Like a bad reality TV show, today's entry is a follow up to "riddle me this" , the "Riddle Me This" results show, if you will. This entry, then, will have all the hallmarks of a good reality TV results show: hilariously dramatic music, a visit from a B-list celebrity, lots of drawn-out pauses before the big reveal, and a slew of crocodile tears at the end. Hope you'll stay along for the ride.
         (Commercial Break: Voting in the aforementioned entry hasn't closed, so if you have yet to weigh in for your 500 gift points, drop by. I'll update the results here if more answers come in.)
         We've received sixteen responses, which seems like a lot, except when you consider that according to Summary Stats, this journal got 35 views on Thursday and 48 on Friday. Come on, lurking readers, what are you afraid of? I'm hardly intimidating...but I digress.
         Of the sixteen responses, eight people had heard the phrase "getting an MRS" before. Exactly half of the group! How definitive. Two of those eight included with their responses the caveat that they thought it was an LDS phrase, which would be statistically significant (25%) if the other responses didn't mirror the conservative culture aspect of the phrase. I suppose that its frequency in LDS circles (some circles -- it appears not to be ubiquitous among Mormons, either) is due to conservative culture.
         (Is it horrible that I laughed aloud at highly evolved 's comment that in her experience, it referred to past eras? So, so true. The percentage of female BYU students who finish four years of school doesn't scream "21st century.")
         Although the masses seem quite divided (a fifty-fifty break. Really? Not even one person to tip the scales one way or another?) I have, after this discussion, made the decision to remove the reference from my novel. I feel like it's safely established as something that isn't primarily LDS, or even primarily regional, but it doesn't seem common enough to belong in RM's teen lingo. Hopefully I can come up with something that Summer can say with even more disdain. Time to be original...

*
The numerical breakdown, if you're curious; I know I would be...
(New data added 10/26)

"Getting an MRS"
Yes: 10
No: 8

Of yes answers (region):
Northwest: 1
Midwest: 1
Southeast: 3
West: 2
Canada: 1
None given: 2

Of no answers (region):
Northeast: 1
Midwest: 0
Southeast: 0
West: 2
England: 1
None given: 4

Of LDS respondents:
Yes: 1
No: 1

Understand it despite not hearing it:
Yes: 3
Maybe: 1
No: 3
No answer: 1

By education (yes):
College: 7
No college: 1
Unknown: 2

By education (no):
College: 1
No college: 2
Unknown: 5
 

If you haven't offered up your two cents in yesterday's entry, "riddle me this" , I encourage you to do so. It helps with my novel and satiates my curiosity, and, perhaps most importantly, there are gift points to be had!

         Not that I'm a fan, but the latest Sarah Palin news: http://politicalwire.com/archives/2009/10/23/palin_endorses_hoffman_in_ny-23.htm...
I just can't figure this woman out. Really. I have her narrowed down to three possibilities:
She's so inept that she sabotages her own party without knowing it;
She's blinded by ideology, so much so that Republicans aren't conservative enough for her;
She's secretly a Democratic operative who not only guaranteed Obama a win in the 2008 elections but is working to keep the House Democrat-controlled, too.

         Being partial to conspiracy theories, I like to think it's the last one. How delicious a story, right? She could be a spy in the middle of the Republican party, carefully choosing only soundbytes so ridiculous that no normal human being would buy them. (Not that no human beings seem to agree, just that no normal ones do.) It'd be a shrewd move for the Democrats.
         As some of you are aware, for last year's primaries, I re-registered as a Republican so I could vote for Ron Paul. Right afterward I switched back -- the Libertarians need my registration, you know, to keep party status in the state -- but the damage was done, I guess. My parents' house still gets mailed "District Alerts" from a local Republican group, although my dad reregistered to vote for Ron Paul too, so I can't take all the blame for that.
         Unfortunately, something that is entirely my fault is the amount of conservative junk email I get now. I've mentioned before that somehow I mysterious got on the Democratic Governors' Association listserv; I'm also, somehow, on the listserv for "Gun Alerts," "Socialism Alerts" and "Conservative Action Alerts." That a lot of alerts. I don't know how conservatives function, being on alert all the time.
         Here's the problem: if it were genuinely a "socialism alert," I'd probably be all for it. If, for instance, it were an email that gave me updates on socialist countries' abuses of citizens or violations of civil liberties, I'd probably like it a lot. Instead it keeps reminding me that Obama was born in Kenya and wants to kill my grandmother. Scary! Except that neither of those things relate to socialism.
         Next week, I'm giving my class presentation on Maoist policy and the Miao in 20th century China. Now that's what I call socialism! Maybe I should write a Socialism Alert about it...
 

