Tag Archive | life

Alcohol: A Confession

Are you ready to hear the most shocking thing about me that you may ever hear?

Okay, here it is: I don’t get alcohol.

Nope. I don’t get it at all. I completely and utterly don’t understand the point. It makes no sense to me. I know that it’s a million dollar industry and everyone and their brother loves to go out drinking from time to time. Apparently alcohol is a social lubricant and people associate it with a good time. Youngsters yearn for the day when they can legally drink and sneak the stuff behind their parents’ backs when they can. Heck, there’s an entire era of American history surrounding the prohibition and underground industry of alcohol. It’s a big thing.

I don’t get it.

Now don’t get me wrong, I’ve imbibed a time or two myself. I’ll drink wine at important events, or in the evening if I’ve got a bottle of something I actually like (Moscato!), and I am always up for a small shandy after a long, hot cricket match in the summer. But past that? I fail to see the appeal.

Granted, I’m pretty sure that my mystification and head-shaking over alcohol is because of the way it affects me. It wasn’t until a couple of years ago that one of my friends pointed out that they think alcohol has a different effect on me than it does on other people. Here’s how I feel when I drink….

First of all, when I’m in a social situation I like to be present. I get a high off of intellectual discussion, or not-so intellectual discussion. I feel focused and tuned in when I’m talking to people and I swear it gives me an actual rush. Especially intense conversations with one or two people. I’m an idea person.

When I start drinking I get fuzzy fast. It feels like my mind unmoors and starts to drift. I lose the ability to pay attention. I lose the thread of the conversation. It’s almost as if my eyes roll back in my head and happy elevator music plays. And it’s not like I drift away to something like I do when I’m in the throes of a serious daydream. Nope, I just come loose and float off.

I guess some people might want to experience that feeling, but not me. Especially if I’m at a social gathering. I will quite literally end up sitting in a corner staring off into space, possibly drooling. Not exactly social, is it.

Ah, but there is one very brief stage that I hit before I drift completely. That is the stage of saying really stupid things. Yep, first the filter goes, then the stupid things come out. Of course, it’s a little safer when everyone else has been drinking because then they don’t care. But I care. I have a pathological aversion to saying stupid things. Mostly because I do it far too often for my own good.

One of the advantages of not drinking that often and stopping when I get too flakey to refill my glass is that I don’t think I have ever been pissed out of my mind fall down drunk. That is something I truly don’t understand. Why in God’s name would anyone want to deliberately engage in an activity that makes them get testy, violent, and vomit. I was on the receiving end of a friend getting that badly, belligerently drunk on New Year’s Eve 2000. It was the most wretched, embarrassing thing I’ve ever seen.

Why?

Ah well. I’m weird, I guess. But I also think my indifference towards alcohol comes from the fact that I live every day with a severely overactive imagination. I once worked for a man who had been a hippie in the hippie heyday and who had tried every drug out there. He told me boldly one day that I didn’t need to do drugs because I could get to places without drugs that most people needed drugs to get to. Hmm. I’ve always found that to be a fascinating comment, worthy of pondering.

So there you have it. Alcohol (and drugs)? *shrugs* It’s all yours. More power to you. Knock yourself out. I won’t stop you.

I will also add, however, that while I also have no interest whatsoever in smoking pot, people who have been smoking are hilarious to hang out with! But that’s a story for another day.

Coming Out

Jan18

I didn’t watch the Golden Globes on Sunday, but I read all about Jodie Foster’s “coming-out” speech the next day. And of course I thought to myself, “So? Big deal. Didn’t we all already know that?” Then, a couple days later, the indomitable George Takei posted a blog about why it actually is a big deal.

I’ll let you read his heart-felt words about why it matters, still, today, when celebrities come out and how that affects young people in and out of the closet who are scared of what will become of them if they do come out. George’s words definitely gave me a different perspective on things.

The fact is, whether or not someone is gay or straight ceased to matter to me personally many, many years ago. I remember the exact moment when my opinions about sexuality changed. And yes, it changed in a flash, in one single moment. I was raised in a conservative, religious community where (at that time) it was definitely not okay to be gay. Granted, I didn’t know at that point that one of my closest high school friends was gay either. But then I moved to Florida for two years of college.

I had a good friend, Sonia, who I worked with at an after-school job. I really liked Sonia. She was funny and quirky and we had a similar sense of humor. We were both a little awkward around other people and I could sense that there was something deeply painful underneath the surface of Sonia’s world. I visited her house, met some of her family, and listened while she told me about some of the trauma and trials that her family had gone through. She was the closest friend I had during that time of my life.

