I snapped a dozen pics of the rather dumpy house in one of San Francisco’s most far-flung neighborhoods when I told our realtor Matt, “It kind of smells like old people.”

It was a Saturday afternoon, and the pics were for the Manly Fireplug, who was working at the shop, and the house was the first stop on our first tour.  We moved to the window of the back bedroom, and Matt pointed out at something in the overgrown yard.

“It comes with its own boat,” he said. A decrepit rowboat had been propped against the sagging fence, half-hidden by weeds.

“Architectural salvage,” I said, “People pay extra for that.” Then I wandered into the pink-tiled bathroom (a vast number of the city’s bathrooms, according to real estate photos, are entirely tiled in pink) and snapped a pic of the cracked toilet basin. Then I followed Matt back down the stairs, and he pointed at a sign hanging on the back of the front door.

“Both hearing aids,” he said. I snapped the last pic of the house, feeling a little guilty about my earlier “old-people” crack. Ms. Martha had lived here, maybe most of her life. Maybe she’d died here, too.

Back in the car Matt kept asking me what I wanted in a home. Location? A garden? A stripper pole in the living room? I told him that after my husband and dogs, nothing was more important to me than my home, but then I found myself stuttering nervously that I…well…I kind of like a place that’s a retreat from the world, if that makes sense?

Truth was, I was scared shitless. Our first application for a preapproved mortgage had been turned down, due to the fact that I’d taken time off for grad school and to work on my book, and though our second application was supposedly “looking good,” nothing yet was certain, and I felt hesitant about this open house tour, and of real estate in general. I’m a writer with one 98%-finished book living in San Francisco, hardly the Danielle Steele of every banker’s dreams.

We spent the rest of the tour driving around the Outer Sunset, one of the few neighborhoods in the city we might possibly afford. I snapped pics of fake-wood paneling, tandem garages, and asbestos tiles. I snapped pics of illegal basement in-law units, and grimy bathrooms straight out of Folsom Prison. I snapped pics of a 12-room house carpeted entirely in, yes, pink.

But I also snapped pics of polished hardwood floors, Wedgewood stoves, and a back yard with cypress trees and a view of the Marin Headlands. We wandered through empty houses, and houses where the owners scrambled to make the beds in the next room. We wandered past a 12-year-old girl, oblivious to us, video-chatting with friends on a laptop at the kitchen table. We wandered through houses where it seemed nobody had ever lived, tastefully staged within an inch of their lives.

I felt the nervous, competitive energy of a house crammed full of prospective buyers – young couples and Chinese families, and more than a few start-up types – all of us pretending not to see each other as we tried to picture the living room in a different color.

After five or six houses I felt giddy and exhausted, a headache gnawing at the edges of my vision. “You have an interesting job,” I told Matt. “You see everyone at their absolute most stressed, teetering at the edge of sanity.”

The next day we got word that our loan application had been preapproved,  and the thing I thought couldn’t happen was now possible. Or near-possible. I felt superstitious and unrelieved.

“I’m getting an ulcer,” I told the Fireplug, who had been through real estate insanity in New York and San Francisco, and who, let’s face it, was the more stable, profitable, loan-worthy of the two of us.

“This is nothing,” he said. “Remember what I said. Roller-coaster.”

And I’ve flown off the tracks, full-out OCDing on real estate sites, my already-fractured attention span splintering atomically, unable to focus on anything else. I am writing this partly to distract myself from the fact that Matt is right this moment touring the house that has reached the top of our list, a house we’ve only seen in professionally-staged online photo galleries,  in another far-flung neighborhood, a house I want to believe is solid, a house we can both picture living in together, getting older and more crotchety, needing at first one, then two hearing aids, hanging notes on doors to remind ourselves of all the things we’d otherwise forget.

A while back the Manly Fireplug and I drove around the Twin Cities for a few hours, looking at all the houses where I’d spent my youth. Having finished my MFA thesis, which formed only the first two-thirds of my actual book, I’d turned our trip into a research expedition.

If you’ve hung around here for any length of time, you know I’m writing about my family, who’ve been awfully charitable about the whole thing considering that everybody (including me) comes out of the story looking like, well, singular pieces of work.

