Jennifer de Guzman

Tumbl’d – Week of May 6-12, 2012

Jennifer de Guzman — Wed, 16 May 2012 06:03:49 +0000

Did you know I have a Tumblr? I do! It’s where I share little bits of the world that strike my fancy at the time. I’ll be rounding up my Tumblr posts at the end of the week to tell you a little bit more about what inspired me to post or reblog.

TEXT: The Zones, Part One – An excerpt from the rewrite of my novel — I posted it here, as well. Sometimes writing can be lonely, and works-in-progress may never be published, so sometimes I like to show that I have been working and what I have been working on.

PHOTO: Stanze and Wolfi – As my friend Traci put it, “HOT.” I serendipitously came across what I imagine is a promotional still from Amadeus in a search for something else, and it immediately became my desktop image. I love Mozart, and I love Amadeus, its opulence, its historical inaccuracies for the sake of theater, and its wonderful score performed by Sir Neville Mariner and the Academy of St Martin in the Fields.

PHOTO: The Magic Flute by Maurice Sendak – Speaking of serendipity, I recently discovered that Sendak and I share a few heroes — Mozart, Emily Dickinson, Lewis Carroll — and that Sendak did a fair number of illustrations for Mozart’s operas. I recently bought prints of his “Mozart in the Garden” and “The Magic Flute.” And then, just a day later, he died. It was kind of a blow.

REBLOG : Terrible Yellow Eyes by Skronked – Andy Ristaino, comics artist and lead character designer on Adventure Time, posted his tribute to Maurice Sendak.

QUOTE by Maurice Sendak — From a New York Time‘s tribute to Sendak. It encapsulates so much about the feelings of loss and grief so simply and elegantly and profoundly.

PHOTO: Relic – An Instagram photo I took of an old-timey telephone inside of an empty service booth at the Fremont BART station. There are a lot of little remnants of the mid-2oth-century in Fremont, which is when the city incorporated and started becoming what it is today, and I like to document them.

PHOTO: James Jean Jewelry — I liked the juxtaposition of the skull and pelvic bones because it reminds me of childbirth, and it’s all done up in delicate blue-painted porcelain that reminds me of accomplished 19th-century young ladies.

PHOTO: Cover of Girls’ Romances by Tony DeZuniga — Comics lost another one of its greats, “Mang Tony,” the co-creator of Jonah Hex and Black Orchid, and the trailblazing Filipino artist who opened the American comics market for other artists from his homeland. His work on romance comics is less well-known than his DC work, but it is lovely. It reminds me of Phil Noto’s work.

QUOTE by Roger Langridge — Writers and artists are beginning to turn away from work for DC and Marvel, citing ethical concerns. It’s an intriguing development.

PHOTOSET: Mind the Gap #4 covers — I’m very pleased to be getting the word out about the Image Comics series Mind the Gap by Jim McCann, Rodin Esquejo, and Sonia Oback. The protagonist — a young hapa woman — is brutally attacked, but rather than the violence done to her ending up being about developing a male character, she is the focus as her attack leads to discoveries about her identity, friends, and family. The issue four cover by Esquejo is Mucha-inspired, so I’m pleased.

PHOTO: My mom as a little girl in her Filipino dance costume — I love the expression on her face. Happy Asian and Pacific Islander Heritage Month!

An Apocalypse Too Late

Jennifer de Guzman — Tue, 08 May 2012 05:12:00 +0000

I’ve been writing. Well, re-writing.

Ten years ago, I finished a sprawling, 140,00-word beautiful mess of a novel. Beautiful because there’s so much of my early twenties enthusiasm in it — and bits of nice writing here and there. It’s an overflow of ideas — societal collapse and technology and magic and unexplained natural phenomena. It’s the influence William Gibson and Gabriel Garcia Marquez and Margaret Atwood and Oscar Wilde and Clive Barker and Neil Gaiman and Bauhaus and KMFDM and Tori Amos and my own desire to be more interesting, to be prettier, sexier, smarter, more talented. I wanted to be admired. No, it was more like….

