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Beneath the Hat

Tag Archives: Family

When Good Prompts Go Bad

09 Wednesday Dec 2015

Posted by beneaththehat in Reflections

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Tags

Family, mistakes were made, my brain is why

I don’t have much use for writing prompts.  If there were any indication in a class summary that prompts would be a feature then I avoided those courses like the plague.  Of course when you’re a writing student these things are sort of an inevitable side effect, like drowsiness or hives.

Or drowsy hives.

For many people prompts can be great!  For me, they are more like a minefield of potential disaster.  My brain is a boiling cauldron of stories yet to be written.  The last thing the cauldron needs is extra ingredients.  As an example, I once got a prompt to use the phrase “At the corner of A Street and B Street” and then go from there.

I got 100 pages into a screenplay.

My plot bunnies are sharp-fanged and blood-soaked.  They leap from the shadows at the barest provocation.  A writing prompt is basically attaching a steak to a fishing pole and dangling it over their den when I’m already being mauled.  Unnecessary.

So when in my first year of grad school one of my professors started giving us a prompt, I felt a tad uneasy.  Luckily the guidelines were stringent.  We were writing a letter in which we describe the classroom.  Cue a sigh of relief that came too soon.  After we’d gotten a ways into our descriptions the professor added, “Now you’re writing this letter to your sister.”

First thought: Susan survived?

Let me lend you guys some context.

I’m an only child so when I was little I pretended I had a lot of brothers and sisters.  Then it occurred to me that I needed a reasonable explanation to give people about why my supposed siblings were never seen.  So I decided they all must be dead.

I committed to this narrative.  I have a vivid memory of standing alone in my room, staring into my sock drawer thinking, “These were Susan’s socks.  She’s gone now.”  It’s not clear but I think Susan’s demise was supposed to be due to her falling over a cliff.

There was also an incident at Disneyland where I described to the train conductor in detail about how my little brother had been killed by a train.  He told my mother how sorry he was for her loss.  Mom then had to explain how there was no brother and no train.  They don’t really include how to tell strangers that your child invented deaths for her imaginary siblings in parenting books, do they?  Terrible oversight.

This also resulted in me sitting in a writing class decades later, suddenly writing an incredibly sinister letter to my presumed dead sister about how glad I was she wasn’t dead after all.  Maybe the sinister tone wasn’t necessary but, look, the circumstances had just gotten really weird.  In this prompt I was describing the room to just some anonymous person but then, twist!  Actually I’m writing my sister, who I’ve thought dead since childhood but I’ve now somehow tracked down so I could write about my classroom to her?

Also, all my siblings died in “accidents”.

And Susan’s been in hiding?  Yeah, in this scenario there really is no way for me to write to my sister without it being at least a touch sinister.

It didn’t help that my reaction was to basically write, “I’m so pleased you survived!”

But don’t worry.  It gets worse.

The professor then adds another layer to the prompt and tells us our sister has cancer or some presumably lethal disease.

“Well, I guess you almost survived me.”

Christ on a crutch but this got dark fast.  Now this letter isn’t just sinister but actively cruel and mocking.  Like my imaginary siblings hadn’t suffered enough, now one of them had been resurrected just in time to suffer a little more by being reminded of all their dead family and how they’d nearly died in childhood only to be stricken with a deadly disease.  Oh, and the person writing this letter?  Presumably the sibling who’d arranged for all the deaths and was now gloating about how the one that got away isn’t getting away for much longer.

And I took all her socks!

In the end I’m left sitting in class, staring at a letter from some horrifying sociopath and wondering what the hell just happened inside my head.  What a strange confluence of events.

In conclusion, sometimes grad school is weirder than you were expecting.  And sometimes it’s not the writing prompt’s fault that your brain is a bucket sloshing to the brim with strange.

It may also be a really good thing that I’m an only child.

…. as far as you know.

I Lost A Friend Today

15 Saturday Feb 2014

Posted by beneaththehat in Reflections

≈ 2 Comments

Tags

Family, loss, the feelings corner

Now that I think about it, I realize I’ve never lost a friendship that I genuinely wanted to keep before now.  Certain people have been culled from my life but I’d never intended to keep them in the first place.  And I might not be as close to all my friends as I once was but I know, from experience, that just a few words are enough to reestablish the connection.  The love remains.

I think of it as a web stretched across time zones, linking us no matter how much our lives change.

So I’m being launched onto this strange new landscape of having to cut ties to someone whose friendship I treasured.

