Life Lessons: Live in a Hell-Hole Once in Your Life

When I was in my third year of university, my two best friends, my boyfriend (who would become my husband) and I decided to move into a small house together. It wasn’t the greatest financial decision (at the time we were all living at home with our parents, rent-free, having our meals cooked for us and our clothes and sheets washed for us), but we were young and headstrong and thought it would be a wonderful thing to be out on our own. We learned a great deal from that experience, both good lessons and bad ones. We learned that dealing with finances is difficult, that living with others can be both awesome and painfully frustrating, and that there are a lot of things (cooking, cleaning, yard work, etc) that you just don’t grasp until you have to do them all the time.

And then there are the other lessons you learn by making this kind of leap…lessons like how sometimes the world is just sitting back and laughing at you.

The house that my friends and I moved into tried it’s best to warn us off, you see.

“So…I found something under here…and, well, I don’t think you’re going to like it.”

The house in question happened to be owned by one of the aforementioned friends’ aunt. She lived on the other side of the country and a had a friend look after the residence for her. In retrospect, the fact that our prospective landlady lived thousands of miles away probably should have been our first warning sign, but the place was cheap (which, yeah…probably should have been the second warning sign). Even bypassing those first two signs, it’s truly amazing that we agreed to take the place after having taken a walk through in it. The day the assistant-landlord let us in to look around was the first day he himself had set foot in it since the previous tenant had gone…a tenant who, as it turned out, was a drug addict. The story went that her family had shown up and essentially kidnapped her and her nine-year-old daughter, shipping the tenant off to rehab and thus leaving the house empty. Empty, in this case, is a subjective term. The tenant’s stuff, for the most part, was gone, but the house was certainly not empty by any stretch of the imagination. Every room was filled – and I mean filled – with bags of trash. The sink was filled to overflowing with dishes and, since the heat had been off for several weeks, they were literally frozen into a giant hunk of ceramic and water. There were pizza boxes strewn about and stains on the floors. The daughter’s bedroom walls were covered in crayon – every last inch. There wasn’t a curtain in the whole building. The place, to put it lightly, was a wreck.

Somehow we got past our shock, agreed to help assistant-landlord clean the place up, and took it. Young people are ridiculously stupid sometimes.

As if we hadn’t gotten enough subtle hints already, on the day we cleaned up the house to get read to move in we noticed something that we definitely should have noticed a hell of a lot sooner: there was no stove in the kitchen. The place where the stove should have been was simply empty. Confused and confident that the drug-addict’s family wouldn’t have bothered to take a large appliance with them when they left, we began to search the house. It didn’t take long, since it wasn’t a large place. We located the stove, inexplicably, sitting in the basement. Not only did this bewilder us (had the previous tenant simply never cooked? And if so, still…why bother putting the stove in the basement), but we soon found ourselves wondering how it had gotten down there in the first place. You see, the basement stairs were so narrow, that the boys literally couldn’t put their hands around it while trying to drag it back up. They had to lift it entirely from the bottom, taking it one step at a time. As a side note to this part of the story, I must mention that this particular moment became a favorite story of my husband’s to use to torment our male friend. The reason? Hubby, who was on the bottom end of this particular lift, made it about halfway up the stairs before screaming at our male friend to “get the hell out of the way and let Tracey do it!” Sorry, male friend, but we’ll never let you live that one down. 🙂

So okay. Let’s reiterate: by this point we had been warned off by the absence of the landlady, the state of the place and the story of it’s previous tenant, and the fact that we had to extricate one of the major appliances from unfinished, dirt-floor basement, which logically should have never been down there in the first place. And it was at this point that we actually moved in.

From there on it seemed like an endless slew of tricks that the house was playing on us to try and scare us away. There were “little” things, like how we kept blowing fuses and the fuses in this particular house were of an ancient design so we had to call the assistant landlord to come replace them each time, or how it turned out that there wasn’t even the tiniest bit of insulation in any of the walls of the house, so we went through heating oil like water, and on days when it got warm out it feel like the ninth circle of hell in there. But those were pains gained by an ignorance of reality…someone else may have thought to look at these kinds of things before they moved in. These things we dealt with because we hadn’t known to wonder about them before hand. No, the real “tricks” were the weird, creepy, and disgusting ones.