So I tried hard. I tried really hard. And I wrote a post-Apocalyptic novel called All We Ever Wanted (Was Everything) novel ten years ago, at the age of 23, tried very hard to find an agent for it and then gave up after a couple dozen rejections, a few of them after requests for partials.

I was too early for the trend. And now, as I finally feel like I have enough distance from it to rewrite it, I fear that I’m too late.

Tales from the Slushpile by Ed Briant, published at Publishers Weekly

Well, I’m re-writing anyway, soldiering on from my seat on BART. I have four chapters now, a fifth of the way done with the first volume (because of course it’s a YA trilogy now). It opens

PART ONE

Seth, with Nina and Luna

“Everybody knew Bagheera, and nobody dared to cross his path; for he was as cunning as Tabaqui, as bold as the wild buffalo, and as reckless as the wounded elephant. But he had a voice as soft as wild honey dripping from a tree, and a skin softer than down.”

– Rudyard Kipling, The Jungle Book

CHAPTER ONE

The Outskirts are dangerous when it’s dark, so we headed out at dawn in a rusty car that Nina had stolen from a guy named Grio. The windows were all broken out, so her long black hair whipped in the wind, the tiny braids tangling. Luna was in front next to her, quiet and pale. I was along for the ride as I always was with Nina. I didn’t know why she wanted me to come, but I would have gone anywhere with Nina. I didn’t need a reason. I sat in the back with the basket of sandwiches. Leave it Nina to treat a trip to the Outskirts to kill a man like a picnic.

These days I’m less about being adored than about just getting something done.

Elegy

Jennifer de Guzman — Wed, 25 Apr 2012 04:24:19 +0000

So much of life feels like a performance. Even grieving, when it means standing on a stage and describing to pews of people the contours of that most intimate relationship — between yourself and the woman whose body created you, whose love sustained you, and whose new absence empties you, though you hope for only a time.

And like all the performances of life, it’s necessary. Even as you feel you’re behind a glass wall, Tralfalmadorians choosing to live in the moment when they examine your grief, you must do it or lose the essential element of human life — connection, shared humanity.

But then you realize, later, the connection isn’t what you would wish. The five people who consoled you on the loss of your grandmother. The distant relatives who peer into your face and demand to know if you remember them. Person after person telling you to address an Eclipse, whom they call “Father,” for comfort, when you know the futility of asking the universe’s workings for anything.

You were on the stage, and you showed them a part of what churns within you, and they felt it, but they didn’t understand at all.

When my mother died, her hair was almost all black. She wore a pink nightgown embroidered with flowers that I had chosen for her to wear. In the room with her were her daughters, Lorie and Jennifer, and her granddaughter Amber. As the last breath left her body, a single tear was falling from her right eye.

This is what I said at her funeral.

I said that I saw then that what I had written to say put a distance between myself and my grief. I said that I did not share my emotions easily. I said that my mother was my closest confidant and that no one could take her place.

This is what I read.

Any one of you who ever got an email from my mother knows she loved hummingbirds. They built a nest outside her kitchen window, and she’d watch “Mama Hummie” and “Baby Hummie” and keep us updated on their comings and goings.

So I’d like to open with an excerpt of an essay called “Joyas Voladoras” by Brian Doyle because it reminds me of my mother.

Consider the hummingbird for a long moment. A hummingbird’s heart beats ten times a second. A hummingbird’s heart is the size of a pencil eraser. A hummingbird’s heart is a lot of the hummingbird. Joyas voladoras, flying jewels, the first white explorers in the Americas called them… more than 300 species of them whirring and zooming and nectaring…, their hearts hammering faster than we could clearly hear if we pressed our elephantine ears to their infinitesimal chests.

