Empty

I hate to sound like a broken record, but it would seem I am right back where I was back in the fall when I couldn’t put words on a page to save my life. My head is congested, and not just from this killer sinus infection that wasted no time taking up residence in my chest and transfiguring like an evil Harry Potter character into bronchitis. I cannot seem to nail down a complete thought. I am tired all of the time now, which is not really different from before, except now I am tired with a cough and a really annoying stuffy nose and constant sinus pressure. I cannot think of anything I really want to do other than take care of my child. I stare a lot at my desk and its lists and calendars and things to do. I look out my window at the beautiful blue sky and the leafless branches waving gently in the 68-degree breeze, and I cannot even muster the desire to go outside and feel the sun on my face. I am inertia personified.

This is the part where I announce to no one in particular that I’m probably going to stop doing Word People updates. Well, I’m going to continue to stop, since I haven’t actually done any updates in weeks. I will leave the people themselves and the links to their blogs on the designated page, and I might continue to put up a writing prompt or two every now and then. But I’ve decided that the revolution I need as a writer (and apparently as a human with a functional personality) is going to take some real effort on my part. I thought monitoring and reading the work of other bloggers would be the push I needed, but it wasn’t, or else the infusion just didn’t take, and now I need to find something that will. What I really need is a real live person to say to me, “What the hell did you write about today?” and when I say sheepishly, “Nothing,” I need that person to say, “That is unacceptable. Here, write about _____.” I need a writing teacher, an accountability coach, a word trainer, if you will; problem is, everyone, including me, is just so damn busy.

Meanwhile, I’m still reading, even if I fail to exert the effort it takes to leave a comment. Keep writing (and that goes for you too, I say sternly to myself).

Twenty-five and counting

I’ve decided to add a new item to this list every time I cross off another item, because the little stack of post-its hanging around my desk need a more permanent home.

1. The drugs I REALLY need (as opposed to the ones my spam email claims I need)
2. Clean-ness envy
3. The Mebane House
4. That unfortunate rum and Diet Coke incident
5. The Great Wal-Mart Experiment
6. My daughter’s potty mouth
7. Making ratatouille
8. Have youmet the Robinsons?
9. The naked seat
10. Incredible underwear
11. All the wrong clothes: middle school
12. All the wrong clothes: adulthood
13. Passionflower’s 1984 white Camry
14. Warning: Under the Influence of Toddler
15. MaMa and the one-year old “draft”
16. The single drafter
17. That woman who was crying through Disney on Ice
18. My irrational airplane fear
19. “Sweet maple sugar, honey, hot buttered rum”
20. Wii exercise together now
21. The Santa dilemma
22. London
23. Mommy paranoia: why did no one warn me?
24. Smell memories
25. Free association/writing practice
26. The Wedding
27. The Estate of the Late Mr. Dee

Off the grid

Mexico awaits.

I’m already behind, but whatever

At Chicory’s relentless urging gentle suggestion, I am participating in the 365 Challenge. The 365 Challenge charges participants to photograph themselves once per day for 365 days, a creative effort to make us see ourselves in a more positive light. You can find out more about it here.

I agreed wholeheartedly to participate…back in early December. Now that it’s January and the “new year” and all (see how I’m still pretending it doesn’t really exist like that), I’m not doing so hot. Of eight days, I’ve taken five pictures. Of five pictures I have uploaded zero to my computer, because when I examine the images on my little 2 inch digital camera screen I cannot help but sigh in a disappointed fashion and look away. I am not particularly happy with myself these days. I actually considered backing out of the challenge until my official observance of 2009, but then on the way to work this morning I heard this:

present/infant  (click to listen)

