On a recent episode of his podcast, Conan talked about how gross the writers’ room was. You can read about it here.
Denise and I have been to the fabled room: and it was not pretty.
Here’s how the show depicted the room:
We were still thrilled to be there, though, and the writers seemed to enjoy having us, since our presence meant they could stop pretending to write for a while. In fact, we talked about strategies for distracting ourselves from writing. One writer mentioned that in an episode with Lurlene’s father, they watched hambone videos for much of a day, after deciding the character used that style.
One of my favorite stories they told us about the writers’ room related to Conan, though.
Meal times were sacred, as they are for all writers who desperately want to stop writing for a little while, which is all of us.
Some of the writers would work in a building across the street from the writers’ room, and the staff would use an old-fashioned triangle bell to call everyone together.
Conan was into practical jokes. Once, he came in carrying all of the take out containers for a room of salivating coworkers, only to trip and spill absolutely everything.
My (Grand)Daddy spent over a decade of his retirement working on our family history. Several years before he passed, he lamented, “I’m not sure what’s going to happen to all of this when I die.”
Grandma: Oh, it’s all going to Karma. She’s the one who really cares about it. We decided a long time ago.
(Grand)Daddy: Nobody told me!
Grandma: (laughing): Well, you’ll be dead!
Daddy started shipping me binders and binders of material.
Towards his end, I tried to get my mom to get him to send me the electronic copies of everything, but his growing dementia and her luddite nature prevented this.
Me: Have Daddy send me the electronic files.
Mom: Let me write that down. Electronic files. Where are they?
Me: On his computer?
Mom: On top of the computer?
If you’re picturing that scene from Zoolander, you’re close. She has never sent or received an email or even a text.
(It’s not an age thing: her father was fluent with technology.)
The electronic files didn’t show up, but Dante and I tried to get what we could off of his computer when we were home for his funeral. We got less than we wanted (the autobiographical stories he wrote, for example, are completely missing) and more than we wanted (I hope you, dear reader, do not come across your grandfather’s porn).
I’ve been working in fits and spurts in the years since.
My (Grand)Daddy had found we were descended from an illegitimate son of a Duke, many generations back. The tree sort of stopped there, though I was excited, because a Duke meant there would be documented family going back quite a ways: and there was. This Duke was related to John of Gaunt, who’s related to most of the royalty in Europe, past and present. I was spending an inordinate amount of time manually adding people to the tree, until it occurred to me that someone must have done Queen Elizabeth II’s tree that I could graft on to mine, since we’re cousins. The only one I found, though, is kinda silly. It claims Jesus is my 55th GG, via a baby he made with Mary Magdalene (his dad is listed as Joseph . . .). I would just cut those branches off, but whoever made the file included all of the relevant myths. Odin (Woden) is a GG too, for example. Leaving them in is a little nod to my (Grand)Daddy, actually. At one point in the tree, when he reached the end of the knowable in his brother-in-law’s line, he inputted someone’s parents as Hagar and Horrible and Mrs. Horrible.
As I worked, mom’s side grew exponentially. My dad’s side stopped at his parents. My grandfather hated my father, so he didn’t spend time on that. (There’s also a family member whose wife he hated so much that he refused to add her at all.)
I started working on my dad’s side last Fall. I found the Native America grandmother he had mentioned, though she was way far back in the tree, when I’d been told she was my great-grandmother (I’m not sure if my dad was mistaken when he told my mom about this or if my mom was mistaken when she relayed it to me). Soon enough, my mom and dad’s trees started merging. One of my most recent immigrant GGs is Angus Anderson, from the Isle of Skye, Scotland in the early 1800s, on my mom’s side (he settled in Bay County, FL). I found an Anderson living in the same place on dad’s side now too. I really missed my (Grand)Daddy in that moment. He would have been thrilled to find that.
In the 1300s, though, my parents’ trees became incredibly intertwined. Any given GG from there back links to both sides of me, because of two families whose kids married each other.
Sir Richard FitzAlan (b. 1313) and Lady Eleanor of Lancaster (1318) had Lady Joan FitzAlan (1348) and Sir Richard FitzAlan (1348).
Sir William de Bohun (1312) and Lady Elizabeth de Badlesmere (1313) had Lady Elizabeth de Bohun (1350) and Sir Humphrey de Bohun (1342).
(Sir William de Bohun and Lady Eleanor of Lancaster were 2nd cousins).
Joan FitzAlan married Humphrey de Bohun. Their progeny eventually marries into the Holland line, including a bastard son whose progeny ends up in Jamestown and eventually leads to Bessie Holland, my great-grandmother (my (Grand)Daddy’s mom), who taught me to play solitaire and knitted my sweaters and let me have the cherries out of her Manhattans.
