and today was so very much that--but today feels like a good--not good, but fitting--day to face front. So I'm turning this, which was, until five minutes ago, an e-mail to a very close friend, into a post, for better or worse.

What am I afraid of, right now? 

In ways that have nothing to do with my usual pile of writerly insecurities, I am afraid of when the media finally gets to Evgeni Malkin and asks him about what he thinks about the Russian anti-gay propaganda law that's turned the run-up to the Olympics into even more of a gut-twisting spectacle than before (before the inevitable human rights violations had a name and number and legal code). After Ilya Kovalchuk's response today, I tread the internet carefully, but today's news about Evgeni Malkin is this marvelously affable spectacle. Still, so far, 2/3 of the Russian stars asked what they thought have said they're in favor of the statute, to one degree or another. The third, Alexander Ovechkin, chose the only other option, which is to say "I'd rather talk about hockey" and evade the matter altogether. (Several good reads on the general subject are here, here, here, and here, and many, many more, of course, are out there.)

I understand that there's no particularly good option for the players on the Russian national team who might actually stand with GLBTQ rights or at least with the stance of the NHL/NHLPA/You Can Play partnership. Under the dictates of the law, actually saying anything other than the above two options could be found in violation of said law. I also know that Russian culture is what it is, and we're all products of our culture to some degree. The law is popular in Russia. I should have no expectations that my favorite hockey player should be any different than the significant majority of his country. 

But I do. Maybe I blame American exceptionalism--even my chosen-favorite-beloved-wearer-of-a-coordinated-shirt-and-shorts ensemble should be different, superlative, heroic against overwhelming odds. Maybe I blame escapism: if I dealt better with the actual world, sports and the people who play them wouldn't mean so much to me. Maybe I blame my own selfish worry: what if my favorite player says, "No, I don't think you are deserving of the same freedoms and rights of expression everyone else has"? It's personal. The personal is political is personal. I don't have to have met someone for that to be true because ideology and philosophy have very real, very tangible effects. (This is news to no one.)

Other fans have already had to deal with this--not just in this particular historical moment, but every time a public figure falls from grace and we have to make the decision: stay or go? That's not a choice I want to make, but I know what I'd choose, and there's that selfishness again: I'm broken up over what it would cost me. My fandom, my laundry, my favorite too-expensive, named-and-numbered sweater. But I'd always rather give up pleasure than self-respect, which includes voting with my esteem, my attention, and ultimately my money. Even if no one else notices or cares, I do. 

I'm a wreck over hypotheticals. That's not fair to some professional athlete whose real job is to be good at hockey. And I'm an optimistic person--I want to believe the best about people, particularly about those I admire, no matter the reason. I want to think, however Pollyannaish it may be, that human beings will default to being generous with each other. I think, also, though, of Sherlock Holmes: if I've painted over things with too rosy a brush, I've set up my own disappointment, and I have no right to expect otherwise. 

A ray of hope I have is a tweet from the You Can Play Project which says they've had support from some Russian NHLers who have not been able to support the initiative publicly for a variety of reasons (their own legal protection and consideration for their families likely included, which are good reasons). It saddens me to think that what I'm hoping for most (in an attempt to actually be realistic) is silence, no comment, let's talk about hockey, from a whole slew of Russian players and athletes. It troubles me to think what kind of meaning I'd imbue that with, too, but this is hope against hope. This is back to wishing, always, for what is kindest, and expecting that, even to the point of seeing it where it isn't. It's a disservice to everyone.

***

I'm not entirely sure what I hoped to achieve with this post. Usually I have some idea. Tonight, all I can think is that if I name the fear and whatever reasons I have for it, it will go away. I know, however, that's never actually true for me. Saying it out loud doesn't help. There aren't many cases where I feel better for having shared. But maybe someone else is having the same worry, and at least we can feel fearful and ridiculous together.

I don't know.

The Next Big Thing: I'm Doing It Wrong

Two months ago, Olivia Chadha, a friend and former graduate school colleague whose lovely novel, The Balance of Fragile Things, was published in 2012 by Ashland Creek Press, sent me a set of really excellent writerly questions. These questions are part of a forward-rolling blog series called The Next Big Thing (and the nature of it is to pass it forward, and so if these questions would help you, reader, please take them, please use them, please post), and Olivia was awesome to pass them to me.

