Culture and the Emotional 8-Year-Old

OK, first things first.

I did not complete my novel for NaNoWriMo. I crapped out somewhere around 28,476 words. Ah well. Other things took precedence. Things like assuring that I had registered for employee benefits for 2002, cleaning the apartment for houseguests, entertaining said houseguest, and dealing with traumas (both personal and other).

Apparently, no one else on Team Cincinnati or the Team NOLA offshoot finished either. But if we add up all our totals, we did complete the 50,000 word quota. I think we should combine our output into one big screwed up novel, and declare ourselves winners.

Of course, the fact that we even attempted this ridiculous undertaking means we're all winners, right? So let's take this as a learning experience, salvage what we can from the previous month's insanity, and resolve to get 'em next year.

Despite the fact that I am without a completed crappy novel on December 1st, I'm happy with my results. I am 28,000 words further along than I was a month ago, and many of those words do not suck. I am determined to continue with the project I have begun, despite the lack of contest, and am glad that something got me off my ass and started me writing. If it hadn't been for this, I might still be sitting on the same set of notes for the next five years. And now... I'm halfway to being finished. It may be crap, but at this point, I don't care. I'm thrilled at where I've gone so far, excited about the chapters that came out of the blue demanding attention, and cannot wait to see where I end up. (Once I get past the next 10,000 words or so. My narrator is well on her way to a Very Bad Place, and I don't look forward to revisiting those little landmarks in my psyche.)

OK. So other than me not completing my novel, what else happened this month?

My apartment is, for the most part, clean. I can have people over without much embarrassment. The kitchen sink is clogged, the toilet has broken loose from its connection to the floor (it's now officially the rodeo bathroom), and Ma Huang has finally bent the drapery rod into a point where I took down the green curtains, but otherwise it's not bad. The 8 billion boxes of clothes are gone, the stuff to give away has been removed, both televisions are hooked up and functioning. (I am now the ultimate slacker goddess because I have a TV and VCR in both my living room and bedroom. I can now watch my Saturday morning cartoons in bed if I so choose. Yee-hah!)

My sister has joined the world of the bloggers. Check her out at Mom on the Run for the trials and tribulations of being a working mom and wife in the process of questioning where the hell she is in the scheme of things. I'm so proud of her. It takes a lot to get out there and write what's going on in your head, and she's been amazingly honest in her first two posts. It just reminds me how lucky I am to have such a cool family. You go, girl. I hope that writing stuff down helps you as much as it's helped me.

(Oh, and a brief correction. My sister has decided that her name is Sydney, her husband's name is Steve, and the kids are Allison and Amanda. Oops. Shows you what I know. Guess I didn't watch enough Darren Star dramas on Fox to know the correct pseudonyms for my own family.)

Roger Mexico visited over Thanksgiving , and it wasn't long enough. He tried to spend time with everyone he knew, and four days just wasn't enough for that. I barely had time to talk to him, and he stayed with me for most of the trip. When is your next vacation, babe?

I am now officially almost done with my Christmas shopping. I love you, Amazon. I also love you, Best Buy, for putting this incredibly comfy desk chair on sale so I don't have to sit in the steno chair of death anymore.

OK, I guess that's about all that happened in my absence. Onto current affairs....

I attended my company "Holiday Gala" tonight for the first time, even though I've worked there for over two years. Why has it taken me so long to attend a company function, you ask?

Well, for one, company holiday parties are pretty much lame. The last holiday party I attended was when I was working for the customer service division of a credit card company. We had our holiday party in January. It was a formal affair at the Omni Netherland Plaza Hotel, and the highlight of my evening was catching another employee (who was a morning DJ for 97X) doing the Electric Slide. I approached him with every intention of busting his indy cred, and he retorted by mentioning he'd seen me in the balcony doing "YMCA" by the Village People. Humiliated, we both wandered off to the bar.

This year's holiday shindig was at the Museum Center, which I haven't been to in years. I talk a good game when it comes to culture, but for the most part, I only do the cultural thing when free tickets land in my lap. ('Cuz I'm poor like that. If money were no object, I'd be at every local museum, the ballet, the opera, or the symphony whenever the notion crossed my mind. I'd be the social butterfly I want you to believe I am.) So when I received my invite in the mail, I decided I should go, if only as an excuse to hit the museum circuit for free.

There was no indication how to dress on the company invitation, so I decided to wing it, which meant yet another set of Warner Bros. corduroy overalls. I looked like an eight-year-old trapped in the body of a thirty-three-year-old. Oh well.

Thankfully, I didn't run into anyone I worked with. I saw a guy who quit last week, and a bar friend who apparently works security at the museum, but I was mercifully spared from the small talk I was dreading. Instead, I grabbed a glass of merlot and headed off to the Cincinnati History Museum. Wow. I'm not a big history buff, but the displays were fascinating. The miniaturized of 1940s Cincinnati was amazing, and the timeline walk of the settling of the Ohio Valley was intriguing. (Although the eensy Native American part of me was irritated by the fact that there was a treaty signed that said the white man would not settle north of the Ohio River, and like all of those treaties, it was ignored and the Native Americans were ousted in less than fifty years.)

After the History Museum, I headed off to the Natural History Museum, in search of the displays I'd seen many times as a child. (The Natural History Museum used to be on the other side of town, and I remember going there a lot as a kid, either with my parents or through various school or Zoo programs.) Kids, it's all there. The polar bear? The big lump o' lead that you couldn't lift? The cave? The allosaur skeleton? All that and more. I spent quite a few minutes listening to a volunteer extol the virtues of the local bat population while displaying a big brown bat (which isn't all that big, by the way) that was handraised by the museum (which means it wasn't the one who got into my apartment two years ago) before heading off to the advanced level of the cave. Hell, I used to spelunk for fun when I was 11. I could easily manage the twists and turns of a manmade cave, right?

I think I was holding up the line, because I wanted to check out everything in the cave. I found myself identifying formations under my breath. ("Stalactites. Stalagmites. Helictites. Gypsum flowers. Heh. I rule.")

So who's up for a field trip to Mammoth Cave? The hard trip? C'mon kids!

My superiority was short-lived. The Ice Age exhibit quickly put me in my place, when I was unable to identify the difference between a grazer and a browser. Oops. Subtle differences in the molars of the herbivore escape me, apparently. But the glacier walk was very cool.

The dinosaur exhibit, as always, overwhelmed me. I'm sorry, that's a partial apatosaur femur? Whew.

Yep. I'm a big kid trapped in the body of an adult. I even got my picture taken with Santa.

Of course, if emotional age came into it, I doubt they would have served me so much merlot.