This is it, we’re down to the wire insofar as submissions for the soft deadline for the 2011 Creme de la Creme.  What is the soft deadline?  It’s the December 15th deadline that ensures that your blog post is on the list when it goes up on January 1st in the morning.  You can still submit after December 15th (up until January 5th), but your blog post will go up later — after the Creme de la Creme has already been posted on January 1st.  Which means that you will miss out on getting the most eyes on your post since the largest number of people read it when it first goes up.

We’re actually a little bit behind where we were submission-wise at this time last year, which is strange because we were so far ahead of last year at first.  All I know is that our goal is to get at least 400 posts on the list.  Have you contributed your words?

Speaking of getting eyes on your post, as it usually goes with these sorts of things, the higher up you are on the list, the more people read your post.  We’ve already had one IComLeavWe’er win the 6th slot on the list.  Another IComLeavWe’er will be chosen at the end of December’s IComLeavWe to win the 4th slot.  And here is your chance to win the 2nd slot on the list.  The only thing you have to do is spread around some love.

Like my annual Purim giveaway, the only thing you need to do to enter is leave a comment on someone’s blog.  That’s it — there’s no Tweeting about it, or liking a Facebook page, or blogging about it.  The only entries that count are comments on blog posts.  Here’s how it works (and you can enter as many times as you like):

• Leave a comment below telling me where you left a comment already today–and feel free to leave, write a comment somewhere, and come back.  Please put the name of that blog and a link to the post in the comment.  And say something nice about that person’s post.  And no, commenting on this post doesn’t count for where you’ve left a comment (though my blog still counts as long as you’ve commented on a different post).  The posts that you’re commenting on need to have been written in December 2011 (only entries with a link to a post written in that time frame count).
• You can enter as many times as you like.  Which means the more you comment around the blogosphere, the more chances you have to win.  Only comments that talk about a post you read elsewhere in the blogosphere have a chance at winning (in other words, if you write below, “this is a great idea!” I’ll be appreciative, but you won’t be eligible to win.  You need to list a place where you commented today, give the url for the post, and say something about the post).
• Each comment counts as one entry, so if you’ve commented in three places, you’re allowed to leave that in three entries here.  Leaving it in separate comments is actually sort of an important fact because too many links in a comment will make it caught by the spam filter.  I will release comments caught by the spam filter, but it will take me a moment, and then that only counts as one entry (whereas if you listed them separately, you could have gotten a bunch of entries).
• The contest ends at 8 a.m. EST on Thursday the 15th, therefore, you can return all week and list new, great blog posts you found.  If you’re still confused, think of this as creating a Friday Blog Roundup-type list in the comment section, one comment at a time.

I will also love you forever if you read down the list and click over to read the other posts listed in the comment section.  And don’t just hit the first ones at the top of the comment list. Make sure you hit some of the people in the middle or bottom of the list and leave them a comment telling them that you agree with the original commenter — their writing does rock.

My usual blog rules apply: any spam is deleted — the point is to honour another person, not drum up business for a Viagra website — as well as anything rude.

I’ll use the random number generator and announce it on Friday in the Roundup on the 16th.  So let the commenting/creme spot winning begin.

Tuesday morning, I was emailing with A about crickets, and I had this overwhelming thought that before the day was over, I would see a cricket in the house.  Sure enough, I was making cookies in the middle of the day when I realized that I was missing an ingredient.  I decided to jump in the car and go to the store to get it so I could finish the batter.  As I went to the front door to get my shoes, there, at the bottom of the stairs, was an enormous cricket.

Where did this cricket come from?  I have no fucking idea.  Seriously, I think that this is my own personal horror movie — I think about crickets and suddenly they appear in my house.

I was right near the Dyson so I plugged it in and sucked up the cricket with the wand.  Thankfully, the canister is clear so I could see that the cricket was inside once I turned off the motor and everything stopped swirling.  But once everything stopped swirling, the cricket started jumping.  JUMPING AROUND INSIDE THE VACUUM CANISTER.  I turned the machine back on, certain it would now be killed by being slammed with raging force against the plastic.  But when I turned it off, it staggered a bit and then started jumping again.