Then one day we were working a shift together and I’m sure I said something narrow-minded about sexuality (although I don’t remember what). I don’t remember the conversation, but I remember Sonia saying to me, quite frankly, “Well, what would you say if I told you I was a lesbian?”

Ever have one of those moments where time stops and you have a long string of thoughts within the space of a second? This was one of those moments. Within the space of half a second all of the following thoughts ran through my head: “I’ve always been told being gay is wrong. But there’s nothing wrong about Sonia. She’s a wonderful person and a good friend. But she’s a lesbian, which can’t be right if everything I was told growing up was true. But everything I was told can’t be true, because if there’s one thing I know for certain it’s that Sonia is a great person. She’s my friend.” Seriously, all of that in half a second.

And then I said aloud the distillation of everything that had just run through my head: “You’re still Sonia. You’re still my friend.” I think I might have actually shrugged and gone on doing my job.

I consider that one of the most important moments of my life. It was vital because in that moment I realized that nothing had changed. Sonia didn’t suddenly become a monster or a horrible person or the anathema of all I believed in. She was still Sonia, my friend. From that moment on my opinion on sexuality had been irrevocably changed. It didn’t matter.

I think this moment was also important to me because Sonia and I continued to be friends and she talked to me about her sexuality. I learned a lot. I learned that just because she liked women didn’t mean she wanted to sleep with me. I wonder sometimes if that’s the fear that a lot of people have when they learn a friend or same-sex acquaintance is gay. But that doesn’t make any more sense than the belief that every one of your opposite-sex friends or acquaintances wants to sleep with you all the time.

Of course, since that pivotal moment with Sonia I’ve had many more gay friends. Not to mention learning that someone I’d known and loved for years was gay. I’ve often wondered if there was more I could have done for him when we were in school, if he was struggling but afraid to reach out, and if I would have known how to handle it at that point in my life. I don’t know. I’m just glad that we’re good friends now.

So I don’t know. Maybe George Takei has a point and it is a very big deal still when a celebrity comes out. I can understand how important it must be to someone facing the same situation. But for someone like me, someone on the other end of the whole coming-out process, the one who gets come out to, I don’t think it is or even should be a big deal. It doesn’t change who that person is. It most certainly shouldn’t affect how I feel about them in the least. Who they – whoever they are – feel pulled to fall in love or lust with is no more my business than it is anyone else’s business who I take a fancy to. My business is to love people for the essence of who they are in their heart of hearts.

I’m sad to say that I lost touch with Sonia when I moved away from Florida (in 1996!). I have her birthday written on my calendar still though and I think of her at least once a year because of it. I sincerely hope that her life has been full of joy and promise. And I hope we meet again someday, if not here, then in the great beyond.

A Writer’s Calling

Jan14

Yesterday was a big day at my church. Our pastor was raised to the second degree of the ministry (which is not half as mystical as it sounds – it’s a church government thing). As part of the service there was a lot of talk about being “called” to the ministry. And as I sat there watching Pastor Ryan affirm that he was called, I thought about my own calling.

I was “called” to be a writer. That’s all there is to it. It’s the only thing I have ever really wanted to do since I was a kid. Granted, there have been a great many years between here and there where I have somehow convinced myself that I should actually do something else. But no, it always comes back to writing. It has been my purpose, my entertainment, my escape, my solace.

But I think there’s more to it than that.

I was having a conversation with my cousin Phyllis, who works in the marketing department for Tor Books and whom I will be interviewing later this week, about writing. She mentioned that YA (Young Adult) is really hot right now and suggested I write a YA novel. I thought about it … and I had to admit that it’s just not my genre.

My calling as a writer is pretty specific. I have a feeling most writers might agree with this. As long as I can remember, no matter what I write, it always turns into a romance novel. Even my sci-fi stories, and there are plenty, lean heavily towards romance. It’s what runs through my veins. It’s what rattles around my brain. I’m not just a writer, I’m a Romance writer (capital R!).

And you know, it goes further than that even.

I’ve always loved history. Ever since studying the explorers in fifth grade. There are some fantastic stories in history! It wasn’t until the end of my high school career, though, that I began to realize that, hey, this stuff actually happened to people! There have been countless lives lived before mine in a style that I would find unrecognizable. People have lived and loved, triumphed and failed, for millennia before I showed up on the scene. The possibilities of things that have already happened are endless.

Now, one might attribute this to me being an old soul who has been reincarnated so many times that I’ve lived through all of these times. My imaginative side really likes that explanation. My practical side, however, wonders if this love of history is a deep-seated form of coping with my disappointment in the modern world. There are a lot of things we just don’t have right in the modern world, as fancy as we are. People are disconnected, face-to-face interaction has been replaced by sci-fi-like electronic communication, and the media loves to bully people. There are days when I would rather not have any form of communication beyond five miles of my home, like people did in the Middle Ages, than to know as much as I know about the world.

