also

blogging isn’t an assignment, except to myself.  Yesterday when I met with Wideman we were talking about why I wanted to write the long thing I’m writing (speaking of which, I think from now on I’ll just refer to it as “my long thing” which is vague enough that I don’t have to expect anything in particular from it, but also establishes that it has to be long, whatever that means).  I think that my long thing deals with some stuff that has been in me for a while and I’m trying to flesh out.  Which is nice but also heavy.  So maybe blogging/writing short fiction will be fun and sunny and snappy and firey help balance out the long thing, which is wet and quiety and heavy and down. So that’s the plan, for now.

i feel like blogging because

I was reading someone else’s blog and it was great.  It made me feel like, hey, this guy is a writer.  And like  Wideman says in class, if you’re not writing, you can’t call yourself a writer.  So if you are writing then you must be a writer.  Today I am blogging and editing my fiction, so today I am a writer.

 

This is something I thought I should write about:

We got to the town and it was all dark.  Not dark outside, because outside it was still light, maybe somewhere late in the 4 o’clock hour.  Getting darker though.  But the stores were all dark inside because the entire town had a power outage.

When I write the word “outage,” it feels like an alien word.  Ow-taaj.  Outgae.  Outige.  Out.

This is a story that I feel could be a radio drama (maybe because I have been listening to radio on NPR and This American Life and Transom and WNYC).  It would be in installments, maybe nightly, because there isn’t quite enough suspense to sustain a weekly audience, meaning people wouldn’t remember and care enough to tune in a whole week later, but maybe they would tune in a night later.

So it continues:

We drove down the street and everything was dark, everything inside.  The end of the street came too soon so we turned back and did it again, and again again.  There were people around but they were quiet; the whole thing was quiet.  If I could go back, I would say, we drove into this town and it was quiet.  But since it was quiet because it was dark, it’s better to just picture the dark.

When the power goes out, phones stop working, and traffic lights stop working, though there weren’t any in this town.  There was a candy shop, and a visitor’s bureay, and some store called LINDSAY’S which we wanted to photograph, but later.  We’ll come back later, tomorrow morning maybe, we said.  We don’t feel like getting out of the car now.  But we were gone from that town in less than three hours, so we never made it to the later time for taking a picture, and now all I have from that town is what my brain remembers, which is not all that good.

This has been a broadcast of babbs radio, and i’m your host, LJ.  Tune in tomorrow night for the second installment of this modern horror.

side note: I feel better thinking that this is a journal, and nobody is reading it.  But I also want people to read it.  But I’m pretty sure almost nobody is reading it, so that’s good, but then once I write more then that will maybe feel not good, and I will want people to read it.  So just keep doing what you’re doing, i guess.

whatever happened to february?

Whoops.  Guess I blew it on that one.  It’s this thing with the pressure of writing (self-inflicted pressure of course) that makes me not do it.  But also– maybe the fact that I didn’t write in Feb is indicative of the fact that I was enjoying LIFE! I think there was this period of time surrounding the long weekend that pretty much every day was great.  At first it was just the long weekend, but then the good days just kept coming and coming.  That hasn’t happened in a long time.

Last night I went to a faculty fellows event with this NY Times correspondent on India.  Most of the students there were Indian or really interested in India, but I was interested in the writer as a writer.  We chatted a bit and he shared some interesting advice.  Someone asked him how he got his job, and he said that most people go about it with the wrong mindset, trying to have a competitive resume and all that.  But with writing, it is a skill, and the best thing you can do is improve your craft.  You can practice all the time– by remembering details, or being able to write 800 words really quickly, or knowing how to ask the right questions.  He gave me a little assignment– while we were at Professor Foley’s house, I was supposed to pick out two details and describe them to him before I left, because details are important, and as I am learning in my Creative Nonfiction class with Lauren Sarat, you can use details as a lens through which to view the bigger story.  The reporter dude said that he trains himself to notice details, so that years later if he was writing about this house, he would still be able to remember what color the walls were.