For instance, I brought two cats into the house with me, and they kept pawing at the heating duct in my friends’ room. Not too strange, because cats do tend to be odd sometimes. It wasn’t until my friends’ had kept their bedroom door closed for some time that we realized what the cats were interested in, when a little white snout started poking through the grate. Yeah, it turned out that the dirt-floor basement that I mentioned earlier had quite a large number of white mice living in it.

Later, we found the only thing worse than live mice in our house, when one of my cats started pawing anxiously at a small bump in one of the carpets. Hoping against hope that it was just a poor carpeting job that had left the lump, we peeled back that section of carpet to find a rather enormous dead mouse. Pleasant. Quite pleasant.

But the particular story that we’ve told time and again is the one that reminded us very firmly just exactly who had been living in this house prior to us. You see, from the day we moved in our toilet didn’t quite seem to flush right. It would flush, it just seemed to be a bit sluggish and would occasionally clog for seemingly no reason. So one day, when he finally got thoroughly fed up with the toilet, male friend decided to plunge the ever-living hell out of it. Several minutes of hard work later out popped…a spoon. And not just any spoon. This spoon was enormous. It was one step away from being considered a ladle. And it had been flushed down our toilet.

There are probably more tales to tell about this particular house, but I think you get the point. What is really sad about this is that when hubby and I eventually went our own way and got a different apartment, it was no better…it may have actually been worse. It was an old basement apartment with ceilings that were only about 5-1/2 feet high, a closet that was so disgusting we literally taped it up with packing tape and never entered again, a kitchen ceiling that would occasionally dip and “rain” if the upstairs tenants ran their bath water too long, and rats…yes, rats. Though we didn’t actually find out about the rats until I moved away for my job, leaving hubby alone in the apartment while he finished college. Seems that the rats knew the second that the cats moved out of the house.

The reason I’m telling you about this is because living in these places served a purpose. I came to form a strong conviction about something because of these experiences, and that is that it is my personal opinion that every young adult should experience living in some level of squalor and near-poverty. I’m not saying that we should throw the college generation out onto the streets or anything, but there are a great number of life lessons that I feel can only be learned by struggling to make ends meet, and seeing that sometimes you have to deal with some pretty awful things in order to get ahead. Living in these types of places gave me a great appreciation for what I wanted in life and what was important. Designer clothes, for instance, don’t seem nearly as important if you’re choosing between having them and living in an apartment that’s not infested with rats.

This is a pretty simple lesson that I don’t believe enough young people learn. Too many of the kids I went to college with came out of the experience with an inflated sense of self-importance and a genuine belief that the world was going to bend to their needs. They expected their parents to keep paying for their crap and doing their chores, even after they were supposed to “officially” be adults. They spent half of their student loan money on toys for themselves (one girl bought a goddamn car) and then baulked at the idea of having to actually pay that money back. They seriously expected that the moment they graduated, work would be waiting for them with a big, shiny sign that said, “Over here! Pick me!” They truly believed that when they moved out of their parents’ house or the dorm that they’d been living in while at school, that they would all get to move into beautiful three-bedroom houses with finished basements and a goddamn pool in the backyard.

What I’m getting at is that kids these days (haha, look at me, talking like I’m so very old) have a terrible world view of what things are going to be like when they’re out on their own. They expect to receive everything they want in life by sheer virtue of wanting it, and when that doesn’t work out they turn around and fall thousands of dollars into debt in their pursuits (or, in some cases, throw their pushover parents into debt on their behalf). The reason that kids turn out this way is multifaceted (don’t get me started on not keeping score in sporting events because it “hurts the feelings of the kids who don’t win”), but one contributing factor, in my opinion, is that most of these kids never experience what it’s like to live in a hell-hole and eat Kraft Dinner ten times a week, and because they’ve had it so good their who lives, the idea of having anything less than that is absolutely abhorrent and unacceptable. It’s an attitude that truly frustrates me in many of the young people I see around me. I think that loads of young people would benefit significantly by being cut off from their parents’ money for a year, having anything resembling a credit card or loan taken away, and being forced to actually live on what they earn and deal with whatever results because of that.

