Looking toward Comic-Con, I have been reminiscing about some moments at conventions that were a little embarrassing. I try so hard not to be an awkward and socially stunted nerd, but sometimes I just do stuff that makes me feel stupid. Here are some, in roughly chronological order. They illustrate common pitfalls of attending comics conventions.

• I confused the then-current artist on The Tick with its creator, Ben Edlund. He said to me, “You don’t even know who I am, do you?” I think he also resented that I didn’t ask him to sign my midriff and give him my phone number, as the girl ahead of me in line did. (I know this dude’s name, but I’m not going to mention it.)
  The Pitfall: Revealing that you don’t know Your Stuff. Or actually, revealing to an artist that you don’t know His Stuff. He could be the kind of artist that think His Stuff’s the Hottest Stuff Around, and he might be kind of jerky if you ask him something he thinks you should know. Just get your sketch or autograph, say hello, whatever, and get answers to your questions on the Internet.

• I asked Dave McKean for a sketch after I’d been standing in a line that had “NO SKETCHES” signs near it for fifteen minutes. He did a sketch for me anyway, of Death from Sandman.
  The Pitfall: Not being on the lookout for signing rules. Especially with the bigger names, there will probably be some.

• I tried to introduce myself to someone I don’t know. This artist knew someone at the book and had stopped by . I wandered over. The other person didn’t say anything in ways of introduction, so in a break in the conversation, I started to extend my hand to introduce myself. Unfortunately, the artist was using the break in the conversation to say goodbye. So he said to me, “I don’t know you, but I’ll shake your hand anyway.” I felt stupid. And also unimportant. Wah.
  The Pitfall: Conforming to our culture’s expectations of interpersonal decorum. It doesn’t always work. Comics conventions are kind of full of people who aren’t great at doing this, so when they meet it, they might not recognize it. But don’t stop doing it — because the people who try to mind their manners as well will appreciate it.

• I was rendered speechless. I was talking to someone about a book I had encountered, saying it seemed like it was trying to ride on Lemony Snicket’s coattails while simultaneously copying Jhonen Vasquez. A dapper, roundish man approached us and asked what we were talking about. I showed him the flier for the book. “Well,” the man said, “I’m Lemony Snicket, and I think it’s a wild outrage!” I looked at his badge. It read “Daniel Handler.” I stared at him and said nothing until he slinked off, at which point I sputtered: “You are Lemony Snicket!”
  The Pitfall: Not being prepared to meet someone whose work I admire. Conventions are stuffed full of them. Be prepared to be as scintillating as you are in your daydreams — you know, the ones where people gather around you as you show off your wit and they laugh and say, “Oh, my that is humorous! Very clever! Bravo!” Or at least the ones where you have a pleasant, though not deeply meaningful, exchange with someone whom you admire. (See also, “This part of San Jose always smells like onion rings.”)

• I heard the words, “It’s nice to meet you,” coming out of my mouth as I was speaking to someone I had already met. I saw her expression change as she thought, “This snob can’t even remember that we’ve met before!” I was abashed.
  The Pitfall: This has probably happened to everyone at a convention — you meet so many people and then you forget whom you’ve met, or you don’t connect a name to a face, and then, ugh, you make an ass of yourself. What you need is one of those personal assistants who memorizes faces and names and whispers the information to you as people approach you. Failing that, you need to have a good “con apology”: “I’m sorry, I realize now we’ve met before! You know how these things are! Sensory overload and what not… Anyway, how are you? How’s [insert something that proves you remember who they are]?”

Have fun at Comic-Con kids. Don’t embarrass yourselves.

But it doesn’t really matter, to either of us. I love that we began our anniversary in a quiet way, with our little family together, snuggling with our little one. Milestones have a way of zipping right by while you’re busy living.

