Hello, firing squad.

So I've decided to start taking this writing thing seriously. While I search and wait for ways to get paid to write, it's crucial that I get back into the practice of writing, and that will happen by doing it without the pressure of trying to get paid. It's been long enough since I've posted an entry here that I'm fairly certain no one checks it anymore, which makes it a "safe place"...at the same time, the whole point of this exercise is to put something out there for other people to see. I don't know if that's good or bad—self-editing will be very necessary if (when!) I find work, which puts this at an advantage over a private journal or (cringe) diary. It has its downsides: 1) I feel restrained and unable to be perfectly honest and experimental, but 2) I have no trouble still being completely self-indulgent, because the purpose of a blog is all about self, anyway. Self-expression, self-promotion. In my case especially, self-pity. Verbal self-flagellation. Speaking of which...

I am coming to some disturbing realizations about myself. One is that I really wouldn't blame anyone who knows me for thinking that I'm all talk. I'm starting to think that myself. There's this writing thing I've been talking about for too long, and while I've got some plans, and some possible opportunities on the horizon, none are that "chance of a lifetime" that will surely get me started on my way. In fact, they could lead me nowhere and I could just give in to defeat. And I go on and on and on about how I'm moving away from here, once and for all, or how I'm going to take some crazy trip out of this God-forsaken country and have free-spirited adventures all my own, but still, here I sit in this cubicle, at the same company my mother worked at just before becoming a mother. Thinking, daydreaming, sometimes quietly crying. Watching my move money or my trip money vanish instantaneously each month at the push of a button, through the magic of electronic bill payments and paperless bank statements.

I am a perfect Walter Mitty. I remember not liking that story when I read it for school, and now I like it even less, because it's me. And I cannot keep going on this way.

Baby, it's cold outside.

Based on my drive to see Nikolai this afternoon, it's going to be another fun drive home tonight. A very merry Christmas, indeed.

We had our first wicked nasty storm of the winter last week—first of many, as all of Rochester knows. Somehow it was not the blizzard experience I expected, the one I'm used to. Stressful, dangerous, yes, but the long ride home from work that day was the most meditative hour I've had in a very long time (and probably the only truly meditative hour I've ever spent behind the wheel of my car). I've passed so many seasons of ice and snow here, but how long has it been since I could actually appreciate the way the world is transformed in a white-out? The route I travel every day is made unrecognizable, guiding signs are invisible or bowed to the ground, and everything changes from frantic and reckless to slow and deliberate. On this particular night, every last car had reduced speed, everyone was patient with those who felt the need to go a little bit more slowly, and there was the sense that each person isolated in each little shell of a car was part of a choir of nearly identical thoughts - thoughts of getting home safely, of the safety of their loved ones who might also be driving home, and even of the safety of the strangers around them. Sometimes you get to see the good in people. There were none of the usual jackasses on my stretch of 390, the ones who think they are invincible and fly right past you, the ones you see in a ditch a few miles later. We didn't want to compete for a better place on the road, and we gained no satisfaction from seeing each other in ditches. We were just glad to be warm and protected in our little vessels.

I've never really seen March of the Penguins all the way through, but I'd caught a few minutes of it the day before, and that's exactly what we looked like. Yesterday we had been robots organized into single file between painted lines, all programmed to race each other to different finish lines. The whims of the sky erased all order and structure and turned us back into living things, making our steady, jumbled way toward a common goal. Back and forth every day to work, back and forth every year to wherever penguins go for sex, whatever the weather, what's the difference? Why do we keep doing it? I guess it just is what it is.

