Anyway, after my submission had been out for a few weeks I had two dreams.  In the first, Clarkesword accepted my story.  Yay!  In the second, Nick had sent me a rejection.  It was terrible.  He accused me of inflicting a vile, wretched story upon him and I should be ashamed.  I woke up scared and confused and when I saw I had a rejection from Clarkesworld, a little apprehensive.  Fortunately it was a very kind rejection, one that ended with the double please.  I couldn’t have been happier.  Well, I suppose I could’ve been happier with an acceptance but I thought surely, SURELY this meant I was improving as a writer and I would soon write wonderful, publishable stories…

…

Fast forward to this past November.  I had an idea I didn’t know what to do with.  Somewhere on the Internet, I had seen this sign:

and thought ‘Huh… I bet when March 22, 2228* actually rolls around, someone is going to name their child James Tiberius Kirk.’ I thought it would be funnier if a bunch of people did it and thus ‘All the Young Kirks and Their Good Intentions’ was born.  During my Pensions class I became intrigued with a boy named T… someone who was actually born on March 23 and is terrified the other Kirks would find out.  At first I thought I would write an updated Star Trek episode: the new Kirks go on some ridiculous adventure and T must prove his Kirkness.

Only I don’t know how to write plot stories, so that idea went away.

Next I thought about T having a sister named Red–someone outside the group who died, or moved away and now sends postcards back to T and Jamie about what it’s like living on the Gulf.  Only I didn’t know what that had to do with anything, so that idea went away.

I also wrote about T’s paranoia that his precarious place in the pecking order would be challenged by some other group of Kirks on the other side of the river from Riverside.  Fisher Kirks.  Strange, mysterious people who… did what exactly?  So that idea went away.

I kept restarting the story only to eventually give it up.  I had some people I liked: each trying to find their way and each ultimately failing.  Red doesn’t escape.  T doesn’t realize his obsessive paranoia about being an outsider is what makes him one.  Jamie loses herself when life doesn’t work the way she thought it would.  And Fisher realizes everyone is dying, everywhere, but is strangely accepting and hopeful.  I reconstructed the story from its disparate parts and submitted it to Clarkesworld instead of preparing for my last accounting class.  3000 words about what it would be like being someone named James T Kirk growing up at some point after the Sixth Extinction (which we’re going through right now supposedly).

That was December 1.

On December 3 I had another dream: Neil Clarke had sent me a long personal rejection in which he went on and on about how much he loved the Kirk idea and included suggestions on how to make the kids more Kirk-like.

Then I woke up.  I went to my computer and found a long personal rejection from Neil Clarke…

Then I woke up again.  I went to my computer and found a long personal rejection from Neil Clarke…

And on and on it went for many dreams.  When I finally broke free from the REM cycle, I posted the dream on a writer’s forum.  Everyone commiserated, except for David Goldman who apparently hates my sanity and wants it to die.  He said:

Somebody should forward this to Neil Clarke, so that he can send Hel a lengthy, highly personalized rejection that ends “and then you woke up.”

Shades of Inception! Hel will subsequently never know whether she’s still dreaming.

The day went on.  No rejection.  The next day came and went.  No rejection.  I began to fear that David had in fact emailed Neil and that they were plotting something dark and nefarious involving shady multinational companies and trains.

A week.  Two weeks.  Three.  The January issue went up.  Surely I would be rejected now–he’d delayed out of kindness because no one wants to reject someone on Christmas.

Five weeks.  Six.  Seven. Ken Liu posted an acceptance on Duotrope (which, these days, is like saying ‘hey, the sun rose this morning’).  I silently cursed his name while also betting whatever it was was completely brilliant.  (Editor’s note: It’s a brilliant translation of a brilliant Chinese story A Hundred Ghosts Parade Tonight)

Okay, I thought. I get it Neil.  You’re so tired of my writing you’re going to hold the story hostage in order to prevent me from submitting anything else.  Ever.  

