August and Everything After

It's the tail end of August, but today it was cool enough in Chicago to wear a sweater over my short sleeves. Tonight, after much wriggling, resistance and gnashing of teeth, I did some writing and began to make a plan in my mind.

I can't help but think back to last year at this time. I started the September Blog Challenge, began a class on novel writing that helped kick my book in gear. I even outlined the entire book in one feverish session on a caffeinated Saturday. So much was coming together.

And then my Dad's death slammed into it like a car through a plate-glass window.

Then/Now

October in Chicago has been sunshine and honeycrisp apples in oatmeal and a slow easing into the weather change, like wading into a lake. 

That girl running on the lake path today, singing this under her breath?  That was me.





I follow Tavi's style blog. I get this weird pleasure from her posts extolling the virtues of Sassy Magazine, Hole and the movie Heathers. I was her age when all of that stuff was breaking, and one part of me is freaking out, feeling old and bewildered at how much time has passed. The other part of me is vowing not to miss out on Doc Martins this time around.

September, je t'aime

Today was one of those weird days where you can see the moon in broad daylight.  Staring at it, I felt like an alien who had landed here, taking in the skyscrapers against the clear sky and wondering where it all ends up.

September's over.  I'm back at my desk in my treehouse (or, as I sometimes call it, the Kit Kat Club)  The computer situation is partially...mostly solved.  I've been ripping out recipes for braised pork shoulder and spiced cakes and pasta dishes heavy on mushrooms and red wine.  Looking forward to October, to writing my damn book and to hot apple cider with whipped cream.

Technical glitch aside, writing here every day has been great, great fun and good practice for me.  I may not be back every day, but if a week goes by without a post, by all means -- give me the business.  Sitting down and forcing myself to write something, anything before midnight comes has been a better exercise than I anticipated.

Big shout-out to JP at Buttered Noodles for hitting the big 3-0 (posts) today, too.

The Blight Man Was Born For

Some of you guys know that I'm working on a novel.  One of the major plot points and themes revolves around grief.  As someone who hasn't yet experienced a major loss, I wonder if it's crazy to try to put a character through it and to write about the grief that follows death in a meaningful way.  Sure, there has been serious pain and depression in my life.  There has been loss.  But for the most part, it's an experience that's more on the horizon than reality.

Grief and mourning and luck have all been kind of tumbling around in my head this week.  Last night, I watched Hotel Rwanda and struggled to imagine the burden of drawing a card like that out of the Universe's deck.  Even in our attempts to break genocide down and understand it on a human level through art and writing and documentaries, it's so hard to separate the individual lives involved from the capital-E Event of it.

About an hour ago, I finished Joan Didion's The Year of Magical Thinking, which she wrote in the year after her husband John's sudden death and the catastrophic illnesses of her daughter Quintana.  This passage perfectly sums up for me the way our ideas about luck and grief are tangled:

Once when she was still at the Westlake School for Girls, Quintana mentioned what she seemed to consider the inequitable distribution of bad news.  In the ninth grade she had come home from a retreat at Yosemite to learn that her uncle Stephen had committed suicide.  In the eleventh grade, she had been woken at Susan's at six-thirty in the morning to learn that Dominique had been murdered.  "Most people I know at Westlake don't even know anyone who died," she said.  "and just since I've been there I've had a murder and a suicide in my family."

"It all evens out in the end," John said, an answer that bewildered me (what did it mean, couldn't he do better than that?) but one that seemed to satisfy her.  

 Several years later, after Susan's mother and father died within a year or two of each other, Susan asked if I remembered John telling Quintana that it all evened out in the end.  I said I remembered.  

"He was right," Susan said.  "It did."

 I recall being shocked.  It had never occurred to me that John meant that bad news will come to each of us.  Either Susan or Quintana had surely misunderstood.  I explained to Susan that John had meant something entirely different: he had meant that people who get bad news will eventually get their share of good news. 

 "That's not what I meant at all," John said.

 "I knew what he meant," Susan said. 

We are not supposed to live our lives with one eye looking wearily around the bend for the tragedies sure to come, and I don't intend to do so.  But they are coming.  They will be brought to us or brought on ourselves in a million different ways, big and small.  And it doesn't take an event like the Rwandan genocide or even a death in the family to remind us.