Lately I've been a bit more nuts than usual, lashing out in all directions, reducing whatever or whoever is nearest to me to a pile of shreds and then hating myself for it. It was exactly what I needed, to have all that energy forced inward for a time. God only knew how long it was going to take me to get home, and there was absolutely nothing to do but keep on going (life itself in 25 words). It was the perfect opportunity to do some thinking, to contemplate the taillights in front of me, to consider my own life and the lives dotting the highway all around me. I suppose snow is a blessing if it can get me, the original Hysterical Woman, to be calm and quiet down her craziness. If I do someday move to a warm climate, I may actually find myself missing Rochester winters. I hope I can find a reason to slow down, and I hope I can find some love for all of those strangers flying alongside me... even when they cut me off. How long will it take me to go over the edge in a world of perpetual shouting and honking?

Awwwwww.

This is cute. Got to watch all the way through.

I will not become a chick lit addict.

I came into some money recently and decided to go on a shopping spree at Barnes & Noble. (Translation - I got a $10 gift card for my birthday, which in this day and age enables me to purchase approximately 77% of a book.) What to get? I went against my usual M.O., which is to scan the classics, berate myself for the fact that I haven't read THIS, or THIS EITHER, and therefore am a pathetic excuse for a human being, hyperventilate because there are so many books I'm supposed to read that I haven't read yet, and grab whichever book strikes me as the most meaningful contribution to literature. Instead, I took the less snobby route. I'd heard of the movie version of P.S. I Love You, coming out next month, but hadn't known it was based on a book. I only knew it was about a woman whose dying husband arranges for her to receive letters from him after he's gone. I saw it and went for it, expecting it to be the kind of Nicholas Sparks-type schmaltz I hate, which makes a nice little movie but otherwise should never have been committed to paper. (I loved the movie A Walk to Remember, but I threw the book across the room when I finished it. IF I finished it.)

I fell madly in love with this book and every character in it.

For the last week my life has revolved around finding time to read it. It's one of those stories that gets into your head and just saturates you, changing the way you look at the things that are right in front of you, making you realize just how easily this or something similar could happen to you. It has me thinking nonstop about love and about making the most of it while you have it, it has made me so grateful to have love in my life. To BE alive. And it has me thinking about what kind of writer I might want to be someday, when I actually get around to writing something. (How about right now—the author is 26. Twenty-six! I have so much life to catch up on; I've accomplished zip since I graduated.) Is it okay to wind up writing popular fiction? Should I be at all concerned about being "literary"? Or is all that matters the idea of being able to connect with someone you've never met? To be able to make a stranger cry with what you've tapped out on a keyboard in the middle of the night, sitting alone with your own thoughts, emotions, and fears and trying to validate them the only way you know how? 'Cause let me tell you, this book had me sobbing. I want everyone to read it, I want everyone to see the movie. Even though the trailer tells me they've butchered it, I still really, really want to like it. I'm even ready to like Gerard Butler, whose oh-so-manly facial hair and bellowing about "SPARTA!!!" left me yawning, because he plays Gerry, and Gerry is a man to swoon for if ever there was one.

That's me gushing. I could go on, too, but it's almost time to put an end to this hellish work week. I haven't posted in a while, because I haven't been this bored at work in a while. But tonight is hockey date night!! Thank God for hockey and a welcome relief from feeling like such a girl.

Too bad I won't be needing the car anymore, because I will be taking the short bus from now on.

Let me tell you a story about why I am a savant. Magna cum Laude and honor societies mean precisely jack when you've got this level of common sense.

You've been hearing me bitch for a few days now about my latest car trouble—the sudden loss of pick-up. I could stand on the gas pedal, feel like it was pressed to the floor, and the needle would still creep ever so slowly and steadily to an appropriate speed. Someone suggested that it might be a belt, and when someone says the word "belt" in the same sentence as "car," all I hear is "cha-ching." I've been fretting aloud to anyone who will listen over how much it's going to cost to get it fixed this time, I've been unsure of whether I should even drive the thing. I've been regretting the purchase for the bazillionth time, maligning Best Volvo and the manufacturers of Volkswagens everywhere, I've contemplated a murder-suicide involving me, V-Dubs, and a steep cliff.