And if you’re like me and you like to read along, here are the lyrics:

present/infant by ani difranco

lately i’ve been glaring into mirrors
picking myself apart
you’d think at my age i’d have thought of
something better to do
than to make insecurity into a full-time job
make insecurity into an art

i fear my life will be over
and i will never have lived it unfettered
always glaring into mirrors
mad i don’t look better

but now here’s this tiny baby
and they say she looks just like me
and she is smiling at me
with that present/infant glee
and i would defend
to the ends of the earth
her perfect right to be

so i’m beginning to see some problems
with the ongoing work of my mind
and i’ve got myself a new mantra
it says: don’t forget to have a good time
don’t let the sellers of stuff
power enough
to rob you of your grace
love is all over the place
there’s nothing wrong with your face
love is all over the place
there’s nothing wrong…with…your…face

So, uh, yeah, I’ve decided on a no-excuses approach to the 365 Challenge, and starting sometime in the next few days I’ll be posting my pictures on my 365 Challenge blog, One Small Corner: 365 Challenge. Creative, yes? I won’t likely post the pictures daily, but I’ll take them daily and post a few at a time, and maybe at some point in this process I’ll start to see eye to eye with Ani.

New year, delayed

I’ve spent the last hour reading end-of-2008 reflections on a few of my favorite blogs, and I would love to tell you that these brilliant minds inspired a reflection of my own, but they did not. I’m not sure if it’s the fact that I am at work on New Year’s Eve for the first time ever, or something else, something I can’t quite put my finger on, but this day is passing in a meaningless manner, and with it is passing my nostalgia about the end of one year and the start of another. Even now I keep pausing between words, turning to look out my office window at the trees bending in the wind, trying to call up some feeling about the whole passage of time thing, but I can’t. This scares me a little. I mean, it’s not as though 2008 went by completely without incident. I started a new job, and Obama was elected, and my daughter was a continuous source of joy and wonder and challenge, and I could go on, but the bottom line is that I don’t feel inspired to reflect on any of those things. I just don’t feel inspired, period.

There is always the chance that what I believe to be my old pal SAD (seasonal affective disorder) is advancing, creeping outside my door looking for a chance to slip in uninvited and take up temporary residence in my mind. But I’m choosing to push that possibility out of the way for now. I’m choosing to blame something else for my lack of inspiration. I’m choosing to blame The Wedding.

I’m not sure I’ve even mentioned The Wedding here, so I should probably explain. In January (or, if you want to feel my freakout in a more realistic way, 13 DAYS), my mother, my daughter, and I will catch a plane at the crack of dawn and fly to Cabo san Lucas, Mexico for my cousin’s wedding. Mia is the flower girl (and really, if you’ve ever tried to get my daughter to do something she’s not interested in doing, you understand how that alone is the source of enough anxiety to encourage heavy drinking). I am supposedly doing a “reading” during the ceremony, the text of which I am supposed to be writing. I also agreed to make the jewelry for the bridesmaids (all 7 of them), as well as create a DVD of the bride’s life set to music for the rehearsal dinner. I am behind on all of these projects (and by behind you should understand me to mean “have not even started”). You’ll recall my recent post about being a single draft writer, and how I “single draft” everything in my life? Right, then.

 The truth is, those three unfinished tasks are the least of my worries. I have a whole simmering vat of anxiety about a number of other issues related in some way to The Wedding:

• After talking with my aunt, the Mother of the Bride, I don’t think the dress I bought over the summer  is dressy enough. Apparently this is not a “beach wedding” after all, but a fancy wedding that happens to be taking place ON THE BEACH. Well, damn.
• Also after talking with The Mother of the Bride, I get the feeling Mia’s dress is likewise not dressy enough. Perhaps the possible alternate dress she sent me in the mail was a clue? Well, SHIT.
• AND we have to wear shoes during the wedding. On the beach. And flip-flops are not shoes in this scenario. Well, F…you know.
• I am afraid my daughter is going to be awake and on the edge the entire time we are in Mexico, and since I’m not taking her crib on this trip, there will be nowhere for me to put her when she is tantruming, and I will be tempted to take her to a Mexican jail for Time Out.
• I am afraid of navigating the airport (and the airplanes!) with my sleep-refused, crabby offspring. I wonder if anyone has ever locked a screaming toddler in an airplane bathroom….
• There are a few other things I’m nervous about that I don’t want to discuss here in detail, but I will say they involve being completely out of my comfort zone, and I am in need of comfort these days.

