I kind of hate birthdays, but not for the reasons you might think. I don’t even much like other people’s birthdays, and can never remember the dates. I don’t think anyone in my family has ever received a birthday card from me on time, and I seldom buy them for friends. I feel guilty about this, because I know other people do like birthdays. I just really, really don’t.

It’s not about aging. I’ve never wanted children, so I’m not worried that some kind of clock is running out. I have never considered myself pretty, though experience suggests that there’s something attractive about me, and its influence seems to wane over time. This is annoying, in that I’m used to being able to provoke positive reactions with light flirting, but hardly devastating. I’m just not girly enough to care. Mostly it’s a relief to become invisible to men, frankly, at least to the kind of men who overtly notice women.

I don’t mind getting old. I love the feeling of knowing more than I used to. I don’t know how wise I am, but I’m certainly not as stupid as I used to be. There’s a lot of satisfaction in that. Every year I read more books, have more experiences, meet more people, know my friends better. It’s a good thing.

But I’m afraid of dying, so having that number – my age – go up by 1 on this day makes me a little uncomfortable. It’s a vivid reminder that the clock is always ticking, and there’s only one way this story can end. On the other hand, I used to be terrified of dying, so perhaps I’m making progress. Since my main goal in life is to ensure that the moment of my death is not full of horror and regret, I suppose how I feel about each birthday depends on how I think I’m doing. This year I feel pretty good, looking forward to going back to school, and learning a lot.

For a few years I went big for my birthday, and invited all my friends to share an experience all or most of us had never had before. Once I treated everyone to an evening in the Tactile Dome at the Exploratorium in San Francisco. Another time, I took everyone to a firing range – that was interesting.

One year we all went to a restaurant that featured flamenco dancing, which I’d never seen in real life. Unfortunately some people I knew from work took off without paying, and then a few other people didn’t put in enough, and the whole thing turned into a hideous mess. I was outside smoking to relieve the stress and missed the dancing altogether. I wish I could’ve just paid the whole bill myself, but I was temping at that point and couldn’t afford it. That may have been the last time I did anything on that scale for my birthday. It still makes me cringe to think about it.

Although my friends saved the evening not only by paying the bill, but by presenting me with a birthday cake in the shape of a coffin. This amazed and confused the restaurant staff and remains the best birthday cake I’ve ever had. What could be more perfect?

Normally, though, I can’t stand the whole cake-and-candles ritual thing. Cake is all well and good, but please, don’t get me started on the Birthday Song. What am I, five? I hate being the center of attention that way. I even hated it when I was a kid.

One of my closest friends sings me “Row, Row, Row Your Boat” every year as a compromise.

I hate opening presents, too. I get overwhelmed by a sense of obligation I know can never be satisfied. (I’ve worked on this, but it’s no good.) Last night two friends took me out after work and treated me to beer, pool, and a cupcake, and I swear I just about wept with gratitude at their thoughtfulness. It was precisely what I needed.

What I do like about my birthday is that it marks the beginning of an upswing in my mood. The stressful grind of the holidays is followed, for me, by my least favorite anniversaries. I was raped at the end of January, and my mother and my brother both died in February; my mother died a week before my fifth birthday. No wonder I don’t like to make a big fuss. I get so depressed in February now, especially since my brother died, that I can’t even begin to make birthday plans, and couldn’t stand it if someone else made them for me – I don’t need the pressure.

I wish I lived in a culture where birthdays aren’t acknowledged after, say, your 18^th (with special allowance made for 21, perhaps?), but now I’m being a wet blanket. Now that it’s here, I feel good. February’s over, I have friends, and as I like to say when I’m feeling bleak about life:  at least nothing in my immediate vicinity’s on fire. Including birthday candles. Things could be a lot worse.

Time to get ready to go out, shoot some more pool, and get a little tipsy. I’m actually looking forward to this. But they’d better not have gotten me a cake.

How do you feel about your birthday?

History is thick with cultures and religions that believed in apocalypse, and not just us wacky westerners (google Hopi Prophecy if you’re into that kind of thing). Doesn’t that make it something ingrained in us, perhaps something genetic?

I don’t believe in an apocalypse gene (though I might be persuaded to endorse an apocalypse virus or bacteria). To me, it’s common sense. Many feel that the end is near because the end is near. There have been many ends, many communities and whole civilizations that have been utterly destroyed or so changed as to be unrecognizable. It may not be about to happen, but the possibility is always close by. Plague, natural disasters, nuclear devastation, invasion, genocide. Now that so many of us crowded into cities, with mass food production and nuclear, chemical, and biological weapons, the unknown threat of climate change, viruses able to mutate faster than we can keep up with them, the end is no further off than it ever has been.

