Day 93 What’s That Smell??
Hot yoga is hell on the laundry schedule. Every class means one large towel, plus a hand towel, and one entire outfit – top, bottom, underwear, headband. Also I usually have a third towel for the car, so I don’t soak up the upholstery.
On the days my daughters join me it means an instant mountain of drench-n-stench in the laundry room. Of course, I toss it in the washer right away – when I can. But I’m not the only one who does laundry in the house (thank god) so sometimes the machines are in use. Then, the towels have to sit there, emanating their funk. Imagine those cartoon wavy lines of stink rising up into the air, creeping up the stairs, ghostlike, until they’ve infiltrated every room in the house.
Now, I’d like to point out that one of the lesser-known side effects of menopause is an increased sensitivity to odours. Which is fine when you suspect a gas leak. But it seems I’m always asking “What’s that smell?” or “Can’t you smell that?” until people just tell me to shut up. Which makes me doubt myself.
I should know better.
Back to laundry. Since the laundry room also houses the litter boxes (two of them; we’ve also got another set upstairs. Four cats, sigh.) it’s not a happy room for me. To make matters worse, the garbage cans into which the used litter is dumped is just around the corner, in the garage. It’s a trifecta of gag-orific odours congregating in about 25 square feet. The girls are very good about staying on top of the litter boxes, rather than face the wrath of my nose. But still.
So, yesterday I noticed that the mat in front of the stairs just outside the laundry room looked a little murky. I got down on my hands-and-knees, turned it over and picked up the unmistakeable slap of ammonia.
Cat piss. I knew it! I knew I’d been smelling something more than my own mouldering, sweaty yoga duds. The cat in question has a history of such transgressions, but she’s been good lately. Or so we thought. Or maybe it’s one of the others, letting her take the rap.
I got out a bucket of Mr. Clean and channeled my disgust into adiosing every iota of cat urine out of the tile. And the grout. And the wall. And that thing at the bottom of the door that keeps out drafts. And the baseboard.
But it’s like trying to unring a bell. Once cat urine gets in a wall, can you ever really get it out? Even if I succeed, I’ll have the olfactory memory forever. Is it real? Is it my imagination? Does it matter?
So I’m employing a product called Nature’s Miracle Urine Destroyer, Just for Cats. Nature’s Miracle is a staple in our house, and it really does work. But the cat urine variation was news to me.
I’ve soaked the affected area and you know what? It smells better already.
Day 91 Q: Who’s the Hero of Your Story?
A: Obviously, each of us is the Hero of our own story. When I say Hero, I mean Heroine, Protagonist, Main Character, Star of the Show, Point-of-View Character, Dude, The Big Guy, Harry Potter. The one who owns the story.
You, in your show. Me, in mine.
But some of us forget that sometimes. We get stuck in Best Supporting roles. (Not really, of course, because the camera of our lives is still focused squarely on us. It just seems that way in our own dumb little minds.) What happens, I think, is that it’s easy to slip into a passive role, to let events happen, rather than take action to direct those events.
Good stories have main characters we root for, because they are active, decisive. They act on their own behalf. (That’s why they call them “actors.”)
We can’t help but be the Hero of our own story. Whoever owns the show is the main character. Period. Real life heroes are also active; they live on their own behalf. (Yet we don’t call them “livers.” Hm.)
As you may have guessed, I’ve just returned from another day with Michael Hauge, talking about story structure, the inner and outer journeys traveled by characters over the course of a movie or novel. After the talk concluded, he challenged us as writers – and as evolving human beings – to ask ourselves the same question we must pose to our characters.
What is the next specific, significant step I can take
on my journey to my goal?
Then, fill in the blank:
“I’ll do whatever it takes to (insert the step identified above)
but just don’t ask me to ________.
This blank is the thing that stands in our way, it’s the thing keeping us from finding our True Selves, going from Identity to Essence, from immature to differentiated, child to adult, asleep to awake, pathetic orphan to best-ever wizard, etc. There are all sorts of psychological explanations for this process, but I think we all understand the concept. There’s the ordinary people we are in our ordinary lives; and then there’s that potential to be extraordinary that lies within each of us.
Hero material. We’ve all got it.
We just have to get out of our own way.
Day 89 & 90 Still on Track! And Inner Conflict…
Yes, that means I did a double day on Friday. It was a calculated risk; at the 9:15 am class, I noticed it didn’t feel as hot as it sometimes does.
“The heater’s not working right,” explained Dan. “It’ll be fixed on Monday.”
Hm, I thought. This is about the best chance I’ve got to do another class in a day without killing myself. So I went back for 3:30 pm.
“Weren’t you here earlier?” asked Angela.
“Yup,” I said. “So if I can’t do much, that’s why.”
But I ended up having a second strong class in the same day. It felt awesome. It completed my 90-day challenge without using my loophole-day on the front end… and… it means I can continue my challenge. New goal: 100 classes in 100 days.
Ten more days… piffle.
*
And today, I spent the day with a group of writers learning about novel structure with Michael Hauge. I learned two things in particular that struck me, as they have to do with Real Life, as much as they do writing. He said that a character arc is the journey a character goes through from living in what he calls his Identity, to moving into his Essence.
I love this concept. Our identities make us feel safe and protected, even if they aren’t healthy. Our identities are who we really believe we are – even though it isn’t, not really – and this ignorance is key, which is disturbing to me because I like to think I’m a pretty self-aware person. But I guess that’s why they call them “blind spots.” If ya could see them, they’d just be called “spots.”
Example: in The Titanic, Rose starts out completely in her Identity as a kept woman, the unhappy fiancee constrained by a man who objectifies her and a mother who sees her as a meal ticket. She clings to this identity, this persona, this mask, so tightly that she’d rather pitch herself into the deep blue, than change. She sees no way out, although obviously, she could just tell her mother and Cal to shove off. But that wouldn’t be something her persona would do, so she can’t. But Jack sees something more in her, and helps her see it herself. He sees her Essence, and helps her gain the courage to embrace this part of herself.
Example: in Jerry Maguire, when Renee Zellweger’s character says about Jerry “I love him for the man he wants to be, for the man he almost is.” (Loosely paraphrased, don’t sue me if it’s a bit off.) She sees beneath the mask he’s constructed, to the Essence of him.
We love to watch characters go through this development from shallow to deeper, from someone who’s immature, afraid, insecure, wounded, and who wears a mask to protect the tremendous vulnerability he can’t even admit is there, and become something more, something better.
That constant tug-of-war between living in one’s identity and living in one’s essence is what inner conflict is all about. I think most of us get that. Super-scary.
“You can be safe and unfulfilled,” says Michael Hauge, “or you can be fulfilled and scared shitless.”
Here’s the message to both ourselves, and our characters: “You can have everything you long for, or need on one condition: you must give up your Identity and live in your Essence.”
Can I write characters like this? Oh, how I hope so.
But more than that, I want to live it.
So what does that look like for me, I wonder?