The Queen of Cheese Rides Again

[dr_pretentious]

Saturday I'll finally go to the Dodge Poetry Festival. The festival is as far as you can possibly get from my house without leaving New Jersey--three hours drive round trip--and the thought of doing that every day, four days in a row, was a bit much. So I bailed on my old poetry cronies Thursday and Friday, and stuck instead to my usual tutoring schedule, with all the usual students. The students whose parents pay me, the dears. Which leads us to the spousal gaffe and running gag of the evening.

Dan and I went with some of our grad school friends to see The Science of Sleep, which was completely charming. Over dinner, I lamented that I hadn't managed to get to the poetry festival yet. And then...

DAN:
Sarah's been paid hundreds of dollars not to go to the Dodge this year.

RICK:
Sarah, I didn't think you were that bad a poet!

ME:
Well, that's what I get for founding International Bad Poetry Day.

KRISTEN:
You could wander the venue, declaiming the Queen of Cheese poem, and tell everyone they hadn't paid you enough to keep you away all four days.

SAM:
You could declaim it nonstop, like those monks who engage in continuous prayer. Hail Mary, Queen of Cheese...



Some time later, conversation turned to the new Starbucks that opened near my house yesterday. For their grand opening, they were giving away free everything, and gift cards.


ME:
Of course I went. They were paying me to drink free mochas.

ERICA:
Wow, combine that with your little Dodge Festival blackmail, and you're set for life.

ME:
Maybe I should take up not growing soybeans in the backyard. Does the Department of Agriculture still pay people for that? There's a wide variety of crops I could refrain from cultivating.

WAITER:
Does anyone want dessert?

ME:
I couldn't possibly eat another bite.

DAN:
Maybe...

ME:
D'you think they'd pay me to not eat dessert?

KRISTEN:
You'd have to dress much worse to get them to pay you not to eat at this restaurant.

ME:
Maybe I could get them to pay me to refrain from blogging about dessert.





Only dessert was good, so I didn't pursue that little business venture. If the Department of Agriculture paid me to not grow soybeans, I'm sure the thought of growing soybeans would haunt my dreams--oh, the lure of the forbidden! And no power on earth is going to keep me from the poetry festival tomorrow, Queen of Cheese or no Queen of Cheese. It's a good thing I'm in demand as a tutor, or what would we have to live on but all these Starbucks gift cards?

Comments

[dr-pretentious.livejournal.com]

Dan has occasionally proposed buying an espresso machine, on the theory that it's the coffee I go there for. But really, that would defeat much of the purpose. My house is a place I have to clean. Anywhere I look in my house, there is some task that needs to be done that is not writing, and if I don't do those tasks, they probably won't get done. Making coffee there would (A) generate more stuff for me to clean, and (B) fuel cleaning, not writing. I write at Starbucks because it's a clean, well-lighted place where someone else does the scrubbing and light-bulb changing. For most male writers who have wives, I suppose in that sense Starbucks would be indistinguishable from home, but for a woman, that's all the difference in the world.

At home, I have that classic isolation problem writers have, but at Starbucks, there are numerous other live humans in the room. I can interact with some of them if I feel like it, but it's easy to disengage from interacting with any or all of them if I don't feel like it. If I disappear into my manuscript for hours at a time, nobody cares as long as I tip.

Now, if opening a Starbuck in my home entailed having a staff of cheerful baristas (or maybe the plural should be baristae?) to run around my kitchen scrubbing things, that would be another matter entirely.

[happy-dr-friend.livejournal.com]

Now, if opening a Starbuck in my home entailed having a staff of cheerful baristas (or maybe the plural should be baristae?) to run around my kitchen scrubbing things, that would be another matter entirely.

Now we know what you're going to do with the excess money when you're a famous author outselling JK Rowling.

[dr-pretentious.livejournal.com]

The day I outsell J.K. Rowling... Maybe if she swore off fiction altogether and insisted on writing only in verse forms ill-suited to English--in accentual asclepiads or some wacky shit like that--I could outsell her. As long as she's writing prose, I'm pretty sure she'll have one up on me.

[happy-dr-friend.livejournal.com]

Maybe if you sent her some info on bad poetry day she'd be inspired...