You say tomato, I say, um, that's not a vegetable

In which I make fun of vegetables, New Jersey, students, and possibly some other things that don't deserve it.

I am posting this early, because I am going to spend Thursday writing writing writing (and waiting for animal control).

Welcome to this week's Thursday News of the Absurd Will Someone Please Write This Book Inspirational Moment (TNoftheAWSPWTBIM). No, it is not this, though dearie me, Lord knows I was tempted. Instead...

From UPI:

Students say tomato should be N.J. veggie

Apparently, a group of eager yet ultimately misguided New Jersey students have started a campaign to make the tomato the state vegetable of New Jersey. They are even planning a trip to the state capital to push their case on April 6, which is "National Tomato Day."

All very fine and good, except that, um, a tomato is not a vegetable.

So the question is: did they know? Because if they didn't, it's a kind of sweet story about a group of kids finding their voice in all the wrong ways. But if they knew, and built the campaign anyway, it's an AWESOME story about a group of kids trying to make a laughingstock of New Jersey, its government, tomatoes, and the whole food pyramid.

I think there was a contest, between warring groups in the school. Each group had to pull a prank. One group filled the teacher's lounge with styrofoam peanuts. One group had the local high school mascot, the Ugly Ox, voted homecoming queen.

And one group was led by Finn, the otherwise quiet, always so well-behaved, never would have expected this from him Finn. Slightly overweight Finn who got tired of lectures about the food pyramid and tired of his older sister getting all the attention. Finn who had the fabulous idea to get a new law made, the most ridiculous law they could invent and get passed. Finn never thought it would go this far, but it has, and now he wants to (or has to) see it straight through to the National Tomato Day climax.

Who will write me this book?

A clarification

It has come to my attention* that I may have given you the impression that I hate animals. This is a falsehood. True, I spent a good ten minutes yesterday trying to assure that a mother raccoon laid her baby nest anywhere but in the insulation above my son's bed. True, I may have tried to accomplish this by banging on pots and pans every time I saw her until she retreated out of sight for the day.

But people, I love animals.

For example, I love snakes. It's true. I had a garter snake named Snakey in my classroom** and I spoiled that baby so rotten with live fish that he wouldn't take crickets and other things garter snakes love in the wild.

Wait, did that sound like I hate fish? I love fish. I used to want to BE a fish. Every time I went in the ocean from ages 3 to 15 now, I walked very slowly and deliberately in and then dove under because I had a secret hidden hope that I was really a mermaid and that THIS TIME, upon contact with my natural habitat, I would sprout fins and swim away. After hearing Michael Reisman talk about how much he loves his fish, I consulted him extensively and bought Tink her own goldfish and who do you think feeds Filly nightly and cleans/refills his tank weekly monthly biannually???

Here is a list of other animals I had as pets in my classroom at one time or another:
a Mexican red-kneed tarantula
baby opossums
a bearded dragon
leopard frogs
painted lady butterflies
an African pygmy hedgehog***

Oh, Hedgie. I loved Hedgie so much that when Hedgie got sick, I brought him home and tried to nurse him back to health on a diet of freshly steamed carrots and boiled chicken until Thor told me Hedgie was not welcome on the kitchen counter any more.

So there. See? I am an animal lover and anyone who thinks otherwise is -- What's that? Okay, I can see where this might mislead you into thinking I hate squirrels.

Well.

Um.

Yeah. I can't deny it. I do hate squirrels. Little squeaking flightless pigeons.

Edited to add: As I am reading the comments this afternoon, something is crawling around above me in a part of my house that HAS NO ATTIC. Whatever it is is scratching and biting and must be in my roof somehow and, yes, I admit, I hate it too, even if it is not a squirrel. Not to worry, my boyfriend from Animal Control is coming soon.

* Darn you, real life peanut gallery!
** To be more specific, I had Snakeys # 1 through 3.
*** yes, I know it's not legal to own hedgehogs in some states. Illinois isn't one of those states. All of these animals, in fact, were checked, etc., and okay to have. And they were very well cared for by grown-ups, not second graders.

Monday Math

1.

2. Given that
a=40
b=10
c=2
d=10 and
e=0

where
a=approximate weight of pregnant raccoon in pounds
b=number of minutes Jacqui spent at her front door screaming, dancing, and banging on
c=number of pots, to try to scare the raccoon into not crossing the street, and
d= number of times Jacqui has written "Find hole squirrels where squirrels got in and fix it" and
e=number of times she found the hole and fixed it.

Then, if x=chances that Jacqui will not have raccoon babies in her attic by the end of the week,

then, sadly, I think x=0

3. A word problem:
Jacqui bought six boxes of Girl Scout cookies. She bought 2 boxes of Thin Mints, 2 boxes of Samoas, and 1 box each of Tagalongs and the shortbread ones nobody likes except dipped in tea. Jacqui has 3 other people in her family. 0 of those other people like Samoas. If Jacqui has had the boxes of cookies at her house for two weeks, and there are 20 cookies in each box, where the heck did all the Samoas go, oh my god, really? I ate them all?! None of you had a single one oh I feel sick.

