Drive: some thoughts on anxiety

Photo Credit: Morguefile

Today, the only thing I can find to write about is fear. And I don't want to write about fear.

I am sick of fear. I don't want sympathy. Instead, I want to hear the strike of metal against another person's truth so that the room fills up with the hum of Tibetan bowls. Fear, I've found, tends to elicit something else: a desire to comfort, along with its attendant Hallmark cards and pep talks and "you're-too-hard-on-yourself"s. I have a had time with these acts of kindness. They make me feel...exposed.

But fear it is.

I am scared to death, really, to be a real writer. I was once told (and I think I have said this here before) that if you want to look at what you are committed to, look at what you already have. This is true. I have exactly what I can handle. I want to write and, in the solace of my living room, I want to think that what I have written may be meaningful and good. I want to imagine that I could be successful, am about to be successful.

The list of things I do not want to do associated with being a writer is somewhat longer and it involves any kind of public embarrassment and openness to criticism and rejection, any kind of standing in front of people looking prettied-up and confident, any kind of telling people all about what I can do.

Because—at my core of cores—I don't think I can do anything.

This is what this is really about. Perhaps most of you will not know what I mean, because perhaps most of you are not sexual abuse survivors who are recovering from alcoholism and bulimia* and have spent most of your lives out of the work force raising kids. But—maybe, maybe, some of you, despite not being all the same kinds of messed up, will still know what I mean.

I don't think I can do anything. I am surprised I can cut apples. I am thrilled I can sweep floors. When I applied for my job as an instructional assistant at the local schools six years ago, I was terrified. I had run a daycare, twice, taken child development classes, and had been raised by a mother who worked almost all my life in the schools, but I still didn't really think I could do the job. I couldn't make copies, I thought. I didn't know how to use the die cut machine, I thought. I was sure I would not be picked.

After I expressed all this, my husband looked at me like I had spouted several additional heads.

"You're worried that you're not qualified to be an IA?" he asked. I was.

They hired me anyway.

Now, I tutor and I don't think I can do that either. The parents of my students think I can. I act like I can. And I seem to be able to go through the motions of planning and teaching an individualized lesson for each child, and they seem to learn, and everyone seems to be pleased, but I'm still, on some level, utterly sure that I can't really do the work, or that someone else could do it better than I do.

In my solar plexus—I know.

One of the things I wrote about in my book is that I didn't learn to drive until I was 26. I just felt safer letting other people do it. When I finally learned, I took only a month and I had to learn to do it while having full panic attacks. Once I'd been driving several months, the panic attacks went away (except for when I drive in heavy freeway traffic, or in high winds, or late at night, or on the side of very high cliffs).

I think writing, for me, is a bit like that right now. I have my foot on the gas, but I am tapping the brakes constantly and trying to keep from crying as my adrenalin surges, telling me I need to get off the road RIGHT NOW. And I seem to be off in all directions: updating my LinkedIn profile, trying to get freelance work, researching magazines to submit to, getting help to update my blog and create an author page, ordering books on queries and agents. Trying to figure out what I should do with beta readers. I cannot focus. I just get up and do something every day. Take some action. Drive somewhere. Take notes. Tap brakes. Breathe deeply. Start again.

Before—I was just writing. I know how to write. I do not know how to be a writer.

I did learn to drive, and perhaps I will learn to be a professional writer, too. Perhaps something will yield. Perhaps all this garbage in my head about platforms and business plans and writer's groups and publishing will form itself into something actionable.

Perhaps.

But for right now, again, fear is my teacher. I have the opportunity not to run but to stay and confront it, to put my feet on the pedals. Or to take a break and ask what I am doing and why I am doing it. Or to ask for help. Most of all—to show up and tell the truth. It's all I have: the Truth. It's why I like writing. It's why I am doing this. It's why I am telling you. Not because it's sad (it's not) or because it's interesting (it isn't really). Because it's true.

Not just for me, but in some way, for someone else.

Life was never the same after I learned to drive. Suddenly, I could go where I wanted to, when I wanted to, drive as fast or as slow as I wanted to go. I could choose the grocery store I shopped at. I could drive my kids out to the beach. I was in control of something that before I was just the recipient of.

I don't feel ready, but I'm ready. I'm ready to drive my career. Where, and how, I do not know.

And it may take months  before the panic subsides, during which I will have to take action anyway. That seems to be how it goes. Yes, I've done therapy and yes, I once took anti-depressants for a long time (and I still panicked while driving) and yes, now I meditate virtually every morning. But none of this gets me out of being who I am, which seems to include a certain amount of panic and hysteria to which most people are just not prone.