But on my way to work this morning, un milagro—I, with the automotive knowledge of Paris Hilton, cracked the case. With no help from anyone, I fixed my car. How did I do it?







I pulled the bunched-up floormat out from under the gas pedal.

Please, no applause.

I'm too ecstatic to feel much shame over this, but give me a couple of days. And thank the Lord for small favors—the first thing I planned to do when I got to work was call the mechanic and set up an appointment. I'd much rather chuckle over my nimroddery with all of you than with the humorless service guy at Dorschel.

So now I feel guilty for thinking such violent thoughts about my car, when in recent weeks we've forged a much healthier relationship. I've had something of a revelation about the bond between (hu)man and machine. Now, I have often mocked those who over-anthropomorphize their cars (you know who you are). I will not stop doing so. I also refuse to pet something that has no nervous system and thus no tactile sense, and I will not impose a gender on something that has not been assigned one by physiology and that lacks the capacity to choose one for itself, ala a GRS-choosing parent. However, I have stopped viewing my car as an enemy piece of machinery hell-bent on my financial and psychological destruction (with the exception of the lapse described above), and more like an ailing friend or a sickly pet that I've adopted and now must care for. I think it helped when I found out the latest diagnosis—it needs two new control arms. My car has... arms? What a pitiable condition.... the poor little thing has two broken arms. Not only that, but they're going to need to be amputated and replaced by prostheses.

My car is not a demented artificial intelligence. It is a Lifetime movie subject. It doesn't hate me; it only aims to please. It is Johnny no. 5. No disassemble!

I got breakfast burrito sauce on my khakis, but it's okay.

I might have to change the title of my blog, since I'm now technically a "Publishing Specialist" and not an "Editor." Changes keep a'comin'.

Keeping my own thoughts close and safe for a while, but I'll share someone else's with you....



"Writing is about learning to pay attention and to communicate what is going on. Now, if you ask me, what's going on is that we're all up to here in it, and probably the most important thing is that we not yell at one another. Otherwise we'd all just be barking away like Pekingese: 'Ah! Stuck in the shit! And it's your fault, you did this...' Writing involves seeing people suffer and, as Robert Stone once put it, finding some meaning therein. But you can't do that if you're not respectful. If you look at people and just see sloppy clothes or rich clothes, you're going to get them wrong....

Your job is to see people as they really are, and to do this, you have to know who you are in the most compassionate possible sense. Then you can recognize others. It's simple in concept, but not that easy to do.... I am learning slowly to bring my crazy pinball-machine mind back to this place of friendly detachment toward myself, so I can look out at the world and see all those other things with respect. Try looking at your mind as a wayward puppy that you are trying to paper-train. You don't drop-kick a puppy into the neighbor's yard every time it piddles on the floor. You just keep bringing it back to the newspaper. So I keep trying gently to bring my mind back to what is really there to be seen, maybe to be seen and noted with a kind of reverence. Because if I don't learn to do this, I think I'll keep getting things wrong."

- from Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life by Anne Lamott

Oh, and here's a really beautiful story about enduring love and the tenacity of human life:

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/19037401/


I hope everyone smiles at something and is kind to someone today.

Song for a rainy day

I want to paint my face and pretend that I am someone else
Sometimes I get so fed up I don't even want to look at myself
But people have problems that are worse than mine
I don't want you to think I'm complaining all the time
And I hate the way you look at me, I have to say
I wish I could start over again

I am slowly falling apart
I wish you'd take a walk in my shoes for a start
And you might think it's easy being me
You just stand still and look pretty

Sometimes I find myself shaking in the middle of the night
And then it hits me and I can't even believe this is my life
But people have problems that are worse than mine
I don't want you to think I'm complaining all the time
And I wish that everyone would go and shut their mouths
I'm not strong enough to deal with it

I am slowly falling apart
I wish you'd take a walk in my shoes for a start
And you might think it's easy being me
You just stand still and look pretty

~Stand Still, Look Pretty by the Wreckers