(With apologies to TV.com)

Marcia is distraught after getting braces and becomes convinced she’s ugly. This leads to Greg dressing a whole new way and talking a whole new way, including calling his parents by their first names. However, an overconfident Bobby doesn’t study at all and fails while Cindy is chosen and her ego alienates the rest of the Brady kids. Meanwhile, the girls try to decide on a wallpaper for their room. Later at the mall, a hopeful Cindy asks a Santa Claus to bring Carol’s voice back by Christmas. The Bradys puts on a production of Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs.

Marcia’s sense of security is shattered when Cindy inadvertently gives away her diary to a book collection. This leads Cindy to make up a bogus letter stating that Bobby is dying and his last wish is to meet the football star. However, Peter lets all the attention go to his head, annoying his friends and his brothers and sisters. Meanwhile, Mike sets out to make a family dinner. Later, the family is thrown into a panic when Bobby and Cindy get lost in the canyon. The Bradys prepare a dunking booth for a carnival.

Marcia comes home from school in a daydream and the rest of the family can’t figure out her problem. This leads Peter and Cindy on an all-out search for the missing earrings. However when the Bradys encourage her, she lets it go to her head, which causes her to become unbearable. Meanwhile, Tiger goes on a rampage and begins snatching everything he can get his fangs on. Later, Cindy suddenly feels important when she suddenly gets a mysterious letter from a secret admirer. The Bradys prepare for a Roaring ’20s party.

In 1981 my parents split up, and within a year they both came out of the closet. I was ten, my brother five. He’d turn out to be the only straight one among us. Like all families we had other dynamics at work beyond sexuality, which pushed him off to the side, where he grew up the black sheep scape goat, a boy with a keen sensitivity to injustice. Sometimes he calls me from New Mexico late at night, after his wife and baby girl are asleep, because something in the world has gone wrong. He called me when Prop 8 passed, and when he’d come home from seeing MILK. Last night he called me and told me he had a dilemma. Fred Phelps was on his way to the Supreme Court. Phelps and his nutjob family had taken to picketing the military funerals of American soldiers, claiming that God was punishing the US for tolerating homosexuals. They’d picketed the funeral of my brother’s old roommate, who’d been killed by a sniper in Iraq. At first I thought he was upset about his roommate, but it turned out he was angrier at the timing. “He’s been picketing gays for years and years, and it’s only now that other people are getting involved? So dead fag funerals are okay to picket, but dead soldier funerals aren’t?” His dilemma, he said, was that he believed in free speech, and part of him thought that Phelps should be allowed to do what he wanted. My brother wanted an answer from me, but I had none to give. I told him I had divided parts inside me, too.  We talked about the futility of caring about matters of right and wrong, and I told him that most days it’s all I can do to focus on my little life, to try and do good work, and surround myself with good people. He talked about his daughter then, his love and his worries for her, and I thought how lucky I was to have this brother, this man who as a little boy could have gone in other directions, a boy who could have grown up bitter and full of hate, instead of the boy who grew up to be a man with a heart big enough to break.

The publishing industry moves at glacial speed. So while I wait the requisite four to eight weeks for agents to lay judgment on my work, I have more than a few hours on my hands, hours in which I have to point my obsessive nature in some direction. It’s best when I can get it pointed towards writing and not, say, BigMuscleBear.com. But most of the time I just find trouble. For a while I trolled the web, hunting for more literary agents, tracking book deals on publishing sites and in general making myself sick with anxiety. I’d count the number of memoirs published by famous people versus the number published by non-famous people (Not encouraging). Or I’d read the one-sentence descriptions accompanying each book deal: follows the author’s journey from adored high school athlete to violent, drug-dealing wife beater and, after several suicide attempts, his miraculous recovery, revealing the overwhelming power of the drug to destroy and the power of the human spirit to override the journey towards destruction. I’d roll my eyes at the cheesy, life-affirming pattern they all seemed to follow, then of course wonder if my own book did the same. Cue despair. I’d wonder if I should tinker with my book to make it more marketable. Then I’d swing 180 degrees and say, “FUCK THE MARKETPLACE! FUCK YOU, YOU WHORISH FUCKERS!” It all felt like a flashback to when I was waiting for word on grad school acceptances. Then I turned off the internet and found serenity while writing a television pilot. Then I picked up my book again and tinkered with it. Then I wrote this. Welcome to my head. I don’t recommend it.