If you are reading this and thinking, “Wah, wah, poor you, you have to go to Mexico, quit your bitching,” I want you to go Google Image “The Finger,” and then I want you to imagine that it’s MY hand you see in the picture on your screen. If, on the other hand, you’re reading this and you have some words of experiential advice  about any of the above (or not experiential, I’m not picky), please leave it in a comment or email it to me, because, and I don’t know if I’m making myself clear, so I’ll spell it out for you, I AM LOSING MY GRIP OVER HERE.

I’m certainly not shallow enough to believe that this funk I’m in can be blamed completely on The Wedding. Part of me is even mildly excited about the trip as a whole, and I’m sure I’ll be a little more chill after I finish the pre-wedding tasks (and buy a new damn dress), but the truth is, The Wedding is a sort of metaphoric road block–a giant orange cone in a veil planted squarely between me and 2009. When I think of the advent of a new year, I imagine The Wedding behind me, completed, sized down and made manageable in pictures and anecdotes. And that’s why I’m ignoring 2009 for the time being. Chinese New Year starts on January 26th, so I think I’ll take a page out of that calendar this year. And even though I’ll creep into my daughter’s room and kiss her tiny cheek at midnight, and even though I’ll probably toast the turning of the clock, and even though I’ll self-correct every time I write “2008″ for the next few weeks, I’m going to give myself a break and a few extra weeks, because I have a lot of expectations for 2009, and I don’t want it to think I’m not taking it seriously.

Staring contest, anyone?

In case you haven’t noticed, I have not been a very good Word Person lately. As usual I have things to say, but time–thinking time, processing time, computer time–has been limited these past few weeks. I’ll spare you the details, but if you’re guessing they are work- and holiday-related, then you are absolutely right.

I am at work today, and I’m really not happy about it. I’m in my 14th year of regular grown-up employment, and I’ve never had to work this week, ever, and before that I was a student and I never had to go to school this week, and my brain apparently has some sort of auto-shut-off that prevents cognitive function until the Monday after New Year’s Day. Thus, I’ve been doing a lot of staring today, and if I were being evaluated on staring I would receive full marks, so intense is my staring.

I am very interested in writing a brief holiday reflection, or even addressing an item or two on my “25 things to write about” list, but when I imagine these posts in complete form they are accompanied by pictures that are still inside my camera, and so I have decided to go back to staring. But first, a Word People update AND a few new writing prompts. You know, for those of you whose brains function all year round.

My name is hd, and I’m a single drafter

There is a classroom two floors above the office where I am now sitting that used to be an office suite. When I was an undergraduate English/Education major I worked in that office suite for G, a professor who is now a good friend and colleague of mine. I’m kind of glad that office isn’t there any longer, that someone saw fit to tear down the walls and convert the space, because one of my worst college experiences took place in G’s office. It was my junior year, the end of the fall semester, and paper deadlines were pouring down like rain. I was not handling the flood very well. I’ve always had the reputation of being one who puts things off, who is motivated and inspired by deadlines, and I suppose there is some truth to that perception, but there are far more layers involved, and it’s way more complicated than mere procrastination. It was thanks to a class I was taking during the aforementioned fall semester that I learned to identify and process those layers. The lesson did not come easily.

One of my courses that semester was a writing theory course. The instructor, presently one of my closest friends, was one of my most influential writing mentors, SB. Throughout the semester we explored a number of writing theorists and their philosophies on writing. I can’t remember any of their names, and I don’t even remember much about the theories themselves, but discovering the single/multi-draft writer theory* was literally life-changing for me. Suddenly I wasn’t a mere procrastinator, I was a single-drafter, which means that all the planning, outlining, creative thinking, arranging, and tweaking takes place in my head. I could crank out a 25-page literary analysis on William Faulkner in an afternoon, but not without thinking about it, turning it around and around in my mind, sometimes even mentally constructing actual sentences in the days and weeks leading up to the actual act of writing. To have a name for my process was huge, because believe me, I got a lot of flack from classmates who multi-drafted and who assumed I was having idle recreational thoughts while they penned outlines and scribbled notes in the margins of their many drafts. Knowing that my style had a name that was not procrastination was both empowering and liberating for me, and I talked about it a lot. All the time. I might has well have had it tattooed on my forehead. SB gave me a hard time, but I knew he understood me, and it felt good to be understood.

