Monthly Archives: September 2011

In every house that I have lived in, there is a room that isn’t there.  It shows up, without fail, in every dream I have that takes place in those houses, in such extreme, realistic, technicolor detail to the point that part of me still expects to find those rooms even when I am awake.

In my mother’s house, it was an entire extra invisible floor. By day, my mom’s house was an ordinary one-story ranch. By night, a staircase exists where my closet used to be, and up those stairs is a large room with gleaming wooden floors, a slanting ceiling, and dormer windows.  When I was a child, this room was filled with my favorite toys.  As a teenager, the toys gave way to electronics, as an adult, well, the electronics stayed, but they made way for several large shelves full of books. But some things always remained constant: the light golden wood of the floors, the cream colored walls, an antique standing mirror in a corner, ballet barres lining the two longest walls, and a large fluffy bed that hung from the ceiling.  Looking out of the dormer windows would give me exactly the sort of view I would have expected to see, had I been sitting on the roof of the real house.  The dimensions and layout of the room were so precise, and so accurate, and so real in my mind that this room always felt real to me, even as I would open my closet doors and find only clothes, no stairway.

It didn’t take long after I moved into my new house for it, too, to gain an Invisible Room.  In this case, it is an extra kitchen, situated somewhere between my living room and the back bedroom (now the cats’ playroom).  I have to step down several steps into this kitchen, and it is decorated as if it had come straight from the seventies, all in golds and browns with golden stained butcher block countertops and brown linoleum, elderly appliances and potholders that were either crocheted or woven on those square potholder looms that we all had as children.  A brown, round formica table with metal legs sits in the far corner near a window-wall that opens out onto a patio that also does not exist in reality.  Over the table hangs a macrame-encased basket holding a spider fern.

In neither case are these invisible rooms “dream” rooms. They aren’t rooms I ever particularly wanted, just rooms that, when I went to sleep, my brain seemed convinced actually did exist in my house.  Except for the hanging bed, most of the contents of the rooms are things I 1. already had or 2. don’t particularly want in the first place. They are not particularly special in any way. In my mom’s house I already had two bedrooms to call my own, I certainly didn’t need a third. And while, in my own house, I might occasionally wish for a bigger kitchen, I definitely wouldn’t decorate my dream kitchen in brown and gold, with brown appliances that look older than I am.

I try to remember the rules these rooms have taught me, in my writing. The things that have made them so real that even when awake, some part of me expects to find them where they are in my dreams.  It’s always in the small details, the things which make a setting come alive in the reader’s mind, allows us to picture in detail a huge castle like Hogwarts, or the tiniest of hobbit houses.

I know I can’t be the only person whose mind invents rooms that aren’t there, but there are other things that might have gained a permanent foothold in our dreams that don’t exist in real life. Have your dreams added rooms to your houses, or members to your families, or passages to places you’ve never been?

Created by Anna Mo on Flickr.

So you may be wondering why my blog turned purple.

Today is Alzheimer’s Action Day.

Alzheimer’s is sort of a pet cause of mine. You see, my grandmother lies in a nursing home now, unable to recognize any of her children or grandchildren, only occasionally able to recognize her husband, and completely unable to communicate.

For more than a year now, the only two words she seems to still know how to say are “No” and “Yes”, and even those seem difficult to manage and are indicators of a lucidity that comes at rapidly decreasing intervals. She is trapped in a mind that no longer functions, in a body that continues on in good health in spite of the fact that she can’t quite figure out how to operate it.  She smiles one second and weeps the next, and can tell no one why she does one or the other.  At other times she seems petrified, afraid of some monster that only she can see.

The woman who taught me how to read and write can no longer form words.

And this is a disease that doesn’t stop with the afflicted. In some cases, the patient is the one getting the better end of the deal, for he or she can no longer know or understand what is happening to them. Alzheimer’s is as much a disease afflicting the caregivers as the patient.

When my grandmother became unable to care for herself anymore, unable to even manage basic necessities, it sent my grandfather into such a tailspin of depression that his own mind, once a mind that I considered one of the most brilliant I have ever known, has begun to fail. He has become paranoid, a conspiracy theorist, and so desirous of having something good happen that he has become every conman’s favorite mark.

It’s not his memory that is failing. It is his emotional control. It started when he was forced to become the primary caretaker for my grandmother, and worsened drastically when we were finally forced to put her into the nursing home and he was left living alone for the first time in his life.  Now, he is likely to soon be forced to go into assisted living, at the least, and my mother and aunt are considering a guardianship petition to keep him from throwing what’s left of his life savings away on sweepstakes, lottery, and investment scams.

For my mother and aunt, it has placed extra financial stress, while the emotional stress has been on all of us.

My greatest fear about aging is not pain or lack of mobility. My greatest fear is lack of self, for that is what Alzheimer’s robs its victims of, while their families are forced to sit and watch. It is our intellect, our memories, our histories and relationships, our pasts that make us who we are. Alzheimer’s strips all of that away. Alzheimer’s robs the patient of the very essence of what makes them who they are. And it is one of the top 10 killers in this country.