If there is something biological going on, the rationale for it might be something like this: isn’t it better to be prepared for the worst? Those who trip blithely on, believing that all of this – this culture, this life, whatever it is – will last forever are perhaps doomed not to survive to reproduce, or at least not in such great numbers as those of us who are peering at the sky and stockpiling food and water. Disaster research shows that the people who do best in an emergency situation – a plane crash, an earthquake – are the ones who’ve spent time picturing themselves doing what needs to be done. That’s why I always pay attention during the safety announcement on the airplane; it might not be enough to save me, but ignoring it sure isn’t going to help. Talking and thinking about the apocalypse lets us all practice for disaster.

This interpretation of apocalypse leads me inevitably to that most personal of end times, one’s own death. We’re all going to die. Isn’t that also, in a way, the end of the world? Maybe the more we believe that death, as the end of ego, is a terrible devastation, the more interested we are as a people in the idea of global apocalypse. Doesn’t it feel better to imagine that the world might end with you, or vice versa? Sometimes I just hate the idea of dying simply because I’ll miss the rest of the story. If only the world, the story, and I could all end at the same time.

So many religions portray death as an apocalypse in the biblical sense of a “revelation,” a difficult and painful process succeeded by eternity in paradise, but only if you deserve it. This, of course, has been abused by many people throughout history, as “prophets” claiming insider knowledge of God’s plans have convinced people to follow them in order to be “saved.” This is just an example of man’s propensity to exploit the fears of others for his own advantage. Obviously it works, or there wouldn’t be so many religions based on it – including all the varieties of Christianity.

Perhaps apocalypse myths are humanity’s collective way of contemplating its own death – or its suicide. The way we live now, for example, cannot last. It’s not sustainable. This lifestyle is engendering changes that will bring about an environmental apocalypse for mankind.

This writer equates Christian “prophets” and modern day climate change scientists, as if studying objective evidence that anyone can see if they just look, were just the same as some guy telling you that God spoke to him and gave him the date of the Last Day. It’s just another way to deny the big lifestyle changes that are coming, that are necessary. But maybe we should be taking another look at the original meaning of revelation.

God is coming, and He’s pissed.

We know we’re guilty. I can accept that interpretation. We are guilty. Environmentally guilty, anyway. God is coming, and She’s pissed.

And culturally guilty? Sure. There’s always someone being exploited, or neglected, or abused, and are we doing enough – or indeed, anything – to change or prevent that?

I believe the perpetuation of religions that anticipate apocalypse is cultural, not biological. We yearn for an easier life. Maybe everything will be better after we get through this mess we’re in.

That, to me, is the essence of the apocalypse obsession: The reset. Starting over. To hell with all this, let’s do something else. Surely everyone on earth has felt that way at one time or another.

I know I’ve been fantasizing about The End since I was about thirteen years old, when I first began to apprehend the kind of world I was living in, and the kind of life in front of me. Particularly lately, I’m ready for a big change in my life, and there’s a lot of anxiety about what that’s going to look like. I’d rather do it without the devastation of apocalypse, but one way or another it might not be up to me. I hope that, whatever happens, I can make something good out of it.

The world itself is in dire need of a big change. The whole system needs a major overhaul, and while I’m not eager for massive death and destruction, I also know that major change won’t happen unless it has to. People don’t like change and they won’t do it unless they don’t have a choice. So we basically have to follow our current course of action to its logical conclusion, and I do think that’s what’s happening. It’s not going to be pretty.

And that’s the lesson of apocalypse. It’s the worst-case scenario, the warning. The big or else. It’s the threat that’s always there, and the hope that’s right behind it. The knowledge that we’re really not doing our best, the guilt that goes along with that, and the determination to do better.

When will we ever learn? Maybe the next time around.

Seitan is vital wheat gluten (so poison for those with gluten intolerance), as unappetizing a phrase as it is a concept. It’s pretty unappetizing for most of the preparation, too. But oh my god, it totally rocks!

I am so excited about this. At last, a protein that acts like meat (but isn’t), and is really easy to make! If I can do it, I swear, anybody can. I present the following for seitan newbies who might be wondering if this is hard to do, or for those who’ve started and are now wondering if something’s gone horribly wrong.