Quick review of the basics:

• Parents separate when I’m ten and my brother five
• Parents both come out of the closet when I’m eleven
• Parents divorce and begin adventures in same-sex dating
• Parents both end up with long-term partners who were also previously married, with kids
• I come out at college, as far from my family as possible
• My brother, poor dude, turns out straight

So I did a lot of packing and unpacking, of boxes, suitcases, and duffel bags, in the midst of a complicated joint custody schedule. My brother and I lugged a lot of bags onto a lot of buses, and were forever leaving things at the wrong house.

So there were a few houses for the Fireplug and I to cruise past in our rented Sebring. Ten or twelve or more, I’ve lost track. But during the tour the Fireplug turned quiet. Silence is an unnatural state for him, so of course I asked if he was okay.

“My stomach hurts,” he said. It took us a while to figure out that he was stressed. He’d spent his entire childhood in one house, the house where his mother still lives, and our day-long tour was getting to him.

Ever since college I’ve had a deep, primal longing for a home. It doesn’t need to be big. I just want one. And only one. I like having all my stuff in one place. I don’t rent storage lockers. Whenever I have to move I unpack everything (and I mean everything) within 24 hours. I hate clutter, and my idea of hell is a bad roommate.

Seems like no matter how much we grow up, it’s the childhood stuff that sticks. So the five years that I’ve spent going back and forth between the Fireplug’s house and my apartment, bags in hand, have been challenging to my nesting OCD. Part of being an adult, however, is accepting life on its own terms, and San Francisco real estate is its own reality.

Following our wedding in New York (and our domestic partnership in California), we’d barely dipped a toe in the tepid waters of possible home ownership when a realtor friend called and said a family was interested in looking at the house the Fireplug shares with his roommate, a house which wasn’t even listed. A pocket listing, he called it. (A lifelong renter, I am mystified by the entire home ownership process, including terminology.)

The same realtor friend had just emailed us a photo of a cute little bungalow near Stern Grove with the subject line, “Your Next House.” Looking at the photo, we had to hand it to him, he was good. We weren’t so delusional as to assume that we’d end up in the cute little bungalow, but it seemed unwise in today’s market to turn down the family’s request.

My head that week filled with fantasies of a cute bungalow, with my husband and our dogs, and my duffel bags tucked away on a back shelf of a back closet. The Fireplug, who’s been through the process more than once,  kept cautioning me, telling me to expect an emotional roller coaster ride, with no certain outcome, and that I’d have plenty of opportunities to work on one of my, um, less noticeable traits: patience.

“We haven’t even applied for a mortgage yet,” he said. I tried not to pout in response.

When the realtor arrived with the family, the Fireplug’s roommate and I ducked out through the garage with the dogs. We drifted up and down the block three times waiting for the family to leave, the dogs giving us curious looks, and it was weird to look through the picture window at the strangers wandering through the living room, assessing the place that I couldn’t quite call home, but where I’d spent so many hours. I felt territorial.

The roommate had done his best to de-gay the house of its most egregious belongings, especially since the family of strangers included a grandmother, but you can’t catch everything. After the family left, the realtor told us that the grandmother had carefully examined the shirts hanging over the dryer and asked, “Who’s the sheriff?”

“Depends on which night,” I replied.

The realtor smiled. “I love my job.”

Or One Guy’s Seven-Year Journey as a Mule

I was recently asked to speak to a writing class about my book, which gave me the chance to reflect on what’s worked for me, and since I sometimes get emails asking for general advice, I thought it might be useful to share a little of my experience. I’m entirely aware that by posting this, having finished only 97% of the book, I am seriously tempting fate and derision. But this will fuel me through the last 3%. Pride’s a useful motivator.

Fill the Well
I spend a lot of time on the Internet, for work and for not-work, clicking from one shiny object to the next, and I invariably walk away from the computer feeling dazed and stupid. I can think of maybe a handful of movies that fuel me creatively. Often, the theater. The last season of Breaking Bad. But nothing fuels me like reading, and by reading I mean books. Sometimes all it takes is a page or two to fill me with the courage to return to my own imperfect, unfinished story. Do more of whatever fills your well and less of everything else. Guard the well from celebrity gossip sites, shiny objects, and Facebook barbarians.