Believe me, ladies and gents: never did I appreciate the little things in life more than when I got far away from the two places described above and started earning enough to buy decent food again. 😉

In the Summer of (a Writer’s) Life

I’ve been talking a lot lately about Kristen Lamb‘s Rise of the Machines. And I’m not likely to stop anytime soon because every time I get a minute to read a bit more I end up finding something I want to talk about. It’s just that good. 😀

Today I read a short chapter that invites us to establish which type of writer we are…Spring, Summer, Fall, or Winter. Spring writers are the young ones with tons of time, almost no responsibilities, but not a lot of experience. Fall writers are older so they have lots of experience, and they have few responsibilities because their bills are probably paid off and their children are probably grown up. Winter writers are of advanced age, meaning they don’t have a lot of time left to make their writing dreams come true, but the time they do have can be 100% devoted to writing, and they have tons of experience.

I fall firmly into the category of Summer writer. In fact, I fall so firmly in this category that I found myself nodding enthusiastically as I was reading Kristen’s description. Summer writers are still fairly young, but they’re old enough to have gained a bit of worldly experience. At first it seems like an ideal time to be writing, but there are other problems. The biggest problem facing Summer writers is that they are in the most responsibility-laden era of their lives. Summer writers have day-jobs, children, mortgages, car payments, student loan payments, chores and errands that need doing. Summer writers can’t always find time to write because they have to dedicate many of their waking hours dealing with day-to-day career and family issues. Summer writers may be fatigued because they’re run off their asses by household requirements and children keeping them up at all hours of the night.

Summer writers, to put it succinctly, are bogged down with copious amounts of stress. They’re young, and they have experience, but they have no time.

Currently I am experiencing a slight reprieve, as my job out West recently finished and we’ve paid off enough debts that we don’t have to worry about money for a little while. Regardless, a lack of time is still my biggest complaint. On a daily basis, as the sun wanes in the West, I chastise myself for not writing more, and promise to do better the next day. But the next day I find a million other things to do, or the baby has a bad day, or I didn’t get any sleep that night so I’m completely knackered. And so when I do get a few moments when I could be writing, I instead find myself reading or playing video games or watching movies in bed (and trying not to drift off while doing so).

I’m not trying to give myself a pass or anything; I don’t get to just blame all my troubles on the fact that I’m at a particular period of life and I don’t get to whine that I can’t write because everything else is in the way. But I can say that there are challenges, and that I’m definitely not alone in having to deal with them.

No matter the season, all writers have struggles that they must work through, and as a Summer writer, I invite all other “Summers” to struggle with me. We have families and jobs and responsibilities, but we also have writing, and we have each other. We can do it, come hell or high water!

What season are you? What struggles do you fight with because of the time of life you happen to be in? Please share! I’d love to hear from you!

Comfortable People are Lazy People

A reminder: This post courtesy of Julie Jarnagin’s 101 Blog Post Ideas for Writers.

95. Breaking out of your comfort zone

Humans are creatures of habit, by nature. We like to stick with what we know, what’s comfortable and easy. That’s why it’s so hard for us to do things like move away from home, take on a new diet or exercise routine, or otherwise break out of our “comfort zone”.

For writers this can be particularly detrimental. While you want to write what you know, what you’re good at, you don’t want to dig yourself into a rut. You don’t want to stagnate. You can’t stick with the exact same formula for your entire career; if you do, your writing will become predictable and boring. Imagine for a moment that a reader is picking up your latest book at a storm and skimming over the cover. Now imagine that reader making a face, thinking, “Why bother spending the money on something that’s going to be the exact same as the last one he/she wrote?” and putting the book back on the shelf. Now imagine reader after reader all doing the exact same thing, no one ever taking the leap to actually purchase the book. How does that feel? I’m going to wager not very good. Even if you’re someone who takes criticism extremely well, you can’t deny the fact that not selling your book is a bad thing. A very bad thing.