I followed Mark Bittman’s recipe and instructions, basically.

• 1 cup vital wheat gluten
• 3/4 cup water
• 1/2 cup soy sauce
• 6 cups vegetable stock
• all the courage you can muster

Put 1 cup of vital wheat gluten in a bowl, and add 3/4 cup water.

Mix together. You might as well use your hands right away, you’re going to have to knead this stuff anyhow. It comes together almost instantly into a sort of squishy, rubbery ball that you can’t believe is supposed to be food. I should have taken a photo at this point, but I didn’t know what was going to happen. It’s an unattractive, grayish-yellow color, maybe about the size of a softball.

Knead for 5 minutes. I watched part of a documentary on the Spanish Influenza while I did this.

Leave it in the bowl and cover it with a cloth for, Bittman says, at least 20 and not more than 30 minutes. I’ve seen recipes on the web that contradict this, though – I suppose it alters the consistency somehow, depending on how long you take with this or that step. Anyway, these numbers worked for me.

While it’s “resting,” make the simmering broth. I used Bittman’s Dark Simmering Liquid recipe, which is just 1/3 cup soy sauce plus 6 cups vegetable stock (I like Better than Bouillon). Combine in a large pan that can be covered.

When the 20 minutes are up, cut the weird, rubbery spongy thing in half, and try to make two “logs.” I failed miserably at this. The stuff is so elastic, it kept shrinking back no matter how I stretched it, though I admit I was afraid to stretch it too much. This may be why mine turned out kind of dense. Lay the two “logs” or whatever shape you come up with in the liquid. Bring it to a boil, then turn it down so it’s just simmering. Cover and leave it for about an hour, coming back to turn the “logs” a couple of times.

I went back to my documentary and forgot to turn mine until half an hour in. When I raised the cover on that pan, I stepped back with a cry of shock. The two grayish-yellow lumps had ballooned up into two great, yellowish-gray, misshapen, floating masses that collapsed slightly as the air hit them. Still not at all something you’d want to eat.

Seitan in the pot. Ew.

Looks like a pair of moldy sponges, right? It didn’t smell that great, either. I was frightened and a little discouraged. But I let it finish simmering for its hour, then allowed it all to cool in the liquid while I went to the store for some onions. When I got back, I stuck I fork in one and cut off about half of it, making a face the whole time, and sliced it up.

Sliced seitain - looks like food!

Hm. Actually starting to look like food now. Doesn’t that look kind of like chicken or pork? So I fried it up in my $5 IKEA wok, using another Bittman recipe (I love love love his How to Cook Everything Vegetarian), and it looked like this:

Wok with seitan. You know you want to.

Looks like meat! Smells like meat! I started to get excited.

And here’s my stir fry, all put together. It’s just carrots, onion, celery, brown rice, and…

Stir-fried seitan, yum!

… delicious morsels of seitan! Seriously, I cannot believe how good it tasted. I would have thought I was eating leftover barbecued chicken. I don’t know where the barbecue flavor came from, but it was yummy. And “leftover” because, like I hinted above, my seitan is a little denser and chewier than it’s probably supposed to be (maybe I over-kneaded it), but I still loved it. My only regret is that I didn’t put more in that stir fry.

The idea of eating “vital wheat gluten” still kind of grosses me out, and handling those spongy brain-like masses currently floating in their simmering liquid in the refrigerator is pretty distasteful, but the result is completely worth it. I just might be a seitan worshiper. (I can’t help it! What do you want me to do?)

Next time I’ll try that famous baked version that’s around the web – supposed to taste like pepperoni. I can’t wait! Have you tried seitan or anything else new lately?

I’ve had an epiphany. I’m going back to school for Environmental Studies, and I want to be involved in sustainability planning for communities. Ta da!

Only took me twenty years to figure that out. I’ve never been particularly interested in anything specific as a job, except writing novels. And I certainly don’t give a crap about a career just for the sake of a career. Associate manager to manager to senior manager to associate director to director to senior director – who cares? Do any of those people actually enjoy what they do every day?

People care about the money, of course, and the status. I don’t care about status, in fact in most cases the higher up a person is in a corporation the less I respect them, since I’ve worked in that area long enough to know what it takes to advance that high. And it’s way more important to me to be interested in what I do, and to feel like I’m doing some good or at least no harm to the world, than to just make as much money as I can.