The things I noticed:

1. The arrangement of the chairs in the sitting room.  Folded/temporary chairs were arranged in little conversation clusters of two or three chairs, all angled in towards the middle couches and benches, so that there were layers of discussions surrounding the center.
2. The woman standing in the corner of the dining room, at attention in her catering uniform.  She didn’t speak much, but when she did, her voice was low and thickly Rhode Islander.  I think she was a Brown Dining Services staff member, rather than hired help of the Foleys.  But she seemed strangely out of place, and yet not unexpected, in the corner of that room.

The journalist said that if all of us were to submit a 300 word writing sample to him, he would immediately be able to rank us in terms of our writing abilities.  That’s cool.  It makes me feel good that I am learning something tangible.  People often say to me that having solid writing skills will help me get a job, and I’m starting to believe it.  I thought everyone could write decently, but after working in various jobs and taking classes (even writing classes!) I’m learning that that’s not the case.

keeping track (and testing memory): part I

Recap of my trip to England and Scotland.

WEDNESDAY, DECEMBER 16, 2009

I got on a plane at JFK to London.  For the first time, I was served wine on the plane.  At this point, I began to resent America’s drinking age.  When we landed in the morning, I paced up and down the aisles to try to get a view of the outside, the ocean, the sunrise, England.  No such luck—everyone seemed to be sleeping with the blinds half down, and the little windows in the emergency exits were only big enough to see an insignificant fraction of the sky.

THURSDAY, DECEMBER 17, 2009

Landed and Jennie picked me up from the airport.  I hadn’t seen her in over four years!  We talked all the drive back to Aldershot, mostly about her life and our mutual experiences with Grandma and her worrying over us.  Also how we used to “torture” her when we were little…with water and things. Don’t worry, nothing she couldn’t handle

In Aldershot I saw Barbara, and it was cold, and Jennie and I sat in her office and then walked to a little shop to get sandwiches for lunch.  They asked me if I wanted white or brown bread.  Apparently they don’t use the word “wheat” in the UK.  I helped Jennie look through cans in the garage, after being warned by several of her coworkers that I could not be alone in any buildings (lest I see a mouse and slip on some ice and injure myself, or that sort of thing) and Jennie was to be sure to show me the location of any and all fire exits.  The garage door seemed like a pretty good escape route in the event of a freak bread-pudding-meets-canned-peas fire accident.

We drove home and I saw Danny, he was so furry and I almost forgot he’s a poodle, because normally I think of poodles as sort of ugly in all their pampering, but Danny was fuzzy and full, how poodles are meant to be.  Jennie and I drove to town to pick up some Chinese food for dinner, and we had the first of our many dinners in front of the TV, watching British shows like “Eastenders” (a soap opera I unfortunately became invested in by the end of my stay) and “Deal or No Deal” (which I thought was stupid at first, then began to watch because the contestants were all dressed as elves in honor of Christmas, and then stopped watching after my favorite contestant, Sanjay, was off the show…he was very cute, or fit, as they say).  By the time I went to bed, I had been awake for over 24 hours, I think for the first time in my whole life.

FRIDAY, DECEMBER 18, 2009

By the time I woke up, Hawkley and the surrounding villages, towns, and counties were smothered in snow.  It was beautiful.  We made it out to Tesco, after some ordeals with the cars (including Jennie having to stay home from work after sliding down the hill in her rental car), and did some food shopping.  I can’t decide whether I like Tesco or Publix better.  Both of them appeal to me in their simple packaging, and the aesthetics of the store.  Much less flashy than Safeway or Marks & Spencer or Piazza or even Whole Foods and Trader Joe’s, both of which I love.  Shopping seems nice when foods are plain, in their packages, not trying to be more than what they are: Ground beef. Chicken breasts.  Biscuits.  Bananas.  Scones.  Yogurt.  Blocks of cheese.  Grapes.  Orange juice.  Cheerios.  These are things I like.

SATURDAY, DECEMBER 19, 2009

We went shopping in Portsmouth at a big mall, and it was so cold walking around between the shops.  You would think, being a somewhat cold and northern country, that the Brits would put their malls indoors… nope.  I think part of the mall may have had actual hallways, but mostly we traipsed around outdoors between shops that were well heated, but left their doors open (to invite shoppers in?  and simultaneously waste a ton of energy?).  I found some great jeans…at Gap of all places.  I can’t believe I traveled across an ocean just to shop at Gap.  We ate lunch at a Mexican restaurant, and then, after Jennie and Barbara agonized for a few hours about what to get their friends for Christmas, we went home to the cold and dark and snow.