A break up is like a mid-life crisis. You come out of it, look around, take stock. You buy hair plugs or find yourself doing things you’ve never done before – like joining a gay softball team. The Fireplug and I had been homebodies, and after we called it quits I found myself with a lot of time on my hands. A friend told me he had joined D league softball. “There’s a D league?” I said. “I could maybe do a D league.” So I joined. I’m not very good. I panic. I strike out. I drop balls. Of all the sports I could play, softball may just be the one for which I’m least suited. But this is the error-ridden D league, of which someone said, “Every play is an adventure.” I like being good at things. Writing, school, work, sex. When I’m bad at something my instinct is to run away, but I made a decision to stay put in the D league no matter what. I’m not sure why. Character building? Proving my masculinity (yet again)? Or is it because my team told me I looked hot in a catcher’s mask? Only after ignoring the instinct to run away does another impulse fill me: to stick around, till that’s something I’m good at, too.

I may have been recently single on Valentine’s Day, but that will not deter me from passing along to my coupled readers opportunities like the following, where you could assist the academic community in figuring out what makes your love tick. The researcher emailed and asked if I would share this, and who am I to stand in the way of scientific progress?:

Engaged volunteers needed!

I am looking for volunteers for a study of attitudes towards marriage and parenthood among engaged couples. The study consists of a 25-30 minute online survey. To qualify for the study, you must be 20-35 years old, live in the U.S., and plan to marry or have a commitment ceremony within the next 365 days. You and your romantic partner must not have children, and this must be the first marriage for both of you.

You can:

-Help a doctoral candidate;
-Increase the pool of scientific knowledge;
-Support research on marriage and families; and
-Spend some time thinking about your relationship!

I am working with Dr. Charlotte J. Patterson, a Professor of Psychology at the University of Virginia. This study has been approved by the University of Virginia Institutional Review Board #2009025800.

If you and/or your romantic partner are interested in participating or want further information, please email me at survey.couples@gmail.com. I will send you a link that you can use to access the study.

Thanks!

Cristina Reitz-Krueger
Doctoral Student
University of Virginia
(434) 243-8558
survey.couples@gmail.com

I received the following touching email yesterday:

Hi, dear

Think of me always and dream of me often I am here heartsinadore.net/waityou/
You don’t know how much I really do miss you. I’ve opened up a door for love I thought I locked a long time ago. You are always in my heart and on my mind. I know we are so far apart. I can’t explain how all this distance and time apart has made my love for you grow. I don’t think anyone understands the burden I carry in my heart day by day … until I will be with you. I will be hopelessly in love with you, devoted to being with you. May God reunite us very soon. I am very hopeful that God will lead me to you. My love, I hope you feel the same, because it would be so much worse if I will be lost in this feeling alone, without you to share it with and to share the thought of us being together. I want to make up for all our time apart.

See you
J.S.

Naturally J.S. made me feel very special, until I saw that the email was also addressed to dogpile99@mailinator.com and dogpoop@mailblocks.com. I now feel slightly less special.

So January pretty much sucked. That’s as articulate as I can be on the subject. I don’t know why I was surprised at how tough that month turned out, considering recent heartbreak. But surprised I was, and while nursing a mildly annoying cold I logged more hours on Playstation 3 than I’d care to admit. Makes sense though; for a while you can be a different person, in a different world, working towards concrete, clearly delineated goals, all in the comfort etc, etc.

Playstation 3 also distracted me while I waited a few weeks to hear back from friends who were reading my book. Fortunately the feedback was all I could have hoped for, more or less, and now comes a fresh round of waiting. Today I mailed my book to the first literary agent on my list of potentials.

These days the big publishing houses won’t even read manuscripts unless they come from an agent. You could go the self-publishing route, an option that’s become much more viable in the past couple of years. But I’m a writer, not a businessman, and I could use somebody on my side to navigate the industry.

When looking for an agent, they suggest casting your net wider than one at a time. But for this first guy I’m going off my gut. One of the fringe benefits of getting my MFA at Columbia was its proximity to the publishing industry, and I met more than a few agents at horribly awkward cocktail parties. Imagine seventy desperate, insecure, socially awkward writers pitching their books to six agents. It was like six chunks of meat dropped into a shark tank.