So, what to do?

Finance – vomit. Energy – blech. Manufacturing – do we manufacture anything in this country any more? Medicine, hm. Too much science, too much one-on-one with people. Same with therapy, which I’ve seriously considered. Or teaching – could I get up and perform in front of people every day? I don’t think so.

I would love to help women, children, or animals that have been abused, but emotionally, I couldn’t do it. I cry at the commercials. No help at all.

My most recent chosen profession has been web development. IT is a good field to go into if you hate computers and people. Even if you went into IT because you love dinking around with hardware or you have a passion for programming, you’ll end up in management. And as anyone who’s ever worked for other people knows, rare is the manager who actually likes people and knows how to inspire them. It’s certainly not a job requirement.

I suspect it’s like that in most fields. You go into the industry because you like working with whatever it is – clothing, books, education, numbers, design, programming, etc. – and you end up in management, because if you’re not moving up the ladder, you’re a loser. And once you’re in management, you’re no longer working with whatever it was you liked in the first place. Nonprofits are no different from corporations in this respect, though I suppose if you’re passionate enough about the issue or the industry, it doesn’t matter to you.

I’ve never been that passionate about anything, unless I’m too passionate. I could never work in publishing, for example. I love books so much, but working in publishing would be something like a person who loves steak getting a job at a slaughterhouse. No thanks.

Academia is similar, to me. I can see how it’s a lot of fun to dissect other people’s literary work down to subatomic levels, but does it do good for the world in general? Plus, academia is just as competitive as the corporate sector, if not more so. And there’s the teaching thing, too. Not for me.

Before my career got derailed, I was moving toward usability. To help the web become easier to navigate for everyone, that’s a good job.

Unfortunately my “career,” such as it was, got derailed by 9/11. I’d just moved to NYC days earlier, got laid off a few months later, with no contacts and no experience in the city, which was now in a deep recession. My field was way over-saturated, outsourced, unstable, yet still demanded that its players relearn everything, every couple of years. I could never get enough work to keep up my skills or pay for classes, so every year I’ve fallen further behind. If I were enough of a graphic designer or a programmer to be a strong competitor, I would be okay, but I’m not. And, sadly, I’ve become less interested in usability, too. In what’s starting to look like a permanent recession, no one’s hiring anyone simply to make their web site easy to use, yet a lot of education is needed to learn to do it well.

And it doesn’t do enough good in the world to inspire me.

But I can’t just work at a bookstore, my other job. Talk about a dead end. It’s been killing my body and my soul for the last couple of years, but my mind has just been churning in circles.I don’t want to be a manager, or work in the head offices. What should I do? Leave the city? Take some programming classes? I’m sick of freelancing, too, and that’s what most programmers are nowadays. Go back to school? I haven’t wanted to go back to school. I feel like I’ve done that, and I need to move forward. Of course, I would do anything if I could only pick a goal. But what goal? What should I do? What should I do?

My thinking has become kind of frantic this past year.

I just kept going on, doing my best, when I can, to figure out why I’m alive and what I’m doing here. Watching the depression grow again. Ugh.

Trying to do the thing, I did NaNoWriMo again this past November, and wrote the first draft of an apocalyptic novel that’s been in my head for at least twenty years. It was so much fun, and turned out well enough that I decided to keep working at it. I’ve thrown myself into researching climate change, epidemiology, water issues, large scale environmental disaster, and have surprised myself by getting more interested, instead of burning out.

I even considered becoming a disaster relief worker, but I don’t think that’s a full time job. Also, I think that kind of work is physically demanding and requires a person to be away from home for weeks at a time. Hm.

I kept getting a vision of myself installing solar panels. So I started to look into that. I thought it would probably be handy to know a little bit about how electricity works, should the apocalypse come along, and I thought my classmates would be interesting – would I be the only woman, the only person my age? I wouldn’t care.

As I looked through the programs at each college in New York state, I kept seeing programs in environmental studies. And I found a great program at CUNY Hunter College. You can focus either on the science-y bits or on policy and management, which sounds boring but actually means “planning sustainable communities,” which is what, I realized, I want to do. Yay!

And as soon as I started talking about it, I found all kinds of advice and connections all around me – people who know people in the field who are willing to talk to me, or who can suggest certifications and so forth to get me started. Contacts, networking, mentoring – it’s all that stuff they tell you about in career advice books and articles, but I can use it now, because I have a goal at last.

