Musical Crack

While fighting hard against the wedding planning infection in my brain in the interest of actually getting three seconds worth of work done today, I pulled up some vintage Madonna on iTunes. (Nothing after 1989. That's the rule.) And suddenly I'm relaxed and happy and writing almost fluently. Embarrassing but true.

On the Flowing of the Juices

Don't be misled by the title of this post: it's not just more complaining about my neighbors' raucous sex. I'm making an effort to ignore them and not dignify their inconsideration by letting it seep into my daytime consciousness. Even if they have woken me at 4 a.m. twice this week. Even if one of those times, her screaming was so over-the-top, it made my cat growl.

Nope.

This post is about writing.

Turns out, I haven't written anything (except a few blog posts) in a month. That's pretty much unacceptable, though not entirely my fault. Life has been exceptionally demanding lately. I'm sure a more disciplined writer would have made time to write, but discipline is one of the things I struggle with, and forcing myself to sit down and stare at the computer monitor for the hour between finishing breakfast and leaving for my 11 a.m. shift at work is not going to magically turn me into a writing Jedi. But it might make me crazy. So instead I read a book. That's called caring for my mental health. It's important to me. And to Eric.

Shortly before I stopped writing, I started a new article for the website, on the inspiring topic of getting rid of crabgrass. Since my life has started to resettle into its natural rhythms and I'm trying to reclaim my writing routine (along with my eating routine, my exercise routine, and my cleaning routine), I've pulled that article back up a few times, fully intending to resume writing it. I've even placed the cursor on the next line to be written. Where it sat, blinking at me cheekily, until I realized I'd forgotten to look up who did the voice of the villain in Kung Fu Panda. (Ian McShane of Deadwood.) Which led me to spend all my writing time looking at pictures of celebrities online.

But today, I have nothing but writing time. And there's no way I can spend an entire day looking at pictures of celebrities. They just aren't that interesting. So I have to actually write. But suddenly, staring at that stupid cursor, it dawns on me that I don't know anything about crabgrass. Or the English language.

So I reread my notes. I feel like I know a little bit about crabgrass now, but I'm still stumped by the problem of forming thoughts into words and words into sentences. And the best way I know to solve that problem is blogging. So I blog. I blog long and hard and not very interestingly, I'm afraid. And it works, a little. I can feel the grease seeping in amidst my brain's moving parts. I think I might be able to write productively now.

Thank you (yes, you) for your help.

And I'm Only Drinking Sparkling Water

My least favorite part of writing is all of the time spent watching the cursor blink and trying to figure out what the substance inside my head is. Doesn't feel like brains. Maybe beer foam?

Dinner, Grandma-Style

It's in the oven now. Smells incredible.

Incidentally, I'm afraid this is about all you can expect from me in terms of blog posts for a while. A pretty picture and some Neanderthalic grunting. I've been thinking about blogging lately, but I keep rejecting the idea because I'm pretty sure you'd end up reading either a report titled "What I Did This Week," in the grand 3rd grade style, or some avant-garde rambling about how washing a chicken is eerily like bathing a baby.

I'll be back eventually. We have a couple of trips coming up. Spring is fighting its way into Minnesota. I'll probably have something to say soon.

On Trying to Get Some Work Done

Nina says work is overrated. She prefers cuddling. That usually works with my schedule, except on days like today, when cuddling means digging her sharp knees into my lap and depositing cat hair in my mouth by means of face-rubbing.

This moment, she's sitting in the same spot, purring and following the mouse with her eyes every time I move it. Pretty soon we're going to try the lap thing again, and maybe this time she'll thank me by sitting still long enough that I can write some notes.

Privacy

My recent silence here, if you've wondered at all, can be partly attributed to my discovery that, thanks to my writing on a wonderful little website, I'm extremely easy to find in a Google search. And not just me, but this. Here. This blog. And as most of my teacher-friends will probably confirm, the idea of being findable on the internet can be an uncomfortable one. I hate limiting myself here, but I think any writing about my teaching experiences will now cease. That's a no-brainer, because smearing my reactions to teaching all over the internet is both unwise and unprofessional. But I'm also conflicted about the purely personal things I usually write about here. I'm friendly with my students, but I like to maintain at least a thin shroud of mystery around myself. I might tell them what I did over the weekend, but they don't need intimate knowledge of all my human weaknesses.