Each one visits a thousand flowers a day. They can dive at sixty miles an hour. They can fly backward. They can fly more than five hundred miles without pausing to rest. But when they rest they come close to death…, and if they are not soon warmed, if they do not soon find that which is sweet, their hearts grow cold, and they cease to be. Consider for a moment those hummingbirds who did not open their eyes again today…, each the most amazing thing you have never seen, each thunderous wild heart the size of an infant’s fingernail, each mad heart silent, a brilliant music stilled.

Photo by Nita DeGuzman

My mother had a heart like a hummingbird’s — an organ the size of her slender fist powering her small body in its seemingly endless activity, beating with the energy she put into everything she did, making her beauty glow. Her heart was big enough for the tremendous and deep love she had for the many people in her life who loved her — her children and grandchildren, her mother and brother, all of her family and friends.

Can you believe I once took all of this for granted? I didn’t even realize how beautiful my mother was — well, not until everyone started telling me how much I look like her.

But I was a child then. I thought as a child. I was blessed with a wonderful mother, so I thought of her as a constant presence — hers was the last voice I heard at night before I went to sleep, the voice that woke me in the morning, love that was with me at every moment.

But about twelve years ago, when my mother was first diagnosed with cancer, I got the jolt that I needed to appreciate her. I was 22.

I don’t need to tell you that there is a world of difference between 22 and 34. In those dozen years I changed from a girl with leftover adolescent angst into a woman — a mother now, too — and I was able to truly become friends with my mother. I was able to realize just how much I need her and love her.

We had a lot of fun together — talking, watching our British costume dramas, playing with my little son. If Mateo did something cuter than any baby has ever done before or said something smarter than any toddler has said before, I knew whom I could call who would find him just as amazing as I do.

In this way, these last dozen years have been like those flying jewels, the hummingbirds. They moved fast, and I knew that they would end before I was ready, but they were overflowing with brilliant life.

One of the thousands of things I talked with my mom in the last dozen years was the book of Ecclesiastes because it asks the hard question: What is the point of all of this? What if everything — our work, our relationships, our memories — are meaningless? What should we take pleasure in in this life then? And the teacher reminds us, in chapter 3, verses 9 through 14, that we should enjoy our lives, which are part of something unfathomably large that we can feel more than understand.

What do workers gain from their toil? I have seen the burden God has laid on the human race. He has made everything beautiful in its time. He has also set eternity in the human heart; yet no one can fathom what God has done from beginning to end. I know that there is nothing better for people than to be happy and to do good while they live. That each of them may eat and drink, and find satisfaction in all their toil—this is the gift of God. I know that everything God does will endure forever; nothing can be added to it and nothing taken from it.

My mother loved her life. And eternity was indeed set in her heart — an endless depth of love that lives in all of us and can never be taken away.

Slap Me on the Patio

Jennifer de Guzman — Sat, 07 Apr 2012 20:24:24 +0000

I just turned in the eight-page story I collaborated with Traci Hui on for Unite and Take Over Volume 2! Here’s the first page.

Traci and I spent time finding the perfect fountain for this story, one that is in the Bay Area, has some kind of symbolic resonance, and is in the kind of place that a couple of high school kids would hang out at. Eventually, we hit upon the Latham-Ducel (Diana) Fountain in Preservation Park in Oakland.

The Year of Image?

Jennifer de Guzman — Wed, 29 Feb 2012 04:49:03 +0000

I left the office about twenty minutes early today because my brain stopped working. I think it was just beginning to comprehend what happened in the past month.

I started as Image Comics’ PR & Marketing Director on January 17, five weeks before Image Expo. Everyone was in a flurry of organizing — and I tried to jump into it as well as I could. Not much time for introductions — there were panel descriptions to write, press to contact, and interviews and announcements to line up for the convention, on top of the regular publishing PR. A press release four days out of five a week — new titles, issues sold out and reprinted, reviews pouring in all the time.

Sometime in the midst of this, people in the comics media began speculating that 2012 could be “the year of Image.”

I hope so. And I hope the year of Image means the beginning of the era of creator-owned comics.

