My Secret Shame…
I went a bit overboard this year. I went and bought myself some extra reading matter for this vacation back to the Homeland. Even though there is already reading galore on most every table and table-like surface in this house. Even though some of this consists of books I’ve been meaning to read and even though I have a pile of books at back at my apartment in Beach Town that I’ve also been meaning to read, as well as a book that I brought with me, a good one -- a borrowed one -- that I’ve been making teeny wee dents in since before this month began.

It’s not that I don’t like these books. It’s that, well, gosh darn it, there are so many good magazines out there right now. That’s right, I said it. I went into Giant Bookstore and came out without a single book. Instead, I had copies of ReadyMade, Venus, and Kitchen Sink.
“I’m on vacation,” I told myself. I probably also told myself, “No one back in my MFA program has to know,” though that last one wasn’t exactly conscious. I got home, sat down at the dining room table and immersed myself for what turned into a couple of hours - in articles, short stories and essays by some really good writers, doing exactly what I want to make my own living doing.

…I Lived for Month-Long Affairs !
It was when I was lying in bed that night, devouring the latest Kitchen Sink, that I found it. The payoff. An article by a writer named Jessica Hoffman called “Better Than Books: Or, How I Learned to Stop Fronting and Love the Magazine.” Hoffman writes of an experience eerily similar to mine earlier that day: Going to a giant bookstore with a friend. The friend come out with two books, Hoffman with like, three or five magazines. She’s a bit embarrassed before she blurts out basically that Okay, maybe she just likes magazines better than books, all right??

And while I wouldn’t go as far as to completely prize periodicals over so-called “real” literature in my own affections, Hoffman’s arguments in favor of the magazine are compelling:

One is the relative freedom from corporate and consumer whim: be it a short story or an essay-piece, a new, provocative or unorthodox writer is far more likely to find publication in the monthly (biweekly, whatever) format. Well-edited, independent magazines and journals are cropping up all over the damn place out there right now. From McSweeneys to Punk Planet (my choices here), you can find a range of experiences and writing styles in the pieces within, some of which book publishers, obviously, cannot afford to take a chance on. You might find a writer you come to love who’s never had a book published, Hoffman points out. And who won’t, for years to come. Why miss out?

Hoffman makes a few more stellar points; Conciseness, for example. Having worked as a copyeditor, she says she’s seen too many books get padded way the heck down with excessive prose just so the buyer can leave the store feeling good having shucked out 24 dollars. And there’s more, but you should just read the article. And those of us who get our greatest kicks creasing back the new covers of Bitch and The Believer, can feel better just saying so.*

*(And feel better too, claiming that such writing is our goal, when it is. While, for example, correcting our closest relatives, politely, for the billion-dozenth time, when they tell their church friends at a Christmas party that, “Alice is in school to write the Great American Novel!”
Ahh, not quite.)

When I was very little, I confused these phrases:

A: Heimlich Remover
I’m back in Pittsburgh for ten days. This length alternates between feeling like waaay too much time here and not nearly enough. Today my father needed to get some last-minute food for when the rest of the family comes tomorrow. I went with him, being in that weird position of being home for Christmas and suddenly having no life other than Family Life. If I were married and had kids, it’d be different, but I don’t, and so I might as well be eighteen.
“You want to come?” my dad said.
“What are you getting?” I was finishing up some Christmas presents for my mom and sisters that involve glass marbles and magnets and felt a bit dizzy from inhaling epoxy all morning.
“The turkey. Some cheese,” he said. “Come along.”
“Sure.” I put down the current issue of ReadyMade, this great crafts magazine. If I were a housewife with lots of money somewhere, I swear I’d be a total craft freak. I’d have a different website, and it’d be all about yarn and glitter instead of mundane epiphany and words. Hell, I think if I weren’t trying to do something creative for a living, that’d be me in a heartbeat.

As it is, crafts have become my fallback measure whenever I’m not writing, for whatever reason. If I’m feeling blocked, the hazy notion of creating a collage from 1930s etiquette manuals becomes an imperative. So does gluing erasure poetry onto paint-by-number pictures of golden retriever puppies (a real - and awesome - Xmas present I made for someone this year. No, it wasn’t you.)

For three weeks, I’ve been elbow-deep in Mod Podge, paint, epoxy, Wite-Out and little scraps of paper. And thankfully, since I’ve left Beach Town and gone on this holiday hiatus travelin’ spree, ideas for el writing have been coming from every direction. I take little breaks from the gluing and the snipping to scrawl them down. It’s like they were blocked by some force field around Beach Town, but now that I’m gone, they’re free to make their rightful beeline for me. Which, hehe, isn’t true. Of course. I can write wherever I want. Errmm…

At any rate, I don’t write yet. I bide my time. I epoxy glass beads onto magnets and straight pins. I Mod Podge and I glitter. It works on a similar impulse: pure escapism. There’s nothing like the dissociative pleasures, Henshaw, especially when la vida private is less than stellar. A wee bit of heartbreak? Fears of inadequacy of some sort? Cover over all that ugly stuff with some bright pictures from a 1967 National Geographic, and maybe when you look up from the beautiful paper vistas in a month or so, the real world won’t seem so harsh.

B: Nailpolish Maneuver
So I go with my dad for the turkey and the cheese and to find a neat crafts projects for my nieces -- and also to get Altoids tins for some of my presents. (The notions for these gifts grow ever more lavish, both in mind and on the desk that has accidentally become my gift-crafting command center.).

My dad, who, in my family’s, well, family, days, drove a rusted-out VW Rabbit, has graduated to a luxury car whose vanity plate announces the goofy nickname we’ve given him in recent years. The car is huge; it’s senior-citizen silver. We’ve crossed some line. That car, when we borrow it, marks my sisters and me as people who used to live here.

Today, my dad and I drive down Route 19 through extremely hectic Friday-before-Christmas traffic to Michaels, which is housed in what was in the late ‘80s, a dying little mall. There used to be a Hills there, which smelled permanently of the hotdogs and bright yellow popcorn they sold up front. In high school my friend was caught shoplifting hot pink women’s XXL underpants there. (Not her size.) Except, no; that’s not true. That was Woolworths, also long gone now, in South Hills Village, the mall across the way. SHV used to be one of those malls with a video arcade called Tilt! and photo booths and pigeons. A middle-class twelve-year-old’s dream. Now it’s one of those Ann Taylor, Brookstone malls, which is really every current mall nowadays, I guess. At any rate, when I have to go there now, I feel underdressed and filled with malcontent no matter what I’m wearing or what mood I was in before. And now the Hills is a Home Depot. And the old Giant Eagle/Pharmor across the street is the most gigantic grocery store I’ve ever seen. That’s across from where the old Scandinavian was, now a Best Buy.

On the way home, we drove past the houses of three of my friends from high school. I’ve completely lost touch with all of them. Tonight at supper, my mom tells me that Iron City Beer has gone bankrupt and later I’m rummaging around the internet to see if there are any good rock shows and it turns out two of the clubs that I remember from when I was younger, Metropol and Graffiti, have gone the way if the old I.C. Light jingle.
Hey. Gimme an I.C. Light.