With a new found understanding of my writing process in mind, I started reflecting on other parts of my life, and I realized that the single-draft theory also applied to how I cleaned, how I created art, even how I shopped for gifts at Christmas. And then the end of the semester rolled around. I was taking a full load of upper level courses, and there was a final written product due for every single one. I was mentally crafting four papers in my head–four huge, important papers, the contents of which were starting to churn and  boil like lava in a pre-explosive volcano. Except I didn’t explode. I shut down. I froze solid. I remember sitting in G’s office trying to work on one of my papers and feeling completely immobilized. Quite suddenly, quite unconsciously, and quite literally, I shut down. I couldn’t move, I couldn’t think, I couldn’t talk. My brain was like the blue screen on a computer that’s just crashed. I can remember making eye contact with G, but I couldn’t speak. With a look of panic on her face she left and was back almost instantly with SB.

SB put his hands on my shoulders and physically turned my chair so I was facing him, and he turned my head so he could look me in the eye, and he shook me gently and said quietly, “Don’t go away. Listen to me. Come back. We can manage this,” and I’d love to tell you something clicked and I came back to life, but I just started crying, because I felt like this newly discovered understanding I had about writing process was going to kill me.

It didn’t, of course. SB walked me to his office, and we sat in complete silence for what felt like days and weeks but was probably an hour, and his eyes never left mine; and I suppose when he perceived life in my blank stare he walked me across campus and bought me dinner, which I mechanically ate; and then he walked me back to his office and made me a writing schedule. I am not sure if SB would remember this occasion as momentous, or if he even remembers the occasion at all, but I am, to this day, convinced that he prevented me from having a nervous breakdown with the simple act of creating plan I could follow.

I hadn’t thought about that day in years, but a few weeks ago when I felt myself spazzing out and had what I believe to be a panic attack, the memory of that near-breakdown bubbled up and lodged itself in my mind. I was driving in circles in the parking lot of the local shopping center, trying to talk myself down, and I heard SB’s voice: “Don’t go away. Listen to me. Come back. We can manage this.” And I drove back to my office and made myself a schedule. And not just a writing schedule–a daily time management plan that happens to include writing. True, I’m not always following it to the letter, but seeing everything in its place, with its own time allotment, is centering somehow, because I can only “draft” one thing at a time. This is not to say there aren’t often a hundred things crammed into my brain at any given moment, but I’m not likely to multi-task all 100, or even two. I might appear to be multi-tasking, but really I am just ticking them off of my mental schedule.

So if you ever see me driving in circles or staring blankly into space, you can bet I have a long list of topics to process, and I’m trying to process them all at once, so give me a little shake and tell me it’s time to make another schedule.

 

*To clarify: a multi-draft writer works her way through multiple plans and versions of a product before she creates the product’s final form, or works toward the final product in multiple sessions; a single-draft writer manifests the final product in its entirety in one session, the planning having taken place entirely in her head.

Twenty-five

“What could you write about? List 25 persons, places, or things you would like to write about some day. Then, choose one and WRITE!!!! Save the others for another day.”