No, Really
Another plug for books but from a crankier angle. Expecting people to read your writing when you can’t be bothered to read other people’s books is just plain rude. Read a lot, of everything. Otherwise you’ll go years operating under the delusion that everything you write is brilliant and original and destined to be turned into a four-film franchise starring Daniel Radcliffe and Meryl Streep.

Your Muse is a Flake
Waiting around for inspiration will never get you to the end of your book. Some of my best writing came only after I forced myself to sit at the computer and endure for an hour the thick, fuzzy-headed despair of having nothing in the world to say.

Don’t Wait for the Shack
I once read an interview with a well-known writer who leaves his house every morning, walks a hundred yards to a little redwood shack on the far corner of his wooded property, and spends the next eight hours undisturbed, writing and sipping tea from his lucky mug while the occasional acorn falls on the roof overhead. Oh, how I want that shack. I have no shack. I’ve been working on this book for seven years. For one year, when I had more money, I rented a private office. But I also wrote at home, in bed, at my desk, and on the couch. I wrote on my husband’s couch, on a chair passed down from his grandfather, and in the basement of his shop. I wrote in a tiny Manhattan apartment with a view of an airshaft. I wrote in three different rooms at the Columbia University library and a public library at the Jersey Shore. I wrote at the Hungarian Pastry Shop, Jumpin’ Java, Cafe Flore, and a dozen other coffee shops. I wrote on airplanes and in two different borrowed houses in Palm Springs. I wrote at every job I’ve ever had. You may have a fantasy shack, too, somewhere in your future, but what are you going to do in the meantime?

Your Portable Pal
Carry a little notebook, or your iPhone, a place to scrawl the words, ideas, and sentences that you’ll otherwise forget. No, you won’t remember.

Swallow Your Pride
I was a coward in college, afraid to commit myself to literature, and I chose instead the wildly practical major of sociology. I spent the next ten years feeling insecure about my education, and still it wasn’t until I got into Columbia’s MFA program that I began to see just how little I knew. Workshops and peer feedback can be valuable, but having someone take me through 100 books, page by page, sometimes sentence by sentence, and show me how each writer put together a story, was the single best thing I’ve done for myself as a writer. You don’t need to commit yourself to a Master’s degree. Take an extension class. Download a lecture from Yale. There’s no shame in being taught, and those who tell you otherwise are idiots.

Join a Cabal
The greatest unexpected benefit to grad school was the little group of writers from my program who landed here in the Bay Area after graduation, a group I still meet with every month, over five years later. We started out as a book club (first selection: Madame Bovary), but then one day my husband referred to the group as “your little cabal,” and it stuck. We exchange work, gossip, job leads, literary agent horror stories, and the occasional awesome news of a book deal. We also talk about Downton Abbey, Battlestar Galactica, and eat a lot of Salt and Pepper Kettle chips with french onion dip. They danced at my wedding, and I’d be lost without them. Again, you don’t need an MFA program for this. Find writers through workshops, local lit organizations, or Craigslist.

Be Accountable
Writing is a pain in the ass. The beautiful story you imagine in your head, by the time you get it on the page, is a pale monstrosity. You will want to do anything in the world but the thing you most need to do. You will wash the dishes. You will vacuum every room in your house. You will cut your toenails and then vacuum some more. Unless you are in school or are an incredibly important author with a publishing house editor waiting for your next chapter with bated breath, you’ll need to create your own deadlines. Form a cabal. Find one friend. Exchange work.

Be an Ass
Despite what the world thinks, talent only takes you so far. Only the mule-headed endure.

Everybody Hurts
I did research in the Manuscripts, Archives, and Rare Books division of the New York Public Library, where I went through old correspondence files from The New Yorker, and learned that the magazine rejected every single famous writer you could think of many, many times. It doesn’t matter who you are. You will be rejected. Be a mule.

Let It Brew
I have a friend, a well-respected author with three novels under his belt, who hates revision. He works by slowly moving forward, perfecting each sentence as he goes along. I can’t work that way. My first drafts are hideous. I don’t know what I think or how I feel about something until I start writing about it, and even then it takes time, sometimes a few weeks, or months, or years, till I get at the truest insight possible. I have to let each chapter sit, like a tea bag in a cup of hot water, letting it steep, stirring it around seventeen or eighteen times, doctoring it with milk and low-calorie sweetener, or, fine, yes, actual real sugar if it’s the only thing in the house, till it’s right.