What is the working title of your book?

Where did the idea come from for the book?

What genre does your book fall under?

Which actors would you choose to play your characters in a movie rendition?

What is the one-sentence synopsis of your book?

How long did it take you to write the first draft of your manuscript?

What other books would you compare this story to within your genre?

Who or What inspired you to write this book?

What else about your book might pique the reader’s interest?

The problem is this: I can't answer them. 

I mean, of course, I could. These are all things that I've thought about before (though the "who would you cast?" question is a rabbit-hole that I could fall down forever and still not get it quite right). One of the reasons that I have (again) dropped off the face of the blogging-earth is the completion of the first draft of the novel I've been vaguely alluding to since June. I have a draft. I have a whole, complete project and it's the first time since I finished my dissertation. And I have never been happier with a manuscript. (Don't let that fool you; the revisions will be vast, of course, but I'm already feeling like I know what those revisions are, which is a wholly new experience as a writer.) But I look at these questions and all I can hear is jinx. 

I've written before about being, on the whole, unable or unwilling to discuss the work in progress. That's true and it isn't. In one way or another, this book is the only thing that I've spoken about in six months because even when I'm not talking about it, I am. In the back of my mind, every conversation arrives there. (I spend considerable time hoping no one notices that, too.) But there are probably only two people who've heard real details throughout the process, and now the process is done (at least draft one). Now, there are six people who have or have had the manuscript in-hand, to help me figure out the algebra of revision. I'm glad to be in this space. 

But I still can't talk about it, not in this specific, useful way. It still feels too soon (and I'd be lying if I said there wasn't a little writerly paranoia underwriting it all--don't give away too much, lest someone else take the idea and fun with it, better, faster, farther, nevermind that I also believe, truly and firmly, that there are no new ideas, only new ways of approaching them, and all of those ways are valuable. I am aware that this is a vast hypocrisy). I do think that these questions are phenomenal for someone whose book has just come out or whose book is under contract or for someone who is far more brave and confident about the publication process. 

Part of me, of course, is convinced that my reticence here is base cowardice. Part of me thinks it's pragmatism. I'm thinking that it's some of both and a bit of neither. What I am certain of is that these are important questions to be able to answer, particularly in the context of seeking publication for one's work. And so I am answering them, just not here. I hope, in days and months to come, to be able to answer them properly, clearly, and without the sense that I am somehow sabotaging myself.

Blog post the next: What do I do after the draft? (More about writing than Fantasy Hockey, but that's sure to factor in.)

The Bicycle Repair Shop Can Only Fix the Bike (The Bicycle Elegies, Part II)

The story begins on a disappointing note. I got back my bicycle, and it functions now, but I never got the diagnostic I hoped for. It did take an extra five days to get it back at all--without explanation--and so I explain it by imagining all of the repair folks saying, "No, you touch it" to each other for four days straight. When I picked it up, I opted to be dropped off at the repair shop and trusted that it would work enough to get me home, or I would walk the bike two miles back. Neither option is a great hardship.

I walked up to the counter and asked for my bike and the clerk called out that it was the blue one, and a young man wheeled it out, the repair ticket flapping from the handlebars. I paid, and while it was more than I had originally paid for it, there were no charges for replacement parts, nothing additional to the basic tune-up fee. $47.50 and goodbye and I was wheeling the bike away from the stripmall sidewalk when I finally remembered that I never asked about what they'd done. I never asked for the story I hoped for.

I am terrible at this part.

I didn't go back. I should have. It's not a strange question, and I am not bothered, generally, by people thinking me odd because I am very odd in many ways. But I am not good at asking.

In 2004, I went to Sheffield, England. It was one stop on a longer journey, a stop many, many people found odd, but I was doing it to see the town where my favorite soccer team plays (and then I was carrying on to see them play a match elsewhere). It was a Monday, any Monday, and there was no practice because the team had already crossed England to get to Preston, where I would see them the next day. Someone was tending to the pitch grass, and two young women were staffing the gift shop. The gates to the pitch were closed, of course, and I couldn't bring myself to ask anyone to let me see the grass, the seats, or anything at all. I had crossed an ocean (though not just for this, I reasoned), spent hours on a bus from London, after the red-eye (just for this). But still, I couldn't make myself ask. I bought a shirt, a hat, a mug. I took a photo through the red, wrought iron gate. I still regret that.