The other side of this coin is that I kind of like myself: panicky, over-wrought, tense, and complicated. I know that seems impossible, given what I've said, but it isn't. I've spent a year writing my whole life down and I am now intimately acquainted with Me.

I kind of admire her. She has guts.

My youngest son, who has auditory processing disorder, has not yet been able to earn his first belt in Tae Kwon Do. When called to the front to do his forms, he tends to forget them. He tends not to notice he's been called to the front. He tends to be doing the wrong thing. He tries very hard and so he feels bad about all this.

"Listen," I told him one day, "You are working harder than anybody else."

"I am?" he asked me.

"Yes," I said. "Your brain has to work just to hear them calling your name, to hear them call out the count. You have to work harder and it is going to take longer than others to do the same thing because of that. It's not because you're not as good. It's because your job is harder than theirs."

"Oh," he said, relieved. "Ohhhh."

And it's no different with me—with people like me—I suppose. If it takes me fifteen nervous emails to friends and a thousand scatter-shot web searches and thirty mornings of meditation and that many days of feeling like I am crawling out from being crushed under a rock—all to figure out one thing I really need to do next for my writing—then that is what it takes, and it is not because I am not as good. It is because my job is harder than the people who woke up this morning confident in who they are and what they do. It is because I have put in the work of a PhD in order to get an associates**.

I am not less because I struggle. I am more.

So, today, in honor of every woman I know who has stayed up late with flashcards well past when she knew the material for her test, and every teenager who has dressed and primped for a party and then realized at the last minute that she's too ugly to go, and every woman who doesn't even apply for the job because she can't bear to hear the words "You are unqualified." I say:

You did good work today. Carry on, and fight another day. Breathe in, breathe out, foot on pedal, inhale again. Exhale.

Now drive.



* I am grateful to say 20 years of recovery now.
* *This is a metaphor. I don't even have an associate's and I am not dissing anyone who's earned a PhD.

I wrote a book.

I have written the ending to my book. Or, rather, I have written it again. I have now revised each chapter 20-40 times, until the language, sentiment and plot of as interesting to me as watching Koyaanisqatsi without the aid of any hallucinogenic drugs. It is too long. Far too long. And I wonder what parts of my life I will ultimately deem "unnecessary to the plot." This is the story of my life so far—a memoir—because certainly what the world needs most is more memoirs, you will agree. I can do nothing but give the world what it needs. I am called to serve.

I have passed through the predictable stages of writer's schizophrenia which have first caused me to suffer from the belief that what I have here is a work of shocking genius ready to be set on the shelf next to my favorites: Lamott, Sedaris, and Melton; to take its place in the canon of literature which, in a bold, new way, illumines the human soul. "A victory," the review will say. Next, I have realized that what I have here is the carcass of a toad: stinking, in a state of ego-fueled, narcissistic decomposition, an embarrassment to everyone around. Then, I have thought: "Meh."

But—here's the thing: I have finished something. Until my eldest child reaches the age at which he can be, at least legally, said to be adult enough to leave my home, I have otherwise finished nothing of length or import. I have dropped out, left early and quit everything without fulfilling on what some especially kind people have called "my potential." Now, you see, I have finished a book. Out of respect for those of you with more sensitive natures than mine, I will be polite and refrain from calling it what I truthfully meant to call it, which was a mo$#erf&&king book.

I finished a book!

Sort of.

It is, as I have said, too long. And I want to run it by what they call BETA readers, which are the people who will read my manuscript and tell me exactly and specifically in which way they think it sucks. I did this once and was promised a copy of the book when published. As a volunteer gig, it was kind of fun; like eating pizza and saying "Push!" at someone else's birth.

After the BETA reading bit, I have to try and convince someone at a publishing house, who has sold his soul to Satan in exchange for a red pen, that this is something someone would want to buy. I am not, to say the least, looking forward to this. My relationship to promoting myself is similar to Ted Kaczynski's. I like to deliver my words in plain-looking packages and separate letters explaining what I am about. I hope these will have an impact on the world, but I like to maintain my privacy. The thought of a book proposal makes me physically ill.

Besides, I'm not sure anyone would want to buy it. Why would they, when they could spend their money on thneeds?

Privacy is a concern. It is all good and well when you are sitting at home writing your innermost thoughts onto Microsoft Word, but it is not so well when you imagine several thousand someones reading them. And the criticism! "The author cannot seem to make up her mind about who she is," I imagine that they'll say. "Profoundly full of herself." "Pretending to be wise." I can only imagine that I will have to plead guilty as charged.