Seven and a half weeks.  Seven weeks, 4 days.  I started seriously considering investing in sacrificial chickens…

Seven weeks, 5 days.  Finally, a response:

Thanks for submitting your story to Clarkesworld Magazine!  I’d like to publish it in an upcoming issue.

You can read the story here: All the Young Kirks and Their Good Intentions

I suggest reading it quickly before my delusion collapses and time as we know it ceases to be…

*The date I used in the story is actually 2233 as that’s the official date for Kirk’s birth.  I figured if people in the future were crazy enough to name their kid after a fictional TV character, they’d be crazy enough to use the official year.  Or there’s another batch of young Kirks from 5 years earlier roaming the town… or even Fisher is one…  I never really made up my mind about it.

Others might note that I’m old enough to remember the Jon Benet Ramsey case.  Though the beauty pageant circuit had nothing to do with her murder (that we know about) we were all a little bit shocked and a little bit confused by the heights to which a young girl’s blonde hair could be teased.

But while both those explanations sound reasonable, and though I wish I could claim one or both equally, I’m afraid I have something to confess.

This will no doubt surprise many who know me, and even more who know what I look like.

I was once a childhood beauty pageant queen.

I’ll give you a moment to process.

It started on a sunny day in New Orleans when my parents took me to the Hell Divers Rodeo.  The Hell Divers are a spearfishing group based out of southern Louisiana.  They go out to the Oil and Natural Gas rigs and shoot snapper, jack, and cobia and every year they have a fishing competition with a big party at the end.  At that age, I couldn’t really tell the difference between Jazz Fest and a fish weigh-in: both were loud with lots of people I didn’t know.  Thus, I don’t really remember how or why I was entered in the pageant–I remember there were two other girls, late teens or early 20s, there in swimsuits.

My own swim ensemble was a stunning navy blue with a white stripe with a small tulip near my right hip.

I won.

The way my mother puts it, the judges were faced with picking between two relatively identical young women and since there were only two of them, it’s a lot like picking ‘winner’ and ‘first loser’.  What’s a poor judge to do?  Give it to the four year old.

My ‘duties’ included handing out the trophies to the winners of the various fish categories but since the trophies were bigger than I was, and I had the attention span of a neurotic sparrow, I spent the afternoon running back and forth between the stage and where my parents were sitting on the grass.

I did not return the following year to defend my crown.  Speaking of, where is my crown?  I have a plaque:

but no glittering, glitzy semi-circle of plastic and sparklies.  And I feel a little sad about that.  All these other girls: toddlers and preteens, they get crowns and sashes and trophies and $5000 cash.  I was the queen of effing spear fishermen. My domain was the ocean!  Where is my golden trident of magical powers?

My experience with the circuit, as it were, did not end in New Orleans.  I moved on to the Eastern Hunter Association–braiding and prancing my way across the eastern half of North Carolina–on horseback.  I wasn’t particularly good, or successful.  I did get a lot of ribbons though–which happens when you’re in a group of a half dozen and they award through sixth place.

The advantage though, with horseback riding over swimsuit + evening + talent is that if you lose, it’s partly the horse’s fault.  I mean, it’s still my fault for not getting the horse to do what he’s supposed to do, but at least I lost points because the horse did an extra half stride on the outside jumps and not because my face looked puffy.  And when you’re feeling bitter, you can blame the horse.  And sometimes that blame is even deserved.  Imagine if Miss America had to convince her dress that it wanted to go out on stage with her–and at any moment it could throw her out of it and run back to the closet.

Well, then they probably would have fewer ratings problems among certain key demographics.

When I started watching these episodes, I admit I felt smug and snide towards these parents.

“They’re learning important life lessons,” they all say.  “When she wants to quit, she can quit.  It’s her decision.”

Sure, I thought to myself.  “Her” decision.  That’s why you bleach your eleven year old’s teeth and make her vacuum your living room while in heels so that she can learn to walk more gracefully in those stripper stilettos.  Only, don’t they have a little bit of a point?  If pageants really are all about presence and grace and personality and acting bubbly and adorable no matter what you’ve got balanced on your head, won’t that serve you later in life?  I don’t think an ability to apply liquid mascara is necessarily on the entrance exams of colleges, but it’s not like I was asked to do a flying lead change to get into law school.