SUNDAY, DECEMBER 20, 2009

This was the first night I went to the Hawkley pub.  I think Jennie was out sleeping over at James’ house, so Barbara and I went for a drink or two.  I tried cider at Jennie’s suggestion, expecting it to be some kind of warm alcoholic apple cider.  In fact, it ended up being more like beer.  It wasn’t until later, in Glasgow with Eleanor, that I discovered Kopperberg’s fruit cider, which is delicious.

The pub was magically warm, with its little fireplaces, honey-colored walls, low wooden tables and arm chairs.  We sat at the bar and admired the Moose head (which apparently usually has a joint in its mouth) and Bob, a man who Jennie thinks Barbara should date.  It was nice, being able to order a drink and watch people hang out, without any feelings of age-based status.  It was an old person’s pub, it was a young person’s pub, it was a village pub where everyone seemed to be welcome and everyone was willing to be friends.  Or at least that’s how it seemed to me, not being a townie myself.

MONDAY, DECEMBER 21, 2009

Jennie and Barbara went to work today, so I took Danny on a walk in the snow.  There was a footpath to the village center (I think it’s great how there are so many footpaths in the UK!) which we began down, until I realized there was a field of sheep to our left and I had better get Danny on a leash lest he agitate the sheep and end up shot by a worried farmer.  This took some chasing, but I got him on the leash and he pulled me, tripping over snow and his feet, to the end of the path, and then we walked down the road to the village center.  It didn’t take us long to explore the whole village:  a grassy “commons” the smaller than Barbara’s yard, a church (which I tried to go in, but it was locked), and the graveyard.  After a bit more of chasing Danny as other dogs walked by, I decided to keep him back on the leash until we had walked back around to the Hawkley inn (the pub) for a glass of wine by the fire.  Danny sat so nicely by my feet, and I read my book (The Dispossessed by Ursula K. LeGuin, recommended to me by my dad, which I was reading somewhat to my chagrin, and yet was determined to finish) until I was warm, and then we walked home.

It took Jennie and Barbara over three hours to get home from work that night.  I cooked cottage pie, and it was after eight by the time they got back for us to eat it.  The snow had been so bad that the roads were freezing, and the little English cars were inching along, getting stuck every which way, forcing some people to walk home or sit in their cars for hours, waiting for help.  This was the beginning of a record in cold and snow to rival the past thirty years, or as the news stations called it, The Big Freeze.

glued

I don’t like being so addicted to things: my computer (which I have been wanting when I am on the train, in a nice café, when I think of things I want to look up, when I have down time); music (which I want to listen to on the train, or all the time, so much that when I hear songs that I know, my body physically calms); money (which I feel guilty about spending, as if  I am wasting, being careless, but then I have to weigh the amount of care it would take to really save as much as I possibly could, and wonder if the worry of all that saving outweighs the niceness of being able to do and buy things within reason, or occasionally even not within reason); quiet (to just sit and do a mindless activity during which I am not obligated to start a conversation or chatter; I have recently been taking out my book as if to read, but often end up staring at the page and thinking, so I can have time and space and quiet to think without being asked if something is wrong or feeling obligated to speak.  One of the nicest things was when I was in St. Andrews on Wednesday and Nina went to study, leaving me to sit in her room and have some quiet time.  I sat on her bed with my cup of tea and stared out the window, thinking, processing, just being.  And then I felt better. Other activities are good for finding this kind of quiet: chopping vegetables, folding.)

Which is harder: doing something you don’t want to do, or not doing something you want to do?

Lately I think it’s the latter.  And I don’t mean not getting to do it, I mean purposely not letting yourself to do it.

I want to write down what I have done every day since I’ve been in the UK.  But every day I don’t write it, there’s another day to write and remember.  The train would be a good time to do this, but I won’t have a computer.  Reading is good, too, though.   But is there a point to remembering days?  The most important ones will get remembered, I think.  Or else the ones that get remembered will become the most important.

story people.