I have been drafting the following list for over a week. It was supposed to be my post LAST TUESDAY. I would love to tell you there is some other reason why I haven’t written ANYTHING ELSE in the meantime, especially considering this isn’t even so much writing as it is a list of things to write ABOUT, but then I’d be lying. I was mentally incapable of starting something new until I finished my response to this prompt, because I am a single draft writer (see #16), and this “draft”  HAD TO BE COMPLETED before I could move on to other things. Writing experts will tell you that the phrase “single draft writer” is just another way of identifying one’s writing style, but I will tell you it is a sickness. When I tell you I have multiple “drafts” saved, they are actually finished products I am not yet ready to make public; the thought of leaving a piece of writing unfinished and writing something altogether new and different is not in my nature, even if the ”draft” in question is just a list. It’s very easy for self-inflicted writer’s block to surface when I am working on something difficult, because even though it would make sense to move on and write something else, something less trying, I can’t do it. I can’t leave something lying around in raw unfinished form.

And so I give you my working list of topics which, thank the glorious heavens, will give me some food for thought as I reconnect with my sadly abandoned writing plan.

 

1. The drugs I REALLY need (as opposed to the ones my spam email claims I need)
2. Clean-ness envy
3. The Mebane House
4. That unfortunate rum and Diet Coke incident
5. The Great Wal-Mart Experiment
6. My daughter’s potty mouth
7. Making ratatouille
8. Have youmet the Robinsons?
9. The naked seat
10. Incredible underwear
11. All the wrong clothes: middle school
12. All the wrong clothes: adulthood
13. Passionflower’s 1984 white Camry
14. Warning: Under the Influence of Toddler
15. MaMa and the one-year old “draft”
16. The single drafter
17. That woman who was crying through Disney on Ice
18. My irrational airplane fear
19. “Sweet maple sugar, honey, hot buttered rum”
20. Wii exercise together now
21. The Santa dilemma
22. London
23. Mommy paranoia: why did no one warn me?
24. Smell memories
25. Free association/writing practice

Slam!

I have three drafts saved. Not one of them is anywhere near completion. It is Thursday, and according to my “writing plan” I should have already posted twice this week. But at 4:24, with minutes left at this desk sans child to care for, this is all I’ve got: nothing. Not a damn thing.

Tomorrow is another day, yes?

I’ll say

I just posted this weeks updates from members of The Word People, and I have to say, you guys are doing a great job. There is consistent writing (even though for some of you it was consistent to begin with), but there is also new and deliberately creative writing going on. The teacher in me beams with pride.

Of course, if this were school, and I were actually the teacher, this would have been one of those weeks when I turned off the lights, popped in a nice literary epic movie, and stared at the peeling paint on my desk for hours on end. People in the front lines of education have a name for this: subbing for yourself. In the blog world it’s called “stealing a meme from someone else’s blog,” or, for me specifically, “because I’ve nothing else to say.”

Which those of you who know me will recognize as the lie that it is–I always have something to say. But today started too early with dragging my daughter out of a deep sleep for the second day in a row and taking her two counties over to a babysitter she had met only once for about 4 minutes (a dear old friend of mine), because my regular “villagers” were either sick or othewise occupied. Thankfully she bonded with my friend and her husband in about 1.3 seconds, and I left for the next part of my day: being treated with unnecessary rudeness by a secretary in a high school front office. I spent the rest of my day 5 inches from my computer screen marathon grading student assignments, my least favorite part of teaching. And then my day ended with an hour-long search for my glasses, which have yet to be located, even though I didn’t leave my office all afternoon, which meant that I had to drive to pick up my kid and then drive home in the dark wearing prescription sunglasses. In the dark! After 45 minutes of what seemed less like driving and more like a bad eye exam (that’s too dark! that’s too blurry! too dark! blurry!), I bathed my over-tired child and gave in to her plea to watch “Meet the Robinsons” for the 87th time, and by the time that wonderfully addictive Rufus Wainwright song came on about 8 minutes in (which is why my kid loves this movie in the first place), I was sound asleep.

And now I am awake, and really, I have nothing else to say. REALLY. Because after all that I was actually going to steal a meme from someone else’s blog, and that was going to be my lame attempt at keeping my Tuesday writing appointment with myself, even though I’m technically not counting memes as “writerly” posts (thanks to Chicory for that distinction), but I am so wearied by this day, and so grateful for my bed down the hall that I’m calling it a day.