Writing Exercise, Maybe Poetry

When I was working in social services and led workshops and meetings there was an interesting icebreaker that came up again and again. I always thought that if you take it beyond the literal, it made an excellent exercise in writing. I always managed to reveal more of myself than I intended with this one. Here's mine:
I am me.
I wonder if the world knows that
I hear hushed voices and
I see the good in most things.
I want to remember that
I am independent.
I pretend to be confident but
I feel scared.
I touch lives with my actions so
I worry about my children being all right.
I cry when I am angry but
I am strong.
I understand that I can change only me so
I say it's all good.
I dreamt of marrying again, happily
I try to stay organized because
I hope for a good life.
I am Amanda.

The Exercise:
The idea is to take the following template and complete it in the way that reflects you best. Many people stick to the literal. Try to take it beyond the obvious "I am X years old, I wonder why the sky is blue..."

The Template:
I am...
I wonder...
I hear...
I see...
I want...
I am...
I pretend...
I feel...
I touch...
I worry...
I cry...
I understand...
I say..
I dream...
I try...
I hope...
I am...

The Result?
Try it and send it to me. I'd love to publish them here.

Customer Service is Dead

Denny's* Was the Suck the Other Night

Tuesday night we went to Denny's.* Well, it was more like early-eveningish, which is really sad because I can't figure out when I became old enough to consider anything before 5:30 dinnertime. It used to be a regular thing, the Tuesday at Denny's* meal because the kiddos eat free on Tuesdays. Yeah, pathetic, I know, but I gotta tell ya, this starting out as a writer gig doesn't pay a whole lot of money so we have to economize when we can.

Well, for a variety of reasons, including the fact that our oldest is now too old to eat off the kid's menu and is thus disqualified from the eating free on Tuesdays deal, we only go once in awhile. Oh, yeah, plus the food makes both J. and I sick. Literally. I think that goes along with being old enough to enjoy the thrill of an early bird special. Your stomach says: "Ha. You're over 30 now. To hell with good digestion."

Ordering Was the Easy Part

You wouldn't think it would be that difficult to put in an order. Oho, my friend, think again! The waitress looked like she was writing stuff down. Maybe not. Here's how we ordered. I really don't think we were all that picky.

M: I want a classic cheeseburger with American cheese, seasoned fries, none of the veggies on the burger and a side of BBQ sauce.
Me: I'll have the bacon cheeseburger with seasoned fries and only pickles on the burger.
Waitress: None of the lettuce, tomato or stuff?
Me: No, just pickles.
j: I want chicken and regular fries with no monsterella sticks. (He's 5, he doesn't like mozzarella sticks and can't say it either)
J: I'd like the Chef's salad. Does that have onions on it?
Waitress: (taps her pad with her pencil, kind of glares and glazes over at the same time) I don't know.
J: Well, if so, I don't want them please.

Here's What We Got- The FIRST Time

M: ended up with a cheeseburger without cheese, with all the veggies and no BBQ sauce
Me: ended up with a bacon cheeseburger and regular fries
j: ended up with 3 chicken nuggets, fries and 3 monsterella sticks
J: ended up with a salad tasting like onions, about which we heard the waitress yell before coming to the table: "He said he didn't want onions!"

Here's What We Got- The SECOND Time

A horribly dirty look from the waitress when we asked for the orders to be straightened out. A sigh and a glare like we were annoying her by being there. Two slices of cheese on a plate to put on the non-cheeseburger, a plate with the monsterella sticks picked off and another chicken nugget plopped down on it, a promise of seasoned fries and NO BBQ sauce!

Wait, It Gets Better

J. bites into a cherry tomato. It's rotten. Not, going soft, questionable, but I can it eat anyway rotten. Rotten! With brown and black spots on it. So, he summons the waitress and points it out to her. Again, the glare and the "you're being really difficult attitude." She comes back with two cherry tomatoes in a bowls and tells him she brought a couple more. Doesn't offer to take the salad back and doesn't apologize.

Then, the whole time we're eating (and BOY are we pissed while doing so) the waitress is standing behind the counter, one hip cocked to the side and staring at us. Like she is daring us to say anything else.

Time to Pay

By this time I am so uncomfortable that I escape to the bathroom when the check comes. J. and I have decided we really don't want to have to pay full price for this horrible dining experience. When I come back, J. says the waitress told him they took $2 and j.'s meal off the check.