Filipino food is notoriously meat-centric (also garlic- and vinegar-heavy). There is a Filipino restaurant in San Bruno that has some dishes they can make vegetarian, and I went there recently only to discover they were closed for a private party. Disappointed and still in the mood for Filipino food, I decided to call other Filipino restaurants in the area to see if they had vegetarian dishes. They had no idea what I was talking about. One offered me milkfish. The other offered me something that had “only a little bit of chicken and shrimp” in it. I’ve always felt like a Filipino outsider because I’m mestiza, but at that moment I felt like I wasn’t part of my culture at all.

To counter this feeling, I have decided to start making the Filipino food I remember from my childhood, adapting the recipes so that they are vegetarian. First up: sarciado. Sarciado, as my family makes it (there are regional variations — I just discovered that this dish is also called afritada), is a stew with a tomato-based sauce, potatoes, garbanzo beans, and peas. Usually it’s made with chicken or pork, but I realized that it’s just as good without it. Here’s how I make it:

Vegetarian Sarciado
(makes 4 servings)

Ingredients:
2 tablespoons of vegetable oil
2 medium-sized potatoes, cut into one-inch cubes
1/2 onion, sliced thinly
1/2 red bell peper, cut into strips about one inch long
4 cloves of garlic, minced (or pressed with garlic press)
1 bay leaf
8 ounces of fake chicken strips (like Trader Joe’s Chickenless Strips) or fried cubed tofu (optional)
2 small tomatoes or 3 Roma tomatoes, diced
1 can of garbanzo beans, with liquid
3/4 cup of frozen peas
1/4 cup of tomato paste
Salt and pepper, to taste

Heat oil in a large pan over medium heat. Add cubed potatoes. When they just begin to brown, add the onions, red bell peppers, and bay leaf. When the onions begin to turn translucent, add the garlic and the fake chicken strips (if you’re using them). Be careful not to let the garlic burn. Let the fake chicken strips brown a little, then add the diced tomatoes. Lower the heat and let the mixture simmer to draw the moisture from the tomatoes (about eight to ten minutes). Then add the can of garbanzo beans with the liquid and the frozen peas. As the peas thaw, add the tomato paste and stir to incorporate it, creating a sauce. (If needed, you can add water or vegetable broth.) Add the fried tofu at this point if you’re using it. Add salt and pepper to taste. Serve over steamed rice. (I know, I know, potatoes, garbanzos and rice? It’s a carb-fest. Just go with it, ‘kay? And make sure you don’t eat the bay leaf!)

And that is vegetarian sarciado. Sorry I don’t have a picture. I’ll add one once I make it again.

Next up: vegetarian lumpia!

It operates like a fable or a myth, a story in which outlandish and extravagant figures and events serve as conduits for universal experiences. Dystopian fiction may be the only genre written for children that’s routinely less didactic than its adult counterpart. It’s not about persuading the reader to stop something terrible from happening—it’s about what’s happening, right this minute, in the stormy psyche of the adolescent reader.

Read more: http://www.newyorker.com/arts/critics/atlarge/2010/06/14/100614crat_atlarge_miller?currentPage=all#ixzz0r9T9l6r7

Miller notes that the interior logic of The Hunger Games does not hold together unless you regard it as a reflection of the adolescent mind.

Of course I am thinking about this subject because of my decision to revise my dystopian novel All We Ever Wanted (Was Everything) as a young adult series. (I’ve since learned there has been a novel of that title published weekly, so I will have change the title — right now, I’m thinking I’ll call it The Zones. It’s too bad because the thread of narrative in the Bauhaus song was such an inspiration to me.) I began writing the novel when I was nineteen, just out of adolescence myself, so I feel like it has the rawness of my teenage years in it — and also the rawness of my relative inexperience as a writer.

The two main characters, I admit, are a bit Mary Sue — idealized and stand-ins for aspects of my personality. (Much like the Mouse and the Minx in “Minx Mouse Monster.”) I didn’t realize it as I was writing it, but Cat, the privileged young woman with prophetic dreams, represents my desire for being a near-perfect person. (The point of the Endowment in the novel was to help society become perfect by privileging those whose genes mark them as “perfectable.”) She is pretty, smart, and nice — a little naive, too, but of course that changes. Nina, the volatile magic user, is a femme fatale — and also hot-tempered, mercurial, often mean. She’s something of my shadow self. Her flaws are mine writ large.

