Megan Stielstra's Blog

My husband (I’m still getting used to that word. Husbandhusbandhusband) said, “You have not blogged since September 20th. He said this with a great deal of reproach, as though I hadn’t paid the electric bill since September 20th. Or picked up Mojo’s Heartguard. Serious things, you know?

Something else he said was, “Instead of Halloween it should be called Halloweenis.” Our roommate Kat had just showed us a photo of Dracula biting a girl in the neck and suggested Christopher and I dress up like this for Halloween which would, I imagine, involve me getting a white dress from a thrift store, making a gruesome latex bite on my neck and dousing myself with fake blood.

Good times.

I asked Christopher, “Can I blog that? How you want to rename Halloween Halloweenis because Halloweenis rhymes with penis?” I’ve started asking him if it’s okay if I blog about him. He’s made it very clear that it’s okay if I WRITE about him, i.e. in my “work,” my “fiction,” but it’s usually assumed I’m making stuff up there, whereas people generally think my blog is true. Right? Do y’all think my blog is true?

(insert long monologue about truth in writing, with various James Frey references, a couple mentions of Tim O’Brien and a particularly heavy paragraph about Kant and truth being the highest moral obligation of human beings in a philosophical sense).

“Don’t misinterpret my words,” he said.

“What am I misinterpreting?” I asked. “That’s what you meant, right? Halloweenis rhymes with penis?” but really what he means, or maybe what I mean, is that it’s necessary to laugh about something stupid as we sit at the dining room table, drinking wine and reading about North Korea. Sometimes, when one is reading about North Korea, one drinks wine—

(insert another long monologue about point of view, specifically a mid-sentence jump from first person to the greater distance of third, in which Kafka is quoted from Wedding Preparations in the Country: “And so long as you say ‘one’ instead of ‘I,’ there’s nothing in it and one can easily tell the story; but as soon as you admit to yourself that it is you yourself, you feel as though transfixed and are horrified.”)

(insert speculation that perhaps, based on the two previous inserts, one is spending too much time teaching and not enough time living)

(insert clarification that what one is horrified about is the situation in North Korea—one, you see, is very paranoid indeed, yet even if one WASN’T, even if one was the picture of calm and ease, one is still familiar enough with her country’s recent history and also basic human nature to know that whenhappens, there’s a reaction to that happening. And to that reaction, there’s another reaction. And another and another and so on, and this is what one is currently pondering—not my husband’s rhyming of Halloween and penis).

—and yearns for levity. One’s husband rhymes Halloween and penis, and one laughs very hard, and reaches under the table to hold one’s husband’s hand because she is a little transfixed. And horrified. And tired and trying to hold it all together.

It’s in that moment that Kat joins us at the table with another bottle of wine (Yaaaaay, Kat). “You guys,” she says, and we look up from the news magazine with all its pictures and headlines and terrible, terrible words. She has a big smile on her face, like she’s just set up a big joke and this is the pause before the punchline. “Hallowed weiner!” she says then, and Christopher grips my hand under the table as we laugh, so goddamn hard we almost fall out of our chairs.