Tomorrow, B and I are going to visit Mount Auburn Cemetery in Cambridge.
As close as we live to a gorgeous tri-level graveyard of our very own, I am always a little excited to see new, beautiful monuments to history and the lives that trod through it.
We are bringing a couple with whom we are friends. They're a wee bit older than us and expecting their first child, and it seems bizarre to bring them somewhere so morbid, but they're weirdies like us, with serious goth roots, so I'm sure their frolic through the paths.
Staring down this road of adulthood, it's easy to feel like you're being shot down a tunnel that narrows the further along you go, and I like to be around people who don't behave that way. They inspire me to shake off my bonds and feel less trapped by my responsibilities and more confident in my securities.
Growing up, I never knew if it was worth while getting close to people, making real friends, because I always assumed I would be leaving just as we got to really like each other. As I've matured, I've tended to the opposite getting very close very fast and creating these weird ultra friendships, where I think I'm insanely dear to a person, or we are both very important to one another, but for a very short time, and then something happens, a new lover, a job change, a huge stress or even something fairly commonplace but evolutionary, and the person handles it poorly, or vanishes from my sphere to surround him/herself with people who are truly close to them.
I also find myself being more careless with my word. I make plans with no intention of following through on them. In this way, I allow myself to be lied to by acquaintances who also have no plan to actually do what we are arranging. I have, more in the past five years than ever in my life, found myself in blizzards of false promises with people who have no more gravity behind their words than i behind mine. We pepper our conversations with glass compliments and shallow facts. We are overly enthusiastic about one another's interests, and we throw out dates and options with absolutely no desire to follow through with them and a simultaneous knowledge that the other is doing the same. It is a dance of no substance, a worthless endeavor, a completely barren interaction.
Would living with more intent improve my life?
Does being truthful, socially, end up stunting my social interactions? Will I become one of those weird foils in the movies who stops herself from being enthused over anything?
Why has this kind of relationship become so commonplace in our society now?
Will we actually go to the cemetery tomorrow?
Monday, March 19, 2012
Tuesday, March 13, 2012
Between Me, the Clock and the Pen
The house feels stifled.
Poisonous and thick. I keep opening windows, when I probably shouldn't, and lighting incense and attempting to blow out the cobwebs, but the real cobwebs are in my brain.
The last two days, I have forced myself to write for an hour apiece.
I remember when I was the most productive, I would come home from work and write for an hour no matter what. Sometimes it was longer. Sometimes I could spend all sixty minutes staring at the page and write one word and then delete it. Sometimes the hour would be up, and I leapt out of my chair and far away from the computer. Sometimes two more would go by without me noticing.
The beginning is always the hardest.
I have written three pages in these two days. They are all starts to short stories that I can't seem to follow through. A woman wakes up in the hospital surrounded by confusion and covered in bruises: TRITE! BORING! LIFETIME ALREADY MADE IT INTO SIX DIFFERENT MOVIES.
A man stalks his wife's student through the night. She is one in a long line of rapes he commits annually. BLARGH SO DUMB! TOO SEXY! TOO SENSATIONALIST!
A girl finds her grandmother asleep on the porch covered in bees...
DUDE SERIOUSLY?
WHAT HAVE YOU BEEN SMOKING?
It's so frustrating.
I let my sister read the first hundred pages of my book last week, and all she did was tell me how bad it was.
The perspective is the same for all four characters, none of which are worth caring about due to the writing of the first twenty pages, which is the most important, as it is when you hook your readers. There is a reference made to a song, which apparently our Dad uses in one of his books (which I've never read).
Awesome.
Nothing like two years of work to get skewered in an afternoon.
I keep following Neil Gaiman's blogs and twitter posts, because I think he's got the right idea.
I like his writing, and I would like to marry his style with Margaret Atwood's, throw in some Bret Easton Ellis and a bit of my own, and present that to the world.
He writes about writing, which is helpful.
Except for one thing.
He has time.
I don't know how they do it.
Stephen King boggles my mind. He had two jobs, two kids and a dumpy trailer back in the late seventies, and he churned out Carrie like it was child's play. Sure, we can all remember how he began submitting short stories when he was in his teens, and he used to keep his rejection letters on a nail above his desk to remind him to keep going, but where the hell did he find the time?
Maybe I need to start doing speed.
J.K. Rowling was on the dole. Her kids were in school all day. She had six hours every day to devote to dreaming up her ode to magical England.
I want to find out how you write when you're busting your hump at a forty-fifty hour a week job and coming home to a filthy house and a depressed husband.
Do you take the time to yourself despite how selfish it makes you seem? Do you realize it really is impossible to do everything, and just shelve the whole writing dream until everything calms down? Because that one doesn't work.