         Even if you don't normally read me, I hope you'll drop in to answer a quick question. Answer in blog comments, even a simple yes or no, for my thanks and a few gift points.

         Now that I have your attention, I have a quick usage question for you. Do you understand, or have you heard before, the phrase "getting an MRS" regarding girls in college?

         This came up in today's writing meeting: in RM's "Chapter Nine"  [13+], one reader didn't understand the phrase, and the other did. I initially assumed that this must be a cultural thing, that perhaps it is an LDS turn of phrase (much like the initials RM themselves, which when spoken aloud make me think "returned missionary"), but since the other reader had heard it before, I wondered how prevalent it is.
         For obvious reasons, I need more than two opinions, so I'm asking you: have you heard the phrase "getting an MRS" before? Do you understand, for instance, the following sample exchange?

"What is your sister studying at Arizona State?"
"Oh, she's just getting her MRS."

         If this is a regional thing, cultural thing, etc., I'd rather not include it in my novel without explanation or at least a winking sort of allusion; however, if it is as prevalent as I thought it was, I'll certainly include it. It fits.
         So, good readers, tell me true: have you heard this before?
 

1601409

The Cost of Living  [GC] Martina receives an unusual proposition. By: Lorien

         Clearly, the solution to me not writing enough is just not to do anything else. Yesterday, after the midterm, I did nothing but work on this story and watch SVU. Last night after dinner, I came back and pushed through the remainder of the third section, and boom, suddenly, 2200 words later, I'm done. "The Cost of Living" (god, the title is still awful) wraps up at 9100 words. Sweet.
         Ah yes. I didn't do any studying or homework, or even start researching for my Russian presentation tomorrow, but I did conclude the very rough first draft of this bizarre story. That makes today a good day.
         It's really long and pretty strange, but if you have the time and interest to read the beginning, I'd be quite grateful. There are still a lot of things I don't like about the story yet, but they all take place in the second and third sections, and we all know I'll probably work on them instead of doing any homework again tonight.
         Yes yes. This is why I am such a winner.
 

         For the third time in four days, I've dreamt about produce shopping. Being partial to fiction, I decided to look up this topic on a dream interpretation website. I learned that "to dream that you are shopping for food and groceries signifies your hidden attempt to buy the attention of others."
         Wowza.
         Have any of you noticed me doing this lately? Or perhaps trying and failing to do this? Apparently my subconscious is a major attention whore. You be the judge:
         In the first one, Friday night, I dreamt that when I finished all my tasks at work one afternoon, my boss sent me to a mysterious downstairs room of the building where a number of hipster kids/Brown students were putting fruits and vegetables into bags, which would eventually be sold to poor people in the neighborhood. I started loading up the bags, which was difficult, because all the fruit in a particular bag had to be the same color, but on the big table, the fruits and vegetables were completely mixed up. After I had completed three bags, the overseer came over and yelled at me for putting too much fruit in each bag. Apparently I needed to be weighing the bags on a small kitchen scale. For example, he told me, some people wanted more berries than apples, hence the need for the weighing. When I pointed out that, um, that didn't make sense, he fired me from my regular job.
         In the second dream, Saturday night, I dreamt that E--- and I headed to the grocery store for our weekly food supply. All he wanted to buy were frozen pizzas and cans of those ready-to-bake biscuits, while I was analyzing prices on different sizes of whole chickens. When we came to the produce section, I saw that snow peas were on sale, so I went to get a large bag of them, though there were other types of peas in there too. A middle-aged woman with a baby was also getting snow peas, and she told me that she recognized me from the newspaper. I smiled a little and kept getting snow peas. She told me that in general she liked my opinions columns, except for the very first one, which was "awful. Just awful. And stupid." Then she dropped her bag of snow peas.
         In the third dream, last night, I dreamt that my mom and I went to the grocery store to get some apples to make a pie. This would have been easy except that the fruits and vegetables were all mixed together, not in rows like at a regular grocery store. I was digging through the grapes (to make a grape pie...?) underneath a bunch of small bags of carrots when I jerked my hand away from a weird, wormy, spidery-looking bug. A man also looking for grapes told me that I needed to be more careful digging around because I could get stung by that bug. He said they especially like to live under fruits.
         I may be weird, but at least I have excellent dream recall.
         So, faithful readers: thoughts? I don't lend a lot of credence to metaphysical, New Age claims of dream interpretation, but I do think that recurring dreams must indicate something. Something must be going on in my life that fruit keeps showing up in my dreams. I must be subconsciously fixated on something related to groceries, maybe, or shopping, or inappropriate mixing of produce. I'm not sure what it is, but I doubt it's the attention of others.
         But, then again, who am I to disagree? Everybody's looking for something.
 