Faking It, Chapter Two, Part Three – Cabal

Jennifer de Guzman — Mon, 20 Feb 2012 03:19:48 +0000

Cabal

Jamie and I, like most teenage girls, were plotters. A joint operation on the Pellicci brothers resulted in success only for Jamie, in the sense that after a few months of dating, the younger Pellicci broke up with her over the phone.

That’s how these things go, I counseled her at the time. We were so young, of course our relationships weren’t going to be permanent.¹

We were finally going to be together in the same school, though, so fall 1993 was going to be when we undertook our greatest plot of all. Like action heroes, we geared up for our mission. First, boots: I acquired a pair of ten-hole Doc Martens²; Jamie had an enviable pair of mid-calf jump boots. Then, armor: We had matching plaid flannel dresses from Contempo Casuals, mine burgundy, hers olive green. I had a German army shirt, one of thousands that had flooded the American apparel industry after the fall of the Berlin wall³, burgundy-and-black striped knee socks, and black cotton thigh-high stockings.

My crowning objêt, however, was a silver slip-dress that I had to beg my mother for. Paired with an old sweater that I stole from my brother Richard and cropped short, and with my hair done up in corkscrew buns this dress played a vital role in what was basically Björk cosplay. She thought its $40 price should have bought about three outfits, and I had already gotten those expensive boots. I could protest all I wanted that $40 for a pair of Docs was so cheap that I deserved the oxblood ones too for finding such a deal, to no avail. Forty dollars is forty dollars. I eventually got a job to pay for my expensive tastes, but it was so sucky and retail and short-lived that I’m not going to write about it.

Anyway, the point was that my loins were girded. Jamie and I had planned an all-out assault on what remained of the group of mods I had admired since freshman year. The principle target of this mission was a senior named Brian. He had dyed-black hair, a black leather jacket painted with art and the lyrics of a Cure song, and he was a musician or something, I wasn’t sure. Thanks to preliminary scouting, I knew where he and his friends ate lunch so one day Jamie and I just showed up and started hanging out, resplendent in our burgundy lipstick and battle-damaged stockings. Brian didn’t stand a chance.

Reader, I married him. Seriously. I don’t see much point in keeping this information secret. I’m not writing a novel here.

On the steps of my sister's house. No one stood a chance against us.

Those who know me will recognize this as dramatic irony. So will you in about 30 seconds.
I finally got rid of these boots a couple of years ago, and I regret it, just as I regret destroying all of my high school diaries.
I still have this.

Faking It: Chapter Two, Part Two – Grunge

Jennifer de Guzman — Tue, 14 Feb 2012 03:28:11 +0000

Grunge

In the summer before my sophomore year, my best friend Jamie and I discovered grunge, god help us.

I have to take some time here to write about Jamie because she was basically the most important person in my life from the ages of thirteen through sixteen. In adolescent years, this is an eternity. We often spent the night at one of our houses every Saturday, since Jamie’s parents went to the same not-quite-a-cult church as my mother did.¹ She is my only witness to the time my mom hauled me out of bed at three a.m. to clean up the yarn that my kitten had strewn around the living room during the night.²

We both had black hair, and Jamie had an insanely pretty heart-shaped face with apple cheeks and eyes that became crescent-shaped when she smiled.³ Jamie and I were the kind of best friends who could laugh at ourselves in the middle of an argument for being bickering little bitches, freak each other out with ghost and demon stores, and share a crush on an Unattainable Idol.

In the summer of 1992, that idol was Eddie Vedder. I’m not sure how we even became aware of Pearl Jam’s existence, since neither of us was technically allowed to watch MTV. But you can’t keep teenagers away from angst; they’re wired to pick it up, and it’s in the air, like the wifi in a Starbucks.

