I’ve been sort of hanging out behind the potted plants and walking in dark shadows hoping this one might pass me by but Holly from June Cleaver Nirvana has slipped up beside me and quietly placed the baton in my hand. I considered sprinting off in the direction of the spectators screaming I’m not worthy. Because I’m afraid that my six words won’t make good company for those bits of brilliance already written by Nora Ephron and Dave Eggers and Hemingway. Hemingway for God’s sake! And I’ve never completed a thought in only six words in my life. I’m nothing if not verbose. My life is only just a quarter of the way through (I hope) and six words seems like one-sixteenth of a thing I might have to say about that 25 percent of the life I’ve already lived. Damn. This promises to break me in two. I’ll share my favorites from the video clip over at Smith:

Revenge is Living Well Without You – Joyce Carol Oates
Thought I Would have More Impact – Kevin Clark
I Still Make Coffee For Two – Zak Nelson
Never Really Finished Anything But Cake – Carletta Perkins

And now my own bits of drivel:

Surprised To Say, Where Am I?
Missteps, Compromises, With More To Come
Not Entirely An Unmitigated Disaster
It’s Safe To Say – Deceivingly Unspectacular
This Too Shall Pass, And Quickly

But definitely the one I offer up as the ultimate encapsulation:

Not to Worry, It Will Change

So those of you not rushing towards the exits, grab a seat, stay awhile. Give us YOUR six words.

So here I go complying with orders and re-issuing some old Madmarriage posts for your perusal. It’s a sort of best of compilation. With categories: The best post about friends, family, me, something I love and a wild card selection.

And the winner in the friends category just has to be Gift Swap Gone Wrong which is a sort of blow by blow of the evening I spent trying to make friends and, instead, alienating a town with my errant gift selection. Read it and weep right along with me.

The post that I will include to represent something that I love is called Closer to Okay, a suggestion that however imperfect my stabs at affection, I really do love my children.

My favorite family related posting has to be May the Road Rise to Meet You a treatise on how just how difficult it is to send the young-ins off into the big wide world without car seats and responsible bus drivers.

And the one bit exclusively, indulgently, unabashedly about me is obviously The Self Interview of last April.

A post that just needs to be included here and therefore will take the Wild Card spot is Louse in the House, proof that I was dancing dangerously close to insanity last March.

Enjoy the regurgitation and since I’m supposed to coerce new friends to play along: Gypsy at Heart, edj of Planet Nomad, liv and flutter – have at it.

Mizmell has tagged me and I am supposed to grab the book nearest to my left elbow and open to page 123. I am to find the fifth sentence on the page and copy the next three sentences after the fifth here in this blog. And while three sentences in the middle of a book aren’t usually all that telling or descriptive of a novel or a writer’s talent as a whole, when I selected the book nearest me and opened to the designated page, I liked what I found. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again, Amy Hempel is a wizard with words and even the sixth, seventh and eighth sentences of the 123rd page do her justice. I keep her compilation of short stories on my desk beside the laptop. I begin my day with her. Opening the book at random and finding inspiration in the way she strings a sentence together.

This is how it looked: a car in the driveway, a light on upstairs. But nobody answers the door. I know what I would have done as a child if there was somebody home on Halloween night who did not bother to answer the door. I would have come back with shaving cream and eggs, with toilet paper and friends.
~Amy Hempel, The Collected Stories

She’s nailed it. It’s a simple thing but she has conjured memory: me and Megan Cisneros tormenting the neighbors who failed to produce adequate loot on Halloween night with mailbox pranks and doorbell ditching and all manner of obnoxiousness well into November. Now, twenty year’s later, I can only think that the citizens of Fredrickson Road can thank their lucky stars that paint ball had not been invented in 1983.

But there are other books here in the stack beside my laptop and I can’t resist the urge to see if these authors, the ones I begin my day with, like stretching my calve muscles or exhaling deep breathes, the ones who help me prepare to write, will they manage the same brilliance on a random page, mid-story?

Next in the stack is Lorrie Moore’s Birds of America.

