TKM

As I write this, I’m not in Hawaii or even in a Starbucks but in our home office, a room that shouts every bit of our house’s 1954 vintage with its dark-paneled walls and diamond-paned windows; we’ve paid homage to its build era with the odd Esther Williams movie lobby card and a framed oversized pullout RCA Victor magazine ad announcing the company’s latest line of 17 television sets, several of which are lovingly caressed by ladies in ball gowns. The view through those diamond-paned windows diverges sharply from 1954, when it was reportedly among the first few houses in our neighborhood, an area of the San Fernando Valley then dominated by apricot orchards. It now overlooks a well-traveled thoroughfare bisecting our thoroughly residential neighborhood, and on weekends I can often expect to watch a recent immigrant, perhaps undocumented, fixing his truck. I’m not crazy about car repairs taking place in my front yard, but I know whose side I’m on amid all the current anti-immigrant Republican hysteria, if only to differentiate myself from these folks:

Honk for spelling proficiency!

Let’s play an analogy game!

Recent immigrants are to many U.S. citizens…

as Eleutherodactylus coqui tree frogs are to many _____________.

If you answered “Hawaiians,” put a gold star on your forehead and proceed directly to the lightning round! And if you want to incur the wrath of same, stage a demonstration for “nonnative” species’ rights anywhere islanders gather.

Our first night on the Big Island we kept looking up into the trees trying to identify the bird emitting this relatively high-pitched but sweet co-qui call. The sound was everywhere, but there were curiously few birds in sight. When we tabled the issue the following morning at breakfast, our B&B hosts told us that the owners of the call were not birds at all but rather tree frogs:

The nonnative species has become a scourge across the island due to that tireless co-qui, used by boy frogs much as a male human would use Barry White records: to both repel other males and attract females. And like Barry, who “Can’t Get Enough of Your Love, Babe,” the little boy frogs court and impregnate the hyper-fertile ladies all the livelong year. (The males average a tiny 34 millimeters, while females reach an average of 41 millimeters, with the pronounced size difference attributed to the burden of all that reproductive energy expended by males.) So successful are the boy frogs at creating more frogs that their species, introduced accidentally to several Hawaiian islands in the mid 1990s via plant matter, has reached densities in some rain forests of approximately 8,000 specimens per acre. That’s about the same density the little devils have achieved in their native Puerto Rico, the difference being that in Puerto Rico they’re reportedly revered as a beloved native species and a symbol of territorial culture, much as Mexicans, all the rage reportedly in Mexico, are seen as encroachers in Los Angeles, especially when they’re not cleaning your toilets.

Mind you, some of the folks who disparagingly pronounced the coqui a nuisance nonnative species themselves arrived in Hawaii later than the frogs did—much as most “native” Angelenos’ families lazily trickled into California quite some time after the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, when the United States “bought” the Southwest from Mexico for $15 million and a psych! fingers-crossed promise to honor Mexican citizens’ preexisting property rights in the territories. Truly, the guy fixing his car in my yard may have a greater claim on my yard than I do—unless I play my Native American card.

If we could all just agree that the concepts of nativeness and citizenship are wack, we’d probably get along a lot better. But U.S. citizens are an I-me-mine lot, even if their families first immigrated to the United States in the 20th century, glossing entirely the part where their own tired, poor, huddled masses were disparaged as wretched refuse by preexisting 19th-century immigrants, who were in turn looked down on by 18th-century immigrants, who seemed like upstarts to Mayflower importees, of whom my own longest-standing North American forebears, the Peigan Blackfeet tribe, were understandably leery.

My Native American bloodline has since been diluted considerably by breeding with Swedes and Germans, but it’s that eighth-part Blackfoot blood that most captures my imagination, both because of the Ninawaki (“manly hearted woman”) tradition—aberrational tribal members identified by early European settlers as women who, contrary to the submissive Blackfeet feminine “ideal,” dressed and acted like their male counterparts, held tribal ranks, owned horses, told bawdy jokes, and sometimes engaged in warrior roles—and because, I suppose, if anti-immigrant assholes want to distinguish native versus nonnative species on a scale of centuries, I’ll gamely play that Native American card and ask them how many millennia their people have been here and suggest that maybe they should vacate my continent. Also, if the Blackfeet Nation ever exercises its sovereign right to establish large-scale gambling on its Montana reservation, I want a piece of my casino.

The Hawaiian Islands having been formed by volcanic activity, there aren’t really any native Hawaiian species, but by casual observation, the imposed cutoff for native versus nonnative species seems to be around 1950. If you landed or were brought to one or more of the islands before then, congratulations, you’re a Hawaiian species. If not, you’re a nuisance, especially if you make a lot of reproductive noise or mess with the ecosystem of a preexisting species. Take the nene—about which le domestique can tell you much more—a Hawaiian goose that serves as the official state bird (it is found in the wild exclusively on Maui, Kauai, and the Big Island). The nene (pronounced nay-nay) is a threatened species whose numbers declined to near extinction around 1952 thanks to hunters and other mean predators and maybe not the best survival instincts on the nenes’ own part. Through human interventions like captive breeding programs they have bounced back from a paltry 30 birds to between 500 and 3,000 today, but there’s a new recent immigrant in town to fuck with the nenes: the Kalij pheasant, a Himalayan breed disparagingly referred to as “those damn chickens” by many residents.

The Kalij pheasant arrived in 1962, a dozen years too late to be considered native, and thrived like a mofo such that by 1977 it was declared a legal game bird. In other words, “We’re lousy with these guys, so let’s shoot ’em”—an attitude not unlike that of self-appointed border vigilantes, who seemingly never got over their crushing disappointment at being rejected from any real job that would allow them to discharge a firearm in the line of duty. Thanks be to heaven that God recognized the need for the Second Amendment when he wrote our glorious Constitution; otherwise we might question the deep and patriotic need for random people to stockpile weapons at a ratio of 200 million firearms to 300 million Americans, and if we didn’t have all those guns, how would we ever feel secure?

One reason the Kalij pheasant is so successful on Hawaii is that it breeds quite competently in the wild [see also: coqui tree frogs]. Adding to its advantages, the Kalij is an omnivore [see also: humans], so while the nene is all finicky with its diet of leaves and berries, the Kalij krew is sucking down entire plants, from roots to buds, robbing the nenes of current and future crops in a single sitting.

I feel for the poor nenes (to say nothing of honest-to-god, born-here white guys), but should coqui tree frogs, those damn chickens, or even brown people really be faulted for thriving in a new environment? Adaptation is a handy skill that’s otherwise lauded by humans. As an invasive species to Hawaii myself, one of my first acts on arrival was to purchase a basic Hawaiian grammar book, both because I’m a big freakball and because I didn’t want to mangle the names of streets and people and seem too much like a tourist, though I’m guessing that any cred I attained in my prodigious ability to pronounce Queen Lili’uokalani’s name was blown as a result of my visit to the Mauna Loa macadamia nut factory:

Learning about the 12-letter alphabet, including all five vowels plus seven consonants, explained the paucity of hard sounds among all those mellifluous mingling vowels, and picking up some basic rules—like every syllable and every word must end in a vowel sound, no two consonants can occur without a vowel separating them, and the accent almost always falls on the penultimate syllable—helped me adapt to my new environment. Not that Hawaii has much of an adapt-or-die vibe, but failure to adapt can be so ugly. Consider the Bradys.