I've been doing that for sixish years now.
A trail of scribbled paper followed me from san francisco. There were coffee stained poems and love letters, essays about youth and sex and feminism. They clung to my elbows and nipped at my ankles while I packed boxes and sent out resumes.
A love affair. More poems. Long journal entries all about how confusing the launch of a new relationship is. More essays on feminism, body image, whether finding your soulmate changes you. More boxes, more moving. More resumes.
A hard time. No jobs. No money. Sharing a two bedroom mousehole apartment with my sister. I built fortresses out of panicky journal entries. What was I doing? Was this how it was supposed to be? Should it ever be this hard just to exist? Let alone create?
Putting the head down. Working working working. Getting to a better place. Finally having more time to write. The book. It happens. Fast and furious and full of glory. One hour at a time. Then the wedding. Lost in planning, money, moving to a better apartment. Nobody comes knocking. Not at all.
Then the ambition returns. I send out stories to magazines and contests. I talk to friends about launching my stories online. I tell my Dad about how excited I am to be on the forefront of this new media for writers.
I win none of the contests. My Dad gets my friends to launch his writing online instead. He tells me enthusiastically that he will be on the forefront of this new media for writers, and I want to scream, curl up in a ball, and give in.
The editing of the book is the last thing I can think of. If nothing else it will give me a place to go, a destination, a light in the tunnel to work towards. I have faith that my story is good, that I will outstride my Dad's writing with my modern take on classic themes. My job is changing. I am taking on more responsibility, more hours, but it means more money, and the husband just lost his big paying job, so I take it, and the editing takes a back seat, but at least I'm still doing something, still moving forward. Still a writer.
Except it doesn't feel like it.
What do I do? Did I miss my chance? Do I need to shake things up? Quit my job? Move somewhere new?
I've worked so hard to finally get to a place where I'll have time to write, and now that I'm here I'm churning out garbage. How do you get past that, Neil? How do you tell your brain it's okay that all that stuff kept you from writing for so long, but now it can come back and bring all the ideas it's been hiding from you this whole time?
What does Margaret Atwood do when she's overwhelmed?
Bret Easton Ellis is selling out. There's talk of an American Psycho II...
Stephen King is still sequestered in his bat mansion in maine, tocking away on his computer, earning everything he deserves.
Today, I start with an hour on the clock...and what comes next?
I have no idea.
Poisonous and thick. I keep opening windows, when I probably shouldn't, and lighting incense and attempting to blow out the cobwebs, but the real cobwebs are in my brain.
The last two days, I have forced myself to write for an hour apiece.
I remember when I was the most productive, I would come home from work and write for an hour no matter what. Sometimes it was longer. Sometimes I could spend all sixty minutes staring at the page and write one word and then delete it. Sometimes the hour would be up, and I leapt out of my chair and far away from the computer. Sometimes two more would go by without me noticing.
The beginning is always the hardest.
I have written three pages in these two days. They are all starts to short stories that I can't seem to follow through. A woman wakes up in the hospital surrounded by confusion and covered in bruises: TRITE! BORING! LIFETIME ALREADY MADE IT INTO SIX DIFFERENT MOVIES.
A man stalks his wife's student through the night. She is one in a long line of rapes he commits annually. BLARGH SO DUMB! TOO SEXY! TOO SENSATIONALIST!
A girl finds her grandmother asleep on the porch covered in bees...
DUDE SERIOUSLY?
WHAT HAVE YOU BEEN SMOKING?
It's so frustrating.
I let my sister read the first hundred pages of my book last week, and all she did was tell me how bad it was.
The perspective is the same for all four characters, none of which are worth caring about due to the writing of the first twenty pages, which is the most important, as it is when you hook your readers. There is a reference made to a song, which apparently our Dad uses in one of his books (which I've never read).
Awesome.
Nothing like two years of work to get skewered in an afternoon.
I keep following Neil Gaiman's blogs and twitter posts, because I think he's got the right idea.
I like his writing, and I would like to marry his style with Margaret Atwood's, throw in some Bret Easton Ellis and a bit of my own, and present that to the world.
He writes about writing, which is helpful.
Except for one thing.
He has time.
I don't know how they do it.
Stephen King boggles my mind. He had two jobs, two kids and a dumpy trailer back in the late seventies, and he churned out Carrie like it was child's play. Sure, we can all remember how he began submitting short stories when he was in his teens, and he used to keep his rejection letters on a nail above his desk to remind him to keep going, but where the hell did he find the time?
Maybe I need to start doing speed.
J.K. Rowling was on the dole. Her kids were in school all day. She had six hours every day to devote to dreaming up her ode to magical England.
I want to find out how you write when you're busting your hump at a forty-fifty hour a week job and coming home to a filthy house and a depressed husband.
