Ways and means
Apparently it's almost NaNoWriMo, that delicious month where ordinary people are encouraged to write at least 50k words of their own novel from scratch. I've watched it come and go a few times, always thinking rather abstractly that it might be nice to try, but my participation is somewhere in the middle of a long list of other nice things like exercise and consistently bringing my lunch to work, or even refusing to work through lunch. My Ravelry list of things to knit and crochet is ridiculously long, and is often complicated by the arrivals of babies (and furry adoptees) among my family and friends. There are project ideas stuffed into notebooks, supplies in countless bins hiding in closets and under the bed, and snippets saved in folders on my hard drive. So much just waiting for me. Too much.
My mother is part of the process, sending me clippings of articles intended to Change My Life with two simple additions or subtractions, but more often her mailings are a catalog of what she thinks is wrong with me: weight, acne, poverty, a lack of direction or children or happy married life. I'm sure she sees in me what she thinks is my potential, a tall, thin, and charming woman of means and skill with adorably quirky, personable children and a loving, accomplished male provider, all of us gracefully moving through our lives and available for her visits whenever convenient. And I'd be the first to say that this is a lovely idea, seductively persistent even as I try to figure out what it means to be in my 30s, but only one or two of these things comes naturally to me. I am tall, yes, but nothing spectacular, just a round 6'. I am a woman according to all tests and appearances, and I share my space with a man who is loving and also tall, but on all other points my story diverges.
I blame a little of this on a palm reader my mother took me to on a whim when I was very young, perhaps before my brother was born. It is hard to imagine my mother having any time for frivolity during the year he was in and out of hospitals, with tubes and scars and his fight to survive. So we'll say that the story took place late in my second year, with a quiet, precociously perceptive toddler with blond ringlets walking with her mother at a street fair. Raised Catholic but having converted for my father, my mother must have thought it a little naughty to ask a fortune teller anything, much less the fate of her first child, but I don't know why she did it. The occult never had much of a place in our home, as my parents were far too practical to spend any effort on divining the future: either you made it happen or God took care of things in the end if you were good along the way. So the story has always felt strangely incomplete, and so many years later, any details my mother could add would be suspect. She doesn't tell the same story twice even with recent, mundane events, and my father's memory is at least twice as revisionist, so it's no use asking either. All I know is that the palm reader took my hand and pronounced me a writer even before I could hold a pencil.
My mother has always been of the opinion that I'd know "it" when I found it, and has thus encouraged me to follow my heart, though she has been increasingly less encouraging as I have traveled further and down fewer financially-productive paths. When I went to college, she was delighted in my English degree and awaited my Great American Novel, but when I moved to Japan, she consoled herself with suggestions that I write a travel book. When I returned to pursue graduate school, she took comfort in the idea that most dissertations become publications, but when I left to move to California, she became vocally disappointed, and continually suggests that I find my way back to the East Coast and start over. The town I moved to wouldn't even suggest a pulpy crime novel or a teen drama, and I'm with her in doubting that anyone wants to read about the socially-stunted software engineers that populate the area. Beneath Steve Jobs and in the shadowed corridors of Apple and Microsoft and Google work thousands of unnamed, faceless drones who create the structures supporting your apps and text messages, and they are my neighbors. While I love engineers and come from a family of them, these are a breed apart, and can be incredibly off-putting; in short, not fodder for more than a short story. I bet David Sedaris could do them justice, but not me.
Strangely, my father has taken up where my mother has stopped, and now wants me to write a collection of stories based on the veterans I work with. This is an unexpected change, as he has long suggested that I pursue work in fields predicting the most growth: gerontology and elder care, therapy for aging baby boomers, corporate law. He never spends time reading, much less anything I have written, be it emails or stories or letters, so I am not sure how to respond when he asks me to send him what little I've written, which is about the veterans struggling to maintain sobriety for at least six months (long enough to qualify for a specific medical treatment), or male and female soldiers raped while in service, or servicemen who returned to a country that was strange and frightening and spent the following fifteen years living in the woods, unable to hold a job or a relationship for more than a few months at a time. He missed being drafted to Vietnam by a handful of months, so I suspect he wants to know what he missed, but I have a hard time sharing any of my life's details with him, much less such raw material. Plus, I'm not sure if it's any good, and even if it is, if this is indeed my calling.
One way of relating all of this is to say that I am a failure at so many things (and this way comes far too easily, and first, to me), but perhaps the problem is a lack of specificity. The fortune teller never said what kind of writing, or whether I'd even be good at it or paid for it, and it is true that I am fully capable with a pen and paper. I write things down, which makes me a writer, and sometimes a typist with the advent of computers. Perhaps my mother did not take the fortune literally enough, and so her expectations are both unrealistic and irrelevant, or perhaps the fortune has already come true, as I have written all sorts of things, some of which have indeed gone to print. The palm reader didn't say that I'd be fourth author on some article in a dusty psychology journal, but there I am for all posterity. There, too, are my journals from the years 1997, 1999, 2000, and 2002, patiently handwritten but never to be shared. Perhaps I am a writer after all.