I wish I could tell you that I didn’t think even once about the three-episode Hawaiian vacation arc of The Brady Bunch while visiting the islands, but that would be a lie. I was reminded of it on our very first day, as we hiked the very first trail at Volcanoes National Park. The Bradys didn’t even go to the Big Island as far as I’m aware, but they trotted gamely alongside as we walked past the steam vents of Kilauea, as I undoubtedly drove le domestique to murderous thoughts by painstakingly describing every bit of trouble various family members encountered as a result of Bobby’s having picked up that infernal tiki idol.

That isn’t to say that my Brady memories weren’t corrupted. For instance, I remembered that Don Ho had made a guest appearance, but I misremembered that it had in fact been he who told Bobby the idol would bring an invasive species like himself nothing but heartache; now that I’ve refreshed my memory at the information gettin’ place called the Internet, I’m reminded that he was warned off the idol by those same random guys who told Greg about the big surfing contest that he should enter—because Greg had clearly and obviously become a championship surfer on the flight over.

Le domestique had to be reminded of these basic plot elements because she [claims she] has maybe never even seen the Bradys’ Hawaii triptych! She is, however, aware that the Bradys had run into similarly stressful situations on their Grand Canyon trip, which led us to speculate on a hike through a stunningly beautiful rain forest that the Bradys simply should not have traveled, because they never encountered such strife when they stuck to their own turf, which happens to be the very San Fernando Valley that we call home, which volleys up another issue: As SFV dwellers accustomed to our soft city life on a piece of land which, however licked lengthwise by the Pacific, is contiguously linked to a whole continent’s worth of infrastructure, are we not just as ill-equipped to meet Pele on her own terms? Le domestique picked up a tiki idol in the Honolulu airport; had she slipped it into her theoretical purse instead of setting it back down—after noting that it was made in China—would we have ended up like the Brady boys, hapless hostages of a late-career Vincent Price in his creepy cave lair?

Which brings us to the Thurston Lava Tube, the product of an approximately 500-year-old lava flow that could easily have served as the set for Price’s cool tiki cave hideout. It seems that as a lava flow cools, the outside can form a solid upper crust even as lava continues to flow through its insulated center, forming a tunnel. It’s kind of like a Twinkie, another potentially 500-year-old product, with its creamy goodness excised. Unlike the Thurston Lava Tube, no Twinkie has yet been declared a UNESCO World Heritage Site—but fear not, the little sponge cake can’t be denied its due forever.

VNP has been kind enough to illuminate a section of the TLT that is fairly uniform in width and height such that the average invasive species can amble through it without a flashlight and get the subterranean vibe without need of much courage. But there is kindness also in letting nature stand for itself, and because Hawaii is cool like that, VNP has left a much longer section of the tunnel—a portion less regular in width, height, and depth—dark and craggy and separated from tourists only by a gate and sign warning of its undeveloped nature and the absolute necessity of self-provided light sources beyond that point. Again, I have to hand it to the country of Hawaii for warning tourists of potential pitfalls and then leaving it to us to decide whether we’d like to face the very slight odds that the awesomeness that lies just around the bend could claim a life, perhaps my own.

Happily, le domestique had packed a headlamp, so we surfaced to the rainforest exterior and made our way back to our rental car, then returned to descend its murky maw. As she who is inordinately fond of dark, drippy, and slightly dangerous places, I pronounced the undeveloped part of the TLT an early trip nominee for Coolest Place Ever!

Sharing a single headlamp posed its challenges, but we held hands. Tightly. Tighter still when I noted the similarity in sights and sounds to the very creepy horror flick The Descent, wherein a swell group of nonnative species of the gal variety go spelunking only to encounter subterranean cannibalistic humanoids way scarier than any late-career Vincent Price could ever be. They sound like giggling cockroaches and look like this:

Let’s play an analogy game!

The humanoids in The Descent are to the Sleestaks of Land of the Lost…

as the Thurston Lava Tube is to a ___________.

The dark side of TLT is the kind of place that makes a person feel brave and scared witless all at once—and maybe a little happier for the experience once it’s over, at which time I wanted to do it again. Not unlike riding a roller coaster backward, a terrifying proposition Magic Mountain (now Six Flags) used to occasionally offer up back in the day on its monster wooden coaster Colossus. I was never the bravest kid on the block, but the first rule of hanging out with boys is, Do as they do, and don’t cry about it. So I rode the damn roller coaster backward, never happier than when it finally pulled back into the station. Coming home from Hawaii hasn’t yielded that same sense of bewildered relief, but I know that if I overstayed my welcome there, the stigma of my invasive species status would eventually get me down. I had to return to my “native” soil, because unlike the coqui tree frog, I’m neither willing nor able to replicate myself 10,000-fold to claim my piece of the rain forest, especially when just a one-eighth share is enough to claim sovereign casino gambling rights. I’m waiting, my Blackfeet people.

Speaking of roller coasters, I apologize for any jarring segues, tangents, or abandoned roads you may have noted in the preceding text. My brain is currently laboring under the auspices of Her Royal Highness Mania, which bestows on my thought processes all the fluid melody of free jazz—and makes me think everything I’ve written is fucking brilliant! She’s a fun friend, until she’s not, at which time I may sheepishly delete this post and salt the cyberspace it once occupied.

Reality shows learn ourselves alot of stuff. Like, myself has learnt “myself” is alot better then “I” or “me” when myself talks about I. Of course myself’s English “teacher” learnt myself wrong, or efforted to, when myself was little, but myself never liked herself!

Myself was messed up by “school,” so when themselves on reality shows—their so way awesomer then wrote ones, and whom cares about a dumb “writers” strike anyways now because ourselves just say ourselve’s own words on TV and stuff—were all like “the alliance is Lance, Brett, and myself,” myself was like “whoa!” because myself’s English “teacher” was all like “the alliance is Lance, Brett, and me (or I?).” But now myself knew herself was wrong! “Myself” is alot righter then “I” or “me,” unless myselves are talking about myselves, then myselves are all like “Myself is so full of me (or I?).” Know what myself mean?

Let ourselves review:

“I am only concerned with me, myself, and I.” Wrong!
“Myself is only concerned with me, me, and me.” Rite!

“Like a bridge over troubled water, I will lay me down.” Wronger!
“Like a bridge over troubled water, myself will lie I down.” Rite!

Maybe next time myself can learn yourselves about “lay” and “lie,” if myself is all like wanting to write and stuff.