         ...if people weren't so idiotic.
         I just took out the trash, down to the trash room on the first floor, and as I took the stairs back up I found myself following this slutty-looking drunk girl wearing heels and a miniskirt. When I glanced up, I realized that she was not wearing any undies beneath that miniskirt. Way more of her than I ever wanted to see.
         Yay feminism.
 

         So I'm writing a new story. I know what you're thinking: Lorien, you still haven't finished and made public your previous story. You haven't even given it a title yet! And its plotline is far more interesting than what you're writing now. Well, ye readers of very little faith, to you I say boo. I know. Someday soon, I will finish "The Cost of Living"  [GC] and make it visible. And then you'll all be happy. (I will, at least.)
         Anyway, this new story. It's interesting so far, though very emotionally draining to write — hence why I can squeak out only about three or four hundred words on it a day. It's the sort of thing you have to construct, consciously, painstakingly, so as not to make it a PSA. I want it to be fuzzy, unclear, controversial. It's called "Gray Area."* I want it to embody that concept.
         Here's the problem: I can already tell that people are going to think this is biographical. It's happened to me before, specifically in reviews of these two pieces: "Toledo"  [13+] and "Tomorrow"  [13+]. And I suspect it'll happen again here. College girl, smart, desperate: I can write that. I can access that voice.
         I'm having the opposite problem with the novel I'm potentially considering writing for NaNo. (Whether I'll do NaNo or not at all is still up in the air at this point.) I know the plotline, the inciting events, the backstory, the characters, everything, but I can't manage to find the narrator's voice. I know who she is but I don't know her. I know details about her, but not how she thinks, the phraseology she uses, the words she leans on, the heuristics she sees. I sort of know how she reacts to the other characters but not really. Not enough to write a compelling novel based around her. Not yet.
         I know it's coming. Every day this story idea is more developed. But will it be strong enough to start writing in November? Remains to be seen. I just need to know more: rather than knowing who she is, I need to know who she thinks she is. That's the way good first-person stories work.
         If I keep working on these other things, who knows if I'll even be able to. Waiting to see who I write next...


*Unless it's called "Fighting for Nothing." But probably "Gray Area." Ehhhh, too early for me to say definitively which I'll choose.
 

         ...so fucking fantastic.

*does the joyful publication jig*

"Anywhere You Hang Your Head"  [18+] has been accepted for publication at Ruthless Peoples Magazine!

This is what the editor wrote:

Dear [Lorien]---

Well, that is just excellent. I would be delighted to publish, subject to edits and contract.

I’ll hopefully sort out the contract this weekend – I’m just plugging through the submissions list at the moment.

The key thing that’s puzzling me at an edit level is the tense change. When I allocate to one of my associate editors you may discuss with them and come to a conclusion.

Excellent, excellent story. A real lesson on how things should be done.

Kind regards

Editor
RUTHLESS PEOPLES MAGAZINE


EEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEK!

         I guess the moral is, buck up and submit, Lorien. The stories sitting around on your computer and in your portfolio aren't getting you anywhere.
         Seeing this email this morning completely made my day. It almost makes me forget about how behind I am on homework, and how soon I'll be getting a CAT scan. Because seriously, folks, my story was excellent. Excellent! And pretty soon everybody will get to read it...making me one step closer to complete world domination.
         Just kidding.
 

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/opinions/pundit-contest/index.html

         Oh shit. Best. Job. Ever.
         So, let's see, my qualifications are nil, I don't (yet) have a degree, I'm far from their normal demographic, young, not famous (different from infamous ), libertarian, barely keep up on my obligations as is, but, oh my god, you know I am applying for this.
         I estimate my chances are .00000056%. Wish me luck!