California Roll

Chic Lit for the Cosmopolitan

I've read two, and only two, chic lit novels, both delightful and both by Camy Tang. She's a SF bay area writer who grew up in Hawaii, like my husband.
I had fun sharing lunch with Camy after I'd read her first one (the featured pic). (And she doesn't look at all like the women pictured on her novels; in fact, she's probably my age!) SUSHI FOR ONE and ONLY UNI are both fun, fast reads. Though written for younger Christian women than me, this 50-some still enjoyed them. They gave me insight into the dilemas and emotions of singles as well as Asian American culture (Japanese and Chinese mainly). The books are so good my nerdy husband even read one! (Albeit, we were on vacation and he didn't have his home library.)
Chic lit is not my usual genre, but the realistic view of human emotions, frailties and the ups and downs of spiritual transformation made these captivating.

A good read: "Plum Wine" by Angela Davis-Gardner

I throughly enjoyed this book about Barbara, a young American woman teaching English at a Tokyo university. Barbara receives a shocking bequest from a colleague who's been a mother figure to her:  a chest filled with bottles of homemade plum wine, each wrapped in rice paper covered with calligraphy—one sheet for each of the last twenty years of her friend's life.

Since I lived six years in Japan (from 1993-99) while immersing myself in the culture, I was delighted to see Davis-Gardner's portrayal of the Japanese way of thinking and relationships. The story caught me up in its suspense as I read on to discover how Barbara would find what the writing on these plum wine bottles revealed and how she'd manage these strange cross-cultural relationships.  Descriptive language in this novel was beautiful and some passages brought an amused smile to my lips.

The characterizations of the protagonist rang true to me as I understand the loneliness of being in a foreign land, especially a place where the ideal of men and the values they live by (work has priority over relationships, relationship with mother has priority over spouse) are so different than western values.

I thank Angela for a compelling read that enlightened me to the shame and sadness experienced by survivors of Hiroshima.

Reading Outside My Usual

Last night my husband leaned down over me as I sat in our green easy chair and planted a juicy, enticing kiss.  "Do you want me to go to bed with you?" I asked.

He smiled happily and I went to brush my teeth. 

Ten minutes later I was leaning back in my green leather chair again, intent on completing my read of BODY DOUBLE  before I closed my eyes.  I finished that novel in record time (fitting it in between family and church commitments on Sat. night through Sunday evening).   Its a crime thriller, written by a medical doctor, Tess Territsen.  The kind I call my "TV" book.  I enjoyed it thoroughly.

I did wonder as I read, "Is this a waste of time?  Is this outside the kind of activities that God would have me involved in on my day of rest?"  I'm not positive how to answer those questions, but I have some clues.

I found this morning that I didn't wake up with 'things to do" on my mind - I'd gotten over my overly-responsible habits of thinking too much about what I can do to make people happy or impact them.  And I still had a good night's sleep despite finding out about some despicable things a few "monsters" did at the book's end.  (I did try to ponder a few verses from the Bible as I laid my head on my pillow.)

Also in the on-line writer's news this morning a writing expert advised us writers to keep reading, even outside our genre.  So perhaps it wasn't a waste of time. 

Anyways, I had some fun and God knows I needed it after the intense weekend I had the week prior!

Angle of Repose

     Last night at a book group we discussed marriage through the lens of Angle of Repose by Wallace Stegner.  This wonderful book chronicles the relationship between a book-loving, "genteel-ed" artist, Susan,  with an adventurer, a sensitive, intelligent mining engineer bent on forming the wild west into a civilized place and source of wealth.
    Women at our group spoke of seeing the same dynamics of relationship carried out some two hundred years later among our neighbors, relatives and in our own homes. Though we honor marriage as important and don't want to break up a hope, sometimes we can't find a way to both together and happy.  This is the story of Susan who leaves her husband twice in the novel, but returns because bound by the convictions of Victorian society that she must fulfill her vows and take the consequences for some disastrous choices she's made.
    This story is investigated and then written down for us, the reader, by a historian, Lyman, suffering from a paralyzing bone disease.  Broken in body and abandoned by his wife, he fights to understand his past and what he can learn from it for his relationships of today.  The contrast and similarities between the two parallel of Lyman, historian, and his grandmother, the artist, and her Wild West gun-toting husband, is riveting.
    I saw tragedy in the grandmother's refusal to mingle with her neighbors when the sojourned in Leadville, California or in Idaho.  She held herself aloof because these people were not educated, literate or genteel. So she suffers great loneliness and depression and continually mourns the loss of a dear girlfriend both literate and of high society living in the east. She first appreciates her husband, and then slowly rejects him and loses hope in him when he is not able to fulfill his dreams and make money at it.
     We reflected on whether Susan would have been happier if she'd married someone different.  Who can know? I agree with the person who said, "She probably would have been unhappy with anywhere, with anyone."
    I see their tragedy coming from several sources -  her pride which caused her to find fault with so much of what was good in her husband and to reject means to sustain her emotionally in the wilderness - the company of other women.  For him, his downfall was being so committed to fulfilling his dream that his work took precedence over his family's emotional needs.