“Hey, do you guys fix and sell bikes?” a passerby stopped to ask one Sunday as le domestique and I tinkered with our bicycles in the garage.

At first it seemed like a random question, but then I took an objective look at our garage, noting the shop stand; the shelves full of spare pedals, saddles, and other bike parts; two bikes in various states of undress, their tires propped against the fence; and three other bikes hanging about.

“No, sorry,” I said. “We just really like them.”

After a brief discussion about where she might find a cheap used beach cruiser, she went on her way, not realizing, I’m sure, the tribute she had paid me. Imagine me, a bicycle mechanic!

If you’re like me, you seldom appreciate the talents you have, instead eyeing with envy skills you lack. I, for instance, have not as yet revealed anything in the way of musical aptitude. As much as I love music and covet the ability to make it, notes and chords and…stuff aren’t at all intuitive to me. I can poke at keys on a piano or strum something vaguely recognizable on a guitar, but only by rote and not at all soulfully. If only my parents had pushed me to be a well-rounded child, I’ve thought poutily, then I might have developed my musical gifts early, when our skill sets are elastic. And if such had been the case, the reasoning continues, I would undoubtedly be making my living as a singer-songwriter today.

Instead, I make my living as a copy editor. I’m pretty good at it. Give me a muddled manuscript and I can bully it into making sense. I may even be able to make it sing, manipulating the words—mostly the author’s, some my own—and orchestrating the commas and their poorer punctuatorial relations into some kind of musical flow. On especially rare occasions, I’m even artful enough to get away with making up words, like punctuatorial.

But in my continuing quest to decide what I want to be when I grow up, I’ve lately flirted with the idea of going to school to become a bicycle mechanic. Not hard flirting, mind you, rather the kind of flirting one might engage in while already in a committed relationship.

While I’ll admit that, for me, a major industry attractant is the wardrobe, there are others: I enjoy hanging around bike shops, tools are cool, bikes are sexy, and basic bicycle technology—not the quality of components or frame materials but the way a bike works mechanically—has remained static for about a hundred years. That can’t be said of cars, which in a single generation have morphed from the family sedans our dads tinkered with on weekends into vehicles with engine cavities so inscrutable those same dads can only stare forlornly at the tightly packed network of housings and hoses, wishing they could tell us why our goddam “check engine” lights keep flashing.

I got my first taste of wrenching at a hands-on “advanced bicycle maintenance” seminar offered at a local bike shop. I was the only one who showed up, resulting in plenty of personal attention—as well as an earful of sensitive information. My instructor, let’s call him “Dave,” had become a certified mechanic, he said, in response to his fiancée’s demand that he relinquish his former career as a host at swingers’ parties in Chicago. Dave’s was a niche market: He served as a “fluffer” at gatherings of white heterosexual couples who fantasized about having three-ways with black men, he being one such man. Dave didn’t actually have sex with anyone. Rather, his job was to, (a) entertain couples who indulged in the fantasy aspect alone, and (b) prime couples who might be inclined to contract with a hustler, should one happen to be available, coincidentally, at that very same party. Dave may also have appeared in one or two erotic videos, but if he did, he stressed, he didn’t engage in sexual contact—rather, he (may have) played the porn trope of the third-party voyeur, that ubiquitous fellow who stumbles on a couple having sex in, say, the copier room, he being there maybe to fix said copier, and gets so turned on by their naughty public display that he must then remove his own pants and play with his pee-pee. Anyway, his fiancée, a corporate attorney, thought maybe they should move away from Chicago and that maybe, once a couple thousand miles away from his networking circle—in which he operated under a pseudonym connoting meatlike properties—he could do something…else. And he loved her, so he went to bicycle mechanics school.

Dave inspires me, not for the obvious reasons but because when I think about the almost total lack of overlap between his former skill set and that required of a certified bike mechanic, I imagine that my own transition would be a breeze. After all, wrenching is wrenching, whether fixing broken drive trains or clunky sentences. If you want your wheels (subject) to move, you need to pedal (a verb), but if your chain (subject-verb agreement) is broken, your trajectory (sentence) will stall. With all other parts in harmony, your journey (idea) will ramble beyond control should your brakes (punctuation) fail. If you want to move not merely forward but toward a specific destination (direct object), you’ll need to pedal and steer (a predicate), as opposed to merely pedaling (an intransitive verb).

Still, just as experienced copy editors can spot disagreeable text without diagramming sentences, competent mechanics are able to localize a bike’s problem without having to think through how bicycles work. And just as enthusiasm for reading doesn’t necessarily equip a person to edit what he or she reads—though we all occasionally want to chuck a book or magazine across the room because the person who is being paid to write but is not therefore a writer is incoherent, predictable, annoying, abstruse, contrary, or plainly inept in directing their story—riding a bicycle gives me no particular talent for fixing one.

Thanks to Dave’s instruction, I can do more than clean a chain and fix a flat, though my efforts at adjusting derailleurs and truing wheels are amateur at best. Happily, I don’t let that stop me from hiking my bike up on a shop stand and performing a professional pantomime, turning cranks and shifting gears as I watch the chain’s motion and listen for disagreement. As with language, there’s a certain music to all components working in harmony (and as with music, my overambitious manipulation of said components often results in discord).

Still, I can sling my guitar or drape a mechanic’s shirt over my shoulders and fool casual passersby into thinking I am what I am not, and for just a moment I’m not what I am: a comma jockey, wielding no instruments or tools but a dictionary and corrective pens. Not that I think my skill set is unimportant. A poorly punctuated maintenance manual results in confusion at best and mechanical breakdown at worst. And I do so wish that Joan Osborne had asked, “What if God were one of us?” even as I recognize that though Bob Dylan’s “Lay Lady Lay” might inspire images of an egg-retentive hen, “Lie Lady Lie” just isn’t…musical.

So we all, or most of us—I can’t speak for retired fluffers or Bush administration appointees—stick to what we do best, happy in the knowledge that there are others out there ready to do for us what we suck at most. But don’t think for a moment that I’m therefore willing to concede my guitar or my mechanic’s shirts, because the one thing in which we all excel on common par is dreaming.

I come to you today from a joyful place—namely, my own office. Wait a sec, didn’t I already write about getting an office months ago? I did, but then I was recubicled, and now I’ve been reofficed, and this time it’s new and improved, bigger and better than ever. Also, it seems to have come with a mysterious box of “emergency food”—the only nonfurniture item left here by the previous tenant. (Should I tell someone about it?)

My former office was understood to be temporary all along, you see, a shimmering vision of what could be in my otherwise gray cubicle existence. A tease, really.

