Although some people don't think you should make yourself sit down at your computer and blog everyday just because you adhere to some ill-concieved self-imposed weekly quota, I feel like I've got to keep at it. I worry that if I take too long a break I may never come back to it again.
This person also thinks that People don't care about your opinion so much as how you express it. And Sloppiness as an aesthetic is okay, but you can't get too lazy with
your diction and syntax. The well-turned phrase is your biggest
strength.
I could die here at this computer -- rigamortis could set in with my right thumb attempting to hit the space bar yet one more time, trying in vain to bang out a well-turned phrase. Am I not supposed to hit "save" after I've suffered through two hours of trying to write some piece of pixelated dribble just because my diction and syntax are down on the couch under a blanket taking a nap?
I wish I were really comfortable in front of this screen. But most times I'm not. I've got ideas swimming around in my head 24 hours a day, but when I try to get them out on this keyboard I most times drown in a sea of self-doubt.
I just read Joan Didion's account of her husband's death in the NYTs. She and her husband, John Gregory Dunne, both being writers, carried around little index cards at all times to make quick notes of ideas they would have, so nothing could be forgotten. Her husband told her once that making those notes and keeping those cards actually made a writer a good writer.
I have a ton of faith in the trip I'm making to the drug store tomorrow. It could be a life changing experience. Mr. Dunne's death may hold a deeper meaning for me -- she wrote not sarcastically at all and thinks you're really mean to even think she would.
Because if those little index cards that I'm intent on buying tomorrow don't work, I fret I'll be suffering from this anguish for years and years to come. And I really trust John Gregory Dunne. Afterall, all really good writers use their full name like that.
Anne Lamott, one of my favorite writers -- also obsessed with the whole index card thing --describes what I suffer from in Bird by Bird:
Most of my students want to know why they feel so crazy when they sit down to work, why they have these wonderful ideas and then they sit down and write one sentence and see with horror that it is a bad one, and then every major form of mental illness from which they suffer surfaces, leaping out of the water like trout -- the delusions, hypochondria, the grandiosity, the self-loathing, the inabilitiy to track one thought to completion, even the hand washing fixation, the Howard Hughes germ phobias. And especially, the paranoia.
You can be defeated and disoriented by all these feelings.
I loved reading that. Misery loves company after all and just imaging that so many people feel the same way is giving me the energy to tap these letters out, one after the other, right here, right now.
Lamott suggests you take all that mental illness, that anguish and nausea and work it out through words. Get your creative juices flowing. Use that insecurity and shape it into something true and funny or ...frightening.
To illustrate her point, she normally reads aloud a poem by Phillip Lopate, that goes:
We who are
your closest friends
feel the time
has come to tell you
that every Thursday
we have been meeting,
as a group,
to devise ways
to keep you
in perpetual uncertainty
frustration
discontent and
torture
by neither loving you
as much as you want
nor cutting you adrift.
Your analyst is
in on it,
plus your boyfriend
and your ex-husband;
and we have pledged
to disappoint you
as long as you need us.
In announcing our
association
we realize we have
placed in your hands
a possible antidote
against uncertainty
indeed against ourselves.
But since our Thursday nights
have brought us
to a community
of purpose
rare in itself
with you as
the natural center,
we feel hopeful you
will continue to make unreasonable
demands for affection
if not as a consequence
of your disastrous personality
then for the good of the collective.
When Lamott is done reading her poem meant to inspire creativity, she notes that a few of her students...
...look at me with actual disgust, as if I am standing there naked under fluorescent lights.
Talk about a well-turned phrase. I may have written quickly: They looked at me sharply as if I had lost my mind.
Naked under fluorescent lights is way more "show, don't tell." A phrase I quickly grew tired of in my writing classes last Spring.
Which brings me to the end of this post.
Some people also say: Self deprecation is ill suited for someone as intimidating and intelligent as you are.
But I'm not too worried about that rule. There's no way he could be talking to me.
It's Friday! Anytime you want to take a break today, come on by and hang out at blue girl's place.
I think the answer is that he saw what his in laws were up to and he didn't want them using either her body or her grave to form a cult.
I don't know if the Schindlers were warped before all this, but they are warped now. This isn't about their daughter. It's about them. Their vanity is incredible, all the more so because so many people mistake it for love for their daughter.
Lance was responding to a post that I had written about a commercial that I had seen on Fox News that afternoon (only saw it once, I'm sure they then yanked it) where an ambulance-chasing lawyer was standing in front of the camera as shots of Terri Schiavo footage was being played behind him, showing her in her weakened, vegetable-like condition. He wanted YOU! to get a living will NOW! so this didn't happen to YOU!
It was reported at the time that Schiavo's parents were selling video tapes of Terri for $100 each, which of course the ambulance-chasing lawyer must've got a hold of one and it was enough to make you sick.
So let me wrap this meme up.
A blue girl who got the idea for doing this meme from Lance Mannion, was lucky enough to be having another birthday, surrounded by family and friends including new blogging buddies. And she wrote about the father of our current President loosely connecting probably the only thing he and she had in common in 2005; a very surface connection with a former world leader. While continuing to write posts about a girl that had no birthdays in front of her at all, while her parents, family and our current President, the son of 41, who also had a very surface connection, if existent at all, betrayed her during dying and after her death, which was commented on by Lance Mannion.