I have the urge to cook. School has started. Geese are making Vs. The air is turning breath white. Venti vanilla nonfat no whip mocha every morning for a week straight. At night in our bed, instead of being two island nations in a sea of white cotton, with clearly defined international waters, there is continental drift and instead of whining that I’m haaaaaaaahtgitaway, I’m grateful for the blast furnace of body heat. This morning, on my drive to work, I saw a low cloud settling in a valley, looking very much like the steam over a pot of simmering soup. I’m wearing my standard issue grey cashmere cardigan over jeans and also socks with my loafers and it feels just right. Fall is definitely here.
I had a few conundrums with school, first taking the same Dr. O’Henry Award that I did the last two semesters, but his class got cancelled due to low enrollment. Then I switched to a Women Writers class, which I learned on the first day of school was actually a Native American Women Writers class. Since I actually know two highly-acclaimed Native American women writers and have studied their work and the work of others extensively as an undergrad (in fact, I think that if I concentrated hard enough, I could glurt out an exact replica of Leslie Marmon Silko’s Ceremony) I looked at the book list and just wasn’t excited about going down that road again when I had so many missing pieces of my educational experience. So, I ended up in another fiction workshop. Which means I have to write some fiction. Stupid details. Yeah, I have no idea what I’m going to write, but since something’s due next week, I guess I’d better come up with something fast. During, you know, the five minutes of spare time I have.
However, my class is very cool, and there are four people from previous classes, including three guys who are following me from class to class. Or perhaps I am following them. I was talking with another student and he asked me if I was a poet (which is sort of the graduate student version of ‘what’s your sign’ I guess) and I replied ‘I’m a shitty poet. I’d rather write mediocre prose than write shitty poetry.’ To which one of the other guys said, ‘Excuse me? Bullshit. Mediocre prose. Ha! Listen to her talk.’ Which is sort of cool, because creative writing programs tend to be like packs of wild dogs (or, actually, online diarists). Everyone is aware of the hierarchy and where he or she falls. They are sometimes loathe to compliment their peers and risk the possibility that their words will be believed by someone else, therefore demoting themselves down the rung. Which is petty and stupid, but also sort of true. Writers are all incredibly egotistical and also have inferiority complexes, which is the only way I suspect that you can exist as a writer. You must think you are good enough to believe people want to read what you’ve written and at the same time, you must think you write like shit because otherwise why try to get any better? Which probably explains why the suicides, substance abuse and addictive personality issues abound among writers and artists.
Anyway, class is cool. And I don’t have to read Ceremony again, so go me.
Also, I am swamped with freelance stuff again. I’m sort of getting used to being swamped, a boiling frog mental condition, I think. It will be better when it gets colder. That is what I’m telling myself right now. But, I’m very much looking forward to Journalcon in three weeks, so that is my beacon. Or my bacon. Mmm.
I was ranting to Esteban about how much my Monday had sucked and how I just didn’t have the mental capacity for very much this week as my brain was spread very thin, like a sparse coating of cheese on a Ritz (Mmm), and during which time, I mentioned that one of my triggers is when someone is glory hounding or, in this case, sympathy hounding and how I worry about inadvertently doing that myself, considering that I was raised by someone with a narcissistic personality who would Woe Is Me about any little thing. I have very little patience for that. And Esteban assured me that I don’t, that if anything, I tip the other way and don’t look for sympathy when perhaps it would be good to receive some. But then, it could be said that the reaction is also due to the fact that if I badly sprained my ankle as a child, my mother turned it into a story about poor her, now she would be stuck at home with a broken kid and also a hospital bill and then her friends would pat her on the shoulder and say there there. So, I don’t know. Maybe I’m biased because I solve my mental anguish with bacon rather than looking for a tilted concerned head and a pat on the shoulder. Maybe that’s why my mother is svelte and I am not. Maybe I should stick with disseminating writing programs rather than this armchair psychology.
In other news, Mopie, Ian, Esteban and I went to many rummage sales this weekend and I became imbued with hard core negotiation skills, talking people down on prices left and right. At one point, I held out someone’s paint-by-numbers pirate ship and said “Six dollars? Come on. It doesn’t even have a frame. A buck.” And people just caved because they didn’t want to argue. Now I want to wheel and deal with everything. Later, I offered someone two dollars for their Victorian house with leaded glass windows and covered porch. They didn’t say no, but explained that they didn’t have any change. Then I offered them a quarter for their dog. The woman pretended not to hear me, because she knew that she was helpless to resist! Once I learn to harness my powers, I will clearly be unstoppable.