I regretted this, too, continuing to walk the bike down the sidewalk, though it's not on the same scale at all. And I know more about this--I know the front wheel was out of true because the clerk said so when I dropped it off. I know they fixed the shifting mechanism because the chain now stays connected to the sprockets. I am fairly confident that that is all that changed, save maybe some greasing or tightening. I got the bike back near the end of August, and I rode it to work all of last week, and it feels the same as it did. The character of the bike has not changed. It still has a sluggish heaviness that could belong to either of us, and it has a few interesting clicks, which I am fairly certain belong to the bike. But the story of the object itself isn't what I wanted it to be.

I want the bike to be exciting on its own. I want the bike to mean something. The bike is not exciting. The only thing that it means on its own is department store bike-ness. One colleague did stop to look at it, but I expect he stopped mostly because my shirttail is always stuck on the tacky black rubber of the handlebars as I try to get the whole thing into the building and then into my small office. I think I can squeeze past to open the door, only to be caught or pulled or thumped in the gut because something is caught. None of the doors I use are automatic. Another colleague here has a snappy road bike that he skims along so neatly, only three fingers on the handlebars. I am always wrestling mine.

That's probably the story--the wrestling. I am never so graceless than when the bike is involved, and that is saying something. I am also always afraid on it. Last Wednesday, I had a point where I wasn't ashamed to say so because I had a reason why. Most of the time, I have no actual reason.

My commute to work is not even a mile in each direction, and all of it is on residential streets. I was on one of those, quiet and empty, and, on Wednesday, someone in an SUV hung behind my back tire for a few hundred yards. I was two feet from the curb. The looming metal was three from me, and maybe that's not so close at all for people who are used to riding in highly trafficked areas, but on an empty street at so few miles an hour, it felt very near. I eventually stopped, tires scooted against the curb, and turned. Maybe the person wanted directions to somewhere. But when I looked at him, the driver only pulled away, hands up, protesting innocence of some kind.

On my feet, I do not feel this way. On my feet, I can walk in the dark with someone at my heels and be unbothered. In the sunlit eight a.m. quiet of ten minutes after the school buses leave the neighborhood, I found the nearness frightening. On the bicycle, I am suspicious.

What it means, though, is that all of that is the sum of me. It has nothing to do with the bicycle itself, save that the bike is a bike, just a thing, an uninteresting thing. Knowing that it works in the way it was intended to work now has not made the task any easier, and that makes me feel foolish. I had hoped for--nearly expected--some magical transformation of the object after its tune-up, that there was some adjustment the shop could make to turn it light and graceful and easy. What I wanted was the (quite impossible) experience of being turned myself into something light and graceful and easy when put in tandem with the bike.

I suppose I don't have to tell you that there's no bike shop on the planet that can do that.

It's just going to be hard. If I want to do it, I will just have to keep practicing. I don't have to tell you that I hate that idea. I'm not going to let it go because I'm stubborn, but it has been a long time since I've had to fight with something so hard. (There are, of course, many tasks I have chosen not to fight with because they're hard, too hard in some way, but that's another issue. I am still terrible at asking necessary questions.) Maybe that's one of the privileges (and pitfalls) of adulthood: unless one's career says learn this, do this and one is committed enough (by choice or necessity) to the career to not walk away, there's no one to make one do the hard thing. As a child, life is all about having to do hard things that don't feel or fit right because childhood is a series of tests that must be passed, and many of them are quite literally tests. Someone is always saying, "Just try it," and expecting good things (like climbing the rope in gym class and drawing human faces and memorizing the capitals of all of the countries in South America). Right now, absolutely no one but me cares whether I manage this bicycle thing. In fact, I probably shouldn't care as much as I do. If I'm being very environmentally conscious, I can walk, and the distance is so short that the time added is not so much. I probably walk as fast as I ride, actually, because I don't fear my feet and my feet don't fail and I know how to walk and I am always in a hurry. I know always what to expect of my feet and the sidewalks and where I cross the street.

But the story is in the wrestling. The story is in doing the hard thing (even if it's ridiculous that the thing is hard in the first place--maybe because it's ridiculous that this, of all things, is difficult). I should be reminded of that. It's what I expect from my students every day. I don't care how hard it is to write. I only care that they keep trying.

Christ, it's only fair.

