Lucy Kemnitzer

So, Dom -- did it rain where you are?

Yes, well. I was a student there 70-75 when there were 5. And then 6. And the fifth one was called 5. That's where my kid is: it's Porter now. Do you remember Elfland? That's where 9 and 10 are. But there are still cows in the Great Meadow and Bambi still gatecrashes the colleges.

I think the thing Dom is talking about isn't so much rtain for its own sake as for a day off, because he works outside. I've been anxiously watching for rain too. The rain I'm looking for is the first rain of the season, defined as being enough rain to flush the crud out of the storm drains. This is my second year of volunteering for the Coastal Commission to help test the storm drains for water quality (they drop their water right into the Monterey Bay Marine Sanctuary, which explains their importance). My daughter's at the University this year, and there's a tradition up there for a crowd of students to run naked in the first rain from one end of campus to the other (it's quite a feat: the University is divided into ten colleges, most of which are at the tops of rather steep paths through the forest, and the students who do this thing feel they must run to every one of the colleges). I don't even have to wonder if she's going to participate, since she has an injured sciatic nerve and can't make it up all those hills, but I know she's sort of looking forward to the general hilarity. We had a late end to the last rainy season, but still, it hasn't rained since early June (usually it quits for good in mid-May, with very little rain after mid-April), and even though the first rain could happen any time now the season won't really get underway till late December. So construction and "allied industries" are pretty busy about now, around here.

What I would like to figure out is this: Was I being new-age honest man or frigid b*tch with a lolly up his arse? I'd say you were being self-preserving. Those are pretty scary things for a potential boyfriend to have going on.

I'm sorry, but at my age if somebody says "it took me a LONG time (till I was 22)" I just burst out laughing. If a person is twenty-two, they haven't spent a long time doinganything if you know what I mean. 36 is pretty young, too, I'd say. But I don't mean to be mean. I mean that if you are in your twenties or thirties you have all the time in the world: it's way to early to say that anything is a certain way with you, that you will always be something or do something or that you will never do something or be something. I also think that it's quite true that there are people who have seasons to their lives. There are those who are sexual butterflies in their youth and true-blue loyalists in their age. Or vice versa (though I'd think that would be kind of risky, emotionally). Or for another kind of example: I know more than one person who, having raised their children with perfectly reasonable opposite-sex spouses, came to the conclusion that the second act needed a same-sex partner. I don't know anybody who did it the other way around, but I wouldn't be surprised.

Thank you for mentioning this story. I read it a while back and liked it a lot, and I think about it every so often, and just now I went back to reread it (and I'm up to chapter 3) and it's such a pleasure.

You know, I just don't think this is true. I think people vary a lot in their "capacity," and I think people also vary a lot in what emotional content they have in any relationship. And that's before you add in the variations caused by culture and environment. Does a person only care deeply for one sibling at a time? It can be the same kind of thing. Not always.

Dom, all of those thoughts make perfect sense in the development of the story. I'm glad it came out the way it did, though, because Aiden is so interesting.

hehehe. okay, here's one for you: Owen from TLW almost ended up with Ryan. Oh my, Dom I'm sorry, but that comment requires more of an explation please. Well, it explains to me why I thought that might be what was going to happen for a chapter or so there. I can't remember exactly where, but there was a moment when I was thinking -- "what? No, it has to be my imagination that there's this spark here."

