Month:
February, 2005
This week is Kurt’s and my wedding anniversary. We’ve been married eleven years. I think of this as a pretty long time. I don’t ever want to not be married to Kurt, which may not sound terribly romantic, but which I think is about as good a thing as one can say about their partner. We’re so broke that we’re not exchanging gifts this year. We’ll consider what we will pay the babysitter and what we’ll be spending on lunch out and a movie (a matinee) to be our gift to each other. We gave each other pretty large gifts last year, on the decade mark, so it’s all good. I like our anniversary because it’s like our own personal holiday that no one else has any business intruding on, and most people aren’t even aware of. Christmas, birthdays, any other holidays might get you well-wishes and gifts and even demands for your time from others, but no one celebrates your anniversary with you (unless it’s 25 or 50, in which case your kids might throw you a party). Once every 25 years it’s probably ok to share the day. For the most part, though, a wedding anniversary is like this secret special day, which is only about the two of you. I think that’s right and good.*
Also this week we had a sudden, unexpected, very large monetary expense with my car. It went on the credit card, of course, which we are now (as of the first of the year) officially not paying in full every month. I hate that. It has been many years since we’ve carried any substantial credit card debt. When we first got married we used our credit cards in order to eat, and that was unpleasant, but better than not eating. In that case, as well as the case of the car, at least we have the option to have yet more debt in the form of credit cards. Up to our eyeballs in debt. Having more houses than you need does that, specially when the houses are – strictly speaking – larger than you need them to be. About that latter problem, the current house is much better than the former house, with much less square footage and all of it better organized. At any rate, the car repairs would fall under the category of an emergency, and we had options in terms of what we could do in an emergency. Not everyone does, and that’s a little frightening. Worse than piling on debt is not having the credit card at all, I think.
That brings me to a recent there-but-for-the-grace-of-God story, which is the news that fully half of personal bankruptcies in this country turn out to happen to mostly middle class people in the aftermath of a health issue. There’s your stereotype of irresponsible spending given a little perspective. One serious illness and the primary breadwinner in your family could be unemployed. Lack of employment is usually concordant with lack of health insurance, so if you lost your job, you probably lost whatever was helping you through the health issue in the first place. To be both sick and destitute has to be worse than only being sick or only being destitute. That this happens to about two million “stable” middle class families a year in this country seems not only horrifying but wicked.
* This is not meant to cast aspersions on whomever sent a card, wished us a happy anniversary, etc. If you’re inclined to take the above paragraph personally please stop, take a deep breath, and turn your mind to other subjects. It’s just a rumination on the joy of a private celebration.
I wish I had a last resort. Something to do when the writing is not going well. Caitlin R. Kiernan drinks absinthe, when all else fails. I have next to no interest in absinthe, but I wish I had something – a substance, a song, a piece of clothing, anything – that I could turn to and know that when I did, it would help. Words would come, the plot would reveal itself, characters would follow the paths I’d set out, story ideas would drift down before my eyes like snowflakes. I’m feeling jittery and uncertain about writing. I know it will take time. Mentally I’ve told myself to prepare for three years of work before I start to see results. This is so long-term, though, that it’s difficult to focus on as a goal. And right now, I’m tired of Yonder Wicket Gate, Yonder Shining Light. I don’t want to do it anymore. I’m sick of it. I can’t fathom how a reader will be interested if I am not. Although I am comfortable with putting it aside for a short time, I know myself well enough to know that this runs the danger of making it an abandoned project. I can’t afford abandoned projects. If I stop working on it, it can only be for a very little while, just for a breather.
I am considering something Merrie wrote in her journal, about pieces that just aren’t meant to go out into the world, and I like this idea. I like the idea of doing things for practice, as an experiment, as a way to get to (or possibly at) something else. I’m pretty sure Egghead Kingdom is this sort of thing. An exercise. Still, I produce so little. Three months and I have two stories and somewhere between one-fourth and one-third of a novel. That’s nothing! Oh, and a couple of poems but gah, how I hate the poems. I won’t count the poems. They suck and I hate them. I hate writing them, and I hate realizing that I’m considering an idea that should be a poem and I hate that I’m always going to be one of those people who sometimes writes poems but is not a poet. There’s a persistent gulf between what I can write and what transcends. Poetry should transcend. Willing myself to the higher plane, telling my words to dance, wishing for a better language ear : futile. If I’m going to write poems they need to be breathtaking and gorgeous. I want to write like Octavio Paz (“aire y agua, palabras que no pesan“), not the way I do, which is clunky and stuttering and never even the pale approximation of what I was aiming for. And there’s no market for the dumb things. No place in the world. Even if they didn’t suck, what would I do with them? Gah. So frustrating, thinking about the poems.