It Matters
I routinely forget to follow my own suggestions, but eventually I remember. If you’re plugged into contemporary culture (and what 21st Century writer isn’t?), you will frequently fall into black despair over the future of books. Our fragmenting attention spans. The publishing industry death spiral. The Real Housewives of Beverly Hills.

But listen. Writing still matters. To a lot of people. There will always be readers who want to get lost in a story, learn about other places, or step inside the skin of a total stranger. Readers willing to have their minds changed and their hearts broken. Readers quietly thrilled by beautiful language. Readers who find, within the pages of a book, a voice that articulates the things they’ve always felt but could never express. Readers who feel, at the end of a book, less alone in their fears and mistakes. I can’t list all the reasons why people read books, or why literature is important, because there’s too many of them, and most of the fun is figuring out, book by book, your own reasons. Why you need to read, and why you need to write.

My father and I were strangers for most of my life. Our shared quiet exteriors hid contrasting temperaments. He was, and still is, the most practical man I’ve ever met. As for me, well, I wrote a lot of poetry as a kid, trusted dogs and kitty-cats more than people, and wound up in places like New York and San Francisco where I could barely afford the rent.

I was a gay dude with a gay father, and in our relationship at least, “father” weighed more heavily than “gay.” What I mean is that, like a lot of fathers and sons, we weren’t so skilled at talking to each other.

That began to change ten years ago after my mother’s death, and that change is a part of my book, and since I’m wary of giving away much of the book’s story on the blog, since I want the book to be fresh and full of new stuff for you to read, I won’t go into great detail.

But the years I’ve spent writing the book came with all kinds of obstacles and awkward moments, including the times I’d visit my father, as he struggled to understand why I was going so long without a real job and benefits and a 401k, working on something that might never make one single cent, and as I struggled to reframe the project in terms he might better understand:

“Hey Dad, it’s like, it’s like an investment! In my future. You know, with, like deferred benefits…”

But the benefits weren’t guaranteed. I could spend seven years working on a book that might still go unpublished, and my reframing explanation to my father worked about as well as you’d expect.

Don’t get me wrong. Most of the time we got along just fine, and when the Manly Fireplug came with me, he amped up the fun factor (as he tends to do) and I even one time, after years of second place, BEAT MY FATHER THE EDITOR AND ALL-TIME REIGNING FAMILY CHAMPION IN SCRABBLE. I tried not to gloat. Wait, I’m still totally gloating. Sorry, Dad.

But at some point during every visit we’d find ourselves alone, and he’d ask me about the book, and work, and money, and down the rabbit hole we’d go. I walked away from these talks frustrated and angry, convinced that he wanted me to be someone I didn’t want to be, with a different set of priorities and dreams, and though I won’t pretend to know how he felt after our talks, I doubt they were any easier on him.

Eventually, as I’ve told you here before, the money ran out, and I was forced to get a couple of jobs, and struggle, and feel broke since I was paying $500 a month in health insurance, and after a year the two jobs turned into three, one of which finally offered me benefits, and for the first time in a very long time I had money in my interest-bearing savings account, and dreams of a house with my husband.

And a new energy swept through me.

I found myself finally using my Mint iPhone app, categorizing my spending and planning monthly budgets. Every day while waiting for MUNI I’d check the balances of my linked accounts before opening my Kindle. Checking my balances turned out to be more fun when the sums went above the double-digits.

This led to me creating all sorts of spreadsheets and lists that I uploaded to Google Docs, where I sorted everything into collections. I don’t know if any of this will actually lead to greater productivity, but man do I feel organized.

This led to me taking ownership finally of my desk at the firm, no longer assuming I had one foot out the door, but instead committing myself to making the three jobs work, and I cleaned out the desk drawers of the last guy’s junk and set up a couple of framed pics of the Fireplug and our wedding, and blew half a can of compressed air into my keyboard (OMG GROSS!).

This led to me taking greater ownership of my second job, where I grabbed hold of the weekly conference call reins and created a brand new categorized agenda template, and got more done in two weeks than I had in the previous three months.

This led to me taking on more freelance clients for my third job, and having a lot of fun with invoices.