I turned back on the vacuum, sat down at the table, composed a long email to A about the cricket which was churning around in the machine for a good 5 minutes.  I hit send.  Stopped the machine.  The cricket started jumping.  This went on for about an hour.  Sometimes the cricket would fake death and lie still for a moment, and I would crouch down to examine him through the plastic, but he’d always pop back up and start hopping amongst the dust particles.

You may ask yourself why I needed him dead vs. just leaving him in the vacuum until Josh got home and could deal with him.  Because that’s just not the way I work.

I finally had a brilliant plan (brilliant for cricket killers like me.  Probably not brilliant if you’re an entomologist).  I soaked a cotton ball in bug killer and then sucked it into the machine so it was in the canister with the cricket.  At first I couldn’t get him to hop over to his new little bed, but using a flash light to direct him (no, I got nothing accomplished that afternoon in case you were wondering), I got him to jump onto the cotton ball, where he snuggled up and died.  And I took a photograph to prove to A how enormous this thing was.  It could have snapped me in half.

*******

Thank you to everyone who emailed me the picture of the largest cricket-like thing in the world.  It made me remove New Zealand from my list of places to visit.  At least, I removed that section of New Zealand from the list.

He looked too large to be sucked into a vacuum.

*******

In talking with A, I was trying to figure out where my cricket fears stem.  I’ve never liked crickets, but until recently, my fear of crickets didn’t factor into decision-making.  I went camping and walked around outside at night.  But at some point in my life, I went from cricket-hating to cricket-phobic.  They went from something that repulsed me, but that I didn’t think too much about unless one was right in front of me, to something that I actively worried about.

The only thing I could tie it to was that I’ve always thought of people who veered from expectations as cricket-people.  Which accounts for the majority of eighth grade.  That person who you thought was your friend but turned out to be talking about you behind your back — cricket-person (get it, because they jump out at you unexpectedly).  That group of friends you always ate lunch with who suddenly tell you that you can’t sit at their lunch table — cricket-people.  I had a few very cricket-y people in my life, and perhaps that led to me to transfer my feelings about cricket-y people onto crickets themselves.

Something quite interesting to think about.  I tend not to trust people that I deem cricket-y in my head, therefore there are few of them in my life because I don’t tend to keep people close who are cricket-y in nature.  But even noticing this fact about myself and wondering if there’s any connection between my dislike of people who behave unexpectedly and crickets doesn’t change how much I scream when I see one of them hopping around inside the Dyson canister.

*******

Getting off the topic of crickets, we had two more Creme prize winners this week.  A Blanket 2 Keep was the winner of the crocheted afghan provided by Wistful Girl’s World.  Thank you, Wistful Girl!  And then Home Grown Love was the winner of the babylegs provided by Here We Go Again.  Thank you, Jen!  Reminder: the deadline to have a post on the Creme de la Creme when it goes up on January 1st is coming up quickly.  The deadline is December 15th.

*******

And now the blogs…

But first, second helpings of the posts that appeared in the open comment thread last week as well as the week before.  In order to read the description before clicking over, please return to the open thread:

• “Et Tu, Muppets” (Willcarryon)
• “Ice Lanterns” (Hiding Scars in my Yarn)
• “All the Married Ladies” (The Maybe Baby)
• “Dark and Ugly” (By the Brooke)
• “Maybe Someday” (The Pursuit of Pregnancy)
• “New (Old) Patient” (From IF to When)
• “Letting Go of Our Babymakin’ Fantasies” (Hannah Wept, Sarah Laughed)

Okay, now my choices this week.

I actually read this incredible post by Edenland before the last Roundup came out, but for some reason, I wanted to hold it for this week.  And I can’t explain why.  This post is haunting, raw, brutally-honest.  More than one person wrote that they had their breath taken away by her words.  I am sure you will too.

The Zen of the Egg Hunt has a story about the transfer from hell — the one where your worst nightmare comes true and you have the wrong time written down.  But it’s the moment where her husband runs into the room that I started crying too.