But I’m getting sidetracked. What I’m trying to say is that I would feel better about saying something to myself like ok, these don’t count, if there were enough in total to count. If I had seventeen stories and only seven were worth submitting someplace, I’d be ok with that. I have three, one of which (the only one I’m truly happy with) is already out. And I don’t know whether to shelve the novel and try some more stories or what. Sophia sometimes falls onto the ground in a heap and screams,”I just don’t know what to do!” That’s how I feel right now. I just don’t know what to do. Should I putter around with the novel? Should I put it aside? If I write something else, what will that something else be? Do I have anything in the pipeline? And if I don’t, wtf not? And then, once I’ve asked, but not answered mind you, all these troubling questions I come up with the trump card : am I overthinking this? Which of course, I am, but I can’t help it.
At the moment, while I try to decide what it is I should be doing, I’m working on an essay. I’m going to print and re-read the novel, think over what bits should go to Viable Paradise and outline the rest of it. I’m going to think about stories. Hopefully by the end of the week I’ll have something figured out. Just in time for Sophia to be out of school for three days so I won’t get writing time. Someone somewhere is probably laughing about that. I hate thinking so much about the writing. I want to just do it. But I have to find a well of words first, and I can’t seem to do that right now. Word count for February is abysmal, worse than January. And somewhere I keep hearing a voice telling me to go get an actual job, that it’s easier and makes money and is useful, whereas all this thinking to myself about writing while not writing is pointless but I think that’s just a subconscious saboteur. I think I need to ignore that voice. This is my chance, dammit, and even if I fritter away today, or this week, or whatever trying to work out what I’m doing without accomplishing anything, I’m still going to get something written sometime. So shush. Begone.
Prescription : more stories, less doubt.
One of those bursts that came out of nowhere, when I was reading Shasticon’s blog this morning.
I’m writing outside. No, really, I am. I’m sitting on our deck and looking out over our yard and writing on my laptop. It’s not as warm as I would like, but it’s not cold either, and with a warm mug of tea to heat up my fingers, I can type. It’s sunny and it’s a beautiful day. Happy Valentine’s to all of you.
The sequence of events may be muddled. One from last night and one from the night before.
I do a lot of telling myself that I’m going to do a blog entry before the night is out, and then we put Sophia to bed and the house is quiet and all I want to do is read or sleep. The task seems at that point like an overwhelming effort, and even entries that I half-formed in my mind earlier that all I have to do is type out won’t come with coherence. Consider that fair warning: this entry is likely to ramble and end up nowhere. With luck, however, it will be short.
Today I think I heard a woodpecker up in one of the trees at the front of the house. Is that possible? Are there woodpeckers around here, and if so, do they live here in winter? Tomorrow, if it’s not as terribly cold as it was today, I shall try pick him out with my binoculars. On Tuesday as I pulled up the car into the driveway after writer’s group a huge bird flew into a tree that grows right off our deck just as my lights illuminated the foliage. It was a cloud of spread wings and grey, indistinct and moving fast. I didn’t get a very good look at it, but I thought that most birds slept at night (except for stuff like owls). It was snowing a little at the time, too. I’d be pretty pleased if it were an owl, and if I could get a better look at it sometime. An oddity of living here is the number of birds nests that I see in otherwise bare trees. I guess in more tropical climes, birds pick trees that don’t drop their leaves to nest in, but here, all the trees appear bereft, so they don’t have much in the way of options. So there’s all these tangles of branches and leaves, like clumps of dirt, high up in all these completely naked trees. It can’t offer much shelter and there’s certainly no hiding the nest up there among the straight, empty branches. It actually took me several nest sightings to figure out what they were (yes, I’m slow).
In other news, for those of you who miss my hair updates : my hair is growing back and it looks pretty good. I would still be taking hair pills but they’re a bit expensive to be taking all the time, so I think I’m going to alternate months or something like that. I have to say, though, that my heightened sensitivity to hair loss has not left me. I can always hear and usually feel every time I break a hair. When one of the cats sits too close to my head at night or kneads at my hair while I sleep and I hear that faint elastic snap of one of my hairs breaking I come instantly wide awake.
There are a lot of things that I’ve been thinking about, lately, and a lot of things that I have been working on. I have a request of the readers of this blog. I have been doing some reading in the area of creationism and related studies and I have come across the theory (not widely held) that there’s no such thing as plate tectonics. What I haven’t been able to pinpoint is what the alternate explanation for earthquakes is in the absence of plate tectonics. Does anyone out there know? If you do, please leave a comment explaining, or a link to a URL that explains it or a print reference that can tell me. Thanks.
Soon, soon, soon I want to find the time to write some things about Sophia’s school and the Montessori method. There’s so much that Sophia is doing and learning, and so many interesting things about Montessori education.
And as a last little bit, here’s a brief list of words and phrases that Sophia uses, never failing to surprise me that she knows them and uses them correctly:
- area
- what are my choices
- options
- best behaviors
- is this a chapter book
- instructions
- agreement
- emergency
- amongst the potatoes (from Potter’s Peter Rabbit, a recent favorite)
- binomial cube, cinnamon grating, cylinder block (these are works at the Montessori school)
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