Return to the Scent Saga

A few posts ago I mentioned my scent savvy hippie friend who had the good taste and discriminating nose to recognize my fabulous perfume. Well he isn' t the only one noticing. Last week I met with my writing professor, Ann Dee Ellis, to conference on a couple of chapters I have been working on in my novel. In the midst of our discussion of character development and voice, she asked me what perfume I was wearing, because, of course, it was divine. I told her, and she was delighted to find that she already owned the perfume, but she never wore it. The next time we met in class Ann Dee announced that she had followed my example and started wearing the luscious scent and that her husband was quite pleased. She left it at that, and I think I will too. It warms my heart to know that I can make a difference.

Bombshell with Brains

I finished college yesterday. I sat in that stuffy overcrammed auditorium that I've been attending History 201 in for the past four months wondering who all these people taking the exam were, and why they never came to class all semester as I wrote a brilliant essay on the causes of the rise of Western Europe after the collapse of the Roman Empire. At 2:30 I dotted my last period, threw down my pen and yelled "It's over! I'm Free!!" Well not really. I actually dropped my pen, nearly hit my head on the chair in front of me when I stooped to pick it up, and stepped on three peoples' toes as I squeezed down the aisle to turn in my test. I am not normally a clumsy person. But this is huge. I realized that now my school days are over and I have so many choices and responsibilities ahead of me. I need to get a full-time job so I can earn some money and start saving to buy a house, and I need to get a job with good benefits so I can afford to have a baby someday to put in that house, and I really want to spend more time working on my novel now, but that's kind of scary too because what if it's no good and no one will publish it?
I think thinking about all this made me nervous. That explains the toe stepping. In fact it must have made me nervous because after I finished the exam I just kept thinking about what I should do with my life now, so I had to go to the track and run a couple of miles. Then I went home and took a shower and shaved my legs. No matter what comes next in life, I knew I wanted to meet it with smooth and shiny legs.

Bombshells and Buggies?

So, I'm graduating from my university life in December. It really is about time, I started my undergrad in fall of 2001, so I've been at this thing for six and a half years. Actually that's not true, I took two years off in the middle of that to serve as a full-time missionary in Ireland (a mostly gorgeous country that still pulls at my heart and mind and always will). So really, it's been four and a half years of concerted effort, not six and a half. But it feels like it. And just as the end is looming in sight, something more frightening than six years of undergrad work is at the threshold. Babies. No, I'm not pregnant. How could I be, I still have another four weeks left, and morning sickness and finals do not make a very agreeable mix. To be honest, a baby has never really been much of an option for me, until now. My Handsome Prince still has an undetermined number of years left in school, and I've seen enough couples doing the baby trade-off between classes to know that I did NOT want to have children while both of us are still in school. But all that is about to change. I won't have 15 credit hours anymore to balance with a job. Some people would say "get your career going girl! You didn't go through that many years of intellectual servitude for nothing!" Which is true. But . . . but . . . sigh. What I really want as a career is to write for children. All kinds of children. Picture books to 'gritty' YA novels. That doesn't necessarily conflict with my ability to multiply and replenish the earth. So no excuses there. Other people might say "perfect, you can have kids, and write stories for and about them!" Yes, I do want to write for kids. But that doesn't mean that I really like kids. (Gasp! I know it's shocking.) Don't get me wrong, I like babies. It seems like just about everyone I know either has one, or if they don't, they are working on rectifying that right now. Sometimes I even get a bit baby-hungry when I see all these cute wee tots. But I don't really like kids. I have no desire to ever own a five year old, and I think it really is too much to hope for to expect a baby to continue as an infant infinitely. And Handsome Prince is already beginning to have visions of coaching Little League. (I think I did manage to talk him out of trying for a whole baseball team though, think of what that would cost in equipment! He settled for a Short stop.)
So basically it comes down to that I'm scared. What if I have a brood of awful children who all have freckly pale skin, runny noses, and temper tantrums? It happens to people, I've seen it in grocery stores.
Or,
On a more serious note, what if my kids have autism? (There's a streak of it in my family.)Will I still be able to love them?
And why do parents sit around and swap horror stories of things their children have done to humiliate them in public, or spewed on them from various bodily openings, or shoved objects into those openings and had to be taken to the doctor to have them removed, and then smile and ask childless people like me "aren't you so excited to have children?" Well you can't say "No, your child has cured me of any parenting aspirations I've ever entertained," which is what you're thinking. No. You have to smile back and say, "Oh yes,I can't wait to experience my own bundle of joy!"
And yet,
And yet. I basically melt when I see cute babies. It doesn't matter if they are physical present or in photographs. And I stop to linger in the baby departments of stores, fawning over tiny sweaters and shoes. I have the perfect nursery decore picked out, and I have names picked out for two girls and a boy. I guess I really don't stand a chance. Handsome Prince may get the short stop he's been dreaming about after all.

The Right Scent

I fancy myself a perfume connoisseur. I have just the right scent for every occasion. On Saturday I was stopped by a burnt-out ex-hippie whilst excavating in a charity shop, and he asked me what perfume I was wearing. I told him "Euphoria by Calvin Klein" he said "I'll have to remember that, it's so good, it definitely has a cannabis smell to it." See? I chose the perfect scent to take him fondly back to his youth, legally. Luckily for me, I have no previous experience with cannabis, so the perfume reminds me of more healthfully induced forms of euphoria.

Oh, and I never wear a sent that smells like food. I wish to be exotic, like an orchid. Not mom's homemade apple pie.

Meet the Bombshell

Okay, so maybe I'm not so explosive as I used to be. Now I'm more of a almost 25, slightly overweight, one-time bombshell so unspeakably fatal my stilettos couldn't keep up with me. Really. Then came marriage and birth control and my Marilyn turned to Bette Midler overnight. Sigh. But I'm working on it occasionally.

I never thought I'd be the type of person to keep a blog, but I want to be a writer when I grow up and all the girls I know who are writers have sassy blogs. I guess one could call it peer pressure. . .