Before Dawn: maybe my first favorite story

Stories.  Short ones.  Crafted by Brian Andreas onto pieces of recycled barn wood, creating tea trays and sculptures and treasure chests and mirrors and coat racks.  There are also books and prints and greeting cards, but mostly, if you don’t have lots of money to buy all those things, they are stories.  Here are three stories that meant something to me (recently…I have a “favorites” list that scrolls down and down and down).

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connected by a silver cord that hums with sadness the further it is stretched

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If there is any secret to this life I live, this is it: the sound of what cannot be seen sings within everything that can.  & there is nothing more to it than that.

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This is a giant block of whatever is most difficult for you to carry & trust me on this, you’ll carry it more times than you can count until you decide that’s exactly what you want to do most & then it won’t weigh a thing anymore.

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They have a story of the day email too.  Get it.  Best daily email I recieve.  Story People is like the best song or your favorite line in a book you love.  The stories say things that we all feel, in a way we can understand it.  There’s nothing like reading the perfect story for your day.

excerpts

from “In Praise of Idleness” by Bertrand Russel, 1932

Andy suggested I read this when we were talking about the importance of play.  The first quotation below stuck out to me because it really does make our industrialised society seem a bit insane, and makes me dream of working only four-hour days and then having time each day to write, or dance, or hike, or even sleep a normal amount.  At pretty much every job I’ve had, there have been people who don’t work hard at all, or spend a lot of their work day in idleness but still have to show up.  I would rather work hard for four or six hours, than lounge around and do bits of work for eight or more hours a day.

“Suppose that, at a given moment, a certain number of people are engaged in the manufacture of pins. They make as many pins as the world needs, working (say) eight hours a day. Someone makes an invention by which the same number of men can make twice as many pins: pins are already so cheap that hardly any more will be bought at a lower price. In a sensible world, everybody concerned in the manufacturing of pins would take to working four hours instead of eight, and everything else would go on as before. But in the actual world this would be thought demoralizing. The men still work eight hours, there are too many pins, some employers go bankrupt, and half the men previously concerned in making pins are thrown out of work. There is, in the end, just as much leisure as on the other plan, but half the men are totally idle while half are still overworked. In this way, it is insured that the unavoidable leisure shall cause misery all round instead of being a universal source of happiness. Can anything more insane be imagined?”

This next quotation makes me feel better about how much money I’ve spent in traveling.  I have been working for the past three months, and school year, and two summers.  Therefore, it must be okay for me to spend the money I’ve earned on leisure.

“The butcher who provides you with meat and the baker who provides you with bread are praiseworthy, because they are making money; but when you enjoy the food they have provided, you are merely frivolous, unless you eat only to get strength for your work. Broadly speaking, it is held that getting money is good and spending money is bad. Seeing that they are two sides of one transaction, this is absurd; one might as well maintain that keys are good, but keyholes are bad.”

other people getting published

Once when I told my grandma’s friend that I want to write, she told me it was impractical, but if I must, I could do something functional like transcribing medical textbooks into online versions.  Boy, does that sound fun.

I’ve been reading Joey Comeau’s Overqualified website, which is a collection of real cover letters that he sent out with job applications to dozens of corporations over the past few years.  When I first discovered this website at least three years ago (though now I no longer remember how I first came across it) I mostly read the comic, but soon discovered the Overqualified section and was highly amused.  Now it turns out Joey has turned the letter into a book, which is getting published.  Rock on!

And what struck me was that from this small idea he had, or some way he entertained himself, or some fluke, he’s now getting a book published.  Think about Julie and Julia, that movie about cooking and Julia Childs that was based on a blog written by somebody named Julia in New York.  These things are crazy to me, call them what you will, mini success stories, entrepreneurship, miracles.  What I wonder is if Julie and Joey have forever had burning desires to be published, or if this was just something great that happened in their lives and all of a sudden they were Real Writers.

I’ve noticed by way of this blog that all I want to write about here is writing.  Lots of things happen to me every day.  I’m in England and I’ve seen cute towns and snow and sheep and family and friends, and there’s a lot to write about that might be interesting to read, if only for my mom.  But.  I can’t seem to force myself to write every day, though that was my goal…to write every day for a month.  I thought it would be a good New Year’s Resolution but then realised that I had no computer access on the first because I was in London, then was staying at Benny’s house on the second and third, and I feel weird blogging on other people’s computers.  So maybe I’ll start small and see if I can blog every day for a week.  Except starting Thursday I’ll be travelling again, so who knows what will happen.

