Yesterday I finally got around to calling animal control on that varmint that destroyed my hummingbird feeder and is on its third regular birdfeeder.

"Yeah, they like those birdfeeders," said the bored woman who answered the phone.

"Can you loan me a live trap?"

"No, not for a birdfeeder. Now if he gets in your attic or something, that's different."

"Gotcha."

I hung up and moped a little. I have no intention of actually buying a raccoon trap. Last night I brought the birdfeeders inside for the night, though Beloved worries that means we'll get mice in the garage. I still haven't taken them back out there. I think the hummingbird feeder is cracked, which is too bad since I had four hummingbirds visiting it regularly -- four hummingbirds who are going to wonder why their favorite club suddenly pulled up stakes under the dark of night like a speakeasy.

All because of the bully in the neighborhood. That chittering, masked, stinky raccoon.

This is not over.

The raccoon that keeps knocking over my birdfeeders is in big trouble. Last night he knocked down my hummingbird feeder onto my newly pruned tomato plant and broke it.

"I'm calling animal control," I said to Beloved yesterday.

"What are they going to do?"

"I don't know. Maybe they'll let me borrow a live trap."

"Do they do that?"

"I don't know. I haven't called them yet."

I could tell Beloved thought this idea was dumb. However, the neighbors with the koi pond have animal control out here like three times a week.

I know what my father would do, but it's illegal within city limits. Plus, I don't know that tools.

But that raccoon has got to go. It's Caddyshack time.

This week I corresponded with a friend of mine who is writing a memoir. She had some questions, and I had some answers she had to wrap her head around for a day or two. At one point, she wrote something akin to "I thought I was running a 5k, and I got two miles in and realized it was a 10k." I nodded sagely and spent last night working on my own novel for two more hours, two hours added to the hundreds I've spent since I started writing in 2009.

We wrote back and forth a little more, and I told her about my own struggles and time commitments. I told her how I felt when someone asked me at BlogHer '11 if I'd sold the novel I mentioned at BlogHer '10 yet and I had to say no, that I'd thought it was finished but it was so not finished last summer. Not finished at all. I've overhauled it completely since then.

Somewhere along the line, I had to face the -- is it humiliation? Maybe that's too strong a word. But it's an emotion similar to that, the sort of emotion that drops your stomach an inch when it hits you, the sort that brings a flush to your cheeks and a burn to your ears and maybe some frustrated tears to your eyes, whether you want it to or not. It's something akin to humiliation that creative people feel when they talk about their work publicly and then don't immediately succeed in the eyes of the world, in their own eyes even. It's something akin to humiliation that stops many people before they even start.

I faced it pretty hard core that day at BlogHer '11 when I realized I'd talked about this novel at my panel and then had the audacity to show up a year later with no hardcover to sell. There's a balance one must achieve between laziness or fear and hubris in order to query at all. In order to survive rejection, you have to be confident in your writing, in what you're doing. It's a mental game as much as any endurance sport, because you can't win unless you compete and finish, and just finishing alone can feel so insurmountable most days.

I write about my process here because I hear behind the scenes from so many people who think book deals drop out of the sky. Since I started working on Sleep Is for the Weak, I've managed to meet and become friendly with at least twenty published authors, and they all echo back what I emailed my friend this week: It's hard. It's painful. It's worth it. Don't give up.

I've always found the community of writers online to be so tremendously supportive of each other.

At BlogHer '11, Lisa, Elisa and Jory announced a writers conference put on by BlogHer and presented by Penguin in New York City on October 21. I'm going to go. I'm hoping to meet in person a few of those authors who were such an inspiration for me. If you find yourself in that place where you need those emails, you should go, too. But either way -- it's hard, it's painful, it's worth it, don't give up.

I won't, either. Ann Napolitano, one of our current authors, didn't -- it took her six years to write the novel I just read for BlogHer Book Club. And the writing was memorable, exciting and worth every minute, in my opinion.

Today is Beloved's birthday. And today a crew of twenty or so men showed up at our house at seven in the morning to begin replacing our roof.

The roof is wood shake, which is the worst kind of roof ever. It's expensive, it's flammable and it rots. Ours is crumbling to bits and got slammed by the hail earlier this summer to the point that we were getting water stains on the ceilings. The first insurance inspector who came said it wasn't bad enough to replace. Beloved was livid, so was the roofer, a readjustment was arranged, and lo and behold, the second adjustor agreed: New roof! Paid for by the insurance company!

I've been in a half stage of shock since Beloved told me we were getting a new roof. We've been through a lot of money and broken house issues in our ten years of home ownership, and really, I've stopped expecting insurance companies to replace anything. I'm all GET OFF MY LAWN about it in a way I never thought I'd grow -- so jaded, just like my father when he talks about parking in Omaha. I'd accepted when the sweating man huffed his way up my stairs and examined the water stains located right above my winter sweaters (is there anything so vulnerability producing as having a stranger perspiring all over your wardrobe?) that we were screwed, there would be no insurance money and we'd probably have to take out some sort of horrific loan we don't qualify for or have buckets in every bedroom to catch the water when it rained. This is my best talent: catastrophizing. I don't even stop for the mid-level crises; I go straight to the bone splitters.