Of course, more likely, I will simply receive a form letter: "Game Over. Thank You For Playing."

At any rate, like all achievements, the book was more fun when it wasn't done than it is now.

That said, I am doing this anyway. Because—

I wrote a mo$#erf&&king book.

The Mathematics of a Weekend Morning

Photo Credit: Morguefile by kconnors

"I set you for 6:30 AM, " I tell it. "And here it is 6:35. What is the problem with you?"

The cell phone remains obdurately silent, a closed coffin glistening ebony and the finality of mysteries unsolved. It makes no more sound than it did five minutes ago. No matter, I suppose. I am up anyway. I am disappointed, though, in the refusal of responsibility inherent in its flat little play-dead.

Virtue rests on the teetering point of decisions to shower deferred. Surely, I think, this can wait. Bedtime plus eight equals 6:30. 6:30 minus shower equals 7:00. Subtract Facebook, email, coffee and the letting out of dogs and you have yourself 7:30. The war begins at 8:00. First shots fired at 7:55 or so with the trudging sound of sleep-stupefied feet. Carafes are bounced, boffed, settled. Clatter arises in the vicinity of the sink. Commotion ensues. When the child awakes, I am enveloped in mustard gas. I lie dying, writhing and clutching my throat. "That's it! I'm not writing anything today!"

Ergo, the shower is off. I look like Medusa before she combs her hair. I've got jammies and a t-shirt, coffee and a pile of live snakes which are nibbling on my ears. Mascara has settled into the cracks of my face. Surely, you say, you've washed that off before you go to bed! Hardly, my friend. At bed, I was chased under my sheets by exhaustion which menaced me with a club. Mascara removal was well out of it. I am starting a small zit farm operation on my face.

I know I'm getting old because I awake now suffering symptoms of anaphylaxis, an allergy to time. My face is somewhat swollen; my skin seems poisoned. It's reacting to the unkind use I put it to, facing the mirror every day. Perhaps, one day my throat will close up and I will collapse on the bathroom floor. My hair is going grey to keep the snake bellies company. I look like someone's grandmother in a crack house, part of anti-drug campaign.

I sleep in my socks. Knee socks with skulls and crossbones, black on white, protecting my feet from the South Pole relocation which has ended up under my sheets. At 3 AM, the climate shifts and becomes tropical. The socks turn into Venus fly traps and start digesting my toes. I pretend that I'm still asleep. Nothing is eating my digits, I mutter. It's dark out. I haven't traversed the number line eight marks. Finally, though, I realize that there will be nothing left of my toes. I bend and release them from the jaws of the socks, and the seam angrily slinks away. "You haven't seen the last of me," it says. I growl.

So, I'm tired from all this activity. My toes still hurt. The snakes on my head are hungry and, tangled into Tantric positions, are trying to eat each other's heads. I open the document I'm working on and read it one more time. Because I'm sleepy, I murder all the characters. I'm sick of them. Let them choke their last on their own blood. Ill-conceived and ill-wrought, stupid, pointless things. I hate people like that, don't you? At some point, you just have to end those relationships that aren't feeding you at all. "You'll never prove I did it. They lived their whole lives in this file!"

Now, I feel just a little bad. If I had showered, things would probably not have had to end this way.  The kind of person who has clean hair is much less likely to massacre her imaginary children while no one else is awake. And I would hate to have a mug shot taken while I look this way.

Twelve cups of coffee minus one travel mug equals nine. Time for my second cup. Two cups equals two wholes. I will have had two cups of coffee. 48 fluid ounces equaling two. If I could lift up a small barrel with a lid, I could call it one. Given enough coffee, I will look more like Helen and less like a gorgon any minute now, lack of hygiene aside.

I sip and consider resurrection, the power of Control Z. "No," I think, "Let the dead stay dead. Bring me more characters! If they impress me, I'll let them live." I am a god, or a monster, the necromancer of files. I am just sipping my coffee while fictional characters live out their tortured lives. I will subtract them if they vex me and add them only if they charm. In the end, they have less power over me than socks.

Already a Prize

Photo Credit: Flickr Creative Commons by Claire S.

I like sunrises, don't you?