What a difference it makes!

What’s interesting to me (and hopefully to others) about this process is the idea that action creates action. Even if you don’t know what to do, you have to keep doing something in order to make something else happen – a new idea, a new opportunity. Otherwise you might as well lie down and die, which tempts me at times, believe me. It’s transforming, to have a purpose. I’m even studying Algebra, in preparation for placement testing, and actually enjoying it.

That’s where I am today. I’m sure I’ll have a lot to say about this whole process. Wherever you are in your life, I wish you luck, and the energy to keep trying!

They’re depressed because they’ve seen a world that is beautiful, in which every living thing is connected and in harmony, and they’ve been reminded how far they are from living that way.

I went to avatar-forums.com and had a look at the discussion there for myself. And you know what?

I like those people. They’re sweet, and they give me hope. Most of them have realized why they’re sad, why they’re going to see this movie over and over, and it’s not because it’s a beautiful dream. It’s because we have that reality right here on Earth, and we’re fucking it up.

We do live in a beautiful world in which everything is connected. Unfortunately, much of it has been thrown way out of balance by greed. In the film, the Na’vi fight off corporate mining interests with the help of the main character, but our own planet lost that fight a long time ago. If you haven’t noticed lately how much that sucks, it’s because you’re purposefully repressing it. Probably because it’s too depressing to think about.

If you’re suffering from post-Avatar depression, here are some things you can do:

• Get informed. Learn as much as you can about ecology, climate change, water resources, and even chemistry and physics if you can do it. Talk to people about it.
• Vote for ecologically sustainable practices, and vote against unsustainable practices. Act locally – pay attention to what’s going on in your community, and speak up. Call or write to your government representatives.
• Buy local food and products whenever possible. Do what you can in your own life to reduce your energy consumption.
• If you can, consider getting an energy audit for your home, and even installing solar panels or a wind turbine.
• Be kind. Live more simply. Continue to question your values.

“All I ever wanted was a single thing worth fighting for.”
- Jake Sully in Avatar

This isn’t about just installing curly lightbulbs and figuring we’ve saved the world. Part of the problem is the lack of ideas, or more accurately, the lack of people talking about the ideas. Look around for more, and come up with some of your own.

We are part of our environment. This isn’t my opinion, it isn’t some hippy-dippy bullshit, it’s reality. If you think it’s not true, please, try living in a vacuum. Be my guest.

Living as if we aren’t part of our environment means that we’re making it so – we’re exiling ourselves right out of existence. Either we do something about it, or we wait to die. And as much as you might hate the sound of it, “doing something about it” means realizing that we are our environment, we are all connected, and the way we live now does not work. Our one hope is to balance the earth in an equation that includes us and everything else.

And that we learn to do this before we get off the planet, and go ruin the rest of the universe.

Writers of articles on post-Avatar depression, and of course most of the comment-section peanut gallery, sneer at these people. It’s a movie, they say. It’s not real. Get over it.

I think it’s the cynics and sneerers that have something they need to get over. They’re so far removed from reality, they can’t even feel what’s missing.

So S. and I go into the cinema to see if there was anything else playing – the smell of popcorn was that tantalizing – but there’s nothing at the right time, and I’m ready to leave. S. eyes the staircase. “Let’s just go up here for a minute,” she says.

I’d never been to this theater before, but she’d been here lots of times, born and raised in the city. At the top of the stairs is a ticket-taker, so I hesitate. Nearby is another cinema worker, chatting on the phone. “Bathroom?” S. says, and the woman gestures. We walk right in.

Who knew you could do that?

I’m giddy, having snuck into the movies – I feel like a little kid as we’re walking down the main drag, past the popcorn concessions (gotta get some), past theater after theater. I’m trying to figure out what we’re going to see. S. is just heading for the bathroom – she really did have to go.

And suddenly we’re in the doorway of a movie, I can’t tell which one, but I have my suspicions as there are security guards and a guy waving a wand-style metal detector. S. is walking so purposefully, he assumes she belongs there. “You were here before, right?” he says, and waves her in. I ride her wake, trying not to screech with joy.

We’re in. And The Book of Eli is just starting.

We had to stand, but it’s just under 2 hours and we both work on our feet all day at the bookstore, so no sweat (my feet are much better these days).

Later she told me how she and a friend happened to walk past a theater downtown showing a premier of some big movie, and all the stars were there. She and her friend just walked right in. Saw the movie, saw the stars.