4. 20 Samoas per box X 2 boxes = how many calories? For real? Oh crap. How many calories do you think I burned torturing the raccoon?

5.
Cost per book to buy The New Girl...And Me: $16.95
Approximate royalty income to Jacqui from each book: seven peanuts
Payment to Jodi Reamer, Jacqui's agent: two peanuts
Validation of herself as a writer Jacqui gets every time a royalty check comes in the mail: priceless

Everywhere Babies

In which I take a suggestion from the real world peanut gallery and begin recommending more picture books people might not know.




Everywhere Babies,
by Susan Meyers, illustrated by Marla Frazee

As if I needed more of a reason to love Marla Frazee, a friend handed Destructo this book at the library today. The rhyme is simple and sweet, but the illustrations are what shine. Destructo and I read it before his nap. It took us forty minutes because he wanted to examine every baby and report back on whether "my bigger dat baby" or "dat baby hab diaper!" I was equally enthralled.

If you have a baby, or a toddler, or a recently-a-baby or recently-a-toddler, or, well, just go check it out, okay?

A cautionary tale

Today is my grandmother's birthday. She passed away several years ago and wasn't herself for years before that, so I can't celebrate with her, but I'm thinking about her.

My grandmother is the one I remember telling me stories. She had a carpet, our "magic" carpet, and we'd take trips, with her describing what we saw as we flew. She wrote me silly rhyming poems on my birthdays and stories about a little girl named Jacqui who had all kinds of amazing adventures. The New Girl...And Me is dedicated to her, but she never saw it or knew, really, that it was going to happen.

My grandmother, like all grandmothers, had a fascinating life. Even as her health deteriorated, we were learning secrets from her past, bits of a story that I will never be able to read in full. I bought my grandmother several journals. I begged her to let me interview her with a video camera, an audio tape, or at least a pen and paper. She was always going to write her own story; she had dreamed, as a child, of being a journalist, and in a different generation, with more resources at her disposal, she'd have been marvelous.

But, she said, she could never get it right. She worried it wouldn't be any good. She worried she couldn't do it. She'd start next year.

You know the end: for all her worrying about getting it right, she never got it written.

I wouldn't have cared if it weren't perfect, of course. I just wish I had the story.

And yes, that's me in the picture. I look like I'm pouting but I may be trying not to crack up. Nice bowl cut, eh? And the wallpaper! Gotta love the 70s. Amazingly, I rock my children to sleep on that rocking chair still.

The best part...

...about being a writer...

... is that sometimes you are stuck. You can't write a word. You have no words to write. You hate the novel and are absolutely sure it hates you back, possibly along with your agent, your editor, your family, and everyone you have ever met. You whine. You set your timer and you make yourself write, but it is like pulling teeth out of a cranky crocodile and what comes out is drivel. You blog a lot. You become convinced that your past successes were blips, that you will never again write or say anything worth repeating, let alone publishing. You wallow in self-hating wordlessness.

And then someone says something, one little thing, and you hit yourself in the forehead and think, "Of course. Of course that is what has to happen." You realize that the reason you were having such a hard time is not, in fact, because you suck, but because the story needed fixed and before it was fixed it could not be written. You have this amazing revelation of exactly what you need to do and you don't even have to set your timer because when it goes off, you knock it across the room with your left hand so your right hand can keep writing.

I asked Tinkerbell. Yeah, I asked a first grader. I was talking about it with Thor, who was looking around for something heavy and blunt with which to hit himself very sympathetic, and Tink asked me what we were talking about. So I told her: this is what's happened so far in my story and I'm having a hard time writing the rest. And she said, "He reads the note," which is EXACTLY what the character would do, but which I had missed entirely. "Of course," I said. And then I re-plotted the rest of the book and wrote two chapters this morning.

I should add that Tinkerbell went on to plot the rest of the novel in her head, including well set-up clues and a touching emotional ending. Then she said, "Is yours going to be that good?" and I was forced to admit that, no, it probably wasn't, but that I thought I'd write it anyway.

Five things Jacqui is not going to do to celebrate Friday the 13th

1. watch any of the Jason movies.

2. crash family Shabbat services at my temple wearing a hockey mask and screaming "The Hora! The Hora!"

3. sneak upstairs into Tinkerbell's room after she's sleeping, crawl under her bed, and whisper, "Mama lies. We are here. And we are coming for you," while throwing wet, cooked noodles onto the bed.

4. chomp the rest of the Hamentashen and sit in a sugar stupor pondering which is scarier: the idea of finishing my novel or the idea of never finishing my novel.

Oh, wait. I might do that one. Do over for #4.

4. stick my hand into the crack between the seat and the back rest in the back seat of my car and try to find whatever's growing there

5. put a giant mouse suit on Destructo and let him chase the cats

Okay, I might do that one too, if I had a mouse suit. Another do over.

5. cut the remarkably realistic hand off Destructo's plastic baby doll and float it in Thor's morning tea

How are you going to celebrate?