I used to have this goal to write in my journal every night before bed.  I think that may have been a resolution once as well.  But now I look at my journal and the dates are separated by three to five weeks, usually.  Even though I always have one with me (there are many; I’ve started at least three or four at the moment and can only think of two in my whole life I’ve finished).

Bottom line:  if I want to get published (ever) I’m pretty sure I need consistency, a routine, standards, discipline.  It ain’t gonna happen from me just thinking about it.  I actually have to write.  Consistently.

I also think my blog needs more links and pictures to be more interesting.  Working on that too. But that’s another issue.

a writer I’ve never read

Jane Austen.  Her books are classics.  There are only six, I think, but they are internationally known and make the English very proud.  Today Barbara and I went to Chawton to visit the house where she did the bulk of her writing (and revising), and I learned that her first books were published under the name “A Lady” and then “by the same author as Sense and Sensibility.”  Those Brits sure are proud of someone they initially tried to supress.  I suppose it was the early 1800s, after all.

They have a writer in residence at her house, and you can do workshops there (unfortunately none this month or the next, which I was bummed about).  She has a blog, too.

The thing that most surprised me about the house was the tiny table that she supposedly wrote at– smaler than an end table, a little low circular table you’d probably put a small lamp on, or a vase of flowers.

Jane Austen's writing table

When I write, I like to be spread out.  It’s hard to imagine being productive at such a small table.  Or without having access to a computer where you can store word documents with pages and pages of notes, or thoughts, and internet where you can look up pretty much anything about anything, any time you need to.  That might be an interesting exercise to do, having to write a complete work just sitting at one table.  I guess that’s how she acheieved her supposedly incredible imagery and attention to detail– she wrote about what she knew, and she knew it very well.

starts, finishes

While watching videos that Benny and Tori and Kim took at MMR, I started thinking about how my two summers there have sort of blended together, and how if I go again it will be distinct because it will not be a consecutive year, and this summer I won’t be going.  Then I realized it’s only winter and not next summer yet (although I’ve already decided that I’m not going back to MMR in 2010) and I have this completely distorted sense of time from not being in school for 7 months (and one more to go!) I guess I’m nearing the end of my self-proclaimed 8 month adventure.

What I can appreciate now about school is the structure of time it provides my life.  Now, time has floated and sped and drifted and shuffled by, randomly at times, and here I am, in December, Christmas, not recovering from finals, for the first time in years.  Which is nice.  But there’s something to be said for school, as it does give me something to constantly look forwards to, like the end of the semester, or graduation– there’s always a goal, and then a chance to start again (never completely, but at least in some way).  And there really isn’t much of that in adult life.  At HSC time just progressed, and the end in sight was December 11, the last day of my internship there.  But for those staff who were really adults and there for an indefinite amount of time, there was no end in sight, no completion to most projects they worked on, no boundaries really.  Not that they had nothing to work towards, because they did (the next newsletter, study circle, Changemaker conference), but adult life just seems so damn CONTINUOUS.

What is there to work towards? Saving for a vacation, or buying a house, or having kids.  But there seems to be so little time for personal journeys towards more skills or knowledge or understanding.  It’s just life, not school, or summer, or classes, or an internship.  That scares me.  I like things to look forwards to, boundaries, knowing that there is an end, or something big is coming to change the way things are.  I like working towards final papers, or dance performances, or finishing a story.  And I can do these things later, if I do write, and continue to dance (which I hope I will!) but it will be just me, not me and 6,000 other people also working towards the end of the semester.  Which is why, I guess, it will be nice to be with other people whose stuff becomes my stuff too, so I can be there when they get promoted, or move to my city, or have a shitty day, or have their own performances and things published and accomplishments.  Basically, I like community– this, I knew already.  I guess I just kind of remembered it tonight.  But I’m also realizing that being in a community allows for much more individual satisfaction too.  The whole benefits the individual, completes her.