This led to me writing down all sorts of tax deduction questions to ask the tax preparer when the Fireplug and I meet (for the first time as a couple) next week to figure out how a domestic partnership (not to mention three jobs) will affect our returns.

This led to me cleaning out my desk at home. Which led to me cleaning out my closet and finally getting rid of clothes I hadn’t worn in two years and all the underwear I’ve been wearing that have been falling apart, since I now had money in an interest-bearing savings account and could spend some of it on underwear that the Fireplug agreed were worth the price, since they made me look, well, like that.

I can be a stubborn ass sometimes. I don’t always acknowledge other people’s influences on me. Dead writers, sure, but real live people? Don’t hold your breath.  But I’ll say this much: the Fireplug is also a practical man, more practical than me, and it has served him well, and it fills me with pride to walk into his shop on a Saturday afternoon and see every chair filled with waiting clients.

He’s a practical man who allowed me the space and time to work on my impractical dream of writing a book, and he allowed me to work on it without complaint until my circumstances changed and I could see for myself that I also had to change, to meet those circumstances. He let me get there at my own speed.

And though this burst of energized productivity, all aimed towards the larger goal of affording us a home together in a beautiful but prohibitive city, feels new, it also feels too thorough to lay entirely at his feet, as much as I love the guy.

Every parent echoes within his child. There was a practical man lurking within me, all this time.

I took this photo in Palm Springs, from the passenger seat of a borrowed car, on the Fireplug’s birthday, as he drove us downtown to meet my gay dads for a birthday lunch at Tyler’s. I like this shot because I remember how I felt, full of this new energy and hope, a feeling that had spilled out and colored other feelings, like my love for the man beside me, which felt like it had expanded in recent days.

And when we met them for lunch I told my father about my three jobs, and the benefits, and the money in the bank, affecting a nonchalance, since I didn’t want to appear, at the age of forty, like a man in need of his father’s approval.

And I could see the change in his eyes as I told him the news, and he smiled broadly and reached out and patted me on the shoulder. We had never been a physically affectionate family, and I’m telling you this so you can feel the full weight of his gesture.

At the end of the meal I slyly handed my new debit card to the waiter.

“Cash only,” he whispered. I blushed, for I had none.

“Oh, no, you don’t,” my father said. “It’s his birthday. Our treat.” He reached for the check, and I let him take it.

A couple of weeks ago I lost my mind. A long unraveling – I trace it back about a year, when my personal finances collapsed in a single day, and I went from a fairly comfortable existence to trolling the Craig’s List job ads on an increasingly desperate mission to pay my rent. The coming days would be familiar to anyone looking for work during a recession: the endless resumes and cover letters sent into a black void, the gradual lowering of expectations, the mounting dread.

Finally a law firm offered me a temp job, each of my three interviewers pointing out helpfully that I was clearly overqualified, to which I replied, “I’m not above anything.” Words I sometimes regretted over the coming months (most often while elbow-deep in dirty dishes) but which I never took back.

The temp job led to a permanent, if low-paying, part-time position three months later. At the same time I found another low-paying part-time position managing content and social media for a small company. In between I wrote low-paying movie recaps for a porn company. Between the three jobs I had a little hope that I’d be ok.

But none of the jobs qualifed me for benefits. I was paying several hundred dollars a month for health insurance (which I was lucky to have), and any day I took off was a day without pay. The Manly Fireplug and I had a couple of weddings to pay for, and we wanted to live together. We’d managed to get through five years in separate places, but the back-and-forth was wearing on me. San Francisco, a beautiful city of cruel real estate, wasn’t making it easy. To live together, I’d need to make more money.

I felt increasingly fractured, working on so many projects that I was doing none of them well. Working as much, or more, than everyone else I knew, but seemingly making far less. An acquaintance on Facebook (I assume he had health insurance) posted a rant about the “socialism” of “Obamacare” (I really, really do not understand gay Republicans). My car broke down, and the mechanic said it would take $1300 to fix. I parked it outside the Fireplug’s house and tried to save up the money. Each week I’d meet with the three separate guys I was mentoring in their sobriety, but I’d show up distracted and grumpy and short of patience. The thirty pages of revision between me and the end of my book felt insurmountable. Then my laptop died.

