Tonight's post brought to you by the letter E and the color Green
Reading blogs is a terrible addiction. I need to go to a support group or check myself into rehab or something.
Such strange little windows into the lives of people I'll never meet. Such strange and enticing windows.
Maybe the problem is that I only read popular ones, which are always the worst. They depress me. I inevitably end up comparing my own ( Read more... )
I was a complete and total nerd in elementary school, which followed me into junior high and high school, even after I grew out of my awkwardness. And then my family moved for my last year of high school. And I ended up "popular", because no one knew what a nerd I'd been, and I was blonde.
It wasn't bad, exactly. But it certainly wasn't fulfilling. It probably would have been more fun if I'd liked to drink and do drugs, but most of my time was spent at parties with people who were good-looking but not terribly interesting because they were drunk/high. I promise you, there's no mystique. The glitteriness of the popular isn't real. It's just a facade. Some of the most insecure women I know were in that group; they were just really good at hiding it. Oh, and having the money for those jeans doesn't make you happy. Or popular, for that matter. I knew plenty of nerds with wealthy parents and popular kids who put together awesome outfits from the thrift shop because they had to.
I'm still friends with a few of the girls from that time but they were all pretty much outliers like me; in that group because they were good-looking (not that I was ever all that good-looking, mind you, I was just sort of conventional-looking) and not because they really thought that watching drunken football players jumping into their rich parents' pools with all their clothes on was utterly enchanting.
Basically, hanging out with people who like you because of how you look is about as fun as you'd imagine it would be.
Oh, and as for being a writer? I can't speak to being a writer writer, but I am an academic, and part of being an academic means writing articles for publication. Some people seem to think that writing academic articles is some mystical process by which deep insights into the human condition magically appear on paper through the minimal intervention of human hands, or that academic work is done in some beautiful wood-paneled library somewhere. Actually, it's not; it's done in sweatpants, with lanky hair, surrounded by books and half the time accompanied by frustration that I can't remember which book this quote comes from and how am I going to make this deadline and dammit, why isn't this argument working?! Most successful fiction writers I know describe something similar. It looks a lot more glamourous than it is.
So, in conclusion: there's a reason the word "glamour" derives from the meaning of a magic spell cast to deceive the outside observer. It's a one-way illusion, from the outside looking in.
I hope that helps, even a little.
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