Richard FitzAlan married Elizabeth de Bohun. Their progeny eventually marries into the Howard line and then the Norris line, including some that end up in Jamestown and eventually James Dean (Skip) Norris, my dad.
I have to actively not let myself just do this all day, since there are papers to grade and classes to plan and conferences to prepare for and friends to see and emails to answer and journal work to complete and meals to make and books to read and queues to watch.
I’m eventually going to post some of the cooler things I’ve found, but I do need to let you know that I know the following:
I’m really privileged to be able to do this: to have some ancestors who weren’t separated from their homes and families in ways that destroyed the knowledge of their lines.
All of this is really specious. I’m counting on records to be accurate that probably aren’t and children to be the offspring of fathers who biologically might not be.
For example, my son’s biological father discovered his father wasn’t his biological father after my son and I did our Ancestry DNA tests.
Thus, this is all a kind of ancestor fan fiction once you go back enough.
After I took a break from online dating right before the pandemic, neither you nor I, dear reader, thought I would be making a wedding announcement afterwards.
My new husband likes that I haven’t written much about him (since my online dating adventures focused mainly on the bad experiences), but here’s a *very* brief overview of how we got here.
Twenty years ago, we met. (I don’t remember him much from way back then.) In 2011, he got back in touch with me on Facebook. I figured he had a crush, but didn’t think much of it. We were in sporadic contact after that. He especially wanted to try to figure out how my awful dating adventures could be made less awful (was there a way to get terrible guys to stop being terrible? No.) and to make suggestions about how to handle my chronic ailments.
When the pandemic hit, I watched him, a first responder (AEMT) argue with all his friends and family on Facebook, furious on his behalf that they would deny the reality of the threat we all faced. When he got Covid (before the vaccines were available), he wrote to me to confess his love.
I told him to back off, for many reasons: a) I was enjoying my break from dating; b) he was entirely too far away (6 hours); c) he had a girlfriend.
And, reader, he did.
Then, in the late Spring 2022, I started to think about dating again. Coincidentally, my AEMT and I had another Facebook conversation. He didn’t have a steady girlfriend anymore (though he was dating a few people), so I told him it was okay to now have dirty thoughts about me.
He talked me into letting him drive down for a date.
There were a couple of weeks between the agreement and him driving down. I gave him permission to wax romantic–and he did. It takes a lot of courage to woo a writing teacher with writing. But he did–and I fell in love.
That date went on for three days. On the first day, he pledged his troth, as they say, and forsook all others.
We saw each other whenever he could drive down, but at the end of the summer, I had to head to Dublin to teach.
At the end of the quarter, he joined me there and proposed (I’ll share that romantic story another time).
And even though I don’t like living with men, and even though I didn’t ever see myself getting married again, I accepted, because he told me we never had to formalize it, we didn’t have to live together, and if we did live together, but I hated it, we could stop living together but still stay in a relationship.
He gets me: all of me.
He also loves all of me, my weirdness and silliness and stubbornness.
And he’s romantic in both of the important ways: in the flowers and poetry way and in the “hey, you said your knees hurt whenever you have to dig in the back of the fridge, so I got you a pad to put down” way.
Though he says I broke my rule about not dating people who live far away, may I present that I never drove the 6 hours to see him, which other men certainly would have expected me to do, and that he moved down here as soon as he could.
Our friend Michael recently invited us to his house in Guatemala, with the hint that he’s ordained. So we eloped in a beautiful place with kind people. Now we’re back, and we’ve filed the paperwork, and so there is officially a Mr. Dr. Karma, god(dess) help him.