So I'll mull these things over, and maybe this blog will become more superficial for a while. I'll try not to stop writing entirely.

Thoughts in a Very Loud, Very Dark Room With Hundreds of Strangers

That was to be the title of a stream-of-consciousness blog post that I wrote in bits and pieces in my head last night during the Modest Mouse concert. But now it's just a persuasive argument for keeping a notebook in my pocket at all times and writing things down as I think of them. Because when we got home last night, I didn't have the energy to actually write it out. So I sat down to recreate it just now, and discovered that all the magic had gone out of it. It would be hard at this point to remember everything I had wanted to say, and hard to achieve the effect I wanted, and I'm not interested enough anymore to put the effort in.

So instead I'll just say, in conventional blog fashion, that the concert--which we owe our friend Katie for, since she let us have the tickets she won--was awesome. We were in the front row in the orchestra pit, directly in front of the guitarist and his guitar-only speakers, which convinced me that it is possible to be too close to the stage during a concert. The singer's vocals were often drowned out by the guitar, and the unique vocals and lyrics are one of my favorite things about Modest Mouse. But that's just an observation. I wouldn't complain. The music was great, the venue was gorgeous, the gin and tonic was tasty, the people-watching was interesting, and the vibe was extremely positive. People love that band. It makes them smile. And for good reason.

Published, After a Fashion

My first article, on how to get rid of hairballs, is up at How to Get Rid of Things. Feel free to check it out, but not if you're eating or planning to eat in the very near future. Yes, that came out of my cat.

Plan B

It's been almost a week now since the last of the small envelopes turned up in my mailbox. I found it as I walked out the door to work last Friday, and spent the fifteen-minute drive in stony silence, with Damien Rice filling up the hollows in my melancholy. The first people I saw when I got to work were two of the people I like most there, and when they saw my face, they looked concerned and Maggie said quietly, "Did you hear?" I nodded and sucked my lips in, trying not to cry. "Plan B?" she said. "Which was really Plan A in the first place?"

When I walked into the breakroom to put away my coat and purse, I actually did start to cry. I collected a hug from another co-worker, took some deep breaths, and refused to talk about it anymore, because people don't usually trust the recommendations of a crying bookseller, and I wasn't going to be able to talk about not getting into any PhD programs without crying.

By the middle of my shift, after a few hours of mostly solitary work and then reading to children in my pajamas (for Friday Night Pajamarama), I was no longer in danger of crying. But even now, a week later, I'm still confused. Maggie was referring to the plan I didn't want to detail here unless life really came down to that. For a while I wasn't actually sure what to hope for, because if I got into a PhD program, awesome, and if I didn't, I would get to try out this new plan, which I'd been kind of excited about.

So the plan is this: I have an opportunity to make money by writing for a friend's website--enough money, if I do it right, to go down to part time at work, and probably eventually quit. Writing regular articles for the website will take up some time, but not so much time that I wouldn't be able to write fiction and submit it to publishers. Writing fiction is what I've really wanted to do for as long as I can remember, and if I retrace my thinking over the past few years, I realize that my desire to be a college professor originated with a desire to have a career that would allow me time to write. Until recently, I've been ignoring certain bugs in that plan. For instance, if I have a PhD and I'm teaching at a university, I have to do research and publish scholarly writing. I kind of enjoy writing literary criticism. But. How much time and energy would that leave me for writing fiction? Probably not much. In a way--and you probably won't hear many people say this--getting a PhD would have been a cop-out for me. That was me playing it safe. Because jumping naked into a big swirling pool of pure writing? That's scary. There's no guarantee of money in it, and creativity is an unpredictable beast. Writers become alcoholics for a reason.

So this is Plan B. But yeah, sort of Plan A in the first place.

I'm not saying I'll never get a PhD, because I think it sounds like fun, and I think I will someday be able to get into a program. Also, not seeing graduate school in my tangible future has changed my self-perception slightly. Before, I was just passing time in a bookstore before I went on to more respectable things. Now there's a possibility I'm stuck. Getting unstuck will be a frustrating and painful process, and I won't lie: I'm scared. But if I can make it work...