Irene Smith

I have finally had to come to the conclusion that I can’t do everything. I was trying to update this blog weekly, write a book, participate on Brigit’s Flame by writing a short story every week, study for Microsoft Certification, and also do my real job, the one that pays the bills. This left very little time for everyday things like, oh, sleep and spending time with my family.

I just couldn’t do it. Trying to do too many things at once caused a system crash (my system, not the computer) and I just haven’t felt like doing anything for several months. My health has been suffering and so has my psyche. The whole experience just made me feel sorry for myself and left me incapable of accomplishing much of anything. The few stories I did manage to write got me nothing more than a bunch of rejections.

Is it time for me to give up on writing? Maybe I’m just fooling myself. I thought that I write well. Most of the people who read my stories like them (except for the magazine editors, apparently) so if I haven’t figured out what I’m doing wrong by now, maybe I should just quit.

Why can’t I do that? No matter how many rejections I get, I find myself writing again. It builds up, like water pressure behind a clog in a pipe and after a while, I start getting story ideas that swoop and dive around my head like crazed birds until I sit down at the keyboard and get them out there. I can’t help myself.

My husband took me and our son to Olive Garden tonight for dinner. The place was beginning to fill up with Saturday night customers so we had to add our name to the list for a table. I went up to the hostess and said to her,”I’d like a table for three.” I paused and said, “Smith.”

“Thank you. What is your first name?”

How is that relevant? I looked at the hostess as she stood, pen poised over paper, waiting for my answer. Reluctantly I said, “Irene.”

This raised a question that I’ve pondered more than once. That is:

When did we become so informal?

Once upon a time young people didn’t address those who were obviously older by their first name. I might enjoy the thought that maybe I look younger than I am, but the truth is that, when I was a little girl, people didn’t address others that they didn’t know by their first name. When you added yourself to a list at a restaurant, you gave the hostess or maitre ‘d your last name and then when it was your turn they would say, “Smith, party of three.”

This change does not just apply to restaurants. When you go to the doctor’s office these days you never hear a nurse say, “Mrs. Smith, could you come with me, please?” It’s always, “Irene,” and then they turn and walk away without saying any more. Now you’ve got to scurry after them as quickly as possible, hoping that they don’t get too far ahead for you to find them again because almost every doctor’s office is a maze of examining rooms but that’s another blog entry.

When I go to the bank, not a common occurrance since my husband usually takes care of our finances, the teller calls me Irene, when I used my credit card at WalMart, the 15-year old at the register says, “Here you go Irene,” when she hands my card back to me. I have been married to my husband for 15 years now and I can count the number of times I have been addressed as “Mrs. Smith” on the fingers of one hand.

Even in the work place, formality has gone by the wayside. I am as guilty as any of calling the CEO of the company I work for by his first name but, now that I think of it, I’m wondering if that’s the best thing for us all? Would we respect each other more if I called him Mr. Sherif and he called me Mrs. Smith?

Some people seem to feel that this informality is a good thing. “Why be so formal?” they say. “It’s so much more friendly the other way.”

At first thought, that seems to be true. However, consider your childhood. To whom were you more respectful, the teacher you had to call “Mrs. Smith” or the kid on the other side of the aisle that you called “Bobby?” I’m betting that Mrs. Smith would have won out.

This is going to be a short post tonight. I’ve been fighting with a ‘flu for the past two weeks, it’s late, and I’m tired.

I had my 50th birthday this week. I find it hard to believe (somehow I don’t remember when I became this old) but there it is. I imagine that a lot of the complaining that I’ve been doing lately has something to do with adjusting to–what? middle age? early old age? I’ve reached a point in my life where most people are satisfied with who they have beomce or they are busy bemoaning their fate and trying to understand what went wrong. Me? I’m thinking about going back to school. I’m thinking about trying to start a whole new career, and I’m looking forward to the birth of my fifth grandchild.

Then again, while I was far advanced with intellectual things like reading and writing and ‘rithmetic, I’ve always been behind the curve when it comes to social and career milestones. For example, I didn’t buy my first car until I was nearly 30 years old and didn’t marry until I was 35. And yet in usual fashion for me, it all worked out well because when I did marry, I married a man with two grown-up children. I became a grandmother before I gave birth for the first time.