New York!

This is all you need to see.

The only reason anyone would go to see a movie like this is for the special effects. Independence Day, The Day After Tomorrow – we all know the plot will suck and the science will be dodgy at best, but who cares, right? Let’s blow some shit up!

That’s why 2012, from the same director, is such an enormous disappointment. I could have forgiven their nonsensical explanation for the end of the world – neutrinos from solar flare activity somehow microwave the earth and boil the core – if only they’d given me more of what I paid for: disaster porn.

We do get to see Los Angeles break in half and slide into the ocean, a sight I can never get enough of. The lumps of burning magma from the Yellowstone supervolcano were very well done, I thought, as was the hemisphere-enveloping ash cloud. And I did enjoy watching a battleship named the USS John F. Kennedy slam into the White House, and St. Peter’s Basilica roll over a dense crowd of worshipers.

I can even tolerate one more Eiffel Tower breaking in half, Christ the Redeemer falling off the hill in Rio de Janeiro, and – just barely – the Sistine Chapel ceiling splitting open, the crack running, predictably, right between the almost-touching fingers of God and Adam, a visual so trite that it’s an eye-rolling cliché the instant you see it.

But I cannot forgive having spent over two thirds of a three hour movie watching the actors wince their way through a weak, cringe-inducing story even by disaster film standards. The characters and their conflicts are so shallow, I don’t even want to spend time detailing them here, but the climax of the movie consists of John Cusack’s character getting his family on board a multi-government sponsored ark built atop a mountain in the Himalayas (presumably to appeal to a Chinese audience). Do you want to see a movie about John Cusack trying to get on an ark?

The spectacularly bad writing makes it impossible to overlook the movie’s faults, a problem I had to a lesser extent with Independence Day. No amount of special effects can make up for a writer and director with so little respect for the intelligence of their audience. However much money they’ll make off of fools like me who’ll see a movie like this (at a matinee price) just for the effects, they could have made so much more, and won over a legion of fans, if they’d spent a little bit of time coming up with a decent story and characters with a little depth. I realize that actual insight is beyond their abilities.

To their credit, they hardly mention the Mayan calendar at all, and mostly steer away from any religious or New Age prophecy, though it couldn’t have made the movie any worse. My friend and I agreed that the animals gave far and away the best performances. One has to assume it’s because the animals were not subject to the script or to the director’s instructions. I particularly admired the chicken’s comic timing. But not enough to justify the $6 and three hours I wasted on this trash.

Watch the trailer on YouTube and save your time and money; this isn’t worth seeing on any screen.

And if you are a writer, I can’t think of a better exercise. I learn so much every year, and this year was the best yet.

I learned about focus, only reading or watching things that had to do with my story, mostly research about all the different risks to human civilization since this year’s novel was apocalyptic (of course). And therefore I learned a lot about climate change, hurricanes (especially Katrina), epidemics, and what will happen to the earth when all or most of the humans are dead. I’ll review some of the documentaries and books I’ve been going through, it’s fascinating stuff. Anyway, by keeping my head in the story, something was germinating all the time, and I never ran out of ideas.

This is totally obvious, but believe it or not it’s always been hard for me. I’m interested in a lot of different things, and my attention is easily diverted. Now I’ve seen how well it works, it’s easy to be disciplined about it.

I learned that plotting is fun. Conflict and plot have always held me up before, in fiction. In my third year of forcing myself to write a novel anyway, I’ve found that it comes easier and easier. And the interplay between character and event – this is what it’s all about.

There’s a feeling I get in my mind when I’m writing, like I’m turning over the most fascinating puzzle in the universe in my hands. I love that feeling. And it’s gotten clearer every year.

I’ve also learned that these stories I have in my head, built up over a lifetime of not writing as much as I wanted to (mainly because of depression), are discrete entities. A character that lives in one story most likely has no place in another. And certain characters are essential to the story they’re in. In week 3, I discovered a “new” character, a tall, gangly man, not conventionally attractive yet my main character was attracted to him, and I wrote his back story and their principle interactions. And then in week 4, going through some notes from earlier this year, I discovered that I’d made rough notes on just such a character, minus the back story, without knowing quite why I needed him, nor why he needs to look like that. In so many ways, this story already exists, I’m just letting it out.

This is the kind of thing that makes me feel like a writer. The magic happens mostly deep underground; my job is to shape what grows, and to keep mulching.