I felt trapped. I argued with the Fireplug more often than I’d like to admit. I was angry and put-upon, and embarrassed by my struggle to accept my circumstances, which were, I had to admit, mostly of my own making. Because a long time ago I’d decided to be a writer.

What this meant, to me at least, was a matter of focus. I could go the career route, finding a comfortable salaried position with room to grow, but risk ending up one of the countless people I knew who wanted to be a writer, but who never wrote. Or I could write, and for the time being,  sacrifice the money and security of a career. There are people who manage to do both. So far I haven’t been one of them. About a month ago I almost switched sides, interviewing three times for a position with a start-up that would have paid me more than twice the amount I’d ever earned in one year.

A week after the third interview, I emailed my contact at the start-up and asked for an update. “Oops!” she said. “Oh my God, we’ve been so busy. I forgot to tell you. We decided to go in a different direction. Best of luck!”

My point here isn’t that I had it worse than a lot of Americans. Only that I wasn’t handling “it” well. My short fuse shortened some more, and all I wanted, from the Fireplug, from my friends, from my co-workers, was to be left alone. Finally, a couple of weeks ago, the Fireplug asked me to help him with some minor chore.  I responded with childish exasperation. We had words. My volume grew, and then it happened. I just lost it. A year’s worth of bitterness and anger and resentment came out of me, through my lungs. I’ll leave out the details, but trust me, for a good five minutes I was insane. I scared both of us. And the neighbors.

Cue regret and embarrassment. And a lot of silent reflection.

Then, last week, my supervisor calls me into her office and offers me a full-time job, with benefits. My little behind-the-scenes campaign of dropping hints to co-workers about interviewing for jobs with benefits seemed to have worked. The partners wanted me to stay.

I’m not sure if I can articulate the relief I felt. It was – it is – immense. I immediately went back to my desk and ran a few calculations. With paid health insurance, and another day a week in pay, suddenly everything seemed possible. The car repairs. A savings account with more than four dollars. Best of all, a home together with my husband.

My mood lightened. My lungs no longer felt tight. “It’s good to see you smiling again,” the Fireplug told me. Last night I drove my car back from the garage, and when I greeted the Fireplug, just home from work, I could actually see him. His handsome face. All the worries and grudges I’d been carrying around, which I’d let hang in the air between us, had fallen away.

I wish I could say that I’d achieved this transformation through some kind of spiritual shift. But no. What had saved me was simply money.

My mother would have been sixty-four today. Her birthday, as you might expect, sometimes prompts a bit of soul-searching, usually about time and priorities and this short thing we call life. I’ll be holding on to all of my jobs, at least for now. The relief about money seems to have whipped off the blinders I’d been wearing, and a few days of reflection have made it clear that I had a bigger part in my year-long stress. I hadn’t exactly made the most of my fractured time. So a personal inventory, just in time for New Year’s resolutions, on how I spend my hours and days is in order. It’s time to get more done.

Butchie is a judo target and t-shirt model for the Manly Fireplug’s barbershop, though he’s been guarding its basement now for several months. Just so we’re clear: he’s in the basement. I know he’s in the basement. Yet every time I go down to the basement he scares the crap out of me.

Butchie stoically presided over last night’s frenzied literary reading preparations, as I dusted off the folding chairs, iced the drinks, and searched for that damn corkscrew. An hour later, after the folding-chair-up-the-basement-steps bucket brigade (thank you volunteers and Fireplug!) I ducked outside to try and air out my damp shirt. I sweat a lot before every barbershop reading.

So I expect the sweat. But I didn’t expect the tears. Last night at the podium, in front of the capacity crowd, I got choked up reading a chapter about my father from the end of my book. Last year, at the Queer Arts Festival reading, I got choked up reading a chapter about my mom’s first girlfriend.

Both times took me by surprise, and embarrassed me. I find myself aspiring to a particular writerly image, the dude who reads, say, at the 92nd Street Y in New York, and sells just enough books to stay – with the help of the requisite side jobs – just above poverty.

That dude writes literature, which requires emotional distance from the subject matter. His work isn’t a barely-digested therapy session thrown on the page.

An emotional distance I thought I’d acquired. By now I’ve written nineteen drafts of my book, and have read through each draft at least ten, but more often twenty or thirty times, tweaking the stray word. I must have read the chapter on my mother’s first girlfriend, and the chapter on my father, at least fifty times each.