“Bill, divorced only once, is here tonight with Debbie, a woman who is too young for him: at least that is what he knows is said, thought the next time it is said to his face, Bill will shout, “I beg your pardon!” Maybe not shout. Maybe squeak. Squeak with a dash of begging.”

Okay, I allowed for four sentences but they were short and the fourth really just modified the third and seemed too brilliant and utterly necessary to Bill’s character and predicament to have left it out.

I could go on like this forever. The stack of books beside me is rather monumental. I could open each at random and see what wordy treasure lies within. It’s an enticing way to spend a weekend, but, in the interest of time and because memes are supposed to be short, slap dash, even whimsical, I’ll just do one more. It’s here and it’s handy: A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius by Dave Eggers.

“I have donated to the couple from the women’s shelter, and to the little boy from the youth group, to the woman from the Green Party, the kids from the Boy’s Club, the pair of solemn teenagers from SANE/FREEZE. The Berkeley-ness of Berkeley, so charming at first, is getting old. The bell rings.”

The bell rings. Did you read that? Of course the bell rings and Eggers has me reading on to see who will answer the bell, to find out which needy pan handler is on the doorstep. This is the beauty of Eggers, I think I’ll read three sentences and a half hour elapses and I’m well into page 150 when I remember that I’ve got a post to finish.

And just for kicks, I want to see how I stand up to the professionals. So I randomly select a page from my own story, Habeas. Since I have not written 123 pages, I settle for page 43, five sentences in:

“The interior of my mother’s car her true reflection, a jumble of paper coffee cups, packages of wasabi peas and soy nuts, a full ashtray, discarded tank tops and blousy skirts, windows clouded with road salt and the dingy filth of cigarette smoke, the windshield hazy and opaque with neglect. She bends forward over the steering wheel and her arm shoots out in front of me at every stop as if to stall my possible trajectory through the front windshield. I am forever ten year’s old in her mind.”

There’s my shameless pitch for my own writing and for that of Hempel and Moore and Eggers and of course for Amazon book sellers and all things reading related. Go forth and be literate. (I’m supposed to tag some others, so Jennifer, Slouchy, Xsd and Ron, if you’re having a slow week and feel like sharing a passage from the book beside your left elbow, please play along.

1. I obsess about a narrow space just to the left of my dryer, a gully so impossibly narrow, so defyingly unreachable that it is the repository for twenty odd years of lint and dirt and soiled socks (twenty odd years of some other family’s lint and dirt and soiled socks). I dream of the day when the dryer just quits and we drag its useless corpse from the laundry room closet. That is the day that I will have my way with the little slice of filth that taunts me daily.

2. I clean for play dates and babysitters and before moving to a place where hired help gets $25 an hour, I used to clean before the house keeper came. I would tidy and plump pillows and make sure the dishes were put away. It was absurd really, this frenzy of activity that would proceed her coming. But I never could talk myself out of doing just a little bit of her job before she arrived. And, now that there’s no one keeping house but me, I find it hard to resist the urge to tidy and plump and do dishes before the six year olds arrive. I know, it’s pathetic. It’s all backwards and goofy and a sure sign that I my OCD is in flare-up mode, but the mudroom is clean.

3. While we’re on the topic of obsessions, I am utterly and undeniably smitten with the game of tennis. Those who know me well have taken to calling me “tennis rat”. I lose sleep over flubbed overheads and double faults. If I believed in bumper stickers I would have one that read “I’d rather be playing tennis” and it would be true.

4. I, at the age of thirty-four, have tried my hand at more careers than most people attempt in a lifetime. Perhaps I am the master of reinvention or maybe I just need a good vocational guidance counselor. I have been employed as a waitress, a camp counselor, a caterer, a fitness instructor, a newspaper reporter, an account executive at a advertising agency, a landscape architect and a free-lance writer. Now that I’ve tried all that, I think I’ll just stay home and entertain you all when I’m not playing tennis.