For We Are Bound By Symmetry has a post about coming full circle with the idea of “just relax”, and how much she would like to take that idea to heart as she awaits her third beta.  Except she can’t.  She writes: “During all my years of TTC, I scoffed at the advice to ‘Just Relax.’ Never once did I seriously consider relaxing. You fight for what you want, after all, right? And fight I did. Tooth and nail. After so many years, months, days, hours, minutes and seconds of stressing, worrying, trying, researching, and fighting, I think that’s all I know how to do. And I don’t want to anymore. I don’t want to stress. I don’t want to research. I don’t want to worry.”  It’s about the worrying that never stops.

Lastly, The Maybe Baby has a post about her daughters, Jovi and Isa, on the three year anniversary of their loss.  I found this part of the post so incredibly moving that I think I must have read it now 20 times: “Notes from friends remind me of how much we were cared for when we returned home empty handed three years ago. In the midst of our raw grief, we were weepy. We were cavalier and stone-faced. We made inappropriate jokes. We winced at innocuous comments. We were fragile. We were invincible. We were needy and wanted company. We were offended at social demands and wanted to be left alone. We had to have been simply unbearable.  And yet we were picked up and held and loved and fed and reminded to bathe (um, sorry) and taught little by little how to be human again. And for the most part, I think we succeed. On most days.”  Please read the post in full and send her love.

The roundup to the Roundup: The crickets are out to get me.  Do you know cricket-y people too?  More Creme winners.  And lots of great posts to read.  So what did you find this week?  Please use a permalink to the blog post (written between December 2nd and December 9th) and not the blog’s main url. Not understanding why I’m asking you what you found this week?  Read the original open thread post here.

It is the 50th anniversary of the seminal work of children’s literature, The Phantom Tollbooth by Norton Juster.  It felt like the right time to dig out the t-shirt I got when I attended the opera created from the book, the movie version of the story, and line up the three dozen copies of the book we have in various rooms of the house.  It felt like the right time to lie on the living room floor, head to head with the twins, like a human flower created out of our body petals, and listen to the audiobook version together.  I entertained for the 3000th time finally getting a Milo tattoo on my leg (please, mum, forget that I wrote that last sentence).  We are a Harry Potter family and an Alice in Wonderland family, but moreover, we are a Phantom Tollbooth family.  My brother made sure of that by gifting the twins their own first copies while they were still in the NICU.

The reason why the Phantom Tollbooth appeals to children is the same reason why the construction of the book appeals to adults.  In both cases, it’s a tale of the unexpected, the unpredictable, the fact that anything can happen.  Milo walks into his room and finds a mystery gift.  He starts playing with it and lands himself in an incredible adventure.  What child didn’t walk into their room every day after reading the book with the knowledge that anything could happen (isn’t that an enormous thought — both the good reality and bad reality of the statement)?

The story behind the book itself gives that same sort of hope to writers: anything could happen when we release our projects into the world.  Juster never set out to write a timeless children’s book.  Having his book become this successful is his own personal tollbooth that unexpectedly dropped into his life.  It’s a reminder that the best adventures aren’t the ones we orchestrate, but the ones that we find ourselves in, being led from moment to moment in wonder.

I’ve told this story before, but it’s especially poignant to me on the fiftieth anniversary of the book.  I discovered the book when I was in first grade in the school library.  I loved it so much that I refused to read the last page, choosing instead to skip it and go back to the beginning.  I checked out that book numerous times that year (and even advocated for myself when the school librarian insisted I lost the book.  Lost the book!  I would never lose something that precious.  I grabbed it off the shelf to show her, and she realized with an apology that she had never checked it back in).  My own children are now in first grade, and I volunteer in their school library.  I have checked that book in numerous times; replaced it on the shelf with care.

It was the book that made me decide that I wanted to be a writer.  I wanted to create a character that I loved as much as Milo.

Years later, I was living in Amherst, getting my MFA in creative writing at University of Massachusetts.  I owned many copies of the book, but that didn’t stop me from purchasing the new 35th anniversary edition.  I flipped over the book one night and read that Norton Juster lived in Amherst, Massachusetts.  My heart started sounding in my ears — I lived in Amherst, Massachusetts.  I grabbed the white pages (because back then, children, we had to look up addresses and telephone numbers in huge books… if you can believe that) and discovered that he lived 4 BLOCKS AWAY.  He was 4 blocks from my commune.  4 blocks that would only take a few minutes to walk.

