Crossing the Border in Orange County

Tonight after Pirate was in bed, his mother, auntie and uncle watched "Orange County." And Auntie had a somewhat unpleasant shock during a scene in which Colin Hanks, playing an unlucky high school senior named Shaun, consults his hero, a writer/Stanford professor named Marcus Skinner, played by Kevin Kline.

At first I was amused at the way Marcus Skinner is portrayed: shrouded in J.D. Salinger type mystery. First he is just a pair of hands opening Shaun's fan letter. Then he is a well-dressed man with a briefcase seen from behind in the dark night of the Stanford campus. Then he turns around and looks like Kevin Kline. He doesn't speak much, but he remembers the novella Shaun sent him. Shaun throws his arms around him. (The audience giggles.)

The next thing we know, Shaun is in Skinner's office or sitting room or wherever, and Skinner is giving Shaun a very helpful review of his novella. His advice is so good that Shaun leaves absolutely euphoric. His smooth teenage face is a complete contrast to Skinner's grizzled charms, and he positively glows with youth and optimism and dreams and

And I was right back there in the sitting room with Marcus Skinner, thinking about how very young the young look, and I thought, Oh dear. I no longer identify with the young in young people movies. I identify solely with the grizzled adults they consult. I AM the grizzled adult they consult--or would be if they could see the grey in my hair, which they can't really, thank goodness, on account of the volume.

Sigh.

Have Cold But Also Presents!

Hello, my little poppets. I have a terrible cold and only emerged from the House to see our old pal Aelianus. Aelianus, whom you may remember from my unofficial first novel, The Tragical Tale of Aelianus of England, was wondering if there is any magic realism in my official first novel (Ignatius, soon to be announced on a Catholic website near you), and I had to think for an hour, sipping Lemsip, before I remembered one eensy bit.// Anyway, being so sick, I cannot think of anything very brainy to say about either the Single or the Married Life today. Instead I will gloat over all my Christmas presents, which include a bottle of Chanel No. 5 from Mum and Dad and a book on British baking from Our Nearest Neighbour Angela. I am very excited to have a British baking book to go with British flour, which is so much different from Canadian.// Feel free to gloat over your presents, too, in the combox. We all know Christmas is not about presents, but now that it is the 27th, I think it is safe to revel in them. I personally love Christmas presents, and always recorded them in my diaries so as to remember who gave me what when.// What is with Blogger? I take special pride in my paragraphs, and their glitches are driving me nuts.

Woman with a Troubled Past

Plans are afoot for Auntie to return victoriously to Poland as the keynote speaker for a women's retreat. This retreat is very much still in the planning stages, and eventually I will have to remind the enthusiastic organizer that I do not, in fact, speak Polish and I get the parish Polish altar servers to read me his letters./ In one of the letters, the organizer sketched out his suggestions for the programme, and my parish Polish altar server du jour stumbled over one of the phrases. Apparently I was being described as a "brave woman with a troubled past", which the loyal altar server did not think a sterling summation of my auntish character./ "Yarg," shouted Auntie. "It's the divorce, isn't it? Yarg! Continental Europeans! Yarg!"/ The altar server listened patiently as I ranted about European Catholic attitude towards annulments and divorced women and why people look at me as if I have a troubled past. And then I remembered the last bit might be because I actually wrote about it in my book. Meanwhile, if you write about being divorced, people are going to think of you as divorced. And if you are somehow magically married again, people are going to want to see your annulment papers and hopefully some contrition./ My principal source of contrition, which I thought about as I woke up today, is that I thought Dorothy L. Sayer's Gaudy Night was any kind of guide to life. Plot spoiler alert. In Dorothy L. Sayer's Lord Peter Wimsey novels, Lord Peter eventually falls in love with a dark-haired, husky-voiced, detective novelist named Harriet. We will not say that she was based on Dorothy L. Sayers herself because I will go mental if anyone thinks my own heroines are based on myself (unless they are actually named Seraphic, of course)./ Now, BIG PLOT SPOILER, after a few novels in which Harriet consents to go out to dinner now and again with the dashing and clever Lord Peter, about whom she has a major inferiority complex, Harriet "gives way" at the end of Gaudy Night and, to quote Lord Peter's mother, they end up "kissing madly in a punt."/ This is all very romantic, and I think Gaudy Night was an absolutely splendid book, but Dorothy L. Sayers sacrificed common sense to a handy literary device by making her heroine fall in love with a man she had consistently rejected for three years or so. Harriet is depicted as having won a major victory over herself, and it was of Harriet I thought when I was 24 and much stupider than I am now./ It may have been the last time I mistook fictional decisions for real life lessons. I certainly hope so. And meanwhile I have discovered that I am not the only woman who has done this, for apparently there are women who honestly take as Gospel lessons learned from Sex and the City and other television shows. Never mind that a freelance writer does not make Carrie's salary. I remember Samantha wondering if sleeping with half of New York is what got her breast cancer, and she being very relieved to discover that the nun in her waiting room also has breast cancer. Yes, nuns get breast cancer. But they don't usually get cervical cancer which, unlike breast cancer, is linked to a very common STD. And as my friend Lily pointed out, there is no way a woman who uses men the way Samantha does could possibly have long-term loyal friendships with three women./ Being in general pro-great world literature, I am sure that there are some lessons you can learn from the classics. However, I would steer clear of making major life decisions based on the decisions made by fictional characters. I don't care that PLOT SPOILER Anne and Gilbert got married in the end and had seven children. Lucy Maud Montgomery and her very best bosom friend both married men mostly just not to be spinsters, it seems, and they were miserable./ The Anne books were and are escapist fiction, no matter how many Japanese and Korean tourists insist Anne is real. Plato wouldn't allow any poets into his perfect state, and that is because they told such shocking lies. I am sure he would feel the same way about novelists. However, to be fair to novelists, our first loyalty is not always to the truth of ordinary life but to our beloved characters. We make up our own universes, and the laws that govern this universe do not always govern ours./ If Blogger does not fix the bug in its new model I will be leaving it sooner rather than later for my very own new webpage, so stay tuned.