EDIT: For grins, I checked this entry, and apparently:
I write like
H. P. Lovecraft
I Write Like by Mémoires, Mac journal software. Analyze your writing!
My mother is part of the process, sending me clippings of articles intended to Change My Life with two simple additions or subtractions, but more often her mailings are a catalog of what she thinks is wrong with me: weight, acne, poverty, a lack of direction or children or happy married life. I'm sure she sees in me what she thinks is my potential, a tall, thin, and charming woman of means and skill with adorably quirky, personable children and a loving, accomplished male provider, all of us gracefully moving through our lives and available for her visits whenever convenient. And I'd be the first to say that this is a lovely idea, seductively persistent even as I try to figure out what it means to be in my 30s, but only one or two of these things comes naturally to me. I am tall, yes, but nothing spectacular, just a round 6'. I am a woman according to all tests and appearances, and I share my space with a man who is loving and also tall, but on all other points my story diverges.
I blame a little of this on a palm reader my mother took me to on a whim when I was very young, perhaps before my brother was born. It is hard to imagine my mother having any time for frivolity during the year he was in and out of hospitals, with tubes and scars and his fight to survive. So we'll say that the story took place late in my second year, with a quiet, precociously perceptive toddler with blond ringlets walking with her mother at a street fair. Raised Catholic but having converted for my father, my mother must have thought it a little naughty to ask a fortune teller anything, much less the fate of her first child, but I don't know why she did it. The occult never had much of a place in our home, as my parents were far too practical to spend any effort on divining the future: either you made it happen or God took care of things in the end if you were good along the way. So the story has always felt strangely incomplete, and so many years later, any details my mother could add would be suspect. She doesn't tell the same story twice even with recent, mundane events, and my father's memory is at least twice as revisionist, so it's no use asking either. All I know is that the palm reader took my hand and pronounced me a writer even before I could hold a pencil.
My mother has always been of the opinion that I'd know "it" when I found it, and has thus encouraged me to follow my heart, though she has been increasingly less encouraging as I have traveled further and down fewer financially-productive paths. When I went to college, she was delighted in my English degree and awaited my Great American Novel, but when I moved to Japan, she consoled herself with suggestions that I write a travel book. When I returned to pursue graduate school, she took comfort in the idea that most dissertations become publications, but when I left to move to California, she became vocally disappointed, and continually suggests that I find my way back to the East Coast and start over. The town I moved to wouldn't even suggest a pulpy crime novel or a teen drama, and I'm with her in doubting that anyone wants to read about the socially-stunted software engineers that populate the area. Beneath Steve Jobs and in the shadowed corridors of Apple and Microsoft and Google work thousands of unnamed, faceless drones who create the structures supporting your apps and text messages, and they are my neighbors. While I love engineers and come from a family of them, these are a breed apart, and can be incredibly off-putting; in short, not fodder for more than a short story. I bet David Sedaris could do them justice, but not me.
Strangely, my father has taken up where my mother has stopped, and now wants me to write a collection of stories based on the veterans I work with. This is an unexpected change, as he has long suggested that I pursue work in fields predicting the most growth: gerontology and elder care, therapy for aging baby boomers, corporate law. He never spends time reading, much less anything I have written, be it emails or stories or letters, so I am not sure how to respond when he asks me to send him what little I've written, which is about the veterans struggling to maintain sobriety for at least six months (long enough to qualify for a specific medical treatment), or male and female soldiers raped while in service, or servicemen who returned to a country that was strange and frightening and spent the following fifteen years living in the woods, unable to hold a job or a relationship for more than a few months at a time. He missed being drafted to Vietnam by a handful of months, so I suspect he wants to know what he missed, but I have a hard time sharing any of my life's details with him, much less such raw material. Plus, I'm not sure if it's any good, and even if it is, if this is indeed my calling.
One way of relating all of this is to say that I am a failure at so many things (and this way comes far too easily, and first, to me), but perhaps the problem is a lack of specificity. The fortune teller never said what kind of writing, or whether I'd even be good at it or paid for it, and it is true that I am fully capable with a pen and paper. I write things down, which makes me a writer, and sometimes a typist with the advent of computers. Perhaps my mother did not take the fortune literally enough, and so her expectations are both unrealistic and irrelevant, or perhaps the fortune has already come true, as I have written all sorts of things, some of which have indeed gone to print. The palm reader didn't say that I'd be fourth author on some article in a dusty psychology journal, but there I am for all posterity. There, too, are my journals from the years 1997, 1999, 2000, and 2002, patiently handwritten but never to be shared. Perhaps I am a writer after all.
EDIT: For grins, I checked this entry, and apparently:
I write like
H. P. Lovecraft
I Write Like by Mémoires, Mac journal software. Analyze your writing!