In what way is she simply looking after Marissa --now? Let's look at her history. Her goal in high school has been to be the queen of the straight high school hierarchy. She's been building herself a little empire, complete with utterly acceptable, pretty, well-liked, normal boyfriend. The story starts off because she's starting to act bitchy in order to strengthen her position. But why does she feel that her position needs strengthening? Why does she need to build a wall between herself and Trina? I think, as she said recently, she's becoming aware that Quinn is likely gay, and she's feeling her structure crumbling, and just like Quinn and Brad, her best friends forever, she reacts by panicking and behaving oddly. Only because she has girl culture, her outward behavior just looks like bitchy girl social climbing behavior instead of frank insanity like Quinn's. Being the first of the three to freak out, then, she's had the longest to come to her senses. Okay, now that her boyfriend has been acting completely strangely for months, and massive parts of her high school social structure have crumbled, she could be shoring herself up by laying the whole thing on Quinn and walking away clean. That's not what she's doing. She's trying, in her impulsive, bossy teenaged fashion, to get everybody back on speaking terms and restore her friendship with Quinn -- not her boyfriend-girlfriend status -- while Quinn is still acting strangely. She's throwing away her chance to disassociate herself with the dangerous-status person in order to re-establish friendship, and even more so, to re-establish friendship between Quinn and Brad. Maybe she's doing it to make herself feel better, but really, isn't that why people have friends? To feel more human? She isn't doing this smoothly or gracefully, but she's as much an inexperienced kid as anybody else in the story.

While I don't dispute your experience, my own doesn't match yours. Sex outside the primary relationship isn't cheating if it's part of the contract between the partners: otherwise it is: but even without making that exception, I'd say that the majority of the people I know who intend to be monogamous and say so are. Drifitng off to a tanget: Lately, there's a movement to call it cheating whenever a person has any kind of friendship outside the primary relationship, including friends you go to the movies with, and that's just stupid and makes life more difficult. Makes it much harder to be a good monogamous lover, because you have nothing to bring home to your sweety.

I have -- I am -- a counterexample, Dom, so you know you can have it. I moved in with my nice fellow when I was eighteen, and have been monogamous since. One exception: I was definitely in love with a friend of mine for years. Nothing happened there: we were friends, I would see himand we'd talk and have lunch like any friends and then I'd be in a flutter for a while and my nice fellow would get the fallout (a little extra snuggle with my own guy, right). But, the way I figured it, the nice fellow is the guy who gets to live with me when I'm a slob, gets to support me when I'm disabled and can't work, put up with me when I'm going crazy trying to find work, listen to me when I'm whiny or bitchy, smell me when I'm sick . . . it's just not fair to take my fun parts and give them to someone else. My dad and my stepmom live in a deliberately, ideologically open relationship, but as far as I can tell they're monogamous for practical purposes because of how busy they are and my father's health. And that's what I think about it: I don't think monogamy is a value so much as a strategy for being in a healthy, honest, supportive relationship. I think it is the default strategy: I think it's tremendously difficult and time consuming to do things other ways, if you're going to be a good, fair, honest, and loving partner to your main squeeze, and honestly, that's too much trouble just to get it on with a different person. But it's possible to run other kinds of lives. Also, you also don't have to think that you have to hook up now or never. One of my dear friends had almost despaired of ever having his own sweety but he met the most wonderful man when he was in his forties, and had fifteen years of happily ever after before death did them part. (the most wonderful man was somewhat older) And fifteen years is not nothing.

Nasty characters are starting to rebel. They do that, don't they? The novel I'm transcribing to the web right now developed a romantic subplot which I can no longer imagine the story without -- a minor walk-on character turned into lust at first sight and true love by chapter eight.

Conner -- I wasn't getting into that political=cultural discussion (and I really don't want to any more than you do, beyond registering a strong disagreement with the premise). Nor did I think you were trashing women to say that: I thought it was just an inaccurate word to describe what was going on <i>with Brad, in Dom's story</i>. If "feminized" means "made to be like a woman," and the women in the world of Dom's stories are the nearest examples of what women are like, and the thing we want to describe is Brad losing his initiative, his determination, his courage, and his ability to speak for himself, which is what I think you wanted to describe (and I could be wrong), then the word doesn't do the job <i>in this case</i>. I don't think that's what's happening to Brad in the long run anyway. I think it's important to recall that Brad, Marissa, and Quinn were inseperable best friends since sandbox days and it's really quite reasonable, given Quinn's response to having his world shaken up, that Brad would also have a period of deer-in-the-headlights, since their personalities and (non)coping mechanisms developed together (apparently under the leadership of Marissa). Another thing I'd like to throw in which is only tangentially related -- notice how Bree and Quinn keep emphasizing what a wonderful kid Marissa was before high school? -- (aside from a stupid lasting feud with Trina) -- I think this is important. I think it's easy to underestimate her good qualities because we're seeing her through the eyes of a person who is forcefully disentangling himself from her.

