Irony and fairly useless fun: a duet

I shall start with the second because it has a pretty picture to go with.

Sunday morning I went to Pottery Barn for a flower arranging class. We listened to presentations that were mostly practical, but were certainly also opportunities to sell Pottery Barn products. I came away with several ideas I'd like to implement with vases I already own. I was also reminded of how very visual I am and how important aesthetics are to me, my cluttered, mostly undecorated apartment notwithstanding.

We got to play for a very brief time. I'd gone over to the table with an idea already in my head...and promptly discarded the entire thing. There was this sea glass, you see. It was bright orange and it called to me. So I threw handfuls of that into the vase and then looked around to see what would go with it. In went shells. Then a starfish. Finally, after destroying a bundle of beachgrass to get exactly the piece I wanted, I was finished. And it was good. It was complimented, even by people who weren't trying to sell something. It was also just a bunch of rocks, a few stalks of grass, and a few shells in glass block arranged in about five minutes.

One of the instructors offered to take my arrangement up to the counter for me to buy and take home, but I was attending the free class for a reason. Instead, I whipped out my phone and, ignoring the slightly annoyed look on the saleswoman's face, took a couple of pictures for posterity. Behold! A flower arrangement without a single flower!




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And now, the first. Last night I went to my writers group, which, as it turns out, wasn't scheduled for last night. My mistake. It wasn't a wasted trip though because a new guy was there wandering around looking for the group, so we held our own. Refreshingly, you can tell that he reads as well as "writes"--not always the case, sadly.

Now, some of you know about my discovery last year that everything I write seems to turn out...creepy. Through no fault of my own, I swear! I don't read horror, I don't watch it, it's not my thing. My stories don't have gore (usually) or monsters or zombies--that would be my sister's writing. My work just goes askew and twisty somehow. When I wrote my NaNoWriMo book last year, I was determined to write a straight book. None of this weird nonsense, thank you very much. I even had to let my main character choose her own name because it was the only compromise I could make to get her to stop wanting to be a ghost all over the place.

Due to my hard work, Oblivion is a straight book. It's literary fiction. It's normal and uncreepy. And the second chapter of this book is what I took last night for review. In this chapter, the husband has been throwing up from guilt and worry and just everything. He then goes out to comfort their worried dog and decides to take the dog for a walk. That's it. That's pretty much the gist of what happens.

The nice man listening to me read had a few comments and then paused, before speaking again. "You know what?" he said. "I don't know why, but you know what this feels like to me? It feels like a horror novel."

Aaaaaaaaaaaand irony.