J.'s response: It's Tuesday. Isn't his meal free anyway?
My response: That's unacceptable. $2? That's insulting.

So, I take the kids outside and leave J. to deal with the whole check issue. He comes out after awhile and says we didn't have to pay anything. The manager, apparently, was really apologetic and was going to take off some money. But then she turned around to see the waitress standing there, hands on hips, staring and glaring at my husband. She comped the meal.

The Bottom Line

It's not just Denny's. Everywhere I go lately is like this. What is up with the whole attitude like we, as customers or consumers, are annoying the people who are getting paid to help us?? If we weren't there, they wouldn't have a job. No job, no pay. No pay, no stuff. It's simple. Sometimes I really hate leaving my house. Customer service just sucks.

* Please note that any Denny's links will bring you DIRECTLY to the "Contact Us" page. Make a complaint, if you've got one!

Bangor, Maine...ya'know, Home of Stephen King?

So, I just finished up some work for Mitch Wilder, the guy who does TV's "The Pet Report" and hosts "Amazing Pet Discoveries" on the radio. He's launching a new website soon and needed some copy writing done, etc. (more to follow when the site launches).

However, none of this is my point. The point is that when we were chatting it came up that I live in Bangor, Maine. Thankfully, as a home-bred Canadian, Mitch knew where Maine is, but you'd be surprised how many people think we live up near Alaska! But, alas, he did not know of Bangor.


So, of course, I had to use the standard line: It's where Stephen King lives.

And, furthermore, explain that to us (read: Native Bangorians) he's just another guy who may be at the grocery store, the local Y or wherever else people go around here.

Don't get me wrong, I like Stephen King as much as anyone else. I even took a bizarre, but excellent, class in college called "The Literature of Stephen King," but I have to wonder whether this is the best way to tell people where it is that I live.

It's certainly more interesting than the standard Mainer way:
Well, you come into the state at Kittery, go past Portland and drive up north for a couple of hours. And there you are.

Top 50 (100?) Female Bloggers

Thought I would give a shout out this morning to Enkay for his effort to come up with a list of the Top 50 Female Bloggers (yes, I did say "shout out" and I am ashamed of myself for it). In my opinion it's a great idea. Gives female bloggers a little recognition in a field that, thus far, has been pretty patriarchal.

I'm not quite sure what Enkay plans to do with this list, but it's a good visibility both for the female bloggers and Enkay. He's calling out for submissions and says he may expand the list to 100 if he gets enough nominations. It's worth checking out- there are some really interesting bloggers being nominated. My fave, Deb Ng, is on there both for her weblog and the one I check out every day, Writer's Row.

Looking Back, One Year Past

If you've read of the rest of this blog then you know I alluded to a patch of The Bad Luck. Some of that included trying to find some help for my young son who was having some significant issues with anxiety and mood disorder. He's better now. Thank God for Prozac. In fact, he's so much better that I was looking back at my journal entries and had to actually think about when it was this bad.

So Damn Tired
Our day started at 5:30 this morning. He woke up and began his morning ritual of crying and whining. Moooommmyyy, Mommy, I WANT you. We can't decide whether he can't remember we took the gate down so he can get up on his own or whether he's just trying to get someone to come into his room. In either case we try to ignore it in hopes that he'll stop and go back to sleep or just get up on his own. He doesn't stop so J. gets up to remind him he needs to get up by himself. We're both so tired of going to bed angry and waking up angry.


J. does a great job of being calm when he's in there but he whipped out of bed so angry that I wasn't sure that's what would happen. J. says the boy was up for about an hour and half during the night with the whole "I want you" bit. I wouldn't know because I took Ativan and was out like a light. He went in three times and the boy still didn't settle down until I finally got up and gave him a drink of milk. Then he slept through the night. Well, at least until 5:30 this morning.


I guess yesterday's nap on the couch was a bad idea. It's such a toss up. He's tired which exacerbates the horribleness during the day so when he falls asleep in the car like that am I supposed to wake him up? Or should I take advantage of the little quiet I can snatch?


The really sad thing is how excited I am to be able to do the dishes in peace. I am starting to enjoy the feeling of having my hands immersed in the warm dishwater. It's soothing and lately I will take any soothing I can get.