It's About Baby Jesus

Great column from Single mum Crescat over here.

Being between washing a ton of dishes and mixing up the dough for gingerbread men for the tree which we finally bought this morning (£20 as last minute, woo-hoo!), I have almost nothing more to say.

What I have to say is a suggestion to thank God for who you have and what you have this Christmas, and concentrate on the people who really love and like you, and not on the people you wish loved and liked you. Celebrate with the people who really are in your life, like your nephews and nieces (if you have some), and don't brood over phantasms of your imagination, like your future children.  That is the only and best way to keep sane over the holidays.

And, finally, it's not your birthday (unless it is): it's the day we mark the birthday of our Lord, so good Christian readers rejoice and get ye to the best and most beautiful service you can find to celebrate--unless you are a strict Presbyterian, in which case I wish you a happy and tranquil Sunday!

I'll be praying for you all at Midnight Mass.Merry Christmas (and happy Sunday) to all! Wesołych i błogosławionych świąt Bożego Narodzenia!

"What Do Aunties Do?" Redux

Scene: Dinner Table

Pirate's Mum: Pirate, what do aunties do?

Pirate: They fool around.

Sensation.

Perfectly Innocent House Guest (mournfully): Denounced by a seven year old.

Auntie: What do you mean by fooling around, exactly?

Pirate hops down from the cushion on his chair.


Pirate (with relish): They walk around like THIS! (He does a shambling dance in a circle.)

An Acceptance Letter

I was never this thin, however.

Yesterday I got a contract in the post from Ignatius Press. They wish to publish my novel.

No, not The Bodis Riper. (This is Ignatius Press, people!) I'm talking about my Graham Greenesque thriller, which almost none of you have seen because I never put a word of it online.

This is not a tremendous shock to me, as I was told over a month ago that Ignatius Press was thinking about it, and then I spent a week or two waiting for the final decision. There was a point where I could do nothing but pray that everything worked out the way it should, and then I thought, "Hey! I have a captive audience who could pray, too!"

Darlingses, I can say no more about the drama of it all, but you will all understand soon after you have rushed off to buy my Controversial and Stunning Debut.

The final decision came in early December and a suggested contract by email shortly after that. B.A. and I bought a magnum of champagne and served it to our pals after Mass the next Sunday. But I was determined not to say anything to the outside world until after I got the contract in the post. And lo, I have. It has very nice, thick paper too!

I will tell you what it is called and various other information all in good time. Meanwhile, I just wanted to let you know about this lovely non-rejection letter and what is, I admit, extremely exciting news.

The Realities of Marriage

Occasionally I get an email from a nice Catholic girl who has been dating a nice Catholic boy for some months, and she is trying to decide if she wants to marry him or not. She lays out all the good qualities of the nice Catholic boy and his family and asks me what I think.

What I think is that she should marry him only if she wants to have sex with him, wash his socks and sit beside him on the couch as he watches yet another boring episode of yet another boring TV show. Because this is what the daily, domestic reality of marriage largely is, when you get right down to it. 

I'm not talking about the spiritual stuff, obviously. There are dozens of Catholics happy to tell you all about the spiritual stuff, so go read them if you want to find out about it. I think Christopher West has even developed a kind of Catholic tantra or something, so if you want to mix in some ooh-la-la with your theological reading, off you go to Chris.

Meanwhile, if you are younger than me (it seems) there is also getting pregnant, which involves swollen ankles and having a puffy face and staring down at your huge belly moaning "Come onnnnn, new baby! Hurry uuuuuup!" The new baby will usually look like your husband, so it is important to really like or even love your husband so that you love the fact that his baby looks like him. 

Oh yes. Love. I guess I should also talk about love, although now that I live in Britain it is an even more embarrassing word than sex. The problem with love is that we North Americans throw the word around a lot, and tell everyone that we love them. Even North American boys now indulge, as in "I love you, man!" And what you feel when you get a crush on someone can be called love, I suppose, although I prefer the expression "temporary insanity." The British call it "fancying", as in "Do you fancy him?" which sounds suspiciously akin to that other common expression, "Fancy a fish supper?"

For marriage purposes, however, love is not just a feeling of sexual attraction or affection but, in my experience at least, a feeling that you will absolutely die if you cannot marry this person within six  to eight months which morphs, after marriage, into the knowledge that life will really, really suck if this person escapes or dies. 

Of course,  you could argue, that is just me, Auntie Seraphic, over 35 and brimming with natural affections. What of the indecisive young?  

I would say that the indecisive young should just sit tight until they meet a person--of proven good character and appropriate family background, beliefs and education--who truly rocks their world. And this is because marriage is not something tremendously exciting in itself, on the domestic level (on the social level it is crucial to the health of society), but a man and a woman living in one space, trying to keep the space and themselves clean, earning money and spending it on boring things, having sex, arguing and watching boring TV.  That's what the "marriage lifestyle" looks like, so unless you marry someone who rocks your world, you are going to feel seriously ripped off.   

There is a cynical little term that has arisen from people who marry young and soon feel ripped off. It's called "starter marriage." But this is a little term we want to stamp out because divorce should not be an option, and if you're even thinking of divorce as your handy little escape hatch then most definitely you should not be getting married.