   

Accepting the Tides

    My emotions are raw now.  I tear up easily, over things that wouldn't usually bring such hurt or anger to the surface.  Hearing that such is normal during times of transition, from a psychologist on the radio yesterday, comforted me.
    Also these words from Ann Morrow Lindbergh strengthened me to do what seemed so scary at the time - go to a women's group of 300 plus women - and to accept these transitions of life (see previous blog for specifics.) Here are Ann's words from her classic book, "Gift from the Sea," with some paragraphing added by me:
    "The "veritable life" of our emotions and our relationships also is intermittent.  When you love someone you do not love them all the time, in exactly the same way, from moment to moment.  It is an impossibility. It is even a lie to pretend to.  And yet this is exactly what most of demand. We have so little faith in the ebb and flow of life, of love, of relationships. We leap at the flow of the tide and resist in terror its ebb. We are afraid it Will never return.   We insist on permanency, on duration, on continuity; when the only continuity possible, in life as in love, is in growth, in fluidity -- in freedom, in the sense that dancers are free, barely touching as they pass, but partners in the same pattern.
    The only real security is not in owning or possessing, not in demanding or expecting, not in hoping, even. Security in a relationship lies neither in looking back to what it was in nostalgia, nor forward to what  might be in dread or anticipation, but living in the present relationship and accepting it as it is now.  For relationships, too, must be like islands.  One must accept for what they are here and now, within their limits -- island, surrounded and interrupted by the sea, continually visited and abandoned by the tides.  One must accept the security of the winged life, of ebb and flow, of intermittency."

The last two paraagarphs are all by Ann M. Lindbergh.  I high recommend her whole book.

Highly Sensitive People

I've been reading a book titled "Highly Sensitive People - How to Thrive When the World Overwhelms You.
Whenever I read it, I have a shiver of awakening and a sense of coming home, of belonging.

When I was young, I often felt so different from other people.  Now I know why.  I'm off the charts in terms of sensitivity.

I was often told by my mother, "You're too sensitive."

Sensitivity was then a down trait - a problem I had.  Now I know that many others have it also, and many carry on successfully in their jobs and community involvements and there are specific coping strategies.

Now I'm coming to see it as a very positive trait, but it must be managed with wisdom and self-awareness.  And I must learn to talk about it to others in a positive light, one they can understand.  For example, if I'm going to be at a retreat with women all weekend, I can tell my roommate. "I won't be attending all the session because I need a lot of time alone." An alternative way to avoid stimulus overload would be to attend all the sessions, but choose solitude in the free time.  Either way, I would need to explain with positive framing so I would not be seen as "troubled", depressed or weird.

High sensitive people (HSPs) are born that way.  It means we become overly aroused easily. Too much stimulus overwhelms us. It's not the same as being shy.

I highly recommend this book - it's both theoretical and practical.  Libraries carry it.  The same author has written more on this theme - The Highly Sensitive Person in Love.

Exposing Yourself in Words

Expose myself?  Bumpy brown moles, flab, tits and all?   Being a writer entails doing that.  In the last month angry misunderstanding of an e-mail of mine chopped off my confidence for days once.   I gave in to that monster fear and stopped blogging until I felt again that most people weren't like that.   But I've also resolved to be more careful.
    Four days ago I finished the first draft of my novel (a mother-teenage daughter conflict, set in Tokyo, cross cultural in nature).  I had thought by making the story take place in another country in a situation so obviously not true of my daughters, that no one would assume it was biographical or auto-bio.  BUT, when I mentioned to one of my daughter's previous middle school teachers that there's a scene where an older man tries to force himself on a 14 year girl, her eyes grew very big.  I could see in them her panic at the idea that this had happened to my daughter whom she knew.  When I told her nothing like that had happened to my daughters, she calmed.

Why this reaction from this English teacher?  She knows somethshe fears revealing to the world more of her inner self.  Literary experts say its best to write what you know.  So what do writers know best?  Themselves, their family and the circle around them.  I've tried to get beyond this by using an Enneagram book to understand and get inside the viewpoint of someone with a personality totally opposite to myself.    But I, like other writers, can't get away from myself.  I write from my obervations of people and the world and imagination, but still my own wounds, desires, fears, conflicts and perceptions vitalize my words.  These things leak into - or should we say become the grounds of exploration for - my writing.
    Not only do I expose my real issues through the conflicts and themes expressed in my novel, but I risk having people misunderstand and assume wrongly. That's scary.
    I received an e-mail recently where I felt a poem of mine to be misunderstood.   I spend an hour at least composing an answer.  Almost sent it and then thought better.  Too many times when I've done that I've awakened the next morning and regretted it.  In counselling sessions lately I've been confronted lately with my defensiveness--the desire to prove myself right or good.  It often fires back onto my face and I come out burned.  Remembering this,  I sent my hours worth of e-mail letter to myself instead and went to bed. 

In church God reminded me--Jesus was misunderstood.  Some thought he hung on the cross because he deserved it.  His words were misunderstood--some thought he was talking about rebuilding the temple in three days when he was talking about his body being raised again.  An image kept coming back to mind from a recent prayer-healing session I experienced--Jesus looking at me--a baby-- and telling me, "Look at me."  So that's what I'm choosing to do.  Looking away from other's eyes and looking into His.  When I do that, being misunderstood is okay.  I can give up defensiveness.

And I hope that as others who've been vulnerable with their words, like Annie Lamott (Bird by Bird and Travelling Mercies), exposing myself with help others.