So what I need to do is not so much change these characters, or the other characters — they fit almost exactly the “outlandish and extravagant figures” that Miller describes — but make them more into people. I also need to gather up the narrative and start making sense out of it, giving it stronger structure that has three acts. I kept changing what I was doing when I was writing it — first it was going to be a short story about Cat (I was inspired by the novella version of “Beggars in Spain” by Nancy Kress), then it was going to be a series of short stories set in the same universe. I even toyed with the idea of making it a comic book series at one point.

I have so much more experience with writing with intention now that this will be something I can do. It also will be fun. I’ve missed these people and this world.

This year on Mother’s Day, I had with me my sixteen-week-old baby boy, and I had a lovely day with my family. I have heard people repeat that platitude “You don’t know what true love is until you have children,” and even though I love Mateo like I’ve loved nobody else ever, I don’t think that it’s true. What I think is that if you don’t have children, you don’t experience the particular kind of love that parents have for their children, but there are so many kinds of ways people love each other, each true love in its own right. There are kinds of love that I will not experience. But I am happy to experience this particular kind.

But the worst is the raised-eyebrow feelings I get when I see other parents not parenting their babies the way I think it should be done. Yesterday, I was in Target and the sound of a newborn crying attracted my attention (OK, it also made my boobs go a little crazy). There was a teeny, tiny — I mean, tiny — little girl in a huge stroller, flailing and crying in that piteous newborn way while her mother nonchalantly looked at clothes. I think the mother saw me looking, so she briefly leaned over the baby, said, “Ohhh,” and went back to shopping. My mind began racing. Tiny babies only cry like that if they really, really need something! Why is she in that huge stroller? Newborns need to feel secure! Oh my god I just want to pick her up! Lady, pick up your baby! Pick her up! She’s hungry! Feed your baby, woman!

I said nothing, of course, because I didn’t want to be that woman. And anyway, Brian was wheeling Mateo around the store, so I didn’t have my chubby little drool machine as proof that I totally know what I’m doing with the baby stuff. I hurried to Brian to tell him about it, though, and we both watched in silent judgment later as the same woman passed us at the greeting card section, her baby still crying, her face impassive. We watched her until, finally, as we were checking out, we saw the baby’s grandmother take out a bottle to feed the baby in the food court.

Now, I’m sure this baby is just fine, even if, as Brian pointed out, the were giving her formula. (Gasp!) But that urge to be nosy, it is so irresistible! I wonder what other women think of me when they see me with Mateo.

Speaking of Mateo, he likes to pretend he’s a grown-up sometimes.

Reading the fascinating tome Squishy Turtle and Friends

It bugs me. No, not in the silly “Oh, won’t someone please think of the white people!” sense. It bugs me because it is a specific term used as a blanket one, and it is incorrect. It bugs me because I am an English language nerd, and I like words to mean something. “Anglo” is a prefix that refers to people of English origin. It does not accurately refer to all white people, not even most white people. I wish I could make people stop, but I’m not going to change the vernacular of thousands, possibly millions of people. So I’m going to have to continue to cringe every time I hear it, just as I cringe when I hear people use “begs the question” to mean “raises the question.”

Speaking of white, was I the only person of Hispanic ethnicity confused by the census questions? It asks if you are Hispanic/Latino, so I marked “yes,” “Puerto Rican” and then “other” and wrote in “Ecuadorian.” Then it asks your race, and you may mark more than one. I marked “Filipino” and then got confused. How should I categorize my Hispanic half? I thought of the old census listing my grandmother and her family. In the column for “race,” they were listed as “white.” So I marked “white.”