But this guy I liked. He had a great reputation, a good sense of humor about the industry – which seems almost necessary these days – and he said he’d like to read the book when I was ready. I’m about as ready as I’ll ever be.

I sent him the first 50 pages, standard practice, with a letter that attempted to condense my 300-page memoir into a couple of sentences. And now I wait as my envelope works its way through the pile on his desk. We’ll see if he likes it enough to request the rest of the book, in which case more waiting…

I can’t quite begin to express the significance of this moment. I’ve been writing this book for over five years, and over that time I have gradually transferred all of my eggs into this one basket, fueled by little more than daydreams, blind hope, and the conviction that this is the only thing I’m really cut out for in this world. I’ve done what I can, now the rest is out of my hands.

So I’ve been a little quiet around here lately. I started this blog over nine years ago, and I only seem to grow less inclined to share my every thought with the internet as the years go by. Whether this is due to getting older, or due to all the work I’ve poured into the book instead, is not entirely clear.

But all things considered a little recent silence makes sense. No easy way to say it; after three and a half years together the Manly Fireplug and I decided last week to end our relationship. We started out as friends, several years before, and we both feel that might have been a better fit for our very different personalities. And that’s all I’m going to say about the reasons why. Some things aren’t meant for internet consumption.

And after the decision comes regret, relief, second thoughts, sleepless nights, skipped meals, reheated meals, meals picked up from a drive-thru window. An overwhelming urge to hide. Friends and families to inform. Desktop photos to change. Bad TV and Playstation 3. Sad songs in the car on repeat. A disappointed dog. The many ties to disentangle. Occasional conversations with very hot boys that only make clear what you’ve just given up. The break-up is about as amicable as one could hope but as a friend put it, amicable doesn’t mean easy.

With him I saw Philadelphia, Tahoe, Palm Springs, and Minneapolis. We slept in a hotel in Los Angeles. We ate at shrimp shacks on Oahu and noodle shops in Japantown. We bought Carhartt shirts in Manhattan and sun tan lotion on the Jersey Shore. We walked the manicured streets of Disneyworld and drove the narrow roads of Ireland.

He taught me confidence. He taught me to pay people more compliments. To hold apologies for only those things that require apologies. To take pride in what I’ve accomplished. To be more forgiving of my family. To ask for the kind of sex I’ve always wanted. He saw the best and the worst in me. He charmed my friends and my fathers and he cut my hair every damn week for free. He sat beside me in the ER when my lung collapsed. He never asked me to give it all up for a normal job. He urged me to finish the book, and with his support I did.

“I’m glad we tried,” I told him.

“We would have been crazy not to,” he replied.

I’m back from Thanksgiving in Philly, where I managed to wish Merry Christmas to like three Jews. You could blame this on my Minnesota upbringing, but really I just temporarily lost my mind.

I’m not very sociable. No good at cocktail parties. But I spent an entire week with the Manly Fireplug’s enormous, garrulous, and enormously garrulous Irish Catholic clan. Not one of them is an introvert. All of them love to talk. Nonstop. At high volume. At the same time. Get eighteen of them in a room, feed them booze and turkey, and measure the oncoming decibels. I now refer to them, collectively, as THE WALL OF SOUND.

Since I rejuice my batteries by hanging out alone most days, a full week of the WALL OF SOUND was a psychological experiment which my brain more or less failed by the fourth day. That night we went to the Fireplug’s 30th high school reunion, where I attempted to make small talk and act the charming trophy husband for three hours, all without the aid of seven shots of Jack Daniels. By the end I could only offer the same three or four sentences to each schoolmate, one of those sentences being, naturally, “Have a Merry Christmas.”

Day seven my motherboard shorted out completely, and I sat quietly drooling at brunch with THE WALL OF SOUND. Fortunately this was the kind of high class all-you-can-eat buffet type brunch, where everything looked like it was made on Top Chef, and so I just stumbled like a zombie from pork belly to paté to pineapple bursts without drawing too much attention to myself.

The Fireplug read my book on the plane, there and back. I hadn’t let anyone read it in two years. Just a few more small changes and I’ll let a few others read it too. So friggin’ close now, after 5-7 years of toiling over the damn thing, depending on your definition of starting point. Hopefully after a couple of days of solitude my brain will work again. If not the Fireplug can just stick me in a nursing home and sell my book to pay the bills. Or at least next month’s gas bill.