Reset

Tara Mae Mulroy, a former editor for The Pinch, blogged the creation of a poem one recent morning, and also invoked the issue of scheduling writing, the problem of finding a suitable block of enough quiet to compose. There's little I love more than the process conversation, and the idea of process, specifically the cultivation of writing habits (and others), has been at the forefront of my mind all summer.

For the first time, I feel like I actually got there, wherein "there" is some basic state of satisfaction with what I'm doing with my brain and my body. I've written about my writing process before, at least in part, and that isn't really the heart of this entry. This is mostly about un-fargling my fargle-bargling tendency to do things that I know don't work for me and that result in deep wells of startlingly boring malaise [1].

This past winter was all about becoming really, really attuned to what doesn't work, moreso than usual. At the end of last summer, I burned out on yet another novel, one I'd been working on (ish) for three years. That brings the count to two 300-page unfinished manuscripts and a completed novel draft that could use a good beating revision that are in a drawer and are staying there for the foreseeable future. (I hope these all count toward the requisite failed novel count that every novelist I know racked up before The One That Worked.) There was the semester, too, and grading and the same sad violin I keep playing for myself. That song remains the same.

One thing from autumn that did work pretty well, though, and that was that I joined a CrossFit gym. Yeah, I know. I barely believe it, either. It was actually a lot of fun, in that way that it was fun to go to practice for high school sports: friendly competition and shared misery. Apparently, I sincerely enjoy those things. The bigger deal is that, for about five months, I was in the best shape I've been in since high school. And despite experiencing Jell-O leg syndrome every other day and learning a vicious hatred of overhead squats that I am still not over, I felt completely jazzed. It was also one thing, at the end of three days a week, I could say I had done. For once, I paid attention to that feeling: that was a good thing.

Then the gym moved and things got wonky and that was that. Cue February and March: Nemeses. There's nothing dramatic to relay, just high-functioning flatlining. The work associated with my job got done, I didn't hoard cats or half-empty pizza boxes, I only resorted to wearing sports jerseys instead of "teaching clothes" once a week or so. Still no writing, and I started sleeping up until the point that I had to leave for work, and there was nothing after that. I taught at eight a.m., but sleeping until almost seven is not something that works for me. That has been true since I was twenty-one. After having been in the habit of working out and then abruptly not being in the habit, the dearth of energy--coupled with the internal litany of failure: silence, sedation--became the paralytic that so many of us know so well. The longer I went without doing any of the things I knew worked well for me (writing, eating/sleeping properly, doing something useful with my body),  the harder, of course, it was to start back up with any of them. The task becomes monumental.

What I did have, though, and this isn't to be underestimated, was the NHL season. It sounds frivolous, I know, but it made some serious differences. On one hand, it was something to look forward to, something to get excited about (which is important in that long dead space where baseball had been). It was another community for me, too, centered mostly on Twitter--not that I interact with it a great deal, but it lead to discovering a lot of great hockey blogs and their authors, the You Can Play Project, and a lot of fantastic information about teams and players. For a collector of trivia like myself, for someone who loves and lives for the internal narratives (real or imagined), the whole social media aspect of sports fandom is a dragon's hoard.

Where there is engagement, there is communication, too. As winter trudged on, I wasn't writing, but I was trying to convey some sense of what I felt, that energy, to people who didn't get it at all. When that didn't work (and apologies to the colleagues and family members who are completely sick of me talking about the Penguins), the words turned inwards. That wasn't new. I'd been monologuing to myself, in all of the wrong ways, since January. But this time, the narrative was different. It wasn't my narrative. It was the story of everything else, at least the hockey-centric version. By the time it all built up around the end of March--the playoff race heating up--it all slipped sideways, into fiction. That's where I live. It was good to be back, though it was, at first, hard to recognize the place.

This project has done a lot of things it wasn't supposed to do. It started in short stories. That's extraordinarily rare for me. This project actually became the glue for the first batch of short stories I can think of as a real collection, one I actually sent out into the world as a collection[2]. Then it became the kind of project I dream about: the kind that won't let me alone. It has changed its trajectory in some unexpected ways, too, and has gone on longer than anticipated (no one is surprised), but it also muscled everything else into place.