Funny, but my sci-fi series deals with a group of interplanetary colonists who find themselves suddenly cut off from the rest of the universe and who have to start a new civilization from scratch. Sort of like history. I haven’t actually strayed that far off track.

Now I will qualify all this by saying that I have ONE contemporary romance novel in rumination that might see the light of day at some point. Ah, but that’s still Romance. It’s still within the calling. But that’s my point. As writers, I feel like we come with an inborn sense of what kind of novels we want to write. And as the saying goes, you should write the books you want to read.

So writing Historical Romance – specifically – is my calling. It runs deep. I can’t escape it. Some people I know feel a calling to be a teacher or a mother. Some people haven’t really felt called to do anything. But for me it’s writing Historical Romance all the way. It’s what I will write with every cell of my being and what I will be muttering when I’m old and crinkled and have lost my mind and the ability to distinguish between reality and my stories. I’m looking forward to that, actually.

So what is your calling? How did you know when the moment came?

My Wedding Speech

Jan4

When my wonderful brother Stewart married my best friend Kristine last Saturday, December 29th, I was privileged to be the Maid of Honor. As the Maid of Honor – not to mention the groom’s sister – I got to give a speech at the reception. A lot of people came up to me afterwards and said it was a beautiful speech. I am so flattered by that praise! Although honestly, I was so keyed-up, overwhelmed, and exhausted at the time that it was all a blur to me.

So since I received so much praise for speaking the truth, and since there were a lot of people who weren’t at the reception, here’s as close an approximation to my reception speech as I can write, complete with the two things I wanted to say but forgot to in the moment…..

Me and Kristine

This is a story of Divine Providence. Yes, Divine Providence. For why else would a Pennsylvanian with a master’s degree in Theater from Villanova University decide to go to cosmetology school in Huntsville, Alabama? But that’s where Kristine and I met, in cosmetology school in Alabama. We became friends and ended up going to work at the same salon (eventually) when we graduated.

I also bought a house in Huntsville, and when I did I asked if Kristine wanted to move in and rent a room with me. She did, and our friendship got stronger. Except when things like The Potato Incident happened. After that we almost weren’t friends anymore. I’ll tell you about it sometime if you ask. But even then, potatoes and all, I knew that Kristine was the sister I never had.

After a while Kristine told me that she wanted to go to college, but since she was home-schooled she wasn’t sure she could. I told her, “Hey! I know this great college in Philadelphia, Bryn Athyn College, that is fantastic with home-schooled kids.” She applied, thinking that she’d never get in. But lo and behold, she did!

It was then that I realized that I didn’t want to stay in Alabama without Kristine. If she was going to Bryn Athyn, then I wanted to go home too. So we packed up the house and moved up HOME.

Again, Providence came into play. It was great to be home, but I’m a morning person. I wake up early and I go to bed early. But Kristine is a night person. She likes to stay up and go out. But she didn’t know anyone up here that summer. School hadn’t started and she hadn’t made any friends yet. The only person she knew besides me was my brother, Stewart. So Stewart asked her, “Well, do you want to come hang out with my friends?” And that was how it all began.

Stewart and Kristine were just friends at this point. In fact, when I directed them in Rosencrantz & Guildenstern Are Dead many years ago and they played Hamlet and Ophelia, people kept asking if they were going out. Kristine’s response to that was “Eew! No! That would be like dating Merry!” Yep, everyone else always knows before the happy couple figures it out.

Then one day Kristine came to me and said, “Merry, I have something to tell you and I don’t think you’re going to like it.” “Oh?” I asked. “What’s that?” And she told me, “Stewart and I are kind of dating now.” And I was upset! No, really I was! Because what would happen if they broke up? Who was I supposed to side with, the boy who broke my best friend’s heart or the girl who broke my brother’s heart?

Fortunately, they did the only sensible thing they could do and got married.

[and then I transitioned into giving a “sister of the groom” speech ]

Stewart and I have been through a lot together. A LOT. We’ve lost a lot of people from our life. Most special of those people was our mom. A lot of people here [at the reception] knew our mom and how wonderful she was. She raised the two of us pretty much on her own. People also know that our mom was a quilter. She made the most beautiful quilts!

What people might not know is that Kristine’s mom, Jodi, is also a quilter.

One of the things I inherited from my mom was a big chest in which she kept all of our school projects and mementos and her quilting projects. What people don’t know is that before she passed away, Mom finished piecing together a quilt top. But then she put it away because she knew she would never be able to finish it and quilt it and put the binding on and all that.