5. I have not slept past 7:30 a.m. in eight years. Even when my parents have kept the kids over night and My Better Half and I have painted the town red, or, at least a deep pink, I just can’t tune out the inner clock that is primed to startle me awake at 6:30 a.m. It is tragic. It affects my ability to function much past 9 p.m. It is a sure sign that I have turned the corner on youth and am plunging down the hill towards middle-age.

6. I cannot use Blistex. I can’t even get near someone else using Blistex. The smell of it, the memory of the menthol tingle, makes me yearn to bathe in the stuff. I had a wicked, wicked Blistex habit back in high school. It was then that I discovered that a tiny tube of lip balm in the wrong hands can lead to some extreme dermatological problems – bleeding, cracking, excruciatingly painful problems. There was only one cure and it was cold turkey abstinence. I dream of Blistex.

7. I have an allergy to wheat. Eating gluten-full foods makes my stomach roil, my innards squirm. The reaction is such that I am up all night, to and fro from the bathroom, wishing for death or an enema. And still, at least once a week, I have a complete will-power melt down and find myself face down in a tray of brownies or elbow deep in a pizza. Despite the consequences, I just can’t always abstain. It is an addiction like any other. There is inner dialog and a lot of bargaining with the super-ego. I convince myself that just one buttered french toast bagel won’t hurt anything. And the following day, exhausted, spent, hung over from gluten over load, I swear never again. And it’s always a lie.

8. There is no eighth wonder of me. That’s it. Every thing else is ordinary. I suppose that is weird all on it’s own, the lack of interesting detail. I’m afraid my brain has just revised things and fooled me into thinking I’m a lot like all of you when in fact I’m a complete lunatic.

Anyone better at this sharing stuff than I am, please feel free to play along. If you’re so inclined, consider yourself tagged.

But the “I am” format fits me like my high school prom dress, all small and itchy and ridiculous with the silly flouncing. I’m so NOT an “I am” kind of person. As reflection of my true person, the format will be changed to “I am not”; still revelatory and more aptly descriptive. After all, people, like my MIL, recognize me in quotations like the following, “The Irish have an abiding sense of tragedy that sustains them through temporary periods of joy.” She knows that though I am not Irish, I am certainly THE person with the abiding sense of tragedy that Oscar Wilde was talking about. And she sent me this quote just a few days ago knowing I’d appreciate it.

Here goes…
I am not a patient person.
I am not the type of Mom who can spend hours doing puzzles and playing games and entertaining small children on rainy days. (That’s what computer games are for, right?)
I am not proud of the person I was before I turned 18.
I am not fond of the phone and have been accused of being the all time worst correspondent by long distance friends who value the convenience of their cell phone far more than I do.
I am not able to pass a sink full of dishes or a counter strewn with crumbs without launching into a full cleaning offensive. This happens at my own home and at the homes of others.
I am not the Dog Whisperer though I SHOULD BE considering the amount of time I have devoted to watching back episodes and practicing his methodology on my own canine delinquent.
I am not able to admit defeat and thus continue to try and channel the Dog Whisperer in my daily jaunts with my naughty dog.
I am not looking forward to summer and long days stretching into weeks, home alone, with bored children.
I am not over the paint episode or the trauma of my return from NYC.
I am not sure why the basement solutions guy won’t call me back about fixing our first floor water issue but I’m afraid it may have something to do with the fact that it’s a huge engineering project that, after thousands of dollars spent, may fail to fix the problem. (Oh damn, now I’m going to have Adsense posting ads about sump pumps.)
I am not above spending $45 dollars on a 5 oz. bottle of N.V. Perricone, M.D. cosmeceutical (their word not mine) purported to decrease crows feet and signs of aging. Because, as I get older, the desperately vain and entirely gullible area of my brain has grown large and demanding, convincing my more rational side that there is a direct correlation between efficacy and dollars spent. No more drug store brand moisturizer for me. I have graduated to the Vitamin C Ester with Tocotrienols Eye Therapy with NTP complex and DMAE and I’ve never looked older.
I am not sure where to stop my negative meme rant so I’ll stop here. That’s plenty of what I am not for one day.