At roughly the same time the writing came back--No, stop, I am lying. It didn't go anywhere. It never goes anywhere. I just fail to pick it up, I put my head in the sand, I close the door tighter, all out of sense, all out of reason. I have learned that much: I don't suffer from writer's block. I am never at a loss for things to write. When I don't write, I am choosing not to. To know that I have chosen that--that I have also then elected to feel like hell for weeks and months--is a hard thing to know. But this series of posts is about loss and ending and I acknowledge the time that I lost and now I say I am ending that.

Reset.

At roughly the same time I chose to write again, my desire to do things again picked up. My beloved garage gym remains a thing that probably won't work for me again (timing, now, most particularly), but I've joined another. I work out by myself, or at least it seems so from the outside. But I have a head full of company, all of these characters living and working and yes, also working out, and everything is connected and the (completely invented) people I am writing about critique my music as I get back to the good place on the pull-up bar. I've found out that I can--if necessary--write notes while running at a fair clip on the treadmill. I've also found out that losing my balance and somehow managing to drag my shin across the spinning treadmill belt results in a really spectacular brushburn. These last two things, of course, are totally unrelated.

In the months of April and May, I baked my own bread. Throughout the summer, I took an active interest in making sure the food I was eating was actually food. I've never been a fast-food aficionado, but I would happily eat breakfast cereal and delivery pizza for the rest of my life. That leads to a lot of two p.m. face-plants for me. Throughout the summer, I never quite made it back to my five a.m. wake-up, but I managed six or six-thirty consistently. I had two thousand words by nine, most days. Many days, I kept going. In the afternoon, gym. I kept that. For most of three months, excepting the Montreal trip and a weekend with friends, I managed to do the things that keep me whole (and the two trips had, of course, other ways of doing that, including reminding me of the real, actual human beings I know and that I like them and enjoy leaving my house sometimes).

It is a really short list of things:

• wake up early, no matter what
• write, goddammit
• eat food with food in it
• make the body do something

It shouldn't be a hard list to manage. The last two of those points seem to be universally recommended and endorsed. Still, I have my share of anxiety about it--because they're so simple, they're easy to push away. They don't feel important because they are basic, and they certainly don't sound important to many other people. And I have a job. I am blessed with a full-time teaching job, and I am grateful to have it. I love what I do. I also know, though, that my brain is wired to put the needs of the many (my five classes of students) before the needs of the few (me). I have classes every day of the week, office hours every day, too. When the system breaks down, it breaks down here.

What I managed this week--in the three days my college has held classes and last week when the days were full of administrative and committee duties in preparation for the semester--was to keep those four points. Since classes started, I've managed the five o'clock wake-up. I've unraveled big problems with the book. I'm not making the big two- and three-thousand-word leaps anymore, but the progress is steady. The progress has to tread more carefully because now we have to know where we are going. We tread more carefully, this progress and I. 

Three days is, of course, absolutely nothing. These are three days when I have nothing to grade, three days when my students are still in their late-summer bloom, deciding, too, that this semester will be different. 

But these three days have been the reminder of what each day could be like. That seems a foolish thing to lose.

[1] The fargle-bargling comes from Zoo With Roy, my favorite Phillies blog.

[2] Congratulations to Lee Upton, winner of the BOA Editions' 2nd annual short fiction prize!

What It Isn't Like, Part I

My history with bicycles is not a very storied one. I didn't learn how to ride properly (a term used incredibly loosely) until I was probably ten or eleven, when a trip to Ocean City, NJ, and the inevitable bike rental on the boardwalk, in the company of a friend & her whole family, meant doing it, regardless of whether I could (in the sense of being comfortable or competent--I'd settle for either). There were a few figuring-it-out moments earlier; I think I received my first bicycle--my only bicycle, at least until incredibly recently--for Christmas when I was about seven. Somewhere around age nine, I wrecked it spectacularly. It still had the training wheels on it, brittle white plastic discs, and I say spectacularly because it was a fairly spectacularly dumb way to wreck a bike, at least compared to the grisly and deeply cool stories all my friends had. I simply managed to tip a bike--one that had four wheels on it at the time--off the crumbling berm on my grandmother's narrow, creek-bracketed road. (All of the significant roads in my childhood are like this.) I don't remember the falling part at all. I do remember the aftermath: the training wheel on the right side shattered, which cut up my ankle pretty badly because I was not at all agile or smart enough to at least pitch myself free of the wreckage. Thinking about it now, it feels a little like those Calvin & Hobbes strips.