So when Stewart and Kristine got engaged, one of the very first things I did was to call Jodi and ask her if she would be willing to finish the quilt. Well, she said yes.

So at the rehearsal dinner Jodi and I presented Stewart and Kristine with this beautiful quilt, made by both of their mothers together, even though they never met.

I ended my speech there, but there was one other thing that I wanted to say but forgot to:

Okay, Stewart. I found you the perfect wife. So now it’s your turn. You’ve got to go out there and find me the perfect husband! So get on it!

Congratulations to Stewart and Kristine, the two people who I love most in my life. May every happiness come their way!

2012 Year in Review

Dec31

As a Historian, I’m always a sucker for those year in review things that people do at the closing of each year. And since 2012 was an exceptionally eventful year for me, here’s my own personal version. And so I give you, 2012, a year I will be happy to see the back of!

January started out deceptively quiet. Not too much going on. But 2012 hit me upside the head with a brick on February 1st at 9:15 am when the company I work for did layoffs. And since I’m not allowed to talk about that or the mess of incriminations and back-stabbing by coworkers that happened later in February and in March because they now spy on my blog from time to time…. Heh heh heh….

Moving right along.

After all that I still had a job, but things were about to get a lot worse. Worse? Really? Yes.

My goofy, vibrant brother Kelly

My older brother Brian Kelly Farmer passed away very suddenly of cancer in early May. We got the call in mid-April that he had been diagnosed, and once we were told how bad it was, my younger brother Stewart and I rushed out to Ohio to be with Kelly. Well, what we discovered was not only a brother suddenly dying, but a family in dire distress. I’m not sure I can even talk about the week of pure insanity – literally – that we experienced. Between my mentally ill sister-in-law making poor medical decisions on my brother’s behalf, Kelly’s obvious pain and eventual decline into a coma, and my beautiful and brilliant but also belligerent 16 year old niece and a trip that ended with my sister-in-law threatening to call the cops on me if I didn’t leave my brother’s house where I had been taking care of my niece and nephew for a week … it was bad.

I still don’t think I’ve recovered from that nightmare. I may never recover. But things did start to look up again. I had a book to write.

First, in June I published Our Little Secrets, which I had worked on and finished way back in January before things got crazy. I had started The Courageous Heart early in the year too, but I had stopped when the rollercoaster ride began. By June I knew my deadline with my editor was looming and I had to get serious about writing. So I went into a focus mode the likes of which I have never seen. I was diligent about writing the first draft of that book. I have never worked so hard in my life. But lo and behold, I pulled it out by the end of July. And it was terrible. But there were still revisions to do.

Then came my personal high moment for the year – out of nowhere, I might add. On a whim I decided to offer The Loyal Heart for free for my birthday. Long story short, about two weeks later I had had over 50,000 copies of the book downloaded! And I proceeded to sell more when it went back to regular price and to sell several copies of the sequel, The Faithful Heart. Huzzah!

Add to that the fact that my brother Stewart FINALLY proposed to his girlfriend, my best friend, Kristine, on June 23rd, and the summer was pretty good.

Of course, my awful car threw a spanner in the works in September by breaking down and costing me $3000 to replace the transmission. And then two and a half weeks later it wouldn’t start and I had to spend another $300 on starter sensors or whatever that was. And two weeks or so after that it had another issue, although I can’t remember exactly what that one was, just that it cost me. Throw into that a car-induced incident in October that was one of my major low points for the year but that I won’t talk about because it’s still too painful that involved a family member I thought was close MAJORLY letting me down and showing their true colors….

But the end of the year was redeemed by preparations for Stewart and Kristine’s wedding. The wedding was just this past weekend, on Saturday the 29th, and it was fantastic! Kristine was beautiful, Stewart was awesome, and everything went off without a hitch. It really was the best wedding I have ever gone to.

Granted, I hate what I look like in all of the wedding pictures I’ve seen so far and I think that when I smile like that my teeth take over my face and my face looks five times as fat and wide as it actually is, but hey, you can’t win them all.

So that was 2012. Aside from the good book stuff and the wedding, I’m happy to see it go! Too much loss and too much trauma. I am ready for 2013. My horoscope says that things will be much, much better in 2013 because of something having to do with where Jupiter will be and the fact that Pluto is no longer conjuncted with something? All I know is that I could use a break. I’m supposed to have romance in 2013 too. Okay, I could deal with that, although I have the worst romantic luck in the history of the universe. But we’ll see.

Here’s to 2013! May it be full of new beginnings and easier times.

Merry Farmer

An Historical Romance