Pretty soon, we were local experts in the grunge scene. We watched Singles and decided that Cameron Crowe had pretty much captured exactly what we wanted our grown-up lives to be like. We acquired flannel shirts from the thrift store. There is nothing quite so ludicrous as wearing flannel in the middle of summer, but we were committed to this lifestyle. We roamed the streets of Fremont, California in flannel, cut-off jeans, and Chuck Taylors, sharing the earphones of Jamie’s Walkman as we listened to a mix tape of songs recorded off the radio. We prided ourselves on having “discovered” Stone Temple Pilots before anyone we knew had.

As our delve⁴ into all things grunge deepened, we were psyched⁵ to discover that there were girls involved in this movement. There was Hole and L7 and Babes in Toyland; there was D’Arcy in The Smashing Pumpkins⁶; and in the broader “alternative” genre there was Kim Gordon in Sonic Youth and former Pixie Kim Deal’s band The Breeders and Bjork.

When Kurt Cobain married Courtney Love it was a kind of affirmation.⁷ In our angsty and yet still hopeful eyes, this meant that you didn’t have to be the one boys wrote songs about. You could write your own songs, play your own guitar, scream your own lyrics — and the right kind of boys would think you’re really cool for doing it. Yeah, it’s bad to yearn after male approval, but let’s face it: we were thirteen and fourteen; we cared about boys an awful lot.

All of this was brought into my carefully crafted image, of course. This particular mode of being seemed to fit me better than the Scarlett O’Hara one. It was creative rather than coquettish. I stopped worrying so much about what other girls thought of my hair and make-up and clothes, and — thanks to this being the era of the Grunge Waif — stopped agonizing about my skinny, flat-chested figure.

What this also meant is that I pretty much abandoned my friends. (We were only a little more than a year apart in age, but thanks to my November birthday and her February one, Jamie was two grades behind me, and so not in high school yet.) At the time, this struck me as something I had to do to be true to myself or some bullshit, but in retrospect, I see it as calculated and unkind.

Still, I suppose it’s part of the Teenager’s Progress to leave behind friends when your interests and tastes diverge.⁸ I was feeling the outsider as much as ever. I had to find my people.

In sophomore year, my people were a group of boys who liked the same kind of music as I did and also had a penchant for flannel. They accepted my presence like it wasn’t even weird that some girl had just started hanging around them. Rob, Adam, Paul, and Dan were good guys, with only the occasional bit of unavoidable adolescent boy ickiness.⁹

In a lot of ways, though, I was biding my time until Jamie started high school. Together, I thought, we would be an unstoppable force of pure girl awesomeness. I was right, but — and isn’t there always a “but” when it comes to having your anticipations fulfilled, like when a severed monkey paw grants your wishes? — it came with unexpected results.

I am proud to say that every hole I have ever had in my stockings got there without artificial contrivance. This is because I am clumsy.

– –

Jamie was there when I made the smart aleck retort to the pastor’s wife that I wrote about in chapter one.
My mother doesn’t disbelieve that this happened, but she has no memory of it.
That sentence should be written in the present tense, since Jamie still looks like this, but it reads strangely like that.
In case I don’t get to it later, I am taking this opportunity to tell you about the time during my sophomore year that I tripped over Jeremy Lieb, a senior who was, like really cool, at the local library branch, talked to him for a little bit, and then slunk away horrified when my brain smooshed the words “divulge” and “delve” into an entirely new creation, “velge.”
I originally used “delighted” here, but I’m pretty sure my not-quite-fifteen-year-old self would give me a dirty look for it.
I was confused for a period of months when people kept telling me I looked like “the girl from Smashing Pumpkins”; it was only after I saw this MTV commercial that I realized they were talking about James Iha.
The way everything went wrong makes this feeling hard to remember; the drug use, the suicide, the madness that followed overshadows it.
Toward the end of Freshman year I had put together an outfit I was particularly pleased with (red plaid shorts with a white sweater, white tights, and black Sam and Libby Mary Janes), one of my friends took me aside and said, “Don’t take this the wrong way, but you look like one of those seniors who wears really light make up and dark lipstick.” She was talking about the Mods, and the effect I had achieved was, of course, exactly what I had been going for.
Paul now lives in the same condo complex as I do. We both have two-year-olds. Rob is an allergist who once in a while dispenses free medical advice to me on Twitter.