Many of the outfits and “dance moves” are incredibly inappropriate according to my sensibilities, but it probably evolved over time as each parent tried to outdo and outbubble all the other kids.

What’s hysterical is to hear each Mom say “I never thought I’d do pageants–I thought those pageant moms, they were all crazy.  If it were up to me, I wouldn’t do the the flippers and the glitz and the heavy hair pieces, but you have to in order to compete.”

I think if every Mom actually believed this, they could probably institute some rules.  Well, except in that one run by the woman who likes all that crap because “it shows the lengths to which these girls will go to show off their beauty.”

Whatever.  I may not spray tan, but I’m still empress of the seven seas.

My tiny gun. For tiny zombies. Or zombie plants. Beware the carnivorous ficus!

Many, many ice skaters may have been injured in the taking of this photo.

My biggest regret is not buying this lamp when I had the chance.

The next time you need to stay awake, think of these things in your shoes.

Where we’re going we won’t need roads. But we will need tires. Many giant tires. It’s a strange world. One ruled by a giant beaver; there are no cheese danishes.

The theatre that always plays the movie you wish to see. Even if that film has never been filmed. Even if that film is not a film at all, but rather a bright rectangle of burning light made out of the wishes of cockroaches.

Today’s adventure required that I look up local ghost stories and investigate.  Given that I live in an old town, I shouldn’t be able to leave the driveway without running over at least one white lady in a haunted pirate ship.  New Bern is over 300 years old, the site of at least one battle (Civil War), and the birthplace of Pepsi.

I don’t really know what Pepsi has to do with anything, but the guy who invented it lives in a creepy old graveyard and surely rises from his coffin each night to leave hooks on the cars of unwary coke drinkers.

Knowing all this, I thought I should be prepared.  I’ve seen Supernatural; I knew I’d need salt in order to repel the many gray-faced specters that tried to keep me from learning the Truth. Of course I also knew my mother would probably notice if I took one of her nice Sea Salt grinders and she no longer keeps the Morton’s in the house so I had to settle for some packets of Splenda.

Magical ghost defeating powder. Can I just throw the packets or do the ghosts need to *see* the salt. Should I have used the latin term for added authenticity?

Thus armed I drove to the local library.  I headed to the card catalog.  I couldn’t find the card catalog.  Then I remembered that the 90s happened and headed for the computer that now contains all the information that used to be in the card catalog.  I searched for a book.  I found a book.  It was located in the special reading room in which they keep special historical records.

Where they keep Pirate records, you ask?  Ancient wills and dark secrets tucked into letters between nefarious characters?  Treasure maps and transcripts of important meetings?  Do they have a first hand account of the duel between John Stanly and Richard Dobbs Spaight, perhaps with a tracing of the bullets and a snip of Stanly’s coat?

No.  No to all of these things.  They have lots of genealogical records though, in case you’re dying to find out whether you’re the fourth or third great granddaughter of John Asalo Kingsbury.

The ancient, dark tome of secret ghostlore was equally unimpressive.  It contained a dozen stories about old women or young children who may have died in some old houses.  Most of them were summaries of local color pieces written in the New Bern Sun Journal in the 80s.

Where were my spates of mysterious killings?  Strange noises only heard on certain nights of the year?  Where were my obvious cover ups by local police?

I headed for the microfiche!  Surely if I painstakingly pored through the obituaries in the 1897 issues of the North Carolina Gazette I would find the mysterious mystery of grand conspiratorial aspirations.  Then would come a hand on my shoulder, a whispered voice that warned me to walk away before it was too late.  A door would slam and I would find myself suddenly alone in a darkened room.