So the tears felt like the mark of an amateur, or worse, some kind of performance trick I was pulling on the audience. A schtick.

I used to be the kind of kid that others called sensitive. Code word for homo, maybe, but I’ll admit that I was ruled by my feelings.

In recent years I’ve tried to lean a little more often on my thoughts, if only to reach for a bit of balance, and to become a better writer. And in some cases my lack of emotion began to surprise me.

During those dreary few months when the Fireplug and I split up, for example, I seemed to only feel cold disappointment. I never cried.

But then one day I’m driving to work, listening to a Death Cab for Cutie album I’ve just downloaded, and the sad opening piano chords of their song, “Brothers on a Hotel Bed” throws a hook into the depths of me, and reels up tears. Tons of them. I spend the next few weeks driving around the city with that song on repeat, endangering countless San Franciscans with my blurred-vision driving.

Last week, as the Fireplug and I drove down to Palm Springs, listening to my iPod, up pops that song, and up come the tears. Again. Tons of them.

“Oh G-god,” I said. “I’m sorry, I f…forgot it was on this p…playlist!”

After we’d got back together I’d told him all about the song, so he knew what I meant.

“That’s okay,” he said, grabbing my hand.

“I don’t know why it still m-m-makes me cry. It’s st-st-stupid!”

“It’s not stupid,” he said. “We almost lost this.”

He was right, and really, the only stupid thing is to pretend like you’re someone you’re not. To jam yourself inside an image of a writer that doesn’t fit. We can’t all be Butchie.

So yeah, I cry, and maybe the only thing that’s changed since I was a kid is that I let my tears surprise me. I was embarrassed at first, last night, but then I got over it. Time’s wasting. I’ve got two last chapters to get right, and if I’m lucky, a slew of future readings at which I can freely bawl my eyes out.

I spent seven heavenly days crashing at a friend’s house (thanks Fred!) in Palm Springs with the Manly Fireplug. Sort of a combination honeymoon/sabbatical where I worked on my book – writing six hours a day – took a dip in the pool, then an evening with the hubby. World Gym, dinner, then a cigar in the hot tub. In this case sometimes a cigar is just a cigar. At least at first. It was a honeymoon, after all.

And a very hard honeymoon to leave for the real world again. Since then I’ve been back to the three jobs, interviewing for others, and trying to get the last 3% of the book finished so that I can send it off to a few agents.

If you’re in San Francisco and free tomorrow night, I’ll be reading at the Fireplug’s shop as part of Litquake. Decided I’ll share the What-Happened-When-My-Dad-Found-My-Blog chapter (new material in case you’ve heard me read other sections). Hurt feelings, D.C. snipers, a Banana Republic sales boy with a lopsided mullet, and much more…

A Little Off the Top, and Over the Top
Tuesday, October 11th
Doors open at 8:30 pm; show starts at 9:00 pm
free; $5-$10 suggested donation
Joe’s Barbershop
2150 Market St (between Church and Sanchez)

I know what you’ve been thinking.

“All I really want is to kick back in a barber’s chair with a free glass of wine and listen to a series of sexy writers read their work on a Tuesday night in October. That’s it. That’s all I want. Why is that so hard to find?”

I’m here to make your dreams come true.

Yes, the Barbershop Reading Series returns for a special event, co-hosted by LITQUAKE, San Francisco’s biggest, rowdiest, most awesome literary festival. Maybe you remember the Barbershop series. Maybe you even remember me as the host. Well this time, I’m one of the series of sexy writers reading from their work.

The series will also include Michael Alenyikov, Nick Krieger, Malinda Lo, Monica Nolan, and Rob Rosen. I promise you’ll be entertained.

What’s more, you could meet, in the flesh, The Manly Fireplug. For a look at him, my dog, and the shop, you could always revisit that little video I made.

A Little Off the Top, and Over the Top
Tuesday, October 11th
Doors open at 8:30 pm; show starts at 9:00 pm
free; $5-$10 suggested donation
Joe’s Barbershop
2150 Market St (between Church and Sanchez)

The other day I stood in the living room, punching buttons on the dvd remote control as my roommate wandered through. Together we watched as the big flat-screen TV filled with quick-edited shots of naked men – accompanied by the requisite throbbing pulse of a tribal soundtrack – engage each other in activities you’d never find on prime time television.