Reel Around My Fountain

Jennifer de Guzman — Mon, 13 Feb 2012 01:37:45 +0000

Cover by Jason Pedersen

Hey, everyone! I wrote a story based on one of my favorite Smiths songs, “Reel Around the Fountain” for Unite and Take Over Volume Two drawn by Traci Hui. It’s being Kickstarted, so please do what you can to support it and spread the news. We have only four days to meet the goall, and I’d really love to see this published. There’s also a story in there by my friend, Spell Checkers creator Jamie S. Rich.

Faking It: Chapter Two, Part One – Gone with the Wind

Jennifer de Guzman — Thu, 09 Feb 2012 05:51:15 +0000

Gone with the Wind

I’ve been trying to be breezy and not terribly analytic here because 1. Who wants to read an intense, psychologically probing account of the life of someone with no real problems? 2. I tend to over-think everything.

I over-thought things in my freshman year of high school. I was determined to mold my personality into something entirely different. I would be outgoing, charming, and effusive; the opposite of the girl who wore a D.A.R.E. T-shirt to school and was struck dumb when Gabe Luevano, pompadoured and leading a pack of popular kids like the villain in an ’80s teen flick, stepped into her path and dared her to keep him off drugs¹; the opposite of the girl who would wander around alone at lunch reading a biography of Mozart until a group of Asian Girl Professional Overachievers took pity on her and invited her to join them.² I would, as a girl who had read Gone with the Wind three times in one year without even noticing how racist it is put it in her journal, “Be less Melanie Hamilton and more Scarlett O’Hara.”

Yeah, it didn’t work. Men weren’t getting caught in my charm despite my not being beautiful; dashing blockade runners weren’t chuckling “What a woman” knowingly to themselves after I made dramatic exits from rooms.³

The highlights of what I remember about freshman year are as follows: I cut my hair short after a traumatizing experience with cheap black hair dye; I wrote a pretty good skit for Spanish III; I started writing a “Quote of the Day” on the board of my English class, along with my frienval⁴ Marc Valles; I took the wrong side⁵ in a fight that broke up my group of girlfriends (not the Asian Girl Professional Overachievers) and then gradually drifted away from them; I joined the Aspiring Writers Club, but, completely intimidated by the elegant mod⁶ seniors who headed it, never attended a meeting.

In other words, I was still totally a Melanie Hamilton.

My fourteenth birthday. Aren't I a total siren?

—-

A couple of years ago, I found out that his brother is a police officer in our hometown when he responded to a call I made about kids smoking pot in the park. Don’t know if that’s ironic or not, but it’s something.
This was not quite like joining a girl gang, but there was something empowering about being in a group of fellow black-haired girls in Guess jeans and oversized sweatshirts. I genuinely liked the Asian Girl Professional Overachievers and really wanted to be like them. I even copied the handwriting of the girl who was my closest friend in the group. She eventually noticed, and it was awkward.
That I know of.
That’s a friend and a rival. Oh please please please say I’ve coined the Next Big Portmanteau Word.
That is, any side at all.
In my Bay Area suburb “mod” was what we called people who listened to the kind of music played on the “Modern Rock” station Live105. Here is a Live105 commercial from 1990.

Faking It: Chapter One, Part Six – No Girl Is an Island

Jennifer de Guzman — Tue, 07 Feb 2012 03:54:36 +0000

No Girl Is an Island
(But Sometimes She Really Wishes She Lived on One)

I take after my dad in that I tend to be stoic, introverted and reticent about talking about my feelings. I believe in each generation improving on the last, however, so I am only occasionally verbally abusive to household objects.