Then came the move. The building that had long housed our Gay Agenda™ cell had been mightily spiffed up since being purchased several years back by the TV Guide company (whose magazine’s continued success in the TiVo age is a bafflement to me). Those TV Guide people in their business-casual attire—they thought they were so hot. They couldn’t wait for our long-term lease to expire this fall so they could kick our blue jean–clad asses to the curb and get themselves some real tenants, a company able to pay its rent in gold bullion rendered from unclaimed Daytime Emmys, a company with respectable employees who don’t discuss their faggoty, rabble-rousing business on the elevators. At least that’s how I imagine it went down. It’s possible that our company decided to move simply to fuck with our commutes; we cubicle dwellers, even if temporarily stored in offices, aren’t consulted on such matters.

For months our corporate deciders sought for us a new workspace, a building where we might be less conspicuous in our mission to corrupt, convert, and redecorate the nation. In late September we moved into our new base of operations, one we share with the Los Angeles Israeli Consulate. The operations manager could not emphasize enough how super secure this building is—were we, you know, in any way concerned about possible anti-Israel sentiment.

She also told me that I would be situated in “a really nice cubicle,” and to be fair, the cubicles are perfectly pleasant in appearance. Our new cubicles have slate-blue textured fabric “walls” and come equipped standard with built-in shelving and plenty of storage files, one tower of which rolls around on castors and is padded for use as an ottoman or occasional seating! Pretty fancy…once you get past the fact that they lack ceilings and doors and therefore privacy of an even minimally human sort, which is really the essence of cubicle living.

I tried to make it work, truly I did, but I just don’t think as well as I used to. I have trouble following narratives of TV shows with plots any more complicated than, say, America’s Next Top Model. My brain isn’t so much broken as it is unfocused. I was put through a battery of tests following my blackout episodes in 2004, after which my neuropsychologist pronounced me sound but slow. Disregarding time, she said I tested in the above-average to superior range (!), but my processing speed tested somewhat south, in below-average to impaired territory (!?!). While my partner is happy to fill me in on the machinations of CSI and The Wire, I’m afraid I’m on my own at work.

So it is that I found myself drowning in the new environment, a sea of cubicles ringed by the offices of editors and art directors and photo coordinators, people who must routinely interact and were accustomed to having cross-office conversations in our old floor plan, where departments were more partitioned and the copy editors, though stored in cubicles, occupied their own suite. Here, the copy editors have been placed at the very center of the beehive, surrounded by worker bees and drones alike, including individuals of special note: Mr. No Inside Voice and Princess Cell Phone. By the end of two weeks my grasp on sane functionality was tenuous.

And then, The Straw. You know the straw I’m talkin’ about: that last one, the one that broke the camel’s back?

The operations manager, standing near my cubicle while discussing important operations stuff with HR, invoked the dichotomous rubric of “office people” and “cubicle people” to describe the office population.

There are some things up with which I simply will not put.

There I was, stuffing earplugs deep into my canals, wearing wonky, old-school, over-the-ear headphones, trying in vain to become functional in a dysfunctional environment, only to be labeled a “cubicle person.” That was approximately when I decided I would have to do something antithetical to my worldview: I would have to ask for what I needed.

No, seriously, this is a breakthrough in my cognitive-behavioral universe, because I have always thought that the best way to be liked—and maybe even eventually rewarded—is to not ask for much, not make waves, and be the most agreeable girl in all the land. Having followed this strategy to little end for several decades now, I’m ready to admit that it doesn’t work. As it turns out, people aren’t psychic, not even the ones who love me, and certainly not the ones who employ me.

I appealed to HR, citing the complications of a scrambled brain, and she took me on a tour of available cubicles. I spent time in each of them, trying to get a feel for the environment, and in no case did it take longer than 45 seconds to identify those in the area who lack inside voices. I acknowledged that in moving I would merely be jumping out of the frying pan into an adjacent frying pan—on a burner less convenient to my department—and resolved to give it another go, to try to reconfigure my working process, which is a bit like thinking I can tell myself I’m a butterfly and that I will soon levitate as a result. It didn’t work. Spectacularly.

Plan B was to say, No, really, I’m serious, I can’t work under these conditions. “A job I love is making me miserable,” I said.

Two days later I moved into my fab new workspace, an official medical accommodation. Finally, all the weirdness of the past two years has paid a dividend!

By the way, don’t feel sorry for the guy they evicted to make room for me. He’s an intern who works here exactly two days a week. And that, my friends, is how lowly we copy editors are regarded: Part-time interns get offices while we’re reduced to begging.

My first day in the new digs, an IT guy pointed out to me a design flaw in the door that enables anyone who so desires to lock me in from the outside, but I was far too preoccupied with the concept of even having a door to worry about anyone wanting to imprison me. And, really, can he possibly think I’m threatened by the idea of isolation? Ha! Whatever, dude. I’ll just put on a little Coltrane and crack me open a brick of that emergency food.

In my capacity as an operative for the Gay Agenda™ I must sometimes perform tasks that I find disagreeable. Should any representatives of the totally agenda-free, just-trying-to-save-your-eternal-soul-ma’am religious right be reading, I’m not talking about propagandizing and recruiting your children: I haven’t yet achieved that clearance level. No, what I’m doing is far more insidious; indeed, it may be counterproductive to the cause: I’m editing the coming-out story of a piss-poor role model.

The Gay Agenda™, while whimsically characterized by televangelists and sundry Republicans as almost irresistibly powerful, is really rather desperate, and as such we’ll pretty much accept any new recruits who come our way. It’s like a giant game of Red Rover, except that substitutes are almost invariably sent in place of the recruits we call for. For instance, we call, “Red rover, red rover, send Cher right over!” and over charges Chastity to join our team. At first we think, Hey, that’s not who— But then we shrug and go, “Yay, the more the merrier!” Then sometimes we call out, say, “Kevin Spacey!” and they send the right guy, and we cheer him on as he comes running over, but when he reaches us he angrily denies that he’s gay, breaking our spirit. Per the rules of the game, any opponent who breaks our team’s spirit not only returns to his own team but takes a member of our team back with him, which is what happened to Anne Heche.

Clearly our recruiting strategies are flawed, and I have to think that the weakness of our educational materials looms large in our failure to surpass the 10% market saturation we achieved decades ago. While the heterosexuals advertise their “lifestyle” in the Bible, the best-selling book in America, we long ago realized that, given our budget constraints, the only venue in which we could truly access nationwide crossover market reach is the PennySaver. And compared to straight advertising, our own material lacks a certain kickiness: “Did you know homosexuality has been decriminalized and declassified as a mental disorder? Give it a try—if you can get past that societally ingrained ‘ick’ factor.”