So how do we break out of our comfort zones and keep producing books that our readers will want to read? By buckling down, gritting our teeth, and forcing ourselves to do the opposite of what we would normally do. Are all of your main characters always female? Force yourself to write from a male perspective. Do all of your stories feature a romance subplot? Try a subplot about how much two characters can’t stand each other. Do you only write stories for adults? Try writing one for kids. Doing any of these things will probably be difficult, likely it will even be unpleasant, but it will force you to break your mental boundaries, and you never know…you just might discover that you enjoy it.

For myself, I have a few bad habits writing in my “comfort zone” that I’m actively tying to break. All of the examples above were taken from my own experience. I always write from the perspective of female main characters – not because I don’t think I can write from a male perspective, but because it’s easier to write from a female one. I always have a romance subplot in my stories because I enjoy writing about people falling for each other, even under unusual circumstances (*cough*zombie apocalypse*cough*). And I always write for adults – not because I don’t think I could write books for kids, but because I enjoy writing sex and violence, and it’s usually preferable that those things stay away from kids. I’ve been trying to break some of these habits lately, and yes it’s difficult, and sometimes it definitely sucks, but I do believe that I’m learning from the experience.

Never stop learning, no matter what you’re doing or how good you might think you already are. It would be the biggest mistake you’d ever make.

Twitter: The Paranoia that Binds Us

A reminder: This post courtesy of Julie Jarnagin’s 101 Blog Post Ideas for Writers.

89. Respond to a blog post by a well-known blogger

My first thought when reading this prompt was: “A well-known blogger? Do I even read well-known blogs?” Sure, I read some blogs by people who are fairly popular, even successful, but are they well-known? How do you even define well-known? The basis of comparison that I immediately think of is that if you typed their name (or blogger handle) into Google they would be the first result that shows up. So with that in mind I set out to Google a few of the bloggers who I keep tabs on. Lo and behold, my test worked for several of them. Would you look at that…I read well-known blogs.

My second thought was: “Okay, so which post should I ‘respond’ to?” So I started backtracking through the piles and piles of posts that have been piling up on my “Blogs I Follow” page. I started reading through posts I had skipped because I was busy at the time, re-reading posts that I might not have paid quite enough attention to, and in general searching for something that I felt would be interesting to respond to. This virtual rummaging-through-the-closet ended up creating a number of distractions, as such a thing is like to do, and at some point I happened to come across a mention of “The Bloggess“. It got me thinking, that as popular as this particular blogger supposedly is, I’ve never bothered to stop by her blog.

That’s how I found myself scrolling through the most recent of The Bloggess‘ posts, chuckling to myself because, contrary to how I’d been imagining her, she’s a bit of a nut. I’m not sure exactly what I was expecting – I think I was equating the word “bloggess” with the word “duchess” and imaging her as a stuck-up, better-blogger-than-thou type – but I was pleasantly surprised. Her posts are amusing, well-written, and don’t hold anything back. It was with that in mind that I finally chose a “blog post by a well-known blogger” to respond to.

The post I’ve chosen is Twitter is confusing.

My response is thus: I hear ya sis.

(Is ‘sis’ the appropriate female version of ‘bro’? Somehow it doesn’t sound right to me. Ladies, I suggest we hijack the word ‘bro’. The guys have used it long enough.)

*ahem* Anyway, I hear ya, Bloggess! Twitter is oft more confusing to me than I might admit. While I’ve never had people contact me to let me know that they aren’t going to follow me anymore, I’ve had plenty of people start following me only to never attempt to interact with me in any way, which just feels like stalking to me. That’s not to say that I assign a time-slot every day specifically to ensure that I interact with the Tweeps I follow, but I do make a habit of not bothering to follow people if I have no intention of ever interacting with them ever.

Most of my Twitter experience has consisted of signing in, looking at the “Interactions” page that shows x-number of new people are following me, and quietly rocking back and forth in a corner while muttering, “Who are you people…who ARE YOU PEOPLE?!”