My mom, on the other hand, is classically extroverted. It is well-known in my family that at parties, there will be no stopping her whirlwind of energy that borders on mania. Nobody will be lacking in at least four salad dressing options — whether they asked for them or not. Hell, whether they are eating salad are not. Family dinners were punctuated throughout with my dad saying, “Honey, please sit down.” Since he died in 2002, my siblings and I have carried on the tradition.

Her extroverted personality is how my mom is able to go to churches where the people all around you are waving their arms, murmuring “Yes, Jesus” in a discomfiting, vaguely sexual way, yelling out “Yes, Jesus!” is a way that is not vague at all, and generally making it abundantly clear to those around them how they feel about Jesus and how Jesus is making them feel.

I don’t go in for that kind of thing. Between the ages of eleven or twelve, I tried to pretend like I was as into praising Jesus as all the other kids in youth group were. I couldn’t sustain it. Faking a religious experience is exactly the opposite of what a religious experience is supposed to be, and, besides, I was beginning to suspect I didn’t believe in any off that stuff anyway. Anyway, if I were to be religious, I’d live by more of a Matthew 6:6 model of conduct.* I much prefer to spend time in my room, preferably in the company of fictional people. Or dead people. Or fictionalized dead people. They’re the best.

I have a feeling that I am somewhat baffling to my mother. She thrives in groups of friends, with people around her, but there are often times when I don’t anyone around at all.

I haven’t written much about friends yet in this work. According to my mom, when I was a kid I was this close to universal popularity, but I would keep my friendly classmates at bay by seeming sullen or uninterested. She called me “stuck up” a lot then.

I don’t dispute what she may have seen, just her interpretation of it. I had a perfectly good best friend who lived across the street, and that was enough for me. The truth is, I distrusted the nature of school friendships. In a group of more than two girls, I invariably was the one left out of secrets. If I confided to one girl that I didn’t like something about another, the first girl would immediately go tell the other, starting an elementary school drama that I could not bring myself to care about.

Come to think of it, there were a lot of elementary school dramas that I didn’t care about. Like when I somehow started the trend of collecting milk straws. I quietly amassed a plastic baggy full of them in my desk, not really telling anyone about them, but somehow it turned into a Thing. My poor first grade teacher had to deal with girls whining to her about how so-and-so took her straw or so-and-so was taking straws out of the garbage. I remember thinking, Don’t complain to the teacher about straws. She isn’t going to care. I was right. Our teacher told the girls that if she heard one more word about straws, she would have all of the straws confiscated. At that point, I stopped caring about straws too. Once too many people were involved in something, whether it be straw-collecting fads or friendships, it became more than I wanted to deal with.

This may be why my hero in the second half of elementary school was Karana from Island of the Blue Dolphins by Scott O’Dell. Left alone on her island home when her entire tribe is taken to Santa Barbara by missionaries, Karana lives, what was to me, kind of a dream life. She was completely self-sufficient. She builds herself a house with a fence made of whale bones and kelp! She kills a pack of wild dogs and tames their leader! (Even though he was the dog who killed her little brother, which I found a little weird. But, whatever! She tames a wild dog.) She makes a gorgeous skirt out of cormorant feathers! She catches and kills a devilfish just to prove she can! But then later she swears off violence toward other living creatures!

To me, Karana had that indefinable it that I was looking for. Was she lonely on her island with nobody for company but Rontu her dog and occasionally the Aleutian woman who came with the sealing expeditions? Of course. But she dealt with it. She was an entity unto herself. She made her own sunglasses. She was cool.

I finally visited Mission Santa Barbara, where this plaque memorializing "The Lost Woman of San Nicolas" hangs, in June 2009, something I'd been wanting to do since I was nine. Wasn't it classy of the DAR to make sure their credit was nice and big like that?

– –

* “But when you pray, go into your room, close the door and pray to your Father, who is unseen. Then your Father, who sees what is done in secret, will reward you.” Despite being a fledgling non-believer, I excelled at memorizing Bible verses.