With recruitment materials that underwhelming, we can’t afford to be choosy, which is why we’ve offered open enrollment since the mid-1950s (following a politically embarrassing “sexual purity” movement among extremists agitating to restrict membership to Kinsey fives and up). And since homosexuality is a tough sell based on its historical image, we increasingly rely on contemporary spokesmodels to represent our brand. Heterosexuality, while harboring its fair share of losers, is hawked by a dazzling array of celebrities. Even fringe sects like Christian fundamentalism and Scientology are endorsed, respectively, by Mel Gibson and Tom Cruise. And us? Now, let me be crystal-clear: I’m not dissing Ellen—we all love her; she’s cool people—but I think we can all agree that upon her shoulders are not empires built. Plus, there are a lot of would-be lesbians who just don’t think they would look good in a suit and sneakers; we lose that demographic before we even get a chance to highlight the more alluring perks of our benefits package: potentially shared wardrobes, no more accidental procreation, etc.

So we take what we can get. Thus I’ve spent the last couple of days tracking down articles and sources to verify facts in a top-secret, exclusive coming-out story—a rare glimpse into the personal life of…well, a person who won’t exactly cover the Gay Agenda™ in glory, and for this I apologize to my teammates in advance. But we called “Red rover!” and this is who the straights sent over, and that’s the way the game is played.

I got up on the wrong side of the bed this morning. I certainly didn’t realize it at the time. I actually felt well rested and pleasant enough upon awakening, knowing as I did that for the next few days I would be free of my labors: the nudging around of commas and such. Let misplaced punctuation flourish throughout the land this Labor Day, for I care not. What I do care about, among several other things, are reference books, and no one can make me give them up, not even on a weekend during which I’m encouraged to eschew the tools of my trade.

Ever seen the Hepburn-Tracy film Desk Set? Kate is the head of the reference department at a television network and Spence is an efficiency expert hired to assess where his newly developed supercomputer can replace employees and save the company a few bucks in payroll. I’ve watched the movie at least a dozen times, never giving a flying fig about the inevitable romantic sparks between go-getter working gal Hepburn and her perceived archenemy Tracy. I’m in it for the scenes during which Kate and her team field inquiries ranging from the total weight of the earth to the names of Santa’s eight reindeer, sometimes answering off the tops of their heads but more often searching out answers in their glorious stacks, an upstairs loft with thousands of books collectively containing all the information any of the various employees of a TV network could ever need to know.

A teenager when I first saw the film, I suddenly knew what I wanted to be when I grew up: Hepburn’s fast-talking, whip-smart human encyclopedia, without the messy romantic entanglements. Why did she have to moon after Gig Young or fall for Spence when she had the greatest life ever—a single woman with a head full of steam and a roomful of knowledge?

Years later I would at last locate my sexuality and understand the complications therein, though I still found no appeal in Gig or Spence. How great it would be if Kate instead fell for her coworker Joan Blondell and they forged a life together, two books unbound, swapping fascinating bits of information amid winks and smiles—it is a 1957 film, after all; adult relations are merely hinted at through the symbology of bathrobes.

I did eventually grow up to assume a career in which facts and figures figure prominently, though most of the data I need can be gleaned more quickly via Spence’s cursed computer than through the thousands of books that make up our research department. Still, there’s great appeal in physical volumes, their relative weight often indicative of their information wealth, their indices irresistibly inviting the reader in multiple directions at once. God help me when I have to look something up in a real book, because on my path to whatever I was looking for I’m liable to engage with some other entry and forget what I was supposed to be doing. If you ever happen to lose me in a bookstore, before having me paged like an errant child, check the reference section for my glassy-eyed self, hypnotized by the visage of so many compendiums of information, sorted and ordered for my tidy, systematic gratification.

Maybe it’s because I grew up in a home without an encyclopedia. I know, I know. But there’s nothing we can do about that now; we can only shoulder on when faced with such retrospective adversity. It’s not that my parents couldn’t afford such—we always had shoes in the wintertime—they just didn’t particularly see the point in spending all that money on a stack of books they figured would ultimately serve only to collect dust. Besides, we had a branch library well within biking distance; I could go pet their encyclopedias whenever the mood struck.

So this morning I was flipping through my Facts on File Encyclopedia of Word and Phrase Origins, ’cause that’s the way I roll. I wasn’t looking for anything in particular, just, you know, flipping. This is the second copy I’ve purchased of Robert Hendrickson’s 800-page tome, having bought the first during the 2004 holidays as a gift for my therapist, who had only weeks before asked if I could recommend a good book about the etymology of idioms. My therapist had not only asked me for information, she had asked me for information regarding a volume of information—somebody pinch me! I did my research and settled on the Hendrickson volume, then I wrapped it in holiday-nonspecific paper—she’s coy when I try to discover her belief system—slid it into a manila envelope, just in case my HMO forbade gifts between doctors and clients, and left it with her secretary.

When I came for my appointment the following week she told me the book was precisely what she had in mind and that she adored it, so much so that she bought a second copy for her father and a third for the office staff: When she showed them her copy they were reportedly loathe to give it back. For weeks afterward, upon arrival for my appointment, her receptionist would regale me with reportage: “According to the book ‘happy as a clam’ comes from ‘happy as a clam at high tide,’ because clams were dug at low tide, so, you know, they would be happier at high tide. I never thought about it, but ‘happy as a clam’ doesn’t really make sense, not without the tide part.” Truly it doesn’t. (This is why copy editors often excise hackneyed expressions from the work of writers who have slipped into autopilot mode—commonly heard idioms become furniture in the American lexicon, to such a degree that our brains no longer bother to process the words or their [potential lack of] meaning.)

I later bought a copy for myself, because how could I have lived this long without one? And as I glanced through it this morning I noticed the entry for “getting up on the wrong side of the bed.” In keeping with the age-old superstition that the left is sinister and unlucky, Romans, particularly Augustus Caesar, always got out of bed on the right side to ensure good health and humor.

Good to know: The left is the wrong side of the bed. This explains so much. You see, my partner and I, we have our sides, and mine is the left—always has been—which means that for close to 12 years I’ve been getting up on the wrong goddamn side of the bed!

Why didn’t anyone tell me this before? Has my partner known all along? After all, she’s my Hepburn, retaining every shred of information she’s ever gathered, ready to spit it out on demand. Me? I often can’t remember my phone number; I’m Joan Blondell, always having to climb up into the stacks to ferret out my answers.

Le domestique has left me to languish in the ill health and humor of the wrong side of the bed for over a decade—and she is now officially busted. Starting tomorrow morning I’ll be getting out of the right side of the bed, thank you very much—and don’t think I won’t be rolling over your ass to get there.

Once we leave high school, our composition skills are unlikely to see further instruction. Sad, that. Even we English majors seldom see significant improvement in our core knowledge of sentence structure and grammar post–K-12. Sure, we exit college with a wicked ability to talk smack about Joseph Conrad’s use of symbol and TS Eliot’s meter, but the actual verbiage of our essays? Strictly high school.

The miracle of e-mail distanced us further still from our practice of composition. Even as it encourages greater and more frequent communication, it also prompts faster, less structured missives, its deconstruction of language aided and abetted by the shorthand adopted by users of Internet discussion boards and text-messaging.

