Gah, what a week. Wait, it’s only Wednesday? What a world, what a world, she says, slowly melting into a puddle on the ground. So, a quick recap:
I spent my entire weekend on freelance stuff, even though it was obscenely gorgeous. I made Irish soda bread to go with my Irish butter, which was almost gone but at least I had a slice while the bread was still warm and melted all over with the snobby butter.
I had a really bad day on Tuesday, do to several external forces all collaborating and picking that specific day to dump their collective emotional feces directly on top of my carefully coiffed shag and it was probably the worst day thus far in 2005. However, there was a delightful respite when I met Haus-Frau out for coffee (which is our code word for ‘gossip, giggling and gastronomic delights’) before my class. Also, I made a joke about drugging raccoons that made my cute professor laugh, so that was very nice. I don’t say much in class, mostly because the same five people are crawling all over any pauses in the conversation, so I write big long looping graphs of black ink on the stories and give my feedback that way most of the time. However, I’m now hyperventilating because I must turn in my story for workshopping in two weeks. Two weeks! And have I mentioned that I have nothing? Ok, three pages of scribbled long hand, but that does not a story make. And now I have a quandary, as I have mentioned that the story I want to write for class is not the story that wants to get out of my head. And it’s so delicious, the similes that are fighting for attention. I polish them with my shirt, these similes that don’t exist yet. Writers are silly people, it is totally true, even pseudo-intellectual poser writers like me. But here’s the thing: I don’t want to write a body issue piece because I don’t want to be the fat girl who writes the story about being fat, because when the skinny girl writes the story about how a skinny girl thinks she’s fat, everyone goes ‘Ah well, yes, so it is.’ And I hate that. I know it’s true, because I do it, but it doesn’t make it ok. Yes, I know how these body issues happen and yes, I understand them because I have thought them at some time, at some moment or minute of my life, I might have been that person, and just because I talk about my fat ass doesn’t mean that I’m envisioning cutting huge slabs of flesh away from my body like the extras to a rubber prop on a Mendes-directed Moby Dick. It doesn’t mean that at all. Just like when I wrote about a woman who was dreaming about having a baby doesn’t mean that I secretly want to have a baby. It’s a story, goddammit. A story. God! She said in a Napoleon Dynamite inflection, and then commenced sketching out the form of a liger.
So, yeah, still a little tense. I just wish I could write the Bingo story instead and everyone would be happy, because it would be funny and my typical mix of funny and also sort of sad but not all Amy Hempel and ‘Ooh, I am SUCH a writer you have no idea!’ that litters the post-graduate writing workshop landscape. But man. If I could, I would. Bingo. It’s going to be such a good story too. I can taste it. But no. Alzheimer’s disease. Fat girls. Yes sir. Time to make the fucking donuts.
I keep promising to get over myself. Someday I might actually do it.
In other news, the Dutch Cupboard Cheese has been gifted to June, as she’s the only one of us that likes it. In a reverse bit of TaunTaun logic, it smelled worse on the outside than on the inside, but it was completely invaded with a strange Dutch Cupboard conflagration of herbs (or, as Ward remarked ‘Herbs? Maybe Herb’s feet!’) and spices and also the insidious caraway seeds which are one of the few things I cannot stand. (When I was four, Aunt Brunhilda pointed them out in some rye bread and told me that they were chopped up minnows. Don’t fuck with your kids’ heads, people. It’s not nice.) Esteban, thankfully, shares my dismay of caraway, so we were both completely and utterly squicked out by the whole idea. June, however, was delighted, as now she has a chunk of cheese the size of a small dog, all for her very own, as Ward won’t touch it either (I think he was turned off by the sweating). I’m glad that we’re a family that shares. Sharing our smuggled dairy products, anyway. This is what Ward gets for laughing when June regaled me with the story of his hive breakout. I have to hear about his unmentionable itchy netherworld, he gets to live with the cheese. A fair sentence, to be certain. He’ll be out in a month while I can’t scour that image out of my brain.
So yeah, and tonight, instead of working on my story, I’ve given myself a Queen Helene’s Mint Julep mask and aloe gel chaser, written this, talked on the phone, and watched junk TV. But it was so worth it. Bitch poured beer in Miss Tyra’s weave. That shit ain’t right, y’all.