Or maybe I would be too chicken to ask the guy how to work said microfiche machine, realize that even if I did know how to work it the newspapers would probably be filled with crop reports and wedding announcements.  If I were lucky I might be able to find someone ranting about how Ulysses S Grant should be forced to produce his birth certificate but unless they also accused President Grant of being an evil, blood sucking vampire (and how he was the REAL mastermind of Lincoln’s assassination), I wasn’t interested.

If I wanted a ghost story, clearly I was going to have to do some primary research.

“Primary Research” or as it’s sometimes called “Wandering around a graveyard at the least spooky time of day and hope that something happens. An assassination attempt from a vampiric ex-President would be ideal, but since the only vampires that come out in daylight also sparkle and act emo all the time… maybe I should just hope for photogenic moss”

When the graveyard proved unsuccessful, I suddenly and conveniently remembered that my childhood friend Marian Ballenger had lived across the street from the creepiest of creepy places.

The masonic temple.

When you’re a kid, you don’t know about alien conspiracies and gold caching plots.  All you know is that when someone paints a big freaky eye on the side of a building, something ain’t right.

I am 87% certain that this is where my fear of inserting contact lenses originates.

For years all I had to do to scare Marian was reference the eye.  The eye is watching you.  The eye knows when you are sleeping.  The eye possesses an optical system in which rays that propagate in two perpendicular planes have different foci.

You know, the usual childhood taunts.

But even the masonic temple disappointed me today:

It’s hard to get worked up over the home of Bear City Opry: Country and Gospel Show.

Not shown is the poster on their front door: an advertisement for the musical production “13”, a “[w]onderful, slightly rated PG-13, musical of the trials and tribulations of becoming 13. Whether you are a teen or a grandparent you will enjoy this high-energy musical.”  Show starts on Friday night.  Tickets are $15 at the door.

No ghosts, no cemetery vampire attacks, no alien lizards.  My lists have not been going well for me.

Unless.

What if the Masonic Temple knew that I had planned this adventure for today.  What if they scourged the library before I arrived, placed that oh so convenient ‘Out of Order’ sign on the second microfiche reader (thus reducing my odds of finding a working microfiche reader and increasing my nervousness about asking to use the other one).  What if they told Vampire Grant to go sparkle at someone else’s tombstone and went back in time to tell the Rivertowne Repertory Players, whose USUAL haunt is the Shriner’s Auditorium that they needed to play at the Masonic Theatre instead because they knew my weakness for local musical productions.

Well played, archeological-goldmine hording alien masons.  Well played.

New Bern has been suffering from a bear infestation for the past 300 years. Sometimes they stand still enough for you to take a picture, but don’t be fooled. They are plotting your death.

Today I became an explorer.  In my quest to make a summer in New Bern slightly more entertaining, I have decided to tackle random internet lists with titles such as ’50 Things to Do Before you Die’ or ‘101 Ways to Avoid Boredom’ or ’37 Activities to Annoy Your Fellow Man in the Superstore/College Campus/Generic Location of your choice’.  However, since I am in New Bern some of the activities featured on this list aren’t what one might call ‘feasible’.  For example, the first activity from the first list from the first half-hearted Google search states:

1. Set foot on each of the seven continents. Antarctica might seem like a tough one, but [redacted]. Once you’ve reached all seven you can truly call yourself a world traveler.

As it happens, I have already visited South America, Europe, Africa, and places within North America other than the United States, which just leaves Asia, Australia, and the aforementioned ‘difficult’ Antarctica.  Thus I was left with a conundrum.  How does one visit a continent without leaving a continent.  New Bern is not home to any embassies or consulates or any other diplomatic quasi-international boundary defying parcels, nor does it have an abundance of Asian themed stores.  I thought about dressing up as Godzilla and running around Outback Steakhouse but seeing as how I intend to take the Bar exam later this summer I thought I should avoid accruing any ‘disturbing the peace’ arrests.

Plus the only Godzilla costume I could find during the five minutes I devoted to planning was the ratty Velociraptor suit of my brother’s which, given its design for a five year old, would not have fit in a comfortable or becoming manner.

