Tuna casserole and Simon Says

I am a woman in labor of thought, constantly awaiting arrival. I slam the dishwasher closed and make myself some toast, needing to hear that self soothe of liquid and dish churning to understand what it is I want to say. What am I saying? I don't know what to say.

I’m a stay-at-home/writerperson/stock girl at Nordstrom trying to keep my head on straight and not sleep during the day. I've turned nocturnal in less than a week; its wretched. It's given me a head cold.

Like today, sick as a dog, I have this unexplainable mission to make a tuna casserole. Tuna casserole, for myself. Right. Like somebody died or had a baby or something.(Maybe its for my labor of thought?) The entire heaping dish of it: for me.

It's sitting on my stove now and I'm just glaring at it.
Not sleeping makes a person do strange things.
Like wanting to start a blog called "Simon Says" but my name's not Simon. That kind of weird, stupid stuff.

So back to the dishwasher I go, for inspiration for calm, maybe for a nap bedding down next to it like my dad always does. On his lunch break, zonked out under the dishwasher, or on the dryer, like that dog from Charlie Brown that sleeps on top of his dog house. Nobody gets it. I guess they don't have to.

Dads are strange, but I find myself suspended in the gravitational force field of my dishwasher too, but not for a nap, for a damn good "something" to write about.  All I get is tuna casserole and Simon Says.

Imagine that. If dad's are weird, their daughters are certainly more so.

Take this paragraph Anne Lamott wrote about her dad, the writer, who she grew to be very alike it seems:

"Every morning, no matter how late he had been up, my father rose at 5:30, went to his study, wrote for a couple of hours, made us all breakfast, read the paper with my mother, and then went back to work for the rest of the morning. Many years passed before I realized that he did this by choice, for a living, and that he was not unemployed or mentally ill."

At times I feel like that mentally ill writer, despairing that my words won't be enough and I become hyper-self conscious when people ask what I do, like I work for the freaking CIA or something and can't tell them. With my insecurities compounding, I say: well, I write books, yes both my own and other people's. Or I'm a ghostwriter, which sounds  more like a rogue agent. I only pull that one out for special occasions.

One thing I like to do is chatter away on my computer keys especially when someone needs help taking the garbage out or doing yard work and looking at them like I'm about to crack the human genome or and saying: "I....am working." And they say nothing and I think to myself, huh. That worked. That might classify me as a miserable person, and if so, I'm right on track to becoming an excellent writer.

The Ann Conspiracy, and other issues.

Here I am, alongside a half-empty coffee cup, full of thoughts and regretting my lack of a morning run.

The clouds were able to stave off the rain for a record-breaking few days but as I peeked outside this morning it returned unannounced, like bad company. What else to do with bad company than drink coffee? Certainly you wouldn't go on a run with bad company. That would be a disaster. So I stayed.

The Ann conspiracy is something that struck me while trying to work. More like thinking about work, not actively working. Because at 7:30am, not much occupies this hour other than that which I expressly want to do. Because mornings are God's gift to men and women and to the little children who wake up with screaming voices at an hour when most adults are just doing their best to retain consciousness.

The Ann conspiracy is an indestructable trio of writers, the kind that inspire me: Anne Lamott, Annie Dillard, Ann Voskamp. Trying to write like the Anns' only aids me in looking goofy and amateur for even thinking I could use words like "grandiosity" and "inchoate" correctly.

But I want to. I especially want to fascinate others with my stream-of-consciousness, as if I were responsible for the most witty, downright compelling thoughts ever thunk in the universe. Anne Lamott is responsible for at least a few.

She is a “ likable narrator" and in her own words:

Having a likable narrator is like having a great friend whose company you love, whose mind you love to pick, whose running commentary totally holds your attention, who makes you laugh out loud, whose lines you always want to steal.

Airing my secret fears of being an annoying narrator, it is easiest to subvert this whole conspiracy by just changing my name from Lauren to Ann. Or maybe Laur-Ann, one friend suggested. Maybe Ann is too drastic, but Laur really sounds like Thor and I'm not going for that.

Let's face it, I've always been a little more like Anne of Green Gables, running wild with imagination in preference to having real conversations and friends. Well, isn't that just like an Anne would do. I'm starting to convince you aren't I?