But just as the Internet taketh away, the Internet giveth back: Enter blogging, the 21st-century savior of written language. If that seems like an overstatement, consider this: Other than a blog entry, what’s the last thing you wrote that qualified as a composition, with a main idea, reasonably formal sentence and paragraph structure, and a general sense of wholeness? Blogging is good for you!

Sure, there are bloggers who post word vomit, but I don’t read their blogs and I suspect that you don’t either. You’re a discerning reader, a well-versed blogger, and a better person for your attention to detail. It’s that attention to detail I hope to engage here.

I thought it might be fun to occasionally write about something other than myself, but I can make just about anything about me, other than subjects I don’t know anything about, like nuclear physics or golf, and who wants to hear the pontifications of someone who lacks any authority on the subject under discussion—other than Bill O’Reilly’s estimated 2.5 million daily viewers?

Hey, I thought, with a snap of my fingers, maybe I should natter on about instances of grammatical misuse that are so prevalent they have very nearly overtaken correct usage, the kinds of mistakes I routinely encounter among not just casual but professional writers.

Presenting the inaugural entry in what I hope will be continuing series, a sort of Grammar for Anti-Dummies. Read forth and be edified, then flaunt your correctitude proudly. And please don’t fret over whether you’ve personally made the kinds of mistakes cited. In the case of today’s subject, misuse is as epidemic as that crystal meth I hear so much about. And even if you have made such a mistake, no one noticed except the odd English teacher or copy editor, and, really, how many of those types regularly read your blog?

Without further ado, I present today’s lesson:

When using the phrase “more important” or “most important” to give weight to an item in a list, reject the common instinct to write “importantly.”

The boring English-teacher reason is that “important” is an adjective and is used to modify nouns, of which your list items are almost certainly composed. “Importantly” is an adverb and is therefore properly used as a modifier of action and circumstance.

Take the following:

The primary tools of my trade are a computer, a red pen, and, most important, a good dictionary.

While “most importantly” might sound correct in this instance, the subtle addition of that “ly” would imply thought or action on the dictionary’s part, and while dictionaries are important (sayeth the copy editor), they cannot think or do anything—though if they could, they would certainly do it in a self-important manner.

Also note that if you reframe the sentence*, it wouldn’t make sense to say, “A good dictionary is most importantly to my trade.”

*This is a handy tool when questioning usage in your own writing (especially when you don’t have an English teacher or grammar handbook nearby): Try reversing noun and verb order in your head to see whether your sentence still makes sense.

In general, an introductory “more” or “most” will call for the adjective “important.”

Reserve the word “importantly” to color a character:

President Bush strides importantly about the room, knowing as he does that Jesus is on his side.

Take out the word “importantly” and the tone of the sentence is ambiguous, leaving it up to the reader to decide whether the author means to characterize Bush as heroic or arrogant. Inserting the word solidifies the tone as dryly sarcastic and disparaging, a tone one should always employ when discussing the current administration. Instances are few in which you might describe a person as acting “importantly” without conveying mockery.

The adverb form can also color the significance of an action or perception:

Sexy CSI Sara Sidle kicked open the door to the crack den and noted, importantly, that the abandoned warehouse smelled uncharacteristically of bleach and cleaning agents.

Sure, Jorja Fox is a total lesbionic babe, but the more important point of the sentence is that her character has perceived something amiss in the crack den (even more amiss than are crack dens’ general wont).

Pretty simple stuff, this “important” vs. “importantly” distinction. If you’ve read this far, I hope it was worth your time, and, more important, I hope you feel like a total grammar stud. Blog fierce!

(OK, that should properly be “Blog fiercely,” but the proper form just doesn’t have the rat-a-tat cadence I want. Secondary lesson of the day: Never let boring old rules get in the way of your self-expression.)

This may be the most important blog entry you’ll ever read.

I received an e-mail message Monday from a gentleman named Andrey Vladimirovich Popov. Rather, it was forwarded to me by a friend whose hard heart blinded him to the purity of Mr. Popov’s motives in pleading for financial assistance to save his little niece Elina’s life. Elina, he says, suffers from tetarado fallo, a rare and fatal congenital heart disease.

A bit of a skeptic myself—it’s the human condition, I’m afraid—I Googled Elina’s illness only to find Mr. Popov’s claim to be absolutely true: Tetarado fallo is in fact so rare the search query returns not a single hit on Google! Poor Elina, who is too young to understand, in Mr. Popov’s words, “that her life can be stopped suddenly in the absence of money.” (Mr. Popov’s awkward, foreigner’s grasp of English isn’t the least of his charms!)

Sure, I could have sent Mr. Popov the $1, $10, or $100 he requested—whatever I’m comfortable sending, his humble hat-in-hand tone conveyed. But, as is so often the case, I found myself wanting to do more than could be achieved with my own humble finances.

In a moment of pure inspiration I hooked Mr. Popov up with Dr. Bisi Odum, a Nigerian friend (pen pal? How are we to refer to letter friends in the age of e-mail?) I’ve been corresponding with for some months. Dr. Odum is in contact with someone in the employ of a government official who desperately needs help in transferring a great fortune he acquired while helping a disgraced dignitary to flee the country. When I first heard from Dr. Odum in June 2005, I wondered why on earth someone so remote and with such riches to share would contact me, and now I finally have my answer: because I was fated to act the catalyst for two needful men, one in need of a fortune and the other in need of someone (with a bank account) with whom to share his fortune. Serendipity, thy name is Scout!

I share with you this heartwarming tale to illustrate my sincere belief in the awesome power of humankind when united toward a common goal. Together we can do anything, from saving little Elina’s life through the largesse of opportunistic Nigerian government officials to enabling each other to actualize the greatness we harbor within, which brings me to my own humble story.

When you visit your local bookstore you may ask yourself, What do all these published authors have that Scout doesn’t have? More talent? More drive? People skills? Better ideas? Interesting lives? Connections? Agents? A contract? All are respectable answers, dear readers, but each fail to address the core issue: financial freedom.

Friends tell me, “Say, Scout, that Nicole Richie published a book, and she’s a complete moron. How come you don’t write a book?”

Well, Nicole Richie doesn’t spend eight hours a day fixing other people’s writing, does she? No. Her family is wealthy, because her dad was a Commodore and still gets residuals every time you hear “Three Times a Lady,” and I think he also had a solo career, and she therefore has plenty of money and plenty of time to write a novel, the content of which someone like me must fix in order to make her appear literate. Do you see how unfair the world is? Just because my father worked at an oil refinery instead of joining the Commodores—and my dad totally could have rocked “Brick House”—my voice is silenced.

You may be tempted to minimize my plight by insisting that I can write in my off hours. If such rationale makes you better able to ignore the sound of my soul screaming, that’s your demon to wrestle, but I would be remiss in not telling you that patrons of the arts sit at the right hand of God in heaven. (Unfortunately, everybody nowadays claims God promised him or her a seat at his right hand. To accommodate the influx of do-gooders, individual seats have been torn out and replaced with Astroturf for a “festival seating” atmosphere. Left-hand-of-God seating is still available, with preference given to American Express cardholders. God apologizes for any inconvenience or seating arrangements otherwise implied.)