So Australia and Asia were out.  That still left pesky Antarctica, that vast frozen tundra of tap dancing, vomiting penguins.  My grandmother once described it as “the worst smelling place [she had] ever encountered.”  Apparently 10,000 birds all throwing up half-digested fish guts in order to feed their young does not make for a romantic cruise destination.  Of course I have no cruise ship so that didn’t bother me.  But seeing as how I also lack a plane ship, a teleporter ship, and an inclination to swim 20,000 miles, I had to think of something else to satisfy my Antarctic dream.

Like HP Lovecraft.

A few years ago my Fiction Forms class had to read ‘At the Mountains of Madness’.  The idea of Antarctica as home to giant monsters of non-Euclidean form has always appealed to me.  Who cares if the entire ice island smells like bird burps if on the other side of gigantic frozen mountains are alien ships and sights so horrible that Lovecraft thought he was justified in not describing them.

I may not have a plethora of geometry bending monsters in my closet, but I do have a mountain of poorly stacked cardboard boxes filled with my apartment belongings.  Plus I needed to head out there today anyway to get my CSS books.

60% books, 35% kitchenware, 5% body parts of my enemies

Since moving away from St. Louis for the first and second to last time, I have made no less than a dozen visits to the storage unit.  When I moved I thought I had played it smart: separating out the items I needed for the spring semester from the accumulated “stuff” of three years.  The problem is you never really know what counts as “essential”.

To you a Dutch Oven may be a strangely named cooking apparatus the likes of which you’ve never encountered in your waking life, but to me it is bastion of my sanity.  I need my Le Creuset; it understands me in a way that most people don’t.

Tiny stapler? Random tube of chapstick?  Tiny decorative boxes?  How could I have ever abandoned you!  I didn’t know how I would long for your presence from the moment I started searching for something more practical and came across you in a box titled ‘Box 11: Random Office.’  You are the Oxford Comma of my existence; I shall never abandon you again.

Every time I go out there I find 10 things I don’t need but am going to take with me anyway before forgetting what it was I was looking for.  I then remember what it was I was looking for, decide I don’t need it anyway, and start to go home.  Then I realize that the 10 new things are too much to carry in one arm load and decide I don’t really need them either.  This is great in the respect that I don’t slowly transfer the storage unit into my bedroom closet at my parents’ house, but less great in the respect that I’m slowly rearranging all my initially well-packed boxes.  By the time I find some permanent place to call home all my DVDs will be in ‘Bar Tools’ and my bar tools will be in ‘Sheets & Blankets’ and my blankets will be in ‘Calculus, Physics, Archeoastronomy’.

Fortunately, today I managed to escape the storage unit with the three books I intended to find, and a decision to abandon my search for the hard drive of mysterious hiding ability.  I also briefly encountered souvenirs of Japanese origin and read the spine of a book about Alice Springs in Australia.

That’s not exactly like visiting 7 continents, but if Lovecraft can completely avoid physical description, I can avoid physical displacement in traveling.  My dutch oven said so.

Paris

At the restaurant where we did not eat, there is a table near the kitchen doors.  It is not the best table in the house, nor is it the worst even though normally the table by the kitchen doors is one of those two things.  On a scale of 1 to 23, 23 being the best and the total number of tables in the restaurant except during special occasions, banquets, or large parties where the smaller tables are pushed together, though not particularly well as all of the tables are of slightly ununiform height and width, the table by the kitchen doors ranks at an 11.  It is always an 11, even when the total number of tables in the restaurant changes, as per the aforementioned events.  Even when there are 2 tables in the restuarant, or 37, the table by the kitchen doors ranks, will rank, has always ranked an 11.  It is just that kind of table.

The 11 table is not a favorite of regular patrons, nor of irregular patrons.  It does, however, have a regular set of customers: two women and one man, who always begin their meal with the following conversation.

Woman 1: I think I heard this is the building where Voltaire died.

Woman 2: I think I heard the same.

Man: Lets not have the soup.