When I consider someone a really good friend, I include them in my dreams for the future.  There’s an estate in Scotland, a castle and grounds, where I want to live.  I’ve moved all of my friends there, too.  While they may not always live there, or only visit, there is a room with their name on it.  I make them a part of the family I want to grow and include them in my definition of home.

For the first time since that habit began, I have to evict someone.  They can no longer be a part of my future, my family.  There is now a dark, empty room in the space in my mind that was reserved for hopeful thoughts.  I made a mistake and put someone in that room that I couldn’t trust.  It’s crushing.

The worst part is that I have to cut them out for doing something so completely, pointlessly cruel.  There was nothing to be gained and everything to be lost.  I don’t know why they made that decision.  I don’t know if it would make a difference if they explained it to me.  It can’t be forgiven.

They’ve already doubled down on the initial strike.  Apparently they found the idea that their actions could cause pain outrageous.  How dare they be expected to acknowledge other people’s feelings!

I already have a father like that.  I don’t need friends who think the same way.

I wonder now how I could have been so blind as to stumble into a relationship with someone who cares so little for their friends.  Who would only defend themselves in the face of the hurt they inflicted.

It’s all broken now.  They’ve killed a friendship and left me to grieve.  Probably they’ll think my reaction overkill or unreasonable.  But I can’t do anything else.

I have so few rules when it comes to my friends.  When you break the only one that really matters, there are no second chances.

The home I want to build is no longer open to you and neither is my heart.

Goodbye.

Laguna Beach, Werewolves and Falling On My Face

05 Monday Aug 2013

Posted by beneaththehat in Travel

≈ 1 Comment

Tags

Family, Laguna Beach California, tales of the traveling hat, the hat, West Wing

About eight years ago my family started a tradition of going to the Pageant of the Masters in Laguna Beach every summer.  It’s very fun, although I will admit that the first time I went I wasn’t really sure what the point was.  People recreating art by dressing up in costumes and standing still sounds a little bizarre out of context.  The pageant is nearly impossible to describe because without seeing it you can’t truly understand what’s so marvelous about it.  The show presents living, breathing masterpieces and it’s completely beautiful.

We went about a week ago and it was many different kinds of fun.  That isn’t to say there were no hijinks.  The fact that Mom accidentally spent an hour watching rocks play in the ocean barely makes the short list.

I have to admit that I lied in the title of this post.  I did not, in fact, fall on my face.  What did happen, on one of the busiest streets in Laguna so plenty of people could see, was that my flip flop caught the edge of a high curb as I was stepping up and I went down like a flailing ton of bricks.  First I came straight down on my left knee then somehow my right leg must have twisted around and impacted slightly sideways because that’s where the bruise manifested.  Finally both hands hit the pavement and I saw The Hat eject himself from the situation.  He was lucky I didn’t leave him at the hotel after that little display of ‘loyalty’.

Then again, maybe he knew he was going to spend most of the pageant smothered in my lap and barely seeing any of the art.

I guess we’ll never know.

So the rest of the day included a side of stiff knees and occasional limping.  However, that was hardly going to bring me down (aside from literally) when after two years I’d managed to secure reservations at Nick’s.  It’s a smallish restaurant and always incredibly busy so getting in for dinner was a challenge.  But I eventually prevailed.

The aunts and Mom all had the blackened halibut sandwich while I ordered the salmon.  The sandwich was declared delicious by all and I was thrilled with my salmon.  Here’s a picture!

2013-07-30 18.21.10

Oh no!  Someone ate all my food before I could take the picture.  How terrible.  Well, at least you can see the remains of my blood orange cosmo in the background.

Yum.  Now I want a drink.

Hm, what was that?  Oh.  Apparently The Hat wants to know how that’s different from any other time of day.  Hardy har har.

And he wonders why I keep buying other hats.

Well, that about wraps it up.  Delicious dinner, great show and beautiful Laguna Beach to stare at for a couple of days.

Oh, whoops, forgot about the werewolves.  On that note I shall end this post with a conversation between one of my aunts and my Mom.

Aunt: I don’t really watch the Newsroom.

Mom: Oh, it’s great!  It’s like the West Wing but with swearing.

Aunt: With what?!

Mom: Swearing?

Aunt: Oh!  I thought you said it’s like the West Wing but with werewolves.

Me: BEST. IDEA. EVER.

P.S. One of the tags WordPress is suggesting for this post is ‘drug rehabilitation’.  Thanks a lot.  The highlight of my day is being judged by a website.

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