One of my favorite poems (and a really great YouTube channel):
"Spring and Fall To a Young Child" by Gerard Manley Hopkins 

Spring

Oh my, it's March.  Here's how I spent my winter:

• stressing about money
• getting a second writing gig
• looking for a cheaper place
• borrowing cash from everyone I know
• stressing about money
• getting a third writing gig
• finding a cheaper place
• PANICKING about money
• Fighting with Bank of America (seriously?  fuck those guys)
• packing
• inhaling bushels of dust while cleaning the old apartment
• working my ass off
• moving
• unpacking
• stressing about money

So here we are, three months later.  New place, new neighborhood.  The cats are ecstatic -- there are way more squirrels and birds and dogs to watch on the 2nd floor than there were on the 11th.  We live next to an old creepy cemetery, which makes me feel like I'm always on the verge of a grand Victorian adventure.  I'm working a lot, so maybe I'm not on the verge of being hauled off to debtor's prison.

But.

When I got laid off a year ago I was understandably freaked out, but excited.  I promised myself that I would take time off, rewire my life and focus on my own writing.  My own voice.

When the time came to start earning my keep in society again, I got really lucky and got some great contract jobs.  Now, I'm busy, I'm getting paid and back to doing a version of what I used to do.  But when I ride the Red Line downtown, I look at the girls headed to the Art Institute in purple tights and tatoos and think "she looks like an artist."  I'm just a new version of my old self.  A little broke-er.  A little shabbier.  Still spending my days getting letters to the editor placed and on conference calls.  Even the way I approach my own writing seems so businesslike and soulless.

I imagine that girl on the L - working in a studio covered with inked drawings and full of music.  Drinking beers and catching live shows.  Lots of sweaty late-night sex on a mattress on the floor.  Smoking cigarettes in the sunshine.  I want that to be me.  But it feels too late.   

Spring has never been my season.  Especially in the Midwest.  That first warm and thawing day tricks you, and by the end of the week you're shivering and cursing, waiting for the bus in a too-thin coat.  I never know what to wear, what to eat.  What was previously tucked away now lays bare and terrible in the mud -- old pens and takeout cartons and dog shit.  Nothing green to take the edge off., except for gaudy St. Patrick's Day decorations in bar windows.

That's how my life feels.  Akward and ill-fitting.  Wanting to be something else.     

Will Write (talking points) For Food

My first job in the Senate was answering constituent mail. Not just letters, but emails and (often irate) phone calls. There were about six of us covering our large Midwestern state, most in our early twenties, divided into issue areas. I was in charge of health care, abortion, and numerous “children and family” issues.

Our supervisor was a sweater-vested, mustachioed man who really would have been better off being a junior high algebra teacher. He developed a packet for the Legislative Correspondents that included a number of sample letters, tips and pitfalls to avoid. It opened with a quote from his own father (who I think actually was an algebra teacher), “Do not write to be understood. Write so that you cannot be misunderstood.”

Bullshit.

I worked on Capitol Hill for almost ten years. I graduated from writing letters to writing speeches and op-eds and press releases. And trust me – there are plenty of times in politics where you just want to hit that sweet spot between saying what you mean and meaning what you say. Ambiguity rules most of the time.

When I left government for the private sector, it was way, way worse. Absolute garbage like “suboptimal efficiencies” and “leveraging key stakeholders” seem to be of far more value to the corporate and non-profit world than real English. There is this limited universe of jargon and if you aren’t borrowing heavily from it, then you are regarded with suspicion. I have seen clients visibly relax when I finally break down and throw out something about “target audiences” or “messaging.”

I’m not naïve. I know that different professions come with different cultures and languages and norms. But as I try to make the transition to some “real” writing, I feel sort of like a Replicant going against her programming.

Ideas and phrases tumble around in my brain, but by the time I go to write them down, they’re all clenched up and scrubbed down. 

And I don't trust my own voice. Even up there, when I wrote "should have been a junior high algebra teacher" my brain immediately started scolding:  Well, that's just what you think.  Who are you to say what another human being should or should not have done with his or her life?  Just because he wore a lot of sweater vests doesn't devalue his work...

“Resist the urge to be fair,” said Stephen Elliott when I went to his workshop earlier this month.

I’m adding to that – “Resist the urge to write talking points.”