The second woman believes there used to be more to the Man’s comment.  She believes when they first had this conversation they speculated on how Voltaire had died, what his last meal must have been, and the man came up with a less than amusing comment about not eating the same thing for fear of dying of the same affliction even though Voltaire had died in the late 18th century and so even if they could speculate that Voltaire had eaten in this restaurant, had contracted some terrible malady from the cuisine, and had in fact died from the same, the meal, the cooks, the ingredients, the farms from which those ingredients originated would not, could not, and could never be in any way related so has to reproduce the same sequence of events in them, three patrons at the eleventh ranked table by the kitchen doors.

The first woman believes that the Man’s comment is a confession.  ‘Lets not have the soup’ is his way of telling the woman that he is thinking of going back to his wife and they should no longer continue their affair, though by dessert he will have changed his mind and order the sorbet, which he will allow to melt slowly while contemplating how he will most efficiently remove his trouser socks.

The first woman also wonders if the second woman is having the soup.  If she is, the first woman will spit in it when she’s not looking.

The man is allergic to peas.

At some point in the evening, though they do not know when, one of the waiters will spill something into the first woman’s lap and their meal will be comp’d.  This is the reason they always ask for the table.  This is the only reason they ask for this table.

Often it is soup that the waiter spills into the first woman’s lap and the man will say “See, I told you we shouldn’t have the soup” but no one will be listening as the waiter tries to lift tomato stains from the woman’s blouse with a warm dishcloth, the manager mutters his apologies and insists that their meal will be free, and the second woman thinks about how much she would like to move to Tuscany.

The waiter, who is always fired after the incident, but rehired the next morning because he is the manager’s nephew, is in love with the first woman and always spills things into her lap on purpose.  She reminds him of the way water sounds falling on tin: loud and plinking but somehow smooth.  She reminds him of his high school history classes: Cannae and defenestration.  She reminds him of the number 11.

If she sat somewhere else, his crush on her would surely vanish. She would go back to being an ordinary patron in an ordinary restaurant and so he must continuously spill things into her laps so she and her companions will be convinced to come back to this table again and again.

He does not have a plan to woo or win her, just like the man does not ever contemplate returning to his wife.  So long as they are content in their roles they will play them, just like the second woman will laugh at what she thinks she remembers is the man’s echo of a bad joke, and the first woman will lean a little forward in her chair when she sees the waiter coming, and the manager will fire and rehire his nephew,

until the table by the kitchen doors decides it would rather be a 12 and moves itself three inches to the left.  Sometimes, that is all it takes.

Photo by Mei Qi

My apologies to Mr. Hoagland, but since titles aren’t copyrightable–

…

See, I say things like that and then the law student in me pipes in with “Well what if it’s a really long title.  Like, what if the title is the entire poem or story.”  And to the law student in me I say ‘Stop being a gunner and get back to work on your Ethics essay.’

You may notice that I changed the blog theme.  Again.  Each time I find a new one I promise myself that this is the last time.  I’m always wrong.

Moving on again.

Kelly Barnhill, on whom I have a huge, throbbing internet brain crush (brain internet crush?) wrote a brilliant post a while back (which I missed until I got back from Costa Rica and could resume all my internet stalking–I’m looking at you Hyperbole and a Half) in which she admits everything.  I initially said that I would hold off on doing a similar post until after the Bar exam, until I realized that I would completely forget my intention within the span of thirty seconds and miss out on the chance to divulge personal information to the internet tubes.  So if the Board of Law Examiners for the State of North Carolina is reading, I’d like to amend my 58491891818oneoneone page application with the following notes:

1.  In first grade I used to cheat on my dictation exercises by reading over Chip Grant’s shoulder.  To this day the site of a red head renders me incapable of distinguishing the subtle phonetic differences between your and you’re.

2.  When I was eleven years old I told my classmates I was going to read The Count of Monte Cristo by Alexandre Dumas.  I checked it out from the library and carried it around for five straight weeks so that everyone could see.  I never got past page 48.