Let's change our names.

My best friend (who is not imaginary) always wanted to change her name, from Brittney to something else. Her mom laughed at this suggestion and so did I, until the moment my very own name crisis struck. Names appoint futures, they loom like self-fulfilling prophecies that we have no control over.

Was mine spoken at the wrong moment? Did my parents simply take the easy way out and name me after my surgeon's daughter who is also a Lauren? What is the surgeon's daughter doing? Is she successful and are our fates interlinked because I was destined to become an Ann or even an Anne but fell off the wagon and became a Lauren for the sake of convenience?

I really hope not.

 I think I’ll use Ann as a penname, until I'm part of the Ann Conspiracy bringing forth literary greatness: until I'm published. For then, I will be the paranoid blogger whose thoughts, strangely enough, you are reading.

We bought a zoo...kind of.

I read good advice this week that I will stick to for probably the rest of my life...

"Write about what really interests you, whether it is real things or imaginary things, and nothing else." -C. S. Lewis

Now this seems self-indulgent and maybe it is. But I figure nothing good or interesting ever came of me writing about things I hated.

The zoo is imaginary but everything else is fact. I think its a good compromise.

There are two kinds of things at our zoo: the deer and the trees.

THE ZOO

The  man who formerly owned our zoo was up on the roof when he said he could count up to 200 deer around him.

This classifies as a pretty big zoo I think. Our land borders a nature reserve so at least our animals have lots of room. They can cross the road, they can eat the neighbor's plants for all we care, no one lives there.

We planted 20 aspen trees to border our zoo. It was a solid kind of moment, maybe even something to celebrate--the fact that we have this beautiful zoo.

Once upon a time we had fish too, koi I think? They all froze to death in our shallow pond. We fed them and everything. The trustworthy man said they would "winter" but we saw the whites of their bellies by January, maybe earlier.

We had a mountain robin once that was obsessed with staring at its own reflection in my dad's truck windows. It was like one of those people who develop weird habits like eating laundry detergent or washing their hands a thousand times a day.


I'm making this sound a little like a freak show and maybe it is. But it's the best little freak show zoo that I have ever been a part of.

I was flipping through our neighbor's People Magazine that the mailman fortuitously stuck in our stack and found pictures of this coonhound a photographer adopted from an animal shelter. He taught it to do the simplest, most dumbfounding thing I've ever seen: he taught the dog to balance, on almost anything. See for yourself:

http://maddieonthings.com/

We need one of these for our zoo/freak show to be complete. My birthdays coming up soon, so anyway...

I always thought the deer looked a lot like dogs, with that pleading, tame look in their eye. Then again, I've though that about a alot of wild things that didn't turn out to be so nice. 

This is a zoo, a very real operating zoo that I visit at least once a month because I miss it so much. Even though there are bigger one's with a lot more animals, this one's my favorite.

fri.ster.hood.

I had the privilege of meeting a number of wise individuals around this time last year. One in particular was a man with a gift at capturing the intimate stories of International Justice Mission clients through photography. He said this in reference to years of his time spent building relationships with perfect strangers and I will never forget it:

In the truest of relationships I’ve known, one does not run from the pain and one does not hesitate to share in the celebration of a gift. We hide neither from the hurt nor shield ourselves at a safe distance from the remote possibility of dreams come true. We embrace life. 

-Ted Haddock

Finding that your heart has made a quantum leap into the heart of another person is a fine thing. It's love; something that this world at times does not give even in family relationships. But its something miraculous I've found in my own, in friendships free of obligation and only with the expectation that all parties will venture deeper into truth and authenticity. Much beyond commonality, these kind of relationships are not only forged in shared happiness, but in moments of pain too. 


This is the first published account of the friend-sisterhood that is more aptly named: the fristerhood. Though we do not all fit into the same pair of traveling jeans, we do go to great lengths with whatever means of transportation just to be near one another. And we eat cheese, lots of cheese. Ours is a never-ending story, lived out in hilarity and bedtime stories told to the youngest members (two of which pictured above)enlighten us with silly antics and emerging personalities. We share our favorite things,our hand-me-downs and our opinions with or without request.

Shared life is good life. This is what I've found. Let the fristerhood unite more often than separate!