Lately it seems as though a lot of things have been going badly wrong. My father died, I had a credit card taken away from me (not that the loss of a credit card compares to my father’s death) and I can’t seem to get any reaction to my writing but “thanks, but no thanks.” I’ve been tired and sick and just feeling sorry for myself. Then this weekend came along and I had to admit that things aren’t so bad after all.

In fact, so far this weekend has been absolutely perfect. Two of my granddaughters came to spend Thursday and Friday night with us. We played computer games together, we talked, we made pizza and we watched movies. Then tonight my step-son and daughter-in-law came with my grandson and we all went out to dinner. I looked around that the table for eight at the restaurant tonight and thought, “How can anybody be luckier than this?”

It got me thinking about how very lucky I really am in so many ways. For example (and this is in no particular order):

• True, my father died. On the other hand, he was 85 years old and I was nearly 50. I have some close friends whose parents died before they graduated high school. My son has been lucky enough to know his grandfather and my father was around long enough to see that he did a good job raising me. I know he was proud of me.
• I was lucky enough to have my paternal grandmother in my life until I was in my 40s. She died at the age of 99 in 2003 when I was 44 years old.
• I have a husband who loves me so much that he was willing to move from New York State to Washington State (and greater love hath no man for woman, than to drive across country with a nearly 3-year old child) and then to pick up and move back again 4 years later when my father had a stroke.
• I dearly love both of my step-children and their spouses. When my husband and I were married, my step-daughter was Maid of Honor and my step-son Best Man.
• I adore all four (soon to be five) of my grandchildren.
• I have a good job at a time when many people have lost theirs through no fault of their own.
• We managed to get a mortgage for a brand new house right before everything fell apart. I love my home and so did my father when he visited us. Our home is a place where friends feel welcome and I love entertaining.
• I have good friends who care about me.
• My husband is still addicted to me even though we’ve been together for nearly 25 years.

Who could ask for anything more? It would just be greedy.

This is the beginning of the year of postings. I actually remembered. Starting today, I plan on posting one entry a week from now until next July.

I have this urge to run away from my life. There has been too much sorrow lately; so much that I don’t notice the good things that are surely happening as well. I want to hide, to be alone, and there isn’t time. I’m watching the movie Elizabethtown. It’s nearly over and Orlando Bloom is running around the flea market, looking for Kirsten Dunst. I’m certainly not looking for Kirsten Dunst, but I think I am looking for something. I just wish I knew what it was.

If I had the money to do it, I’d hop in the car and just drive away. I love my husband and my children and grandchildren, but this is a trip I’d take alone. Just me and a bunch of CDs with my favorite music.

I’d go looking for those places that people seldom notice and rarely visit. I’d visit museums and tourist traps. I would stop to eat when I felt like it and stop to sleep when I got tired. I’d check out big cities and small towns. I think it would be refreshing and invigorating, and when I came back, I’d be ready to go on. Of course few people get to do in real life what people get to do in movies.

Despite the fact that I have a really good job, I can’t afford to “run way” even for a few hours because there’s never any money left over. So I go on from day to day, building up a sleep deficit that I’ll never be able to pay back. Getting more and more emotionally exhausted by the day. I eat too much, I sleep too little, and I don’t know how to change it.

There is something very soothing about writing. I’m sitting here in the darkened living room (it’s daytime outside, but dark in here) with the television running the background (Elizabethtown has given way to The Truman Show) and the physical act of hitting the keys and seeing the words appear on the screen is soothing.

I’m trying to think of a cool way to close this off, but I can’t. So I’m just going to end it. Here.

See you next week…

Are we having fun yet?