Come to think of it, maybe Twitter isn’t for me. It exacerbates the paranoia.

Hobbyist

A reminder: This post courtesy of Julie Jarnagin’s 101 Blog Post Ideas for Writers.

41. How a hobby has made you a better writer

I gave myself a night to think about this one, and when I woke up in the morning I had realized the truth: pretty much all of my hobbies have made me a better writer. No, I’m not joking or exaggerating. Seriously, almost all of my hobbies lend themselves to writing in one way or another.

Hobby #1: Reading
This one should be pretty self-explanatory. I love to read, and what better way to learn about pacing, sentence structure, spelling, grammar, setting, etc.

Hobby #2: Video Games
It sounds unlikely, and parents and teachers would probably baulk at the idea that playing video games can be excellent for improving one of the finer arts, but those parents and teachers would be closed-minded. Video games – even the older, significantly less advanced ones – can have rich worlds filled with action, adventure, romance, horror, mystery…you name it! Video games are excellent inspiration for ideas. They’ve even helped me practice my writing via fanfiction (I’ve written several chapters of a Final Fantasy 3/6 fanfiction and also started a Chrono Trigger one as well).

Hobby #3: Movies
This one is more my husband’s hobby than mine, but I guess it’s mine by proxy since I do, in fact, enjoy the movies. This falls under the same category as video games; movies are excellent for inspiration, and if it was a particularly good movie, the kind that gives you shivers and has you thinking about the plot line for days later, it can even be just plain motivational. In other words, experiencing such an amazing story makes you want to write one of your own.

Hobby #4: Writing
Seriously, you didn’t see this one coming? Writing has been one of my most predominant hobbies since I was in grade school. From little one-page scenes my best friend and I would write back and forth to one another during class, to a very powerful fanfiction obsession in college, to the manuscript I’m still working on editing, I’ve been writing for fun for the past 20 years or so. And isn’t that the most important part of being a writer? Actually putting in the effort to write? Or is this just my clever way of saying that I’ve already run out of hobbies to list? That’s up for you to decide.

I totally forgot to title this post

A reminder: This post courtesy of Julie Jarnagin’s 101 Blog Post Ideas for Writers.

38. How the books you read as a teenager affected you

This one is a little harder than the one about books I read as a child because, although I’ve always been a reader, I read significantly less during my teenage years (which I choose to think of as “high school age”). Let me explain why.

As a younger child and a preteen, I was fairly awkward. I was smart, a little shy, and easily embarrassed. I got along perfectly well with pretty much everyone, and I had a tight-knit group of close friends, but I was not a social child, and I don’t believe I came off as someone who wanted to be social. I was the kind of kid the other kids thought of as a nerd. I wasn’t the kind of kid that got invited to parties and events (unless it was a birthday party of the type where you invite your entire class just because), and as we got a little older I was not the kind of girl who got attention from boys. But as we moved on to the teenage years of high school, I started to blossom a little. I somehow mustered up the courage to ask the boy I liked to a school dance, and from that came my first real romantic relationship. That relationship opened up my world a lot. I became exposed to things that other kids my age already had sussed out. My boyfriend introduced me to things like sports, fishing, and non-campsite camping, and I gained a bit more of a social circle which lead to parties, hanging out, and all those things that teenagers are supposed to do even though they’re not technically supposed to (*cough*booze*cough*).

The picture I’m trying to paint here is of a nerdy girl who had suddenly realized that there was other stuff to life than being nerdy. During those years things that had always been an important part of me, like reading and writing, took a bit of a back burner to all the new and exciting stuff I was experiencing.
For that reason, it’s hard for me to talk about the books that affected me as a teenager, because I find myself thinking, “What frickin’ books did I read as a teenager?”

But I wanted to be able to write a proper response to this prompt, so I thought long and hard. And then I remembered something that happened in my second year of high school. My best friend and I were taking a Sociology course, and I was in the first seat of the first row closest to the door, right up against the wall. On that wall, right next to my head, was a photocopy that our teacher had made of a newspaper article. Obviously I can’t remember the exact details of the article, but the basic idea was a story about how a bunch of “good Christian” mothers had gotten together to protest the availability of the new Harry Potter book in public schools. They scoffed at the book and called it satanistic, claiming that the author was attempting to lead their “good Christian” children away from God and into the arms of witches and devil-worshipers.