I polled my fellow commune mates and asked them if they thought I should call him.  Even though everyone advised me to wait until morning, I couldn’t calm myself down to think clearly.  I called him at home around 9 pm, and he answered the phone.  Rather than berate me for calling so late, he good-naturedly informed me that I wasn’t the first person to call him like this.  After I explained how overwhelmed I was — it was literally like talking to Superman — I told him how the reason I was in Amherst at all was because of him.  He made me love books, and in turn, made me want to create books.  I told him that it would mean the world to me if I could take him out for coffee.

And with all of the kindness of Tock, Mr. Juster invited me over to his house for tea.  After work, I dressed up in a red checkered dress, and tied my hair into two braids.  I walked the 4 blocks between our houses and almost chickened out on the front lawn.  I am so glad that I took a deep breath and knocked because it turned out to be one of the greatest afternoons of my life.  There is nothing quite like getting to have tea with your idol on his porch.

I got the opportunity recently to talk to Mr. Juster again, to interview him now that the book is turning 50.  The construction of the book has been well-covered in Adam Gopnik’s piece in the New Yorker, or Norton Juster’s essay on All Things Considered.  There’s a movie being created for the 50th anniversary.

Once you start poking around for Phantom Tollbooth articles, you realize how your own love is just a drop in the Sea of Knowledge.  That there is an enormous wave of love for this book that swells over literature; other people who say that they owe their love of reading to this book, that it also made them want to become a writer.  And that’s one of the points we touched on in the conversation; trying to understand what about the book made so many people want to become writers themselves.

Juster is somewhat amazed by the reaction to the book.  His best guess is that “For many kids, it’s the first time they’ve confronted something where they feel a kindred spirit in terms of their consciousness and their understanding of things.”

I agree that is one reason why people fall in love with the book so deeply.  Knowledge-wise, it’s like a gift that takes years to open.  Everyone loves that moment when they’re tearing off the wrapping paper, still hopeful about what is inside, and the book introduced word play so seamlessly that readers are able to process the book on a multitude of levels.  When I was six, Short Shrift was just a tiny policeman.  When I was older and learned the term, Short Shrift was the embodiment of scant attention.  And it felt like I was let in on a joke, let in on the adult world — one word play at a time.  The word play comes from interactions with Juster’s father.

The other great influence is my father who is one of those addicted word play people.  He was a punster and he would turn everything upside down.  As a kid, your first reaction, of course, is uuuuuh.  Because you don’t get it.  And then after a while you suddenly realize, I get it, I understand it, and I can do it.  Do you know how liberating that is?

Another message I took from the book was learning for learning’s sake; the joy in knowing things.  It’s the anti-teaching-to-the-test novel.  It takes the virtual desks of the world and tosses them aside in favour of exploring, asking questions, and getting one’s hands dirty in knowledge.  Personally, I am always a little wary when I meet a teacher who hasn’t read The Phantom Tollbooth.  Juster admits that while the idea of knowledge for knowledge sake was never an intentional plot point, it is obvious looking back on the book that it was there all along.

The joy of learning is a very important component when you read through it.  One of the unique things that kids have is a way of  finding alternative view points; alternative ways to think about something or approach an idea.  One of the aims of our educational system is to drive that out of your consciousness as quickly as possible.  They teach as if there was almost only one view point to anything.  A story has a meaning, and that’s the story.  I remember as a kid, and I still see it because I taught so many years, that kids will read something and they will tell you about it, and it’s very much not like what the author would say or the teacher would say, but it is the way they understand it.  And that’s terribly important.  You can never lose that; that unique view point.

It’s a lesson he learned the hard way growing up, when he’d come to school excited to share how he interpreted a story, and be met with the message: that wasn’t correct.  Regurgitation of information is about as appetizing as… well… regurgitation of food, yet it is the backbone of our educational system at times.  And Juster’s book seeks to do away with that idea that there is only one point of view as well as banish the ennui contained in “I don’t know.”  And that mentality is something he holds his child and grandchild to as well: that there are answers to be plucked off the figurative trees if you just reach up your arm.  He told a story about his granddaughter and when she uses the phrase, “I don’t know.”

I don’t know is half a sentence.  And I said, “Do you know what the other half is?”  She now looks at me and says, “but I’ll find out.”