Plays: 4 (Dr. Semmelweis, A Strange Loop, Accidental Death of an Anarchist, Tambo and Bones)
Of the 4, plays about injustice: 4
Of the 4, plays about injustice regarding Black Americans: 2
Of the 4, plays without a curtain call: 1
Of the 4, plays with an actor who was playing a robot who could mime sitting at a desk, for a really long time, despite physics: 1
Of the plays with an actor who was playing a robot who could mime sitting at a desk, for a really long time, despite physics, who then crossed his legs: 1
Nando’s: 1
Pounds off our Nando’s dinner due to my points from Dublin: 3
Times we listened to a French server struggle to pronounce “ham” in a way that English speakers could understand: 1 (two groups, though)
Time I ordered the special, forgetting that “ham” means prosciutto in England: 1
Times I bought a bunch of souvenirs at the British Library, got absolutely soaked when leaving the library, and had all the souvenirs spill into the street as the paper bag they were in fell apart: 1
Time I was glad one of the souvenirs was a purse, because I was able to fit all of the other souvenirs inside it: 1
Times relearning that the Greeks thought Persian men were feminine for wearing eyeliner, jewelry, and pants and that while Alexander the Great adopted Persian horse-riding robes, he drew a line at the pants that surely would have made riding more comfortable: 1
Conferences attended: 1
Days Melissa made the mistake of having the conference coffee: 1
Days when I was about to give the first presentation of the day, but it had to be delayed because someone doing maintenance in the building got out the jackhammer: 1
Times I learned some people thought monk fish looked like monks: 1
Visits to the Coral Room: 1
Times realizing the food there is very expensive, but not very good: 1
Visits with Courtney and Liam: 1
Pubs with Courtney and Liam, including my old neighborhood pub in Bloomsbury: 2
New favorite historical paintings: 1
Times we discovered bank accounts had been opened in our names by a scammer: 1
Amazing Indian birthday dinners, including the best broccoli of our lives: 1
Pimms in a can: 1
Times we dropped in on some old friends before a play and they fed us pasta with homemade rocket walnut pesto: 1
Bottles of wine we demolished before heading to the play: 3
Night we got out of a play, and I marveled at the sky, and how, after all these years, I remembered how to get home from the drizzly London streets: 1
Times our Airbnb host sent someone to meet us with the keys at the wrong time, due to not reading our messages correctly: 1
Times our host was entirely unhelpful about the wifi: 2
Times we found syringes in the Airbnb: 1
Times we discovered our host had left the door from the bedroom to the apartment patio unlocked, after having slept there a few nights and left important things like our passport there during the day: 1
Times we realized, after getting back, that our host had overcharged us by about $500 dollars: 1
Times Airbnb tried to contact him: many
Times he took his whole listing down rather than answer us or Airbnb: 1
Let’s put aside that the woman who sued to discriminate against gays a) wasn’t a wedding website designer b) had not been asked to design a gay wedding website c) violated a Biblical commandment by lying about a request.
I want to focus on her insistence that she shouldn’t have to use “her words” on a gay marriage site.
As someone who has hired site designers, I’ve never asked them for words. How the hell should they know what to say about my topic? They’ve been hired to put banners in the right place, install widgets, import themes, etc.
In other words, she didn’t have to sue anyone to not write anything or create “artwork” for a gay wedding.
All she would need to do is say, “Hey, since I’m a bigot, I couldn’t effectively write anything about love for you. Jesus, as I’m sure you’re aware, was anti-tolerance and pro-judgement. My “original art,” if you wanted any, would likely include images of gays burning in hell that I would pull off the Westboro Baptist Church site. I could definitely still install your plugins, though.”
I screened a movie for friends. There had been a murder on a campus, which created fear and chaos. A dashing young vampire took the opportunity to ingratiate himself with a beautiful woman and her friend. While they were all at his apartment, the power went out, and he went to light candles, but the match wouldn’t catch. Somehow, this affected time, both forwards and backwards. Suddenly, the woman and her friend didn’t find him charming anymore, among other problems (him becoming a suspect in the murder).
More people had come over to watch the movie halfway through. They were complaining about it (one complainer was played by the same actor who was Dr. Cox in Scrubs). Our power went out, and I started to light candles as I explained what they had missed in the beginning. Did I mention the meta-ness when my candles didn’t catch? Yes. Did I tell people that the movie was Sliding Doors, but with vampires? Yes. Did I suggest that we all watch Shadow of the Vampire? Yes.
How do I know this was my 7-8 dream? Because I also woke up at 7, from a dream in which Melissa and I were going to a play in the Bay area. We took Thoth and Graymalkin with us, dropping them off in an empty lab on the Berkeley campus on the way. When we returned, the lab was covered in litter. The professor who ran the lab was a very hot guy in a wheelchair. He was telling me I didn’t have to clean it up if I would go out on a date with him. I explained I had a fiancé. He said, “I can tell you’re still attracted to me.” I explained that having a fiancé didn’t mean other people became unattractive, and I was relieved he knew I thought he was hot, because I didn’t want him to think being in a wheelchair was the reason I wouldn’t go out with him.
Interpretations:
I watch a lot of movies.
I want people to know I’m woke.
I’m impotent, since I couldn’t get the match to catch, but so was the vampire.
A couple of weeks ago, I found myself telling my students how rare something was:
“In my [pause while I did the math] 25 years of teaching, I have never read an essay that . . .”
I stopped and wrote myself a note: “Celebrate.”
My celebrations are usually low key. Birthdays are quiet dinners with friends and family and small celebrations with my beloved book group. I’ve skipped all my graduations. Four of my five books have come out without a big party. If some friends hadn’t thrown me something for my PhD, there wouldn’t have been a real Party (with a capital P) for just me in my adult life.
In the summer of 1998, I taught for the first time. I realized what I was supposed to be doing: teaching.
Thus, on Thursday, after I turn in my grades for classes 326, 327, and 328, I will see colleagues and former students and raise a drink to a quarter century of a job I love.
I have a lot of things to update my two readers on. In fact, there’s so much it’s what’s kept me from updating in a while.