Feminized , Conner? I think you've got the wrong word there. That's all I'm going to say about it, for now, except: think about the women and girls you know, and think about Dom's female characters, for that matter, and then think about how you used that word. Dom, I can see all too clearly what the unresolvable is in this story (like some of Owen's relationships in "The Log Way" were unresolvable). It's Quinn. He's just now capable of learning to give other people the chance to do the decent thing. His reactions in the cafeteria -- while completely consistent and excellently portrayed -- are stupid and more wrong than I can say. I was actually hoping that this time, with all the hints from Bree and Jude, he would get it, but no -- and I don't see how, walking out like this, he will ever get it, even if Brad corners him at home or something. Meanwhile, I don't think Brad's father is coming back, and I think Brad's mother is going to have a very hard time with this baby, and I think Quinn should but probably won't get over himself and go help Brad like he did Trina, only without the jumping to conclusions and yelling part. But maybe -- if Bree recruits Jude to help with Brad the way she was recruited to help with Trina, Quinn will finally see the bigger picture. I don't know.

Dom didn't exactly ask for ideas about why he has a headache. Headaches are really common -- even persistent ones -- and there are lots of reasons to have them. Including pissed-off little sisters.

Trina has the story which is least likely to have a happy ending before her mid twenties at least. I don't know what that means in terms of story telling. Just judging by the stories we've seen so far, though, I'd think that wouldn't be a story Dom would likely write soon.

Think back to the very beginning of the story. We first meet Quinn taking care of Marissa and Brad and Bree (she does the cooking, he does the cleaning, and he vets her boyfriends and listens to her problems). Quinn isn't doing something new with Jude, though it feels new to him: he's integrating his new feelings with his old, responsible self. I also love that they spent all that time kissing, because remember Quinn's physicality was always kind of mild before.

The most important thing -- Quinn saying "it doesn't matter." Dom, you're really getting deep into resolving the unresolvable. I think that having Quinn accept his own discomfort is so much better and so much richer than it would have been if he suddenly just felt all right about everything. I can't wait.

Brad has been awake for a couple of days and his excessive responsibility isn't over for two more days, and Quinn has not been available to help him out, not even to make jokes and make him feel better. Brad can be excused for being pissed off and uncool. Everybody has times when they are a mess and say things they shouldn't. So -- Taylor's an orphan too, right? Does he know Quinn's dad is dead? Why hasn't he made a connection with him over this -- because he still doesn't trust Quinn? Because he clearly doesn't, and it's getting to him -- the things Quinn was saying at lunch weren't that bad, just awkward. Quinn didn't forget about his date with Jude -- he thinks about it, and thinks that Jude would agree that it's time to get things straight with Bree. I hope my suspicions about Mom are not correct: she seems really fragile, to be shedding a tear at the very mention of her husband sixteen years later.

I think Bree is with Meyers because she knows he's Quinn's counselor -- and maybe she did talk to Jude (I'm having a little trouble with the micro -chronology in the second half of this chapter), and he told her that Meyers is the one to go to. Yes, it's signifigant that nobody's home at Brad's house. It can go several different ways. That's what this chapter does -- raise questions. It's another way in which it is the right length -- being a chapter full of questions, it would be overwhelming if it were long, and if it had answers in it that would be diluting the tension of all those questions.

I'm glad I'm not the only one who thinks Marissa's problem with Trina comes from her own struggles with her orientation. Alternatively, for a little while I thought Brad might be getting together with her, and later I thought Brad might be getting together with Bree. None of these are necessarily what will happen -- and I think the fact that there are all these possibilities arising out of the story is a brilliant reflection of adolescent reality.

MYbguess it's because Jude's position is that he's really quite ordinary (though he's extraordinarily mature and sweet), and because ordinariness is the thing that Quinn wants.