What do you do with a kid who doesn't respond to discipline? Who doesn't care about losing privileges and things and cares even less about earning them? A kid who shouts, screams, throws things and tries to hurt people? Spanking doesn't work both in practice and in principle. What am I going to do, hit him to prove that hitting people is wrong?


He doesn't stay in time out. No! I won't. I'm not going to stop. I'm not going to stay in my room. I am going to watch TV. He doesn't listen to logic. I don't want to talk about this. I'm done talking. I'm not listening to you.


I've read all the books. I'm trained in this, for god's sake, not to mention I've successfully managed to raise another child into double digits. I wake up with bruises on me, bruises which are from sharp little elbows, rock hard little knees and pummeling little fists. He's not even five yet. What happens when he's eight or twelve?


We keep thinking he'll outgrow it. And he does. For awhile. Everything is always for awhile. Even when he's doing well it's all about him; why is he doing so well? Is it going to last? Have we finally found the right medicine? I can't believe he's doing so well, so poorly, that he's so angry, that he doesn't understand that your mother is a person to revere and respect...


I'm tired of think about it, tired of strategizing, tired of worrying about and predicting the future. I'm so damn tired of it always being about him.

Sending Clips

Today I find myself pondering how I can send clips of my work with snail mail queries if most of my work has been published in online versions of magazines.

• Do I take a page shot, print and scan it?
• Do I send the URL?
• Do I print a hard copy of the article, add the URL to the top and note where it has been published?

I am seriously stumped.

The Bad Luck

Why "the" Bad Luck?

My husband is from a very large family of French-Canadian descent, a group of people who invariably use the article "the" in front of numerous different phrases. Of course, this isn't necessarily any different from the scads of people living here in rural Maine who frequently take trips to the WalMart just as other people go to the mall, but there are sometimes when it takes me by surprise.

A couple of weeks before my husband and I were to be married we bumped into his grandmother at the grocery store, who told us how glad she was we were happy just before taking me aside and assuring me what a good man I'd found. That I knew, and agreed readily. I wasn't prepared for her next statement though. In a conspiratorial whisper she added, "You know our family has the bad luck though."

Does the Bad Luck Exist?

Once I started thinking about it, I realized that it wasn't necessarily untrue. We did seem to have more than our share of bad luck that year. First our beater of a car died and we needed to find another one a week before our wedding, which, incidentally we were paying for ourselves, leaving no expendable income for a vehicle. Then, my job imploded (and me with it), so we were one income short. And it just went on from there.

Since then, things have righted themselves a bit, but I'd never experienced so many disasters at once. But my husband took it all in stride, saying it was par for the course for his family. Hmm...

The Bad Luck vs. Hard Luck

Is there such a thing as "the bad luck?" It's an interesting concept. Especially when you differentiate between bad luck and hard luck.

Hard luck is when life is continuously difficult and- here's the important part- you make no effort to try to change it. So, the job sucks, there's no money, the spouse leaves, but it's always someone else's fault. Not looking for a new job, a second job, putting in the work to make a marriage better isn't bad luck, it's hard luck. It's something that can be changed.

Now the bad luck is entirely different. The bad luck is when, despite your efforts to the contrary, bad things just keep coming. Take, for example, Kathleen Caronna. She's the woman who was not only hit by a Macy's Thanksgiving Day balloon in 1997, but whose apartment was also the one that Cory Lidle's airplane crashed into. There's a woman who has the bad luck. No way did she court those disasters.

Stories of The Bad Luck

All of this got me to thinking. There must be thousands of stories out there like that. Stories, if you will, of The Bad Luck. About a year ago, I even went so far as to reserve the domain name with the intent of setting up an interactive blogsite for such tales. The domain registration has since expired, but the idea still percolates. Anyone have any good stories?

And So It Begins

So, here I am. At my keyboard staring at the post screen trying to come up with some engaging and pithy way to start my blog off. If there is one thing I am not, it's pithy. Of course, if you've read the title and description of this blog you'll see that there are many things I am not. I'm not, for one, famous or well-known. Nor I am resigned to being ordinary.

Here's what I am: a teacher/early intervention specialist/parent educator turned freelance writer. Roll your eyes if you must, I know that everyone considers himself a writer. Of course the proliferation of blogs and sites that allow anyone to be a content producer hasn't helped that at all...

All that aside, I'm putting aside my lingering distaste of the blog-as-online-journal genre to begin a record of aspiring to ordinary.