I can’t do it all now, but here’s the health stuff.
For this, just know that my back and neck and head are still awful.
My gut is SO much worse.
Before the pandemic, I was used to chronic diarrhea, and I was managing it. For some reason, during the pandemic, I swung the other way.
Since I’ve been back to teaching in person, I’ve swung back. However, I’m not managing it well now. Before, I could be okay on half an immodium a day. I would wake up in time to eat, get a sense of my gut, and see if I needed the half a pill before heading to class.
Current status: I almost didn’t make it to the bathroom after class a few weeks ago, and about two times a week, I’m crippled by my IBS. Along with the diarrhea comes cramping that leaves me whimpering on the floor. I have to take up to three immodium to make it stop, which means I don’t go at all for two days after. Then, it’s back to a system in overdrive.
All my docs have been able to confirm so far is that I indeed have IBS.
In other, more hopeful, news, I’m having a little surgery on Monday to try to fix my ear problems. Unlike most people, I can’t pop my ears. Any change in elevation, in a car or plane, hurts.
I’ve managed to convince my team to use a smaller than normal breathing tube during the procedure, since I have an obstructed airway, and a nausea patch, since my last surgery recovery went so badly.
I haven’t, however, gotten them to agree to catheterize me. They think they don’t have to, since the procedure is short, but the last two times docs have thought that, I’ve woken up covered in my own piss. I’m thinking it’s because I only ever truly relax when a doctor puts me under.
Growing up, I didn’t see the appeal of St. Patrick’s Day at all. My non-Irish grandmother would boil corned beef and cabbage, and people featured on tv news would drink too much. It was just the tradition fallacy: we had to eat a very bland meal because we had been doing so every year. If this was supposed to be good, I thought, surely we would have it more often.
I embraced St. Urho’s Day, which I’ve written several posts about on this blog. It was a way to be close to my grandfather, to embrace my Finnish heritage, and to celebrate the comedy of a completely made-up holiday.
Two things happened last year, though, that have shifted me.
First, I used some of my recovery time from surgery to continue my grandfather’s genealogy work. I’m actually a little bit Irish. The Irish ancestors I know about so far are Malones and O’Ferrells.
And then I lived in Dublin for three months, which I absolutely loved. Ireland is dear to my memory and my heart, and now that I’ve had my own local pub and other haunts, it’s one of my former homes.
Thus, today I am making corned beef for the first time. It’s in the crock pot. Since I don’t like boiled cabbage, I’m going to have some spring rolls as an appetizer.
(I’m not worried about being inauthentic: in Ireland, the dish isn’t corned beef and cabbage; it’s Irish bacon and cabbage. Side note: Irish bacon is about as appealing to me as boiled cabbage.)
I’ll pair my dinner with one of my Irish whiskies. And I’ll pet my cats, since it’s also St. Gertrude’s Day.
The start of the year has been busy (when isn’t it)?
MLA was in San Francisco. A terrible storm and a terrible neck kept me from attending in person, but I am lucky Zoom allowed me to see presentations and attend the Atwood meeting.
Speaking of Atwood, I got the Atwood journal finished in the middle of the month, all 264 pages of it!
Eight students won writing awards this month; two were mine.
Dante and I ventured into “the city” to see the Ramses exhibit. Even though they timed the entries, it was overcrowded and uncomfortable, but I’m still glad we went.
We celebrated Martin Luther King Jr day by watching the new Puss in Boots.
I greeted five new classes of students, scaring off tons of Health Science students with my announcement that we don’t use five-paragraph essays in professional health science writing and that I expect them to proofread.
I was late to office hours for the very first time. UCD has given undergraduates the right to park where teachers do, if they pay a little bit more (Karma, do you have to pay to park at UCD? Yup! Almost five dollars a day!), and I had to try three different lots.
My students had their first stand-up special.
I’m working to keep up a few of my New Year’s Resolutions. I want to make one new recipe each week & try at least one new cocktail recipe per month. Since I’m about to be overwhelmed with grading, I did a lot of new recipes this month to balance out my upcoming failures:
New Recipes: Spiced Roast Chicken with Tangy Yogurt Sauce; Berry-Jam Fried Chicken with Savory Cornbread; Mustard and Rosemary Pork Tenderloin with Fried Apples; Saucy Chicken and Peppers with Manchego Polenta; Slow Cooker Chicken and Stuffing; Red Wine Chocolate Cake; Pork Medallions with Red Pepper Sauce; Ginger-Sesame Pork Burgers with Slaw; Thai One-Pot; Air Fryer Turkey Parmesan Burgers
New Cocktails: Moonpool; Lemon Basil Martini; Death in the Afternoon; Corpse Reviver 2; Lemon Lavender Sour; Blood Orange Irish Mule
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