On February 6, 2004, Deborah Donoghue asked me five interview questions on my old LiveJournal blog. Question #3 was about the penguins that infest my brain.
Name the first ten penguins and describe their individual quirks.
A sidebar: These Are Not Actual Penguins. These are constructs: containers, if you’re into decluttering or the container method (mathematical or psychotherapeutic, take your pick). Did a home organizer, mathematician, or therapist advise me to build these? Nope. The penguins are all options in my usual multiple-choice answer to the question, “WHERE DID YOU COME UP WITH THAT [optional favorite expletive] THING THAT [optional favorite expletive] SURPRISED/HORRIFIED ME?”
Why I thought I needed to develop a multiple-choice answer for that…
Yeah. Let’s not go there. Look, see, penguins!
The illustrations of the first four penguins are all by the lovely and talented Jennifer Rodgers.
Steve is my husband’s least favorite penguin.
He has been yanked out of my brain on several occasions and dumped into pet food bowls, force-fed to our former cat Vader, stomped on with great glee, sucked into the vacuum cleaner, dropped into a filling washer, flushed down the toilet, mailed places … well, enough to make him somewhat Undead by now. He always comes back, however. His eyeliner might be a little smudged, and his leather jacket smoking (or on fire), but he always, always comes back to infest my brain with sick, perverse, and highly inappropriate thoughts.
The Penguin With No Name wears a beanie, rides a tricycle, and has a catchphrase. The catchphrase: “I bring maaaaadness … and COOKIES!”
The little fuzzy penguin chicks adore him. The adults give him a wide berth. He may be the Ambassador to the Seabeasts. Or from the Seabeasts. Or the Were-Sheep. Or some other similar destructive force of nature.
Evelyn wears little gold-rimmed glasses halfway down her beak (with gold chain guards dangling from them), and if she had hair, it would be back in a sensible bun. She does wear sensible shoes. Expensive, custom-made shoes, but sensible ones that will last a lifetime, which is good because she only has two pairs, one black and one bright red.
She is known for breaking down the most ridiculous ideas into logical-sounding steps. The older I get, the more reassuring she sounds, which should probably concern me, or at least concern me that I’m not as concerned by that as I could be.
Remember hasn’t yet grown up. She’s still a cute fuzzy penguin chick (but with anime-grade blink-blinky soulless black eyes), even though she’s older than all the adults.
I suspect that Remember is also the lead instigator of the raids into the various locked-up boxes of things I keep buried in my brain, and the penguin dress-up parties/riots that ensue after one is raided. I’m not sure why I bother locking them anymore, for she was there when I created the locks, and I am fairly sure she remembers the combinations. She remembers pretty much everything, just in bits and pieces and moments, though I think she’s forgotten why she’s wearing bunny ears and slippers.
Babble Divergent is Remember’s younger-but-adult brother and best friend. And Evelyn’s best friend. And Steve’s best friend. Hell, he’s everybody’s best friend in his own mind, though jury’s out on everyone else’s minds, except Kate’s. (Kate hates him, even though he worships her.) Though Divergent is his middle name, Babble is also my best friend among the penguins; for while Steve can always make me laugh, Babble always makes me feel safe, even if I agree with Kate sometimes that he should be put down for the good of at least two species. Babble makes sure I am rarely bored and that I always have at least one thing in common with everything and everyone.
Kate was my Junior Tactics Penguin. Since her promotion (or evolution), she looks less like Aeryn Sun from Farscape and more like Chrisjen Avarasala from The Expanse, despite being a penguin. Pity the fool, however, who tells her she looks dumb or underestimates her, for she will kick their ass, not that she will be particularly emotional about it, for Kate rarely cares enough about anything even to hate it. Babble’s a key exception, for even after all these years, he can foil even her best attempts to make me cool, calm, collected, ruthless, and efficient even when it’s not called for. When it is called for, however, Kate certainly delivers.
Grace was my Senior Tactics Penguin. She decided to retire a few years ago, or at least to take a long overdue, well-deserved nap, and hand off both tactical direction and execution to Kate, who has stepped up to the plate admirably, not that I would dare suggest she’s not doing a great job. Grace still is a very dignified Lauren Bacall-looking Penguin, and don’t tell her she looks dumb either, for she will arch an elegant eyebrow at you in that ‘ah, you poor deluded dear — judging one’s appearance at face value, are you?’ sort of way. Grace is serene and charming. She was also a schemer, and a master integrator of the information afforded her via Remember and Babble and Worry and Evelyn (and even, if germane to the subject, Steve and Never) not that she chose to let on at all that she had these powerful resources — and a fully operational Kate then near-invisible in her shadow. If Grace had a keener taste for bureaucracy, she could have quite easily ruled de jure the Kingdom of the Penguins. Her ambition, alas, was not so great as to cause her to risk offending or confronting The Penguin With No Name. She was content with de facto.
(Kate cares even less about bureaucracy than Grace does, especially if it gets in her way.)
Worry does. Worry is my internal pre-editor, pre-planner, and pre-panicker. Particularly the pre-panicker, especially when stuck in the same part of my brain as Remember and Never. Remember is not very kind to Worry. Then again, Remember is not very kind to anyone, except in occasional random moments of pure overwhelming joy and beauty. Never … just isn’t kind at all.
Never is my inner critic. Never is who tells me things are not important or valuable. Never is who whispers into Worry’s ear way too much. Never, alas, is Evelyn’s brother, and as such, is rarely ever wrong about anything. One of Grace’s few failings was that she let Never do what he wanted to do inside the Kingdom of the Penguins. It was only when he was dealing with outsiders did she supervise him. Never is suffering somewhat in Kate’s regime; she has been insisting that he provide receipts to back up his bullshit. Worry’s been doing that for decades, so, why can’t he?
Number Ten goes by Number Nine these days. He radiates patient contentment and seems very fond of productive puttering. His is a lulling presence, so much so that he has worked his way up the ranks by being near his higher-ranking penguins for just long enough to imbue them with a false sense of security, which in penguin-speak translates to ‘Nap. Need Nap Now. Nap Good. Thud. Zzzz.’ He does not deny that he is a foreign penguin who was sent with the objective to overthrow the previous government, but he does not exactly admit that either. Perhaps Grace can clear it all up once she wakes up from her nap.
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