The longer we've been together, the more I've ostriched about money and house-related problems. After a while, I -- feminist still -- relinqueshed the checkbook and all the balancing and math that goes with it -- to Beloved. Every time I see him sit down with a stack of bills I half-heartedly offer to help and pray he says no, which he always does, whether he wants to or not (I'll never know). When I see those numbers fluctuate, I am suddenly incapable of seeing the big picture and become positive we will be living in a van down by the river in forty days. I don't know why. I just do.

Beloved taking over the checkbook and bill balancing put a roof over my head, a layer between me and the harsh outside world. I'm fine with shouldering all things parenting, with scheduling haircuts and dentist appointments for my daughter, with knowing her shoe size at all times and exactly how many minutes it takes to pick her up from wherever, where all her friends live and with whom she's allowed to go past the end of the cul-de-sac. I can be a big girl about my career and my health and my extended family. But that one thing for which I really do need a roof is money.

I'm sitting here listening to those twenty men ripping the house apart -- literally -- and trying not to think of them punching a hole in something or falling off and landing on the cement or dying of heatstroke or smashing my tomato plants. Beloved told me to go work at Panera or the library today because it would be so loud. I'm sure he understood that I wouldn't leave because I have a sick need to think it'll all be all right as long as I'm here while it's happening. But the truth is I wouldn't know what to do if something went wrong.

There are things in life that I know how to handle and things he knows how to handle, and I hope that I am his roof sometimes. My family always told me to marry someone I secretly think is better than I am, and I did.

Happy birthday, Beloved. Thank you for being my roof.

---

From my BlogHer Book Club review of The Kid: Read, then, so we will make better choices than the characters in The Kid. That we will pause and consider what a person might have been through before we judge. That we, at least, will not see the world in black and white, because it is never, ever black and white -- which is the message I took away from The Kid, a story in which the main character never really even knew his name, never knew if he was crazy or sane, never knew who his father was, never knew who was related to him, never knew anything for sure except that pancakes tasted good and dancing was a release and that he could teach himself to do the splits with practice and discipline. Read the rest.

Last night I had a meeting across town after work. As usual, I got the time wrong and was late.

As I was driving back, there was a brief moment when I thought to myself, I miss commuting.

And then I pulled over got out and punched myself in the face.

(okay, not really)

But seriously? I hated commuting! Hated it! Like little kid hated it! So why did I think that?

The light was sort of slanty and there was no traffic and I had the windows down. It was a pleasant drive.

So let's leave it at that.

Something can be pleasant without having to miss it, right?

---

This post would probably be a wee bit more interesting had I not been so preoccupied with our new section that launched on BlogHer today -- BlogHerMoms! Led by my friend, colleague and Sleep Is for the Weak foreward writer Stacy Morrison. So please excuse my lack of clarity -- I thought about not posting at all because that commuting post could've been good had I a brain cell left in my head. But I'm working on forgiving myself for not being perfect, so there you have it.

Five minutes ago, it was Friday night and I was cleaning my house at 10 p.m.

Then it was Saturday, and five of my friends and I threw a shower in the morning and a bachelorette party in the evening for our bride getting married in two weeks. I laughed and cried alternately and with equal force for more than 24 hours straight as the seven of us worked through the happiness of the upcoming celebration and the grief of concurrent personal tragedies.

Then it was 2 a.m. on Sunday, and I was drifting off to sleep in my friend Kathy's house on my air mattress.

Then it was noon on Sunday, and I was hauling downed tree branches out of the yard in preparation for our end-of-summer neighborhood barbecue. That my daughter and her friend unexpectedly invited more people to than I realized. Note to self: Don't hand a seven- and eight-year-old invitations and tell them to go deliver them unsupervised. It was, of course, totally, fine, but the shock, I tell you.

Then it was 9 p.m. on Sunday, and we were dragging back inside the tables and food and laughing about nine kids playing swords and shields while hiding behind the protection of every umbrella in my garage.

Then it was 11 p.m. on Sunday, and I was realizing how many memories we packed into two days, and their bulk shoved aside any other thoughts in my head.

Then it was 8:30 a.m. on Monday, and I sat down to write this. I'm literally shocked it's already today. My conscious mind is still stuck back on Friday night, which is the last time I wasn't swept along completely in the moment.

Life isn't always linear. Not really.

Yesterday I had an appointment to take about twenty in-various-stages-of-empty paint cans to the city. I'd had to make the appointment online twice, because the first appointment had to be cancelled due to my last business trip to New York.