The genius of Bill Watterson

Except it wasn't an explicitly adversarial relationship. The bike--now without training wheels, which made my parents happy, I think, because now I'd have to learn to ride the bike properly--was kind of a non-entity to me. There wasn't anywhere I could really go on it. I grew up in the utter middle of nowhere, and riding on the road (always narrow, crumbling, creek-bracketed) was verboten by my mother. Probably because of my propensity to just fall over on the bike, as exhibited above. Blessings upon my parents because they did everything they could to help me figure it out, including driving me and the bike to the empty high school parking lot and jogging along behind me. I remember my dad running with one hand fisted in the hood of my winter jacket as I pedaled, ready to lift me out of the inevitable wreckage. I wasn't very big, so the system worked more or less for my safety. In the end, it worked enough. I managed three years of beach trips with my friend's family, and those were the only times I rode a bike each of those years. Angelina and I rode tandem bikes sometimes, too, which helped, or several of us (she has three sisters) trundled along in one of those surreys that are super-fun to be in (especially when one is twelve) and probably dead annoying to everyone else on the boardwalk.

When those trips ended after the sixth grade, the bike ceased to be part of my consciousness. I was--am--a walker. As an adolescent, I preferred the woods for my angsty sojourns. As an adult, I still prefer the woods, whether the sojourns are angsty or otherwise. But now I live in a place where there are locations a few miles away I often go, places like work, the gym, the grocery store. The miles are few enough that driving my car, especially while the weather is still mild, tangs of the ridiculous, but even three miles of walking in one direction adds enough time to the activity that the walk can be prohibitive. I thought of solutions. I encountered resistance:

I have been informed by several parties that I am not permitted to put a horse in my--or my neighbors'--back yard.

The sidewalks of Casper are not skateboard- or rollerblade-friendly.

I have been further informed that a team of sled dogs is not an option, no matter how happy a gaggle of Huskies would make me, no matter how many times I have read The Call of the Wild.

A camel is right out.

So: a bike. The championed conveyance of the fit, the environmentally conscious, the frugal, the badass (wherein I think of my friend Vanessa, the cyclocross ninja, and my former student Rachel, who rode across the United States the summer after graduation). It's been nearly two decades since I've ridden a bicycle, and I'm not sure I'd ever really call what I did on a bicycle "riding," at least not in comparison to pretty much everyone else I know who's ever ridden a bike.

I have to tell you that the cliche, at least as it applies to me and my riding of bicycles, is bullshit. Riding a bicycle has never been like riding bike. Knitting is like that. Ice skating is like that. Time doesn't matter: the body remembers. I think solving quadratic equations would be more like that, actually, more attuned to some kind of muscle memory than the bloody bike-riding, and I probably stopped doing that at the same time I last rode a bike. I like other activities sort of like cycling, in that they transport; horseback riding, though I've done that about as many times as I've ridden a bike, feels natural and easy and comfortable. I can rollerblade and ice skate. I managed enough coordination to play softball and field hockey and soccer and recreational ice hockey. There is no reason that a bicycle should remain so opaque (particularly since I live in a residential neighborhood, full of kids from four to fourteen, who zip about and set up ramps in the street and noodle around with their feet on their handlebars in blissful ignorance of my seething envy). I don't even want to get in touch with my inner X-Gamer in this arena; I just want to be able to get to the grocery store and back without getting in my car and without the ice cream melting.

I bought a bike, of course. I may have made a foolish decision in buying the bike I did, a clearance-rack mountain bike from Target, but it had a small enough frame that it fit me with the seat at the lowest setting. Nothing appeared to be lopsided or wobbly or visibly broken, and that was good enough for the experiment, which had several phases.

Hypothesis A: I can figure out the mechanics of riding because I am a damn adult possessed of an able body and a sound mind.

Null Hypothesis A: I cannot figure this out and the ten year old girl across the street who says I am crabby and who grills me about where I have been and what I am doing every time she sees me will have won. (Or a slightly less dramatic version, really.)

Hypothesis B: I will actually enjoy the act of riding my bike and wish to do it more often.

Null Hypothesis B: Riding the bike will bring me no enjoyment.