When I come home from work I’m bone-tired. Some speak of “desk jobs” as though we office workers are just a bunch of lazy clock-watchers. Ha! Until they sit a spell in my ergonomic desk chair they simply can’t appreciate the challenge of reading sentence after clumsily executed sentence, a red pen poised just above the page, ready to correct any offending text. And as if that isn’t stressful enough, I often must contact informants to ensure that they’re represented accurately and that their names are spelled correctly and such, and those informants aren’t always cooperative with us journalistic types; sometimes they don’t want their names spelled correctly, but I press on in the service of accuracy.

As far as my weekends go, there’s so much to catch up on: laundry and grocery shopping and petting my animal companions, plus watching quality television like Meerkat Manor and Intervention. In other words, it’s simply impossible to write the great, great novel that lurks within me while working a full-time job. And that’s where you come in.

For a limited time, I’m offering readers of my blog the opportunity to support me in the lifestyle to which I aspire as I make the leap from anonymous copy editor to renowned author. Before you say “yes!” to this once-in-a-lifetime opportunity, read what the critics have been saying about Scout:

“As with real gems, I find myself not so much thinking, as just feeling dazzled.” —hopskipjump

“Can I get an ‘AMEN’?” —slangred

“Orgazzzzzzzzmic.” —eb

“The more I learn about you, the more fascinating you are.” —wordsrock

“God, I’m so turned on.” —wenwhit

Convinced? Don’t commit yet; here’s what you’ll get with your sponsorship:

• Lifetime membership in Scout’s fan club
• A personally inscribed copy of the novel you finance (impersonally autographed copies available on request for enterprising sorts who wish to sell theirs for big bucks on eBay)
• One or more characters in said novel named after you
• One insertion in said novel of something—an item, place, person, etc.—personally meaningful to you, so long as your requested insertion does not alter the plot. For instance, a request to incorporate your dachshund, a favorite café, or Cheetos® would be cheerfully granted, whereas a request to insert the poem you’ve written about your dachshund, favorite café, or Cheetos® may be refused if said novel is not amenable to a poet character
• Bragging rights
• Everlasting self-satisfaction for having enabled art to flourish

Ready to commit? Well, hold on to your girdles, because you haven’t heard the best part: All of this is available to you at the introductory Founders Circle™ rate of just $10,000! Not only that, but for every Founders Circle™ sponsorship sold, I will donate $1 in that member’s name to Elina Popov. This offer is strictly limited to those who accept it; once Founders Circle™ sponsorships have been issued to all who respond, there will be no more sold. Act now by sending your personal bank account information to neurotranscendence@gmail.com.

Remember: The greater the number of readers who respond to this unbelievable offer, the better my lifestyle will be.

I was asked recently what my favorite element of punctuation is. Really, copy editors are asked these kinds of things, and good golly are they glad anyone cares! OK, in truth, it was my partner who asked, but when I replied she asked me to flesh out my answer for possible use in a language course aimed at adorable little freshmen. Pretty cool, huh? Since writing about my favorite punctuation derailed me from writing the blog entry I was planning—which, by the way, might’ve been about boobs!—I’ve decided to instead post my punctuation piece. Punctuation, boobs: It’s all good, right?

This is an em dash: —. Isn’t she beautiful? While her uses are many—introducing attributions, signifying interruptions in quoted speech, setting off lists (as used here)—her most heroic function lies in eliminating confusion in long or complex sentences, particularly when a writer wants to signal to readers a shift in thought, tone, or pace. Take the following:

1(a). When asked to name her favorite element of punctuation, the copy editor thoughtfully considered parentheses, the semicolon, the colon, at once deftly delineating and joining sentences, complete and otherwise, and the em dash, fairy godmother to the overworked Cinderella of punctuation, the comma.

Decipherable, perhaps, but such sentences cause readers to stumble or even reread them in trying to understand their meaning. A confused reader is an unhappy one—of this you can be sure—so the primary aim of good writing is always clarity, whether ideas are expressed in simple or complex sentences. In the sentence cited, a simple set of em dashes accomplishes that aim:

1(b). When asked to name her favorite element of punctuation, the copy editor thoughtfully considered parentheses, the semicolon, the colon—at once deftly delineating and joining sentences, complete and otherwise—and the em dash, fairy godmother to the overworked Cinderella of punctuation: the comma.

Replacing a set of commas with a set of em dashes not only breaks the monotony of example 1(a) but signals a shift in emphasis between the main idea of the sentence—a list of favorite punctuation elements—and the secondary information contained therein—an aside about the particular appeal of the colon (perhaps honoring its runner-up status?).

In the sentence just above I used em dashes to emphasize detail—signaling that the phrases contained within are meant to illustrate the points made in the body of the sentence—and parentheses to deemphasize a tangential thought (an aside that may otherwise serve only to confuse the reader). Setting such details off instead with commas creates minor chaos:

2. Replacing a set of commas with a set of em dashes not only breaks the monotony of example 1(a) but signals a shift in emphasis between the main idea of the sentence, a list of favorite punctuation elements, and the secondary information contained therein, an aside about the particular appeal of the colon, perhaps honoring its runner-up status.

Looking back at example 1(b) for a moment, bonus points for anyone who noticed one other minor change: the replacement of the final comma with a colon, lending more emphasis to the phrase “the comma” than it might have enjoyed were it set off by, well, a comma.

The comma’s greatest strength is its versatility, which also, sadly, can be its most frustrating weakness. Just because the comma can be used doesn’t mean it should be used, not when written language is so rich with options: Adopt a couple of neglected but eager parentheses. Employ an out-of-work colon. Dust off a pair of em dashes. Go crazy! But not too crazy—keep this rule in mind:

In general, em dashes emphasize content while parentheses deemphasize content, with commas steadfastly maintaining the middle ground. Thus, choose your punctuation with care.

It would be silly, for instance, to write:

3(a). It would be silly—for instance—to write this.

Though it would be sillier still to write:

3(b). It would be silly (for instance) to write this.

Save em dashes for clauses you wish to highlight—at which time they’ll spring forth as eagerly as a puppy, ready to lend energy and character to your writing—and let parentheses serve in their own parenthetical way (though they’ve been known to grouse, with a sigh, “Always the bridesmaid, never the bride”).

And don’t assume that em dashes must occur in pairs (though, for your readers’ sake, please don’t open a parenthetical statement without ensuring that it is properly closed). Employing a single em dash in a sentence commands your readers’ attention, enticing them forward—c’mon, readers, let’s go see what’s over here! It can also lend particular force to a short, terminal phrase—really, it will!