Morning is grand because yesterday is over. Now things can start again. The persistence of things from yesterday into the brand new day is surprising. Possibility seems to abound and then there is your life from before, like cold leftovers, coming at you again. Tomorrow, I will return all my comments. Tomorrow, I will write a new post. Tomorrow, I will finish...Yesterday is following me like a bit a toilet paper stuck to my shoe, or like Ariadne's thread, making sure I'll get back to where I was. O, yes there it is!—my context.

Don't worry. That last paragraph doesn't make sense even to me.

I have something I am writing for submission. I have done that only once before. Then, it was a contest. I had to pay twenty-five bucks. If the editors liked my piece, they'd send me comments. If they liked it best, I would get to be princess of Tunisia. No reply was sent. I was reminded of my sons, standing giddy as helium balloons before a mechanical claw.

"If I put in a quarter, I'll get a toy! Mama, pleeeasse?"

"Me too, Mama! Pleeeease?""

I let them do it several times. Some things you have to learn yourself. Some lessons are worth carrying two children out of a mall in tantrum for. This is one: You don't get a toy in a machine for free.

Here is another one: my writing isn't as clever as I think it is. It's not as good. Accolades are not free.

Real writers: they work.

I am trying to do this, but I don't seem to have all that much free time. That's not precisely true. I have, in spades, the kind of time you could use to write one good sentence and then tell your kids gruffly to go away if you wanted to do any more. I'm not complaining. This is my chosen life. I homeschool one child and a half. I do this, in the way I do all things, which is to say: I go overboard. I have lesson plans. I have objectives. I do research. I pile books upon the table and we work. Grammar, literature, mathematics, world history, spelling, typing, vocabulary from Greek and Latin roots. We are deep and thick in all of it. After the "work," there are library books to read, documentaries to watch, debates to undertake.

All this is to say that I have made my life more about mothering than writing. I am fine with that.
In the spaces in between other people's needs, I tend to look at Facebook. It is easily broken off from, but gives me something to do. My writing, on the hand, sucks me in. When I write, I get up at 4:45 am. I sit in silence. If my husband wakes up and starts talking, I've been known to cover my ears, without thinking, before noticing how rude this is. It takes me twenty minutes to produce the first paragraph. That's the hardest one. Then, hopefully, it goes faster. Sometimes, it doesn't. The process is less like bleeding out lyrical inspiration and more like hacking through stone. Hack, smash, cut. I keep dusting up so that I can see what I have done. The longer I write, the longer it takes for me to write. The longer I do this: The more I revise. The more I think. The less likely I am to hit publish. I have studied grammar, learned to diagram sentences, sent copious emails to my writer friend. I have become much more insecure.

The longer I do this, the longer the chances look of catching that animal in my claw. I think it's called perspective. Or depression. Take your pick.

This writing has made me a lousy blogger. I haven't returned enough of your comments. I read every single one. I haven't visited enough of your blogs. Often, I visit and then leave before I can think of anything to say. I'm a lurker. I've used up all my words. I just wake up, write, school my kids, clean up the books, serve lunch, tutor, clean up again, start dinner and collapse on my couch in a pile of frizzy hair and clothes. Some child comes and cuddles me. When a fifteen year-old head perches on my shoulder, I remain still, like there's a butterfly on my hand.

The sun is up. Today I am going to see a circus. I have a migraine. It's beautiful outside. There's other writing to do. It's time to start thinking about buying seeds. Context. My context just keeps chasing me through my days. I am surrounded by all the parts of me that I have already won and only have to keep. There is no suspense as the claw hovers, no disappointment as it pulls back.

Here, I am already a prize that somebody gets to hold.

Ms.Adams, I have nothing to say.

Photo Credit: Morguefile by doctor_bob

I tutor.

Every week, a new contrivance. Picture prompt. Mind map. Narrative. Fishbone. Hamburger essay. Substitute that word "run" for something more colorful! It does not always need to be "flew." 

Ms. Adams, I have nothing to say.

Writing, it turns out, is not a given. Who knew? And, with 10,000 tricks up my sleeve, teaching the child who cannot spell or use correct grammar to write is often frustratingly slow. For my own part, I may as well teach them how to grow hair. How to convert oxygen in their cells. But I say I can do this and I damn well will. Once in a while, the light turns on and inspiration gleams. Then, no matter what I get, I will be pleased. But I have to wonder...

Why can I write? 

Is it natural inclination? My eldest son could climb a tree almost as soon as he could walk. Gifted with quick-twitch muscle and ropy limbs, he was built to scale a tree. Is the art of writing as simple an act as that? I think I started writing when I was first old enough to move a pen, or could get an adult to sit in a chair and type. Perhaps there have been muses inside me writhing like so many maggoty, inspired worms, threatening to consume me if I do not retch them out onto a page. Perhaps I write because I can and always could.