Hypothesis C: I will actually manage to make the riding functional, allowing me to get to work without trying to put my car anywhere on the construction-riddled campus and to get to the gym & grocery store, where I will get to enjoy feelings of great triumph for a while, and then at least some general smugness after that.

Null Hypothesis C: Nothing will function. Failure on all counts.

I've had my bike for a little over two weeks. In that time, I have replaced a leaking inner tube and added a seat-post rack. That time has also yielded data:

• Hypothesis A: confirmed. I haven't fallen off of the thing. I can manage to do effective signaling, too, though it is a bit terrifying to take one hand of the handlebars. But it wasn't easy, wasn't instinctive, and isn't getting easier quickly (though incrementally, yes).
• Hypothesis B: confirmed. I do enjoy it, particularly in the sense that it's rather freeing. Not-unexpected complication of B: ow. But, as with all things physical, the body adapts. Or gets told to suck it up.
• Hypothesis C: complicated. Last night, I did a test-run of the route I wanted the bike for most: home to work to the gym. The long, gradual grade of the second mile to the gym and my rubber legs notwithstanding, I managed. I also managed to discover two other things. 
• Changing gears on this particular bike consistently results in the chain disengaging from the sprocket, which means that pedaling does nothing
• I can fix the thing enough to get me home without being hit by a car. Pretty proud of that actually, as I know bugger-all about it. Yes, every child on my street can do the same, too, but still. 

I'm going to take the bike to a local bike shop for a tune-up tomorrow (which will cost more than I paid for the bike). We'll see what they say, and I'll cap this upon learning the verdict. 

Hypothesis/Wagers/Jokes in Poor Taste About a Film That Still Makes Several Generations Cry:

What are the odds that there's an Old Yeller moment at the end of this? 

(I said this was a series of elegies. I didn't expect this kind, but I'll write it if I have to. That's what we do here.)

Update: Bike shop says I can expect then to be done with my bike in the vicinity of Monday. So, Part II will come sometime after that. Other bits in this series will come between then and now.

Vampire Bats

Seems like a more appropriate title for a post from last week, no?

Yesterday, I attempted to be a responsible, health-conscious adult.

Yesterday, I failed pretty spectacularly at it.

There was a free campus blood draw & test (the kind where they take your blood and then mail you an analysis of all of those things adults are supposed to know and monitor: cholesterol and glucose and triglycerides and so on), and I decided that I would go. (Not only because doing so would help along a program we have for reducing one's insurance premiums, but because I'd never done so before, and I would like to know what's going on with my hemoglobins.) Friends of mine were also going, and so it was going to be a group activity and, because I was expected there, I couldn't chicken out. (Believe me, I thought about it.)

You see, I have an incredible aversion to needles. It's not the pain level (it's really a very tiny pinchy feeling), but it is the kind of pain and the concept of it. It's invasive, and having teeth drilled doesn't freak me out even a third as much. Also, it's traumatic: I have small veins, and I have blood that doesn't really want to come out of them. My one trip to the Red Cross Blood Drive left me with a collapsed vein and a full hyperventilation. How very embarrassing, on top of everything else.

I reasoned that yesterday would be different because they weren't trying to fill a bag; it was just a wee test-tube. I was nervous, though, and just holding my arm underside-up is enough to give me palpitations. The elbow is there to bend and protect, like the knee, and I don't even like to look at the insides of my elbows, let alone bare them for needles. It's against every instinct I have.  But I survived the stab, and I felt the needle withdraw, and I was relieved. I hadn't cried, I hadn't hyperventilated, and it was over.  And then I was told (because I certainly wasn't looking at the process) that she'd missed, and rather than stab me again, I was to be sent to Roanna, two tables down, who was an expert, and she'd get it in the other arm, no problem.

Roanna did, indeed, get the blood lickety-split, with no fishing or anything, but the damage was done, so to speak. While I didn't hyperventilate (thank God) this time, I teared up, I shook, and I was thoroughly mortified (because there's nothing like being sniffling and blotchy in front of people you've only just met).

Luckily, there was a good 2.5-hour cushion between that and my needing to teach, so I sat in my office and answered e-mails until I calmed down, and then I had coffee with one of the friends who went along and tried very valiantly to be comforting and cool about the whole thing. And I survived. But I'll be wearing long sleeves and avoiding my own elbows for days.

Here's the question for discussion, then: how does one get over fear of something if doing the thing consistently contributes to the fear?