I remember reading that article during a particularly boring part of our teacher’s lecture, and the first thought that popped into my mind was, well…to be honest, the first thought that popped into my mind was that these “good Christian” moms were well and truly gone in the head. But the second thought that popped into my mind was that I totally had to read these Harry Potter books. There were three or four of them published by that point, but I’d avoided them for the dual reasons of everything I mentioned above, and the fact that the looked like kiddy books. But after having read that foolish article about closed-minded moms on an embarrassing crusade, I decided that I had to read them, and did as soon as possible. To say the least, I fell in love with them, and I absolutely struggled through the next few years as I constantly waited for the next one to be released.

If one book (or series of books, I suppose) can be attributed for bringing me back into the world of reading and writing, it would definitely be the Harry Potter series. Though I never got back into reading as much as I had before until I was well into my young adult years, Harry Potter definitely set the wheels in motion, and for that it is probably the book (or books) that most affected me during my teenage years.

You Can Trust Us

Have you ever felt like someone was asking you too many questions? Have you ever filled out a form or a job application and thought, “Now seriously, why the hell do they need to know that?” Well I have, and that regularly-occurring experience is what lead me to write the following drabble, entitled ‘You Can Trust Us’.

Mental Heath Questionnaire

Please answer honestly.

What is your age?

Are you currently taking any prescription medication?

Is there any history of mental instability in your family?

Do you suffer from any form of mental instability?

Are you sure?

You wouldn’t lie to us, would you?

It’s okay. You can trust us.

Seriously, we aren’t trying to trick you into lowering your guard.

Why must you think poorly of us? We’re only trying to help.

Okay, that’s it. You’ve forced us to take matters into our own hands. Orderlies are on their way to detain you. Have a nice day.

New Job, New Time Management Issues

My husband’s uncle asked me a question today. An innocent question: “How’s the book going?” The answer was not quite as innocent: “Not as good after going out West!”

I haven’t written a thing since the week before my flight to Alberta. At first it was because I (obviously) had more important things on my mind, like figuring out how meals work on the camp, and becoming acquainted with my many new coworkers. As the days went on, writing continued to go by the wayside because I was adjusting to a new job that involves a hell of a lot of walking, climbing stairs and ladders, and hanging out in stifling heat while wearing flame-retardant, long-sleeved coveralls. In other words, I was tired. By the time the last few days of my two-week rotation began to wear down, I continued to fail to write because of good old fashioned laziness. Even after returning home, I got no writing done over the past five days because I’ve been too busy enjoying my daughter and filling other obligations (i.e. my niece’s birthday party…enjoy being 3, cutie!), and no one can possibly blame me for that.

Reincorporating writing into my schedule is one of the things that I’m going to have to work on with this new job, but other than a few minor complaints (I never did get the internet working in my room) the entire ‘Out West’ experience has gone much better than I expected. I don’t mind the camp at all, the work is easy and laid-back, safety is actually number one for a change, my coworkers are all good guys, and there is no way anyone could possibly complain about the money. All in all, I have to say that I am honestly enjoying the job. Yes, of course, being away from the baby for two weeks at a time is less than fun, but look at it this way: how many people get 14 days out of every 28 off? 14 days that I can spend doing whatever I want, which in this case is enjoying my adorable daughter? Not to mention, this job is so stress-free that my days off (so far) are being spent in a great mood, actually enjoying myself, rather than coming home from work every day cranky and tired and inadvertently taking my mood out on my daughter and husband.

Everyone is different of course, and I’ve only had one rotation so far so I can’t definitively judge, but it’s looking good so far. I really think this job might be the start of something good. If nothing else, it will allow us to ditch some debt that we’ll be ridiculously happy to see the backside of…we’re coming for you, student loans!

Now if I could just squeeze the writing in there somewhere as well, I’d be doing great.