“You should keep a journal,” my roommate said. “To chronicle your life.”

“I hope you don’t mind,” I said. “But I can’t get this #%#$ review copy to work on my Playstation.” Nor would it work on either of my two laptops. I grunted and punched at the stupid buttons, my eyes bleary after a full day at the law firm, now faced with an absurdly short deadline for my second job, writing a series of 300-word scene recaps for a local gay porn company.

I don’t know what they do with the recaps. Throw them up on their website, I would imagine, giving prospective buyers a glimpse at who does what to whom in each particular movie. Which may sound like fun to some of you, but honestly, there are only so many words for certain parts of a man’s anatomy that are hot without sounding silly.

My roommate wandered off to his bedroom as I settled onto the couch with my laptop, trying to forget about the four newsletter articles due soon for my third job, a marketing-and-social-media gig. I began typing:  Shay Michaels and Lance Navarro swap spit in a dim-lit dungeon…

“How’s it feel being married now to the Manly Fireplug?” people kept asking me.

“Who?” I said.

Somewhere between job one and job two, as the Fireplug buzz-cut the evening barbershop crowd, I’d stumble outside with our three dogs, on three leashes, pulling at three speeds, wagging their tails and weaving in and out of each other’s paths in what I swore was a canine conspiracy of entanglement. As they pulled me along I calculated costs of weddings, health insurance, and real estate.

Who am I? What am I doing? How could I be working so many hours and making so little money? Yes, I had three jobs at a time when many had none. Still, I’m human, which is to say that within each hour of each day I’d dizzily swing between the poles of gratitude and self-pity.

At night in bed the Fireplug would wrap his meaty forearm around me and I’d try to slow my pulse, pondering Steve Jobs.

The man who’d just stepped down from Apple had been bouncing all over the news cycle echo chamber, and I’d clicked on a link and read a commencement speech he’d made, six years back, at Stanford University.

At first his words had moved me, words outlining the kind of philosophy you’d expect to hear at such ceremonies:

 Your work is going to fill a large part of your life, and the only way to be truly satisfied is to do what you believe is great work. And the only way to do great work is to love what you do.

I believed in his words, and I felt lucky that I’d known for a very long time what it is that I love to do, even if I had yet to make a living from it.

But yesterday at the law firm I fielded a call from my car mechanic, who gave me, in an apologetic tone, some fairly bad news. And when I hung up I found myself blinking back tears.

I was not proud of this. I’m not proud of it now. But I felt tired and defeated and pissed at Steve Jobs, who’d exhorted a crowd of impressionable youth to live each day as if it were their last, and Joseph “Follow Your Bliss” Campbell, and every figure of inspiration whose quotes leave out the compromises we must make, one foot in bliss, one foot in life.

Which is not to say that I could give up what I love, with a 98% finished memoir that gets exponentially more wrenching to write with each page, and which has all but convinced me to turn next to fiction, where you can just make shit up, a 98% finished book waiting, like my new husband, for the scraps of between-job attention I can muster.

And I need the Steve Jobs and the Joseph Campbells and the Anna Quindlens of the world to remind me that it’s all possible.

Just as I need to know that I’m not alone in my one-foot-there, one-foot-not: that there are folks like Seymour Krim, who once wrote about “those who have yet to find the professional skin to fit the riot in their souls.”

I need to remember that life falls somewhere between dreams and compromises. That there are worse things than being tethered to competing claims on my time, pulled along in three different directions, at three different speeds.

So yeah, I’ve been dragging my feet, thinking it was presumptuous of me to create an author page on Facebook before I even finished my first book, that memoir I’ve been working on.

But then I’ve been blogging for ten years, and if you printed it all out it would make for a few books. I tried it once, and several trees died in the process.

If you consider yourself a regular around here, maybe you’d think about clicking that “Like” button (the one on the other side of this link, not the one at the end of this post) and becoming a fan. Word of new blog posts, public readings, and any publication info on that elusive memoir will reach your news feed.

Should that publication come to pass, I’m mulling over ideas to reward those fans for their eternal patience.

And I’ll try not bore you.