3. The attorneys at the RIAA thought I was foolish for fretting so much about the Bar application process.  I told them I was worried that I once killed a man and served 10 years in federal prison and wouldn’t find out about it until they rejected me.  ‘Do you have frequent blackout periods?’ they asked.  ‘No,’ I said, ‘But what if I have blackout periods about my blackout periods?’

4.  I once ran over my grandfather’s dog with a golf cart while he was in the seat beside me.

5.  I accidentally ran a red light in Washington, DC last month.

6.  Seven years ago I was in a car accident and my head smashed through the passenger side window. They took my brother and me to the Emergency Room where the nurses brought their trainees to poke and prod at the strawberry shortcake that had become my face.  Even though my brother was walking around with bruises on his legs and torso, and my mother was 400 miles away preparing for her brother’s funeral, the only thing I thought about as the doctor approached to stitch me closed was whether I had shaved my legs that morning.

7.  I have only voted in one election.  It wasn’t a recent one.

8.  Sometimes I write about babies.

Because he wanted to be a truly great accordion player, he learned all the latest Dutch folk songs, Zydeco tunes, and Polish dancing jigs.  Since he could not wait to save enough money to buy an instrument, he learned to practice in his dreams: pushing his arms back and forth and bellowing out the words in the lowest register he could register while his nimble fingers tapped tapped tapped over the keys.

Thomas’ mother did not approve of his dream and thus she never bought him the accordion that he really, truly desired with all his heart.

“You should be a dentist,” she said.  “Learn to extract a dozen molars while standing on your head–now that would impress all the girls.”

But Thomas, like many other young boys his age, did not listen to his mother.  He packed his bags and set off on his own.  He would buy his own accordion, any one would do: a Beccaresci, a second hand Fistalia, or even a run-down, beat up plastic sack of air and sticks if that was what he could afford.  He meandered over the countryside, jumping trains and busking for change outside the street corner cafes in which he’d yearned to play.  He skimped and he saved, tucking away all the loose euros and coins passed his way by such selfless, unwitting patrons.

Alas, even the cheapest, the lowest, the most beat up, unmusical accordion in the back-alley flea markets was beyond his grasp.  But, because Thomas was a true dreamer, and not a fly-by-night, ‘wouldn’t it be nice’ dilettante, Thomas eventually made his way Kinderdijk where he spent each day watching the tourists and windmills.  He may not have had the Yves Gaubert of his dreams, but sometimes, when one of the musicians set his instrument down for just a moment, Thomas inched as close as he dared to the black and white keys.  In their looming shadow Thomas admitted to himself, very quietly, that perhaps he should have listened to his mother and gone to dental school instead.

It’s because Mr. Martin didn’t include enough sexy scenes to capture my interest.  Apparently I can’t read or watch anything associated with the fantastical genre without at least one pants dropping incident every few minutes.  HBO knows this and so out of a fear that their action filled, heady political drama where bad guys turn into good guys and good guys into bad guys would be scorned by all the womefolk leaving their poor husbands and boyfriends to watch alone in the dark, they added all this extra bed jumping. 

The true perversion, though, is the sense you get that all of this illicitness has been tossed in as a little something for the ladies, out of a justifiable fear, perhaps, that no woman alive would watch otherwise. While I do not doubt that there are women in the world who read books like Mr. Martin’s, I can honestly say that I have never met a single woman who has stood up in indignation at her book club and refused to read the latest from Lorrie Moore unless everyone agreed to “The Hobbit” first. “Game of Thrones” is boy fiction patronizingly turned out to reach the population’s other half.

Forget the fact that when I first put down Game of Thrones I did it precisely because I had reached the moment where a certain blonde haired queen and a certain blonde haired boy were canoodling inappropriately.  Nevermind the fact that I’ve watched Lord of the Rings, Harry Potter, the Never Ending Story, Legend, and other sex-free fantasy films many, many times over and never once thought to myself “You know what this needs?  Nekid people.” 