Steve Martin wrote an essay for The New Yorker in 1997 in which he announced a worldwide shortage of periods and, indeed, used only one period in the entire essay, resulting in a knuckle-cracking demonstration of skill with alternative punctuation.

Were a comma shortage afoot, how would you do your part to conserve? If you say, “Use more em dashes, of course!” thanks for listening, but I’m not so biased toward her seductively long sweep that I would forsake other useful elements of punctuation.

My best advice for fellow writers is this: “Listen” to what you read and write, and train yourself to “hear” the flow of the language. Clear, concise writing flows swiftly, while confusing, unnecessarily complex verbiage stammers and leads readers aground. We rarely notice when language is wielded with precision—it’s the jarring jangle of the wrong that gets our attention: That’s good! Notice the wrong in everything you read, and then ask yourself, Why did that sentence make me stop reading midway, sending me back to the beginning as though it’s MY fault it was constructed poorly? If it was in fact your fault, fix it! If not, fix it anyway! Sharpen your punctuation skills to a steely point and unleash your sense of all that is elegant and fine on a disorganized world. If you’re not part of the punctuation solution, you’re part of the problem.

While visiting my parents at the ranchito this past weekend—and performing routine maintenance of my mother’s e-mail box: trashing megaton attachments that had clogged her dial-up pipeline, fixing preferences that had mysteriously been altered, and, when she wasn’t looking, deleting bigoted jokes and “patriotic” propaganda her brothers had sent her—my mother asked if I could help her with a letter she was writing.

Let me repeat that: My mother asked for my help.

My brother’s services are constantly being called upon. He can mend a fence or a roof, re-plaster a ceiling, tile a bathroom, anything really. “That brother of yours is a handy one,” my father likes to tell me.

Yes, but can he give Mother a perm?

Copyediting, while marketable in the workplace, isn’t as much in demand around the homestead as, say, your basic carpentry skills. Besides which, my copyediting zeal has incurred some familial wrath in the past.

My maiden copyediting job was my mother’s 1981 Christmas letter, and I was decommissioned immediately after turning in my finished copy. You see, I wasn’t so much enlisted to copyedit the letter; I was meant to type it. Arrogant teenager that I was, I couldn’t help but see her longhand pages, torn from a drugstore writing tablet, as the roughest of rough drafts—jotted notes, even. Surely she’d want me to smooth her clunky sentences, give current to her narrative, root out passive language, and replace repetitive words and phrases with more arresting verbiage. This would be her best Christmas letter ever!

“This isn’t my letter,” she said when I gave it to her, her expression one of pure consternation. I don’t remember how I responded to her too true accusation—I was busy being stunned by the idea that she didn’t completely love what I had written for her.

But of course she was right to take back her original letter and instead ask my father to type it up for her at work—verbatim. Authorial voice, even if that’s not what she would have called it, is paramount. How dare I assume just because her writing doesn’t “flow” that it’s not the best language with which to communicate her experiences and thoughts. My mother’s friends and relatives would no more have recognized her in the letter I had written than a literary academic would recognize a William Blake poem written entirely in legalese.

Still, her rejection stung, and I never forgot it. And she had never asked for my help with a piece of writing again—until now.

It’s a pretty unsexy assignment, this particular writing project: She wants me to lend force and cohesion to a letter she and my father are writing to a Mr. Matthew W. Slowick, a name you’ll want to remember should you ever need to address the Advance Planning Division of the San Bernardino County, Calif., Land Use Services Department. While personal reasons for wishing to contact such a department may be as many and varied as the directions unfettered community development might take were it not for county bureaucrats, my mother’s reason is more singular: horses.

My mother has made two significant moves in her life. Her first, from her birthplace in Iowa to California at age 20, took her away from her horse, Davey—the best horse who ever lived™. So it was only natural that her second move, at age 63, was to decamp from the suburban tract home she shared with my father in Orange County to a horse property in Yucaipa, an agricultural region with a population of around 50,000. Within a year of moving my parents had acquired two paints, and six months later they took on a third, all under 2 years old.

You may be thinking that three toddler-aged horses seem like too many for retirees in their mid 60s, one of whom has always been a little scared of horses, the other of whom hasn’t cared for one in over four decades. As I’m lately given to say, “It’s all fun and games until someone breaks a hip.” But let’s put these worries aside for the sake of the letter to Mr. Slowick.

Mr. Slowick is the man you want to contact when an unscrupulous mustache-twirling developer is planning a 500-home-and-golf-course development just across the way from your quiet ranchito, especially if said project includes a proposal to turn your privately maintained dead-end rural road into a thoroughfare connecting your 1,000+ new neighbors to the interstate.

“It won’t do any goddam good,” my father declared. “But we might as well give ’em an earful.”

Reading over my finished letter, I’m not sure I gave anyone an earful. In fact, I’m pretty sure I didn’t, because I was trying to write something that wouldn’t be dismissed as the work of a retiree who’s given over to raising hell as a hobby.

The drafts I worked from, one written by my mother and one by my father, were more emotional than county correspondence should ideally be, by turns fatalistic—we can’t have nice things—and angry—your greed is ruining our lives! “How close do you want the letter to be to what you’ve written?” I asked when I accepted the assignment, dancing around the implied question: Will we be enjoying a rerun of the 1981 Christmas letter aftermath?

“Do whatever you think is best,” my mother said.

I just had lunch with a journalist colleague and we discussed the delicate matter of editing friends and family members. “I won’t do it anymore,” he said flatly. “Because they don’t really want to be edited; they want you to reassure them that what they’ve written is great.”

“So what do you do when someone asks you to edit something?” I asked.

“I take it and give it back to them a couple days later telling them not to change a thing—that it’s just perfect. That’s all they want to hear.”

Hmm. That would be great advice if I hadn’t already sent the finished product to my parents, and also if I didn’t want so desperately to be valuable to them in some tangible way. But I had, and I do. I want them to think of me as they do my brother, as someone who’s talented and useful and generally good to have around, not as the alien lesbian daughter they love despite who she is. I want them to appreciate me for a skill or trait that’s unmistakably mine.

I spent the better part of this morning on the letter, starting from scratch but reading and rereading their letters both before and after writing mine, making sure I hit all their talking points and adding some of their phrases to the final version to make it a truly collaborative effort. Then I e-mailed the file to them with the reassurance that they shouldn’t hesitate to ask me for any changes they might need—i.e., should they want me to throw out my version and type their letters as they’d given them to me.

I returned from lunch to the following e-mail:

“Wow, we would not want to change a thing. This is great! When I give Sharon [neighbor] a copy of it, I think I will just let her think we did this all by ourselves. She will think we are pretty smart then, huh? No, I will tell her that we gave you some of the things to write about, and you did the finishing touches. Thanks so much!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Love Ya,
Mom

While I’m ordinarily irritated by any overindulgence in exclamabangs, in this instance I don’t mind them at all. Finally, I can put that damned 25-year-old Christmas letter to rest.