Do you take the time to yourself despite how selfish it makes you seem? Do you realize it really is impossible to do everything, and just shelve the whole writing dream until everything calms down? Because that one doesn't work.
I've been doing that for sixish years now.
A trail of scribbled paper followed me from san francisco. There were coffee stained poems and love letters, essays about youth and sex and feminism. They clung to my elbows and nipped at my ankles while I packed boxes and sent out resumes.
A love affair. More poems. Long journal entries all about how confusing the launch of a new relationship is. More essays on feminism, body image, whether finding your soulmate changes you. More boxes, more moving. More resumes.
A hard time. No jobs. No money. Sharing a two bedroom mousehole apartment with my sister. I built fortresses out of panicky journal entries. What was I doing? Was this how it was supposed to be? Should it ever be this hard just to exist? Let alone create?
Putting the head down. Working working working. Getting to a better place. Finally having more time to write. The book. It happens. Fast and furious and full of glory. One hour at a time. Then the wedding. Lost in planning, money, moving to a better apartment. Nobody comes knocking. Not at all.
Then the ambition returns. I send out stories to magazines and contests. I talk to friends about launching my stories online. I tell my Dad about how excited I am to be on the forefront of this new media for writers.
I win none of the contests. My Dad gets my friends to launch his writing online instead. He tells me enthusiastically that he will be on the forefront of this new media for writers, and I want to scream, curl up in a ball, and give in.
The editing of the book is the last thing I can think of. If nothing else it will give me a place to go, a destination, a light in the tunnel to work towards. I have faith that my story is good, that I will outstride my Dad's writing with my modern take on classic themes. My job is changing. I am taking on more responsibility, more hours, but it means more money, and the husband just lost his big paying job, so I take it, and the editing takes a back seat, but at least I'm still doing something, still moving forward. Still a writer.
Except it doesn't feel like it.
What do I do? Did I miss my chance? Do I need to shake things up? Quit my job? Move somewhere new?
I've worked so hard to finally get to a place where I'll have time to write, and now that I'm here I'm churning out garbage. How do you get past that, Neil? How do you tell your brain it's okay that all that stuff kept you from writing for so long, but now it can come back and bring all the ideas it's been hiding from you this whole time?
What does Margaret Atwood do when she's overwhelmed?
Bret Easton Ellis is selling out. There's talk of an American Psycho II...
Stephen King is still sequestered in his bat mansion in maine, tocking away on his computer, earning everything he deserves.
Today, I start with an hour on the clock...and what comes next?
I have no idea.
Monday, March 5, 2012
Flawed like a diamond.
So here we are, day two of the ten minute blog a day phenomenon.
Today I want to write about Queens.
Not the place in New York, or those fabulous ladies of the lipsynch and the enormous eyebrow make up, but real Queens: ladies in charge.
It takes a lot for me to hold my head up high every day. I know I am not alone in this.
It's hard for women to stand up for themselves or put their own wants and needs first. We're told repeatedly not to be selfish or indulgent, not to give in to our incredibly sensual natures. It's in magazines, on television, and splattered all over the internet.
I read an article in Bust the other day (I'll rant about that magazine another time) about Maya Rudolph, who is 39 years old, a mother of three, and was a cast member on saturday night live for about ten years. They were asking her if she gets tired of being asked by journalists about the "new funniness of women", as though this is the first time women have been able to be perceived as both funny and sexy at the same time.
It boggles my mind to realize that so many times we are fed messages like these, that it's okay for women to be funny if they're fat, but if they're pretty it's not fair because they already have the pretty thing going for them. As though women truly are only allowed to have one dimension because having more than one wouldn't leave any for the rest of us?
What about women who aren't funny, or pretty? What does that leave them?
Being smart?
Okay.
What if I'm a regular looking, not funny woman with an average IQ, what's left for me now?
I know I'm using extremes, but I think the point of this blog is just to make the reader, and myself, look around more, think about the messages we receive from our various forms of media rather than just accepting them to be truth.
There are no omniscient narrators in real life. Everyone's writing with an angle, even me, and my angle is that no woman is just one thing. She is a culmination of experiences and perceptions and perspectives, and she should be as multifaceted as a goddamn diamond.
Today I want to write about Queens.
Not the place in New York, or those fabulous ladies of the lipsynch and the enormous eyebrow make up, but real Queens: ladies in charge.
It takes a lot for me to hold my head up high every day. I know I am not alone in this.
It's hard for women to stand up for themselves or put their own wants and needs first. We're told repeatedly not to be selfish or indulgent, not to give in to our incredibly sensual natures. It's in magazines, on television, and splattered all over the internet.