Additionally, beyond his love of knowledge, it was his background in architecture that had a huge impact on the construction of the book.

Had I not studied architecture I either would have not been a writer at all or I would have been a much different writer.  Because working in architecture, number one, what you do when you are doing architecture is you’re looking for … a very special way to look at something or an alternative way to look at something to turn out a project.  So that mode of thinking feeds exactly into the book the way I write, and I think the way other people write.  Secondly, I find that it’s very important to me to visualize.  I work in pictures a lot in my head.  And I think I can only do that because of the architectural training, which is a very graphic kind of thing.  In fact, many times I will make notes which will be a few words, pictures, diagrams — everything — and when I put them away, I can take them out six months later and I still remember exactly where my thoughts were because I have that tool.  Again, it’s not something I would have been doing had I not studied architecture … I always tell people that I think studying architecture is the best liberal arts education you can get because it touches everything.

The idea that one art form supports another is the basis of many MFA program’s requirements that students obtain a certain amount of credits in an outside though related medium.  At the time, I didn’t understand how taking six credits of visual art was going to make me a better writer, but listening to Norton Juster, I’m convinced that the outside credits are not a happy accident meant to give you additional skills outside your area of study.  Rather, like many things in life, they are skills applicable to enhancing your range of knowledge within your given field.

As our phone conversation wound down, I flipped to the front page of the copy I was holding that he had signed that day during graduate school while we had tea on his porch.  In the inscription, he said he was glad I called the night before, again, reminding me of the character Tock, who good-naturedly comes along for the ride, always happy to help out Milo on his adventure.  Jules Feiffer, the illustrator, may have drawn Juster into the book as The Whether Man, but in my eyes, he is pure Tock, giving us a piece of literature that uses our time wisely.

Book Image Photo Credit: Keith Trice.

Norton Juster Photo Credit: Random House.

I felt like I had to put that parenthetical statement in the title because I didn’t want anyone’s heart to jump again over the words “pregnancy announcement.”  This is a perfect example of how people can truly be clueless and not malicious; when I titled that post “The Stuff of Urban Legends,” I meant just that… the stuff that makes up urban legends.  The Visine, the clove cigarettes, the axe murderers.  Not myself, as an urban legend.  That interpretation didn’t even cross my mind until the first comment arrived letting me know that’s what the person expected.  And even then, it took me probably 30 seconds to understand how they jumped to that conclusion.  This was literally my thought process:

They thought I was surprise-pregnant.  Maybe it’s a common thought of women who are pregnant to consider dumping someone else’s Visine down the toilet.  Do men like to make Visine-in-your-coffee jokes to pregnant women?  Is she talking about the pop rocks picture?  Is there an urban legend about pop rocks getting you pregnant?  I actually like pop rocks.  More than I like all that green tea I used to drink for my cervical mucous.  Where the hell does one even get pop rocks nowadays?  The only time I get them is when J brings them back from Israel for me.  Wait a second, J is in Israel right now.  I should see if she can get me one of those Elite bars with pop rocks from Machane Yehuda.  Is that where that candy store was?  Maybe the place I’m thinking of is right outside Machane Yehuda.  Where the hell did we get those candy-coated peanuts that time?  Those were so damn good.  Would it be insane to call her on her work trip and ask her to pick up a bag of peanuts?  Wait… no… the urban legend is about eating pop rocks.  I should ask her to get the Elite bar… OH THEY THINK I’M THE URBAN LEGEND.

I left a kernel of this thought in my comment section, but thought I’d put it here too and gather your thoughts.  If/when I am lucky enough to have a pregnancy announcement to make, this is how I suspect it will go down:

• I will tell family first, face-to-face or over the phone.
• I will most likely tell friends via email, having no clue where they are emotionally at the moment to hear my news, and just tell it straight.  Subject line gives them an inkling of what’s inside the note and I give the news simply, much as I would with any other facet of life.  I know that if they’re curious or excited, they’ll ask questions and we can discuss more, and if they’re not, then no hard feelings and they’ve gotten the news straight from me.
• I will most likely tell even other bloggers via email in the exact same way.  I haven’t really thought out how I will do so since gmail has a cap on how many people can be on an email.  And there is also the potential problem that while I may think you’d want to hear it directly from me, you may actually be wondering why I emailed you in the first place (as in, “Who the hell is Melissa?”).  And even more importantly, there are people who have read this blog for the last 5 1/2 years but have never told me or commented, therefore, I don’t even know who they are in order to tell them before they see it on my blog (hi, lurkers, I do appreciate your quiet support — this is not an attempt to guilt you out from the shadows).  So emails to bloggers just might not be possible.  But if it is, that’s how I’d tell as many people as possible.
• And then I would post it on my blog.  The title would convey without question what is in the post.  And I’d say it directly.  Probably very briefly.  I would assume that it would look something like this post.  It’s how I tend to give news that I’m not sure how others will feel about it.  I’m sure some people were happy with my book news.  And I’m sure some people were cursing me with my book news.  I know this because I do the exact same thing — some people’s announcements don’t phase me at all because I don’t have an emotional horse in the race.  And some get under my skin, even if I am happy for them.  Let’s be honest, we’re not robots; we’re all human beings who feels jealousy sometimes.

This is my plan simply because this is how I like to be told.  I don’t claim it to be the best way or the only way to give news.  But I tend to give as I’d like to receive.  Which is not to say that if you told me via your blog rather than emailing me directly that I was upset.  On the contrary, I probably didn’t give it a lot of thought at the time nor am I giving it now.  Please no now-I-feel-terrible-about-how-I-gave-my-whatever-announcement-on-my-blog comments.

My personal general rule is that I can’t expect people to read my blog or Twitter feed or Facebook page.  I can expect them to open a direct email, letter, or take a phone call.  So if I have news that is important to me that they know, I use a direct approach.  Everything else goes online (almost always my blog since it isn’t a time sensitive medium), and if they see it, fantastic.  And if they don’t, no problem.  They should probably assume that if it’s only on my blog and not in their inbox or I never bring it up when we’re face-to-face that I don’t consider the news to be of utmost importance.

And my other general rule is to attempt to jump over the chasm of comportment that blogging sets up between the writer and reader.  You guys mean more to me than simply throwing up a blog post conveys.  And yet lurkers and technology limitations sometimes stop me from being able to convey information in the way I think you deserve.  The way I combat that is to keep things short and direct.

My only promise is that I try my best; clueless usage of the term “urban legend” notwithstanding.

How do you like to receive pregnancy announcements from other bloggers?  Am I overthinking how to tell (though based on the comments to that urban legends post, I’m not sure I’m that off in believing that it’s hard to have pregnancy news come out of nowhere in a blog post.  If I was clearly awaiting a beta, it would be a different story)?  Is short and direct the way to go, or would that be more hurtful?  Perhaps best to collect these thoughts BEFORE I’m in that position to have something to announce rather than after.

Just wanted to give a heads up since I read it this morning and we discussed it last summer.  The first person — Hilary Neiman — who was accused with Theresa Erickson and Carla Chambers of operating a baby selling ring within surrogacy/adoption, was sentenced to five months in prison.  According to the article, she also will “serve seven months of home detention, forfeit $133,000 in profits and set aside $20,000 for restitution.”  

Theresa Erickson and Carla Chambers will be sentenced some time in early 2012.

Last summer, when I first read about it, I knew exactly how I felt.  This morning, reading about the jail time, my feelings are murkier.  Maybe because the court began with Neiman, a fellow Marylander who is about my age.  Maybe because there is a difference between accusations and guilty pleas that involve reputations/professions and jail sentencings that involve time.  I said in that second post:

I have a lot of fears right now, and I’m finding it very difficult to return to that rosy, rational place where I was comfortable in my beliefs.  Where I knew that exploiters exist — does Madoff ring any bells? — and they may even cross my path, but the vast majority of people I surround myself with have my best interests at heart even if they want compensation for their work.  I know I will get back to that place because if that is your natural state, you always return to that place.  But right now, I’m waiting for this feeling to pass so I can return to a place of trust.  Because what else can I do when I have this need and I require others to help me fulfill it?

I still believe that is my natural state.  I still don’t think that I’ve fully returned to my place of trust.  Maybe my murky feelings have something to do about noticing that within myself.