And I felt really weird about it. I’ve never identified as half white. If people ask me, I say I’m half Filipino and half Spanish. This, in my mind, somehow precluded “white,” but it does not. On Easter, I visited my grandmother and she showed me her grandmother’s naturalization certificate. It told me that my great-great-grandmother Mercedes Andrade was 69 years old, 5’1″, 115 pounds, had brown/gray hair and gray eyes. “They were actually blue,” my Nana told me, but the color had faded as she got older. My Nana has also told me that Mercedes’s mother was from Ireland, thus accounting for the blue eyes.

We are such fascinating confluences of all the people who have come before us, and yet so often we’re not more than what people see.

“… We should not grieve, should we, baby?” said Celia confidentially to that unconscious centre and poise of the world, who had the most remarkable fists all complete even to the nails, and hair enough, really, when you took his cap off, to make — you didn’t know what: — in short, he was Bouddha in a Western form.”
-George Eliot, Middlemarch

I finished Middlemarch a couple of weeks ago, and was amused to find a completely accurate portrayal of new motherhood in it. The heroine’s sister, Celia, is the mother of what she regards as the most remarkable being in the world, and is content to sit and stare at him, to talk of almost nothing but him, and can’t think that anything is truly wrong in the world as long as her baby is safe and happy. She is harmlessly insipid in her new motherhood, and I understand every inch of her silliness.

I laughed when I read this because I’d been calling Mateo “my little Buddha” because of the serenity of his expressions. Honestly, it is quite hard to work on anything when I could happily watch him sleep and talk of nothing but him — how he has begun to smile and outgrow newborn clothes, how he watches me intently and studies his father’s face.

It is a kind of devotion that is difficult to write about — both because it is so consumingly intense and because I know it can be tiresome to people whose existences aren’t anchored to my own little “center and poise of the world.”

Having a baby made my anxiety spike. For the first couple of weeks after he was born, I would stare at the ubiquitous “CAUTION” tags on every baby thing we own; Brian moved some tools he had in the house back out to the shed because I kept think of how they could hurt the baby; in exhaustion at night while feeding Mateo, I cried out of terror that something bad would happen to him.

Eventually, I realized that I had allowed all of my thoughts to be devoted to the baby. I knew that I needed to bring myself back into my thoughts and actions and to integrate him into them. So I charged my Kindle — I had allowed its battery to die — and downloaded Reading Like a Writer: A Guide for People Who Love Books and for Those Who Want to Write Them by Francine Prose, which I read while I fed Mateo at night.

Devoting some time and thoughts to something besides taking care of the baby helped my anxiety a lot. It’s not completely gone, especially when I’m extra tired, but now when my thoughts start drifting and racing, I just pick up the Kindle. I finished Reading Like a Writer very quickly (my review below will cover part of the reason why), then read a few Chekov short stories (crying in an enjoyably melancholy, mono no aware way after reading “A Grasshopper”), and now I’m halfway done with Middlemarch. Sometimes I read aloud to Mateo. (He enjoys Yeats as well.)

As for Reading Like a Writer — for me, it was more of a description of how I already read than a work offering me new insight. Francine Prose examines several aspects of fiction — the importance of word choice, sentence construction, how dialogue and gesture contribute to character development (the chapter on gesture was the most interesting to me).

Prose lauds her formalist education, in which literature is analyzed on a craft level, without reference to author biography, history, or literary theory that is more grounded in philosophy or politics than literature. I agree that this a very fine kind of education for a writer to receive; my literary education seems to have been similar to Prose’s — so I am pretty well-versed in the formalist close reading and explication.

Unfortunately, Prose doesn’t offer deep explication, and when she does offer any, I tended not to agree with it. (Pride and Prejudice’s Mr. and Mrs. Bennet enjoy a marriage that is “playful” and “respectful”?) Prose also does not devote any of the book to what is the most difficult part of crafting fiction for me — plot. Most of the book is made up of long passages from other works. I appreciated the exposure to works I had not before known of and Prose’s breaking down the components to take note of in fiction, but the work struck me as a bit of an easy write — a little thin on insight and effort.