Five years ago I moved back to New York State from Redmond, Washington. It seems like yesterday. I probably wouldn’t have given it a thought but this year is the tenth anniversary of NaNoWriMo (National Novel Writing Month) and that got me to thinking about time…

The first time I participated in NaNoWriMo, I was in an airplane on the way from Washington to New York. We were coming home. 2003 was not a great year for us. My mother-in-law passed away, my father had a stroke, and we pulled up stakes and moved across the country. On the other hand, we really wanted to move back. When we moved to Washington we thought that we would be back to visit much more often. The best we could manage was once a year. Not enough! We moved back because my Dad had a stroke and Mom needed someone to help with the printing business. It was a good excuse. We missed the family too much and didn’t want to be a continent away.

The only good thing about 2003 is that it is also the year when my first short story was sold (for three dollars and change!) and published at a web site called Alien Skin (http://www.alienskinmag.com) in their November issue.

It has been nine years since we moved out to Washington. I was working in Newburgh at a company called CRS Retail Systems. When I looked around and saw that what they were paying me was about 17k per year less than the average for someone with my experience, I posted my resume on Monster.com and was hired by a contracting company in Washington. I took the job because it was a 50% increase in salary but, more importantly, it placed me as a contract employee at Microsoft.

And speaking of tenth anniversaries, this web site celebrated its tenth anniversary back in July. I purchased the domain irenesmith.com back in 1998 when the cost to register a domain was $35 per year. The site has gone through a bunch of re-designs over the years and has had widely varying amounts of attention from me, but it is still here.

[Edit 21 Oct 2008] I goofed. I thought I bought this domain in 1998. I was at whois today and it turns out that I actually bought the domain in July of 1999 so… that means the Tenth Anniversary is next July and that gives me a chance to do something special. I don’t know what yet, but you will all be the second to find out.

It has been 12 years since my son was born. I can’t even begin to tell you how frightened we were when he was born nearly three months early. His due date was December 22nd and his actually birthday is in the beginning of October. This is what he looked like back then…

Matthew at about 3 weeks.

Of course, you wouldn’t know he weighed less than three pounds when he was born if you looked at him now.

It has been 14 years since I got married and also 14 years since my video games were published. When those games came out in the summer of 1994, they were released on 3.5″ diskettes. (Who even has a diskette drive any more?) The games were written for Windows 3.1 using Visual Basic 3. They weren’t anything like today’s games, of course, since I’m only one person and don’t have the equivalent of a movie studio working with me but I think they were fun. Here is a screen shot of my solitaire game:

My Solitaire Game

The games (Video Solitaire, Dice Games and Casino Games) came out in 1994, obviously not long before Windows 95, and were actually available in stores for four years. I stopped receiving royalties in 1998 but I actually found a copy of one of my games in a K-Mart in Seattle, Washington in 2001. I didn’t get rich from them, but the year they were selling the fastest we actually lived on the royalties.

It has been 20 years since my first computer programming article was sold. It was published in January of 1989 but I sold it in June of 1988. Either way, I made good on my vow to be published before age 30. As is usual for me, I cut it really close. The article came out in January and I turned 30 in September.

It has been 23 years since I met my husband. We were introduced by his Aunt who set us up on a blind date. The minute I saw him for the first time, I fell in love with him. We were so intent on talking to each other that night that, although I know his aunt and uncle were there and some other couple that they knew, we might as well have been alone. We talked to each other non-stop from the moment he sat down at the table until he dropped me off at around 2:30 in the morning. And we have been talking non-stop ever since with no end in sight.

It has been 25 years since I bought my first computer. I had been playing video games on an Atari 2600 and watching the William Shatner ads for the Commodore Vic 20. When I went to the store to buy the Vic 20, they were out of them but they had something called a Texas Instruments TI/99-4A. It had 3k of RAM and also used cartridges.

By October, I outgrew the TI/99-4A and bought myself a Commodore 64. For those of you who don’t remember (or weren’t born yet) when you bought the C-64, you got the computer. No storage device, no monitor, no software. The computer looked like just a keyboard because the CPU, memory, and all of the hardware was in that keyboard and it connected to a standard television set. If you wanted to actually SAVE your programs, you had to buy a disk drive or, if you didn’t have a lot of money, a cassette drive.