Beloved really wanted those paint cans out of the garage. And because I know if I do this for him, he will finish the arch in the kitchen I love him, I willingly and endearingly agreed to do it.

Of course, the appointments are only in the middle of the workday.

Of course, they are located in bizarre and hard-to-find areas on the edge of hell.

Of course, they are staffed with burly men in bright orange t-shirts who wear mirrored fuck you sunglasses and won't take your even close to empty paint cans even though that can't possibly be good for the environment.

They gave me back half my paint cans! They didn't even open them to see if they were all the way empty!

Me: So can I recycle these here?

Them: No.

Me: What am I supposed to do with them?

Them: Take the lids off and throw them away.

Me: Seriously?

Them: Yes.

Me: !

Them: .

Me: Okay, do you have a dumpster here?

Them: No.

Me: You are seriously going to make me put these back in my car and drive them home to take up half of my garbage can after I brought them all the way across town to be recycled properly?

Them: Yes. Next, please!

I got back in Beloved's truck. The air conditioning doesn't work in his truck. I was wearing jeans. And the heat of my sudden, irrational, mind-bending rage was also keeping me warm.

I have no sense of direction and the GPS was hanging from the cigarette heater thingie and I couldn't hear it with the windows down, so of course I made a wrong turn and ended up getting lost on the way home from the edge of hell. I pulled into a large industrial parking lot to turn around, and ...

I spent about five minutes turning furious cookies in Beloved's truck.

Then I drove home, got the garbage can off the curb, tossed the paint cans in and went back to work.

Beloved brought me Culver's and took the little angel away for two hours so I could finish working. I have no doubt my chances for that arch are very, very good.

Just don't tell him about the cookies.

I went to see Sapphire read from The Kid a month or so ago. I already had a copy of the book for BlogHer%20Book%20Club, but I got another one to give away on BlogHer.

Here's an excerpt from my post:

Sapphire started out as a poet, and as she read excerpts from her book, her voice changed, her meter changed, rising and lowering, now chummy, now threatening. She's a powerful performer, perhaps as powerful a performer as a writer, or maybe they are impossible to separate. She says she never cared about her poems as much as she does The Kid, though.

"It's going to take people a while to get this, but I know I have done something good, something strong," she said.

(It's a heavy, heavy dark book.)

So, if you're interested, go enter -- there are a few more days before we shut down the giveaway. I'm sorry I forgot to say anything earlier, but I was, um, on vacation. If you've read Push or The Kid, perhaps you'll join me in being somewhat amazed at the sunny nature of her autograph.

On the first day of our family vacation, my husband rented a boogie board and my daughter dug holes in the sand.

I lay faceplanted on a towel for two hours, stress radiating off my body and seeping out my pores. 

As I lay there, scenes from the previous few days played out. Thoughts of things I should've done at BlogHer -- people I should've met, things I should've said, posts I should've written -- rattled around. Every once in a while, my husband or daughter would come up to me, puzzled at my muteness. I'm normally an energetic person. Instead, I just lay there like a beached whale. Every once in a while, tears trickled out onto the sand.

After the beach, we drove an hour and a half up the coast and I fell asleep somewhere near Miramar, the hard, shuddering, paralysis sort of sleep, the sort I had every night during my vacation. Did you hear the people next door slamming doors? No. Did you hear the storm? No. I heard nothing. I slept the sleep of the dead.

Last week, I built a levee: No email. No Twitter. No blogging. No Internet.

I kept it up all week long, even after we came back home. I took my daughter shopping for school supplies. I went sailing with my husband. I sorted through the clothes I'd worn at BlogHer as though they were someone else's from a different lifetime.

While I was faceplanted in that sand on the beach, I asked myself why modern life is so much, why it all never ends. Maybe it's laptops, I thought. No, maybe it's email on our phones. Or the economy. Or the flexible nature of modern work, yes, that's it!

Maybe. But I don't have to have a blog. I don't have to write a novel. I don't have to volunteer on an arts board. I don't have to work beyond forty hours a week.

I don't have to have any friends.

As we were leaving San Diego, I asked my husband about the sea walls. They seemed pretty short to me, fairly useless against an ocean. He pointed out how far they were up the beach. I thought about the flooding along the Missouri River, how difficult it is to contain surging water.

I have shitty levees in my life.

Yesterday I picked back up the reins after a week away. At five I picked up my daughter and took her to meet her new teacher for second grade. We went to dinner. I gave her a bath, complete with a Wizard of Oz Celebriducks singing contest. I called my parents.

I didn't look at my laptop or my cell phone even though it literally made me nauseous not to do so.

I know from looking at my inboxes this morning that the email piled up against that levee last night. Even now -- by taking the time to take my daughter to summer camp and write this post -- it's threatening to spill over.

Should I move it farther up the beach? Build it higher? Take it down and let the world overwhelm me the way it did right before vacation? My sandbags never seem to hold for longer than two days, and I often grow weary of rebuilding.