I read an article in Bust the other day (I'll rant about that magazine another time) about Maya Rudolph, who is 39 years old, a mother of three, and was a cast member on saturday night live for about ten years. They were asking her if she gets tired of being asked by journalists about the "new funniness of women", as though this is the first time women have been able to be perceived as both funny and sexy at the same time.
It boggles my mind to realize that so many times we are fed messages like these, that it's okay for women to be funny if they're fat, but if they're pretty it's not fair because they already have the pretty thing going for them. As though women truly are only allowed to have one dimension because having more than one wouldn't leave any for the rest of us?
What about women who aren't funny, or pretty? What does that leave them?
Being smart?
Okay.
What if I'm a regular looking, not funny woman with an average IQ, what's left for me now?
I know I'm using extremes, but I think the point of this blog is just to make the reader, and myself, look around more, think about the messages we receive from our various forms of media rather than just accepting them to be truth.
There are no omniscient narrators in real life. Everyone's writing with an angle, even me, and my angle is that no woman is just one thing. She is a culmination of experiences and perceptions and perspectives, and she should be as multifaceted as a goddamn diamond.
Sunday, March 4, 2012
Sushi Love
I have ten minutes to write a blog before B and I go out for sushi.
I have promised myself that I would write a blog every week for at least a year now, but I just never get around to it.
So I figure if I promise I will write a ten minute blog every week, then I HAVE TO do it, and even better, maybe I will pick april to be a month of ten minute blogs every day.
Then I will be forced to think, and be interesting...maybe I pick March instead.
March 4th until April 8th, because april 8th is Easter, and that seems like a good punctuation point.
Nothing religious.
Not really.
Change is everywhere right now.
I have moved out of the back of house bread baking and into the front of house people squishing.
No longer do I mold flour and yeast and water into magnificence, but I mold flesh and heart and soul.
Okay, that's a wee bit melodramatic.
It does make me feel better though.
In the two weeks since the change, I have:
- realized I really have my work cut out for me.
-begun waking up before eight a.m. every day (some days I am awake at four thirty in the morning, and this makes me feel insane).
-worked harder than I worked in the back for the last four months.
-noticed a lot of people being lazy.
-began working with the public again and all that it entails...
I do like people.
I missed the micro-interactions you have helping a person every three minutes. The things you can learn with three lines of conversation. The readings you get off of people in the simple exchange of money for bread.
It's different from any other coffee shop...but I'm not sure how yet.
Somehow, I think it will allow me to write more.
Perhaps I've been a vampire all along, and what was screwing me up these last three years was that I couldn't feed off the masses like I had been for so long.
All I know is that I feel very human. I feel raw and inadequate and poised to conquer, and I've been doing a lot of laughing and crying and thinking, and more than anything else, reminding myself to live in the moment. To really and truly live in this, right. now.
And right now I am going to cram sushi in my mouth with my husband, a magical feat, because we haven't been able to afford to go out for sushi in three years.
Yay the rewards of being a grown up, sort of!
For ten minutes.
I have promised myself that I would write a blog every week for at least a year now, but I just never get around to it.
So I figure if I promise I will write a ten minute blog every week, then I HAVE TO do it, and even better, maybe I will pick april to be a month of ten minute blogs every day.
Then I will be forced to think, and be interesting...maybe I pick March instead.
March 4th until April 8th, because april 8th is Easter, and that seems like a good punctuation point.
Nothing religious.
Not really.
Change is everywhere right now.
I have moved out of the back of house bread baking and into the front of house people squishing.
No longer do I mold flour and yeast and water into magnificence, but I mold flesh and heart and soul.
Okay, that's a wee bit melodramatic.
It does make me feel better though.
In the two weeks since the change, I have:
- realized I really have my work cut out for me.
-begun waking up before eight a.m. every day (some days I am awake at four thirty in the morning, and this makes me feel insane).
-worked harder than I worked in the back for the last four months.
-noticed a lot of people being lazy.
-began working with the public again and all that it entails...
I do like people.
I missed the micro-interactions you have helping a person every three minutes. The things you can learn with three lines of conversation. The readings you get off of people in the simple exchange of money for bread.
It's different from any other coffee shop...but I'm not sure how yet.
Somehow, I think it will allow me to write more.
Perhaps I've been a vampire all along, and what was screwing me up these last three years was that I couldn't feed off the masses like I had been for so long.
All I know is that I feel very human. I feel raw and inadequate and poised to conquer, and I've been doing a lot of laughing and crying and thinking, and more than anything else, reminding myself to live in the moment. To really and truly live in this, right. now.
And right now I am going to cram sushi in my mouth with my husband, a magical feat, because we haven't been able to afford to go out for sushi in three years.
Yay the rewards of being a grown up, sort of!
For ten minutes.
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