I bought the cassette drive and the rest is history. Just think, if disk drives had been cheaper, I probably wouldn’t have learned to program. I really bought the computer in the first place because I had heard that computer games were much better than what you could play on the Atari 2600. Unfortunately, once I bought it, I quickly found out that there weren’t too many video games on cassette. I started buying computer magazines so I could type in the game programs they had listed in them. It is not a huge leap from typing in programs to writing your own. You wonder, what would happen if I changed the way that worked and the next thing you know, you’re writing programs of your own.

I think I’ve gone far enough. If I tell you that it has been 31 years since I graduated from high school, you’ll think I’m really old. If you had asked me in 1977 what I would do for a living and where I would be in 31 years, I don’t think the answer would have been anything close to the truth. So much for my powers of prediction.

If you have been here before and things look different, it’s because I have decided to make life easier for myself and maintain a blog instead of a web site. I’m tired of all the work involved with a regular web site. I don’t have the time to play around with HTML and PHP and ASP .NET. If there’s information I want to post, I want to type it and post it. So…

I am letting someone else do all the programming. I have created a Word Press blog and now all I have to do is post a new post when I have news. Why the change? I realized that it was much more fun to post information to MySpace than it was to post to this web site. Why? When I wanted to post to the old site I had to write a new page or pages and then upload them to the web. When I want to add something to MySpace, all I have to do is log in and type the new post. The added benefit is that I can now post to this site from anywhere I have an Internet connection. Think I’ll be posting more often?

Sometimes life really is good.

On Sunday, September 14th I particpated in the Susan G. Komen Race for the Cure. The “cure” we’re looking for is the cure to breast cancer. My employer paid the entry fee for a team of us to do this race but I need support in the form of donations. It is still not too late! I am including a link to my personal page on the organization’s web site. This will take you to my personal page:

Irene’s Page at the Komen Race for the Cure Web Site

Susgan G. Komen Race for the Cure for the Greater New York Area.

If you can make a donation, please go to my personal page so that I will get credit for it.

Did I make it? Yes. I crossed the finish line an embarrassing one hour and twenty minutes after I started. I suppose it could have been worse; I could have been walking one mile an hour instead of two.

The only thing I can say in my defense is that it was amazingly hot and humid yesterday and since I thought it was going to be cold and rainy, I wore jeans instead of shorts. Not a great idea. Plus, I didn’t really consider how much time I was going to spend on my feet in addition to the walk itself. Let’s see…

I took the train to Hoboken, walked to the PATH (not far, maybe about the equivalent of two city blocks. The PATH was crowded so I stood up for the ride from Hoboken to 14th Street. I got off the PATH and climbed four flights of stairs to the street, walked two more blocks to the subway and then walked down two or three flights to the platform where I stood for twenty minutes waiting for the subway car and then stood for the ride to the 72nd street stop.

At 72nd street, I got off the subway, climbed another three flights of stairs (where I discovered that the exit itself was at 70th Street) and walked eight blocks to meet the rest of the team. So if you count ten city blocks to the mile I have already walked a bit over a mile and that is one third of the distance that I walked in the race itself.

Now we walked about five blocks back to the start of the race and stood around for half an hour or so waiting for the walking start time. By now the heat and humidity have caused enough perspiration so that the back of my shirt was soaked and perspiration was running down my back and my legs. I haven’t even really started yet and I was exhausted.

Finally it was time to start. We started walking and I was immediately left in the dust by the walkers from my team who are all taller than I and in much better shape. People were passing me on all sides. I felt as though I was walking backwards. At that point it occurred to me that my only job was to make it to the end. I focused on the toes of my shoes and thought about nothing but putting one foot in front of the other.

Of course, by this point I was sliding into dehydration. Flash back to 4 am when I was getting ready to go. The weather channel’s web site said it was going to rain hard. I started looking for a hooded wind breaker to keep me dry and suddenly it was 4:46 a.m. The train leaves at 4:50 a.m. so we ran for the train. I left without my wind breaker or an elastic to tie up my hair. I figured I could buy a bottle of water when I arrived at the Starbucks where the team was meeting.