Here’s another example. Last year as I was writing, I kept getting images that really belonged to the apocalypse novel. I did my best to incorporate them into last year’s story, but it became clearer and clearer that these were two separate stories, with different themes and a different mood and all of that. For the next year, I’ll be performing surgery on that novel, separating them like conjoined twins. And working to complete the apocalypse novel as well. And I already have an idea for what I’m doing to write next November. I’m so excited!

I’ll publish some excerpts here once they’re in any kind of shape to be seen. The draft produced by writing at top speed for 30 days is what Stephen King calls a “closed door draft,” one that’s not meant to be seen by anyone but the author. You absolutely need to give yourself permission to suck, in order to take the risks necessary to achieve greatness. This method works for me. And I don’t know about you, but I need to clear some of this stuff out of my head, so I can see what’s underneath.

I’m so grateful to Chris Baty and everyone involved in National Novel Writing Month, for providing this opportunity for me and roughly 160,000 other people all over the world. I’m grateful to the folks who read the Character and Plot Realism forum, asking and answering such wildly divergent questions. I’m grateful for the encouragement of my friends.

And I’m so very grateful that I can do this.

In case you don’t know, this is an unofficial, international, and highly successful event started by Chris Baty and some friends about ten years ago, now including over a hundred thousand participants all over the world.

The philosophy is two-fold. One part caters to the many people who’ve always wanted to write a novel, but are not in the habit of writing regularly and/or need some motivation and support to get that first draft done. It’s quite an accomplishment in itself to make it through the thirty days of November and cross that 50,000 word finish line.

The other part is more esoteric, and won’t appeal to every writer. By writing at speed, attempting to complete around 1700 words a day, every day, for a month, you leave your critical mind in the dust. You get to a point where you don’t know what the hell you’re writing about or where it’s coming from. This, naturally, produces some spectacularly bad writing; but it also, if you’re lucky, pulls some marvelous gems from deep within your unconscious mind.

This is my favorite part of NaNoWriMo. I’ve gone back over pages I wrote in sheer desperation, only to find that some of my best ideas happened during that flat-out, go-for-broke, headlong race to the next word-count goal.

Sign up for free at the site, join your local group if you want to meet up for socializing or strictly for collective writing, or proceed on your own. Check out the forums as a reward for completing your daily goal – or to get some encouragement, commiseration, or congratulations. There’s a forum where despairing WriMos can comfort one another, one where you can ask for suggestions or offer up your own unwanted plot ideas for adoption, and a forum for “Word Wars” where you join an impromptu group for a timed sprint. A very useful forum provides a place where you can ask technical questions that Google won’t answer – i.e., What might the living room of a middle class Iranian family look like? How does a police detective spend a typical day? Anybody know any Russian puns?

The site has many more ways to distract yourself, waste your time, or inspire you.

It’s a crazy time of year for something like this. Most people have to deal with some aspect of the holidays. I usually have a huge project for my freelance client in November, on top of my retail job. Many times, the last two years, I’ve come home at midnight after having worked all day at both jobs and realized that I still had a word quota to make. That I sit down, open up my draft, and start banging away at it is proof that I can be disciplined about writing. It helps me to know this for the rest of year.

I lost a lot of ground ten years ago when I had a three-year episode of depression that left me not only unable to write, but unable to read more than a sentence. It’s been slowly coming back ever since. For me, NaNoWriMo is like sending my brain on a month-long fitness retreat.

However, I’ve read various comments around the internet about how the term douchebag is sexist, because it’s used to degrade a man by referring to him as an object used only by women.

As Dan Savage pointed out in a recent podcast (number 154), anyone interested in receiving anal penetration with a minimum of santorum uses them for enemas, though I suppose in that case the term would be enema bag. Not a bad pejorative in itself, now that I think of it, being non-gendered and associated with unwanted poo. It’s not as satisfying to say, though.

But my argument is different. I haven’t seen anyone else point this out, so I will gallantly step up:

The vagina is self-cleaning and self-regulating. Douching is not only unnecessary to the health of the vagina, it can in fact throw off its natural floral balance, and also interferes with the vagina’s ability to keep its delicate tissue moist and happy. Douching is also completely ineffective in the prevention of pregnancy and disease, two other bullshit reasons women used to be told we need to douche.

Thus, a douchebag is a guy who is unnecessary, useless, and possibly harmful to women. Therefore it’s quite appropriate to say, for example, that Tucker Max is a douchebag.