Alzheimer's Research Graph from the National Institute of Health

And yet it receives a fraction of the funding for research.  Relatively curable and non-lethal diseases such as breast cancer receive millions upon millions of dollars more each year for research into cures, while research dollars spent on Alzheimer’s, which will affect and kill many more people and cost many, many more dollars in healthcare costs, are just a drop in the research bucket.

So I work to make that drop bigger.  I don’t have much money of my own to give, so I do what I can to spread the word and fundraise.

Alzheimer’s disease is the only leading cause of death in this country that has no way to stop or slow the progression of the disease. The only way to find one is with research and research requires funding.

So if you have a few dollars to spare, head over to the Alzheimer’s Association to donate.  Help to save memories.

Geek Unity!

So I’m scheduling this post for the last day of Speak Out With Your Geek Out Week, which I heard about from the fabulously profane Chuck Wendig.

I’ve always been a geek. From my  first Commodore 64 to my first webpage, from Donkey Kong and Ms. Pacman to World of Warcraft, I’ve never not been a geek, even before I knew what the word was, and even while I tried to deny it with every breath while attempting to be cool in high school. (Lessee, I went through a goth phase, a hippie phase, a preppy phase . . . if there was a label to try on, I tried it.)  I know it seems extremely hipsterish of me to say that I was a geek before it was cool, but the thing is, I was. And I am still the most remarkably uncool geek you’ll ever find.

While I always loved sci-fi, comic books, rpg games, video games, or fantasy novels, I never really embraced or welcomed the thought that I was a geek, and for the most part these were things I did when I was Away From Other People and Never Brought Up In Company. (Except, of course, with the exception of my D&D group.)

Then, in college, I began to come out of the closet, so to speak (and not just about being a geek). This occurred in part because I met a guy who didn’t blink at me like I was some sort of unfeminine freak when I walked into his room and went “Ooooh! You’re playing Final Fantasy VII!” and partly because when I got to college I met other girls who were also into those things, so I didn’t have to hide that I liked them.  I stopped trying to be cool and different and just started being myself.  And somewhere in there I realized that my self is kind of awesome, no matter how not-unique and not-cool I might be.

I have to admit that I am in that rare position where I am geekier than my boyfriend, though we are both gamers. At Cons, girls tend to get asked “Oh, so you came here for your boyfriend?”.  When we go to a Con, I have to admit that he goes there for me. Which is usually readily apparent, as I’m the one in the ridiculous costume. He geeks out about the minutiae of video games and music. I geek out . . . about almost everything that I love.

And in some cases, I have been known to turn into a rabid fangirl. Complete with squeeing nonsensical jabbering and drool.

OMG, David Tennant’s freckles omg asdfghjkl!!!

Ahem. The BF would never do that. It would be undignified.

Except, possibly, upon meeting a certain Vulcan.

But see, that’s what a geek is. Geeks don’t love anything by halves, we go in whole haul. When you criticize someone for being a geek, you’re criticizing them for loving something too much. And yes, much of what geeks love may seem trivial and inconsequential, in the grand scheme of things, but is it really such a bad thing to love things so much?

And sure, we nitpick and criticize and over-analyze our fandoms, whatever they are, but that’s all part of the fun. It’s part of loving what we love, really studying it and what makes it great.

There’s a lot of drama out there in the various geek communities too, where fandoms go up against members of other fandoms, where there are fandom wars going on sometimes decades long, but that’s something I’ve never understood about the community. Geeks need to unite and stick together, no matter what they geek out about.  If being a geek is about loving something passionately, why can’t we love each other too?

So I’m standing up in Geek Solidarity! I might even be convinced to hug a Twilight Geek!

Can I still stand with them in solidarity while pointing out weak writing and poor character development?

And, here’s the obligatory (partial) list of the Things I Geek About:

• Books (The physical kind. Of any sort. And bookshelves, because, well…)
• Writing
• Classic Literature
• Science Fiction and Fantasy TV, Movies, and Books, including, but not limited to: Doctor Who, Anything Jossverse, Star Trek (all of them, but most particularly TOS and XI – the Kirk/Spock Era), Harry Potter, anything written by Neil Gaiman, Cheesy 80′s Action TV Shows, and Almost Anything Involving Robots.
• Video Games, particularly RTS and TBS type games. I’m good at strategy, not so good at shooters (mostly because they make me carsick)
• Roleplaying (whether in digital form or pen-and-paper)
• Comic Books (I’m a Marvel girl.)
• Cooking
• Crafts (particularly geeky sorts of crafts, or incorporating fandom love into old fashioned crafts)
• Costuming

There are more, I don’t even think I could list them all if I wanted to, but those are the major Things That Make Me Go Squee. What are yours?