And forget the fact that I stopped reading Laurell K Hamilton because what started off as a kickass urban fantasy series with tightly woven plots turned into porn. 

No, apparently I am to blame for all the sex that turns up in fantasy and sci fi films.  All those fanboys would have been perfectly content for Princess Leia to wear a 3 piece suit and a parka sitting on Jabba’s pedestal but women would have stormed out of the theatres.  I am absolutely incapable of sitting through complex plots and subtle politics unless there is at least one bare chested man humping a girl in the corner.  I’m sorry men.  I didn’t realize I was ruining your cinematic experience.  Had I banded together with the rest of the fairer sex and agreed to watch James Bond, Total Recall, Lara Croft and Pirates of the Caribbean even if it only appealed to your sensibilities, perhaps I could have saved you the trauma of watching all those pointless one night stands, the parade of breasts, and Keira Knightly in a corset.  Oh if we had only known!  I am so sorry that Brad Pitt hooked up with Helena Bonham Carter in Fight Club, that Labryinth’s producers decided to put David Bowie–

Hmm.  Actually, Bowie’s pants probably are our fault.

And now that we know that women don’t read or watch fantasy–that we’d rather read Lorrie Moore (for all the gratuitous bird sex?) I suppse you men are safe to come out of the closet.  You are the true readers of Twilight afterall .   Twilight Moms?  You mean Twilight Dads, right?  All those Patricia McKillip books, the Lois McMaster Bujold, the Catherine Asaraos–written by men for men.  Apparently my brother puts them in my library for me in case he ever randomly drives 500 miles to come peruse them. 

Ender’s Game, The Name of the Wind, Dragonriders of Pern–I merely use them to throw at my TV whenever they pre-empt my planned viewing of Buffy the Vampire Layer with something stupid like Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind.

Bastards.

Disclaimer: Ms. Bellafonte does admit that there are ‘some women’ who read Martin’s books, she’s just never met one.  I don’t know who she hangs out with, but I wonder if even they would state that they only watch Mad Men for the f***ing. 

The pond that was not a pond had a glassy surface on which many swans and ducks and other water-inclined avians practiced their paddle kicks, their flaps, their winged lifts into the still-crisp air of late morning.  It was a good pond for such activities as it was not frequented by people who may stand and gawk at a misplaced ulna.  But sadly it was not a good pond for living as the pond that was not a pond was inhospitable to fish as it was also inhospitable to plants and also to algae and to the many other microscopic organisms of which humans and ducks and other water-inclined avians know little despite the profound effect it may have on day to day life.

It was not long before the pond that was not a pond became known as the duck pond, or the swan pond, or the heron pond depending on which bird was in season and bustled about the edges of the lawn sending threatening squawks and chirps to the other birds who may stake a claim.

The herons were the pond’s least favorite residents as herons are exceedingly full of themselves, begging others to provide the narration as the great white heron, no the great blue, not the finely tufted rises out of the marsh grass against the rosy fingered dawn–

While on the subject of its dislikes, the pond is not overly fond of Fitzgerald.

The pond that is not really a pond despite its many appellations to the contrary desires overmuch to be a pond, a true pond, an inter coastal waterway or tributary, or a body of water falling under the regulations of government agencies.  It wishes it were man-made or natural, or other wise easy to define.

It wishes the gazebo that is not a gazebo and an estate that is not an estate would join it in its protestations to the board of judiciaries, to sign its petitions for reconsideration, to study the rules of civil procedure for whichever federal system has jurisdiction.

The pond that is not a pond knows not why it is not a pond, only that no glacier sloughed its waters, no trench widened and widened, no engineer excavated at perfect obtuse angles to form its shores.  One day the pond that was not a pond was a drop of water.  The gazebo a white stick, the estate–well, the estate admits that it was always an estate and merely went along with the rest for symmetry.

The herons believe they are to be credited for this incredible jump in size and grandeur.  Surely the heavens declared that such stately birds deserved stately surroundings, and set in motion the gathering of mass, the metastisization of liquid.

But herons will believe anything.