Really?

Perhaps, instead, I was blessed by my family. Bathed in children's classics, read to day and night, I was given the works of Kipling, Carroll, Lindgren, and soon could read them on my own. I read like some children eat potato chips, in a room full of crumpled drawings and scattered scarves, laundry heaps and costumes—the library of a child. I spoke in antiquated sentences with grammar fallen out of fashion and vocabulary no one knew but the literary greats and I. Maybe writing in a household full of literature is like picking up a piano in the home of a concert musician, instruments scattered about. Growing up with Nickelodeon and structured afternoons, I might be someone else entirely.

But...why can I write?

Is it practice? How many words had I set on pages before my narratives made sense, before adjectives no longer smothered nouns in bosoms pillowy but let them say their piece? How many essays had I written before I let sentences die when they needed to be killed? How much work did I have to do to recognize I'd written crap again? 

Day after day after day, I write. My voice alters, sometimes clear, more often garbled. I rarely have the luxury of editing as much as I would like, especially on a NaBloPoMo month. But I can write. Compared to a novice if not to a master, I can write.

Why?

And how to give that gift away?

Note: For a somewhat more glimmering view of my escapades in teaching writing, you might look at this. It makes me look way better.

Flashback August 28, 2011: What I Have Been Doing Instead of Blogging

Photo Credit: Morguefile by cohdra

I am sorry I haven't written. I have been spending all my spare time working out soccer carpools on Excel spreadsheets and composing emails to committees of helicopter parents and haven't had time to do things like write or talk to my friends. Also I threw up in the middle of the night Wednesday. I think I have evening sickness. Which is what you get when your teenager is being born from his slimy, decaying chrysalis shell. Come over and we'll have coffee and talk about it.

My oldest son is fourteen today, which is surprising because I'm only twenty-four. At least, I was when I last remembered. He spent the weekend at a Coming of Age retreat, which is a Unitarian thing. We do that instead of a bar mitzvah. The food is not as good, but they got to do a ropes course.

I started a new position at work. I am the reading coach. So I have been testing first graders to see if they can read. They can't. Later I am going to test my dog on his algebra.

Anyway, I miss blogging. I should do that instead of post stuff to Facebook, which no one cares about anyway. Or I should grow up and stop trying to express every thought that crosses my mind in public.

Not likely.

 

What is Faith in Ambiguity?

Faith: belief in anything, as a code of ethics, standards of merit,etc.

Ambiguity: doubtfulness or uncertainty of meaning or intention

Photo by Mike Adams

"What do you blog about?"

Again and again, at my first writer's conference, I was asked what my blog was about and what kind of writing I do. I tried answering this question multiple different ways.

"Oh, I write some funny stuff and some think-y stuff."

"I write about ducks."

"I write about my kids. My kids all have ADHD. I guess it's a blog about ADHD."

The most surprising thing to me was that when people heard "Faith in Ambiguity," they usually asked me if the blog was about my faith.

"No," I would say. "It's about my faith in ambiguity."

Obviously, this wasn't clear, even to me. I learned many things at the Erma Bombeck Writer's Workshop, some of them tactical, some of them inspirational, that will make me a better writer and a better blogger. None were more important than this:

I am funny, but I am not a humorist. I am a writer who writes about an idea. That idea is faith in ambiguity.

What is faith in ambiguity? Faith in ambiguity is about asking questions, questioning assumptions and taking a second look. It is about carefully listening to both sides of an argument and then throwing both of them out the window to look for the truth that neither side has found, in the dirty, dark place everyone forgot to look. Faith in ambiguity is about making the joke that gets the laugh of recognition but that no one was brave enough to tell.  Faith in ambiguity is about owning every part of being human, every part of being alive–the illness, the pain, the addiction, the embarrassment, the fear, as well as the love and inspiration. It is about showing up, fully human, not knowing the answer to anything, and saying so, and then laughing until you wet your pants because it is all so ridiculously hilarious.

Why, you might ask, would all this uncertainty be good? People find great comfort in answers and the faith they hold that there is a reason and order underlying everything. Ambiguity–faith in ambiguity–seems to fly in the face of that comfort. And I really think that it does. People who want their bee hives to remain unprodded will probably not like this blog as much as people who are strangely fascinated by a sudden exodus of bees. That is OK with me. I stopped being comfortable years ago with the answers that were served to me like bland porridge, and started seeking