Of course the line at Starbucks stretched about four times around the store because everybody had decided to meet at that Starbucks. No water for me. Let’s continue…

I made it to the first water table where I got two cups of water. Suddenly I felt much better. For a while the walk was almost pleasant. There was a bit of a breeze and the scenery was beautiful. I’ve never been in Central Park before so that part of it was an adventure. Listening to the conversations around me was also interesting.

I made it to the second water table. More water so I was doing pretty well at the second mile marker. Now I was thinking, “I can do this. It’s not so bad.”

The last mile seemed to go on forever. Of course, if you’ve read this whole entry you know that I’ve actually walked over 3 miles already, not 2. Either way, I was beginning to think I wasn’t going to make it. I stopped about three times in that last mile to catch my breath. Mind you, I only stopped for about a minute each time, but I did stop. I considered giving up. Then I realized that whatever I did, I was going to have to walk somewhere to get on the subway to get the PATH to get to Hoboken to get on the train to get home. I kept going.

Finally, the people on either side of the path were telling us, “You’re almost there,” and, “It’s just around the corner.”

I kept going, kept putting one foot in front of the other, and finished the “race” for the cure. Was I done walking? Nope. I had to walk out of the park (about 3 or 4 blocks) to the subway, another 7 blocks and down the stairs to the subway. I had to stand on the subway from 68th street to 33rd street, then walk up several flights of stairs. Then I had to walk anther five blocks to the PATH and stand on the PATH from 33rd to Christopher Street.

At this point, I was thinking, “Oh well, another 7 minutes and I’ll be in Hoboken. I can get on my train and sleep for two hours.” WRONG! All people going to Hoboken were told to get off the PATH because this particular PATH train was NOT going to Hoboken it was going to Journal Square. We all disembarked and another announcement informed us that the PATH to Journal Square through Hoboken is not on a 30-minute schedule.

About 45 minutes later, a train stopped for us all. It went to Pavonia/Exchange Place and told us all to get off. We got out, we waited. Finally a shuttle train arrived and took us to Hoboken 35 minutes too late for me to catch my train. The next train was not until 4:00 p.m.

They say that no good deed goes unpunished.

Don’t forget, if you can make a donation, please do so.

NOTE: This vignette was written as an exercise for the Practice-W mailing list. The exercise asked us to remember a time when someone’s faith made a difference in our lives.

“Hey, when are you going to take your writing seriously?”

“I spend every spare minute I have writing,” I replied as my fingers danced across the keys. “How much more seriously can I take it?”

I was in the middle of creating yet another story that would be consigned to the bit bucket the minute it was finished. Home from work for the Fourth of July holiday, I had been working from the moment I finished my morning coffee. My husband came into the spare bedroom we had turned into a home office and sat down next to me.

“You had your first non-fiction article published almost fifteen years ago. How many short stories or novels have you submitted?”

“None.”

“Exactly my point. When you decided to write non-fiction, you sent it out so people could buy it. With fiction, you write the stories and then leave them sitting on your hard drive. Nobody ever sees them.”

“They’re not good enough. I’m not ready,” I launched into the familiar list of excuses. The truth was that my first two programming articles, written on speculation, were accepted. After that, I wrote on assignment. Now I was afraid of the rejection. Finally, as my list sputtered to a stop, he leaned over and kissed me. “I think you’re wrong,” he said. “In fact, I’m so convinced that your stories are good, and that you can be a successful writer, that I’ve put my money where my mouth is.”

He placed a check and a piece of paper on the desk in front of me. Curious, I picked them up. The check, for one hundred and twenty-five dollars, was made out to the Romance Writers of America. The paper was a completed membership application that only needed my signature.

I don’t believe in magic, not really, but sometimes it takes someone else’s belief to allow you to believe in yourself. We mailed the application on July Fourth, Independence Day. By the end of July I had submitted several stories, and by the middle of October, I had made my first sale. I still think that if my husband hadn’t made such a concrete declaration of belief, I would still be dreaming about writing fiction. I may not be able to quit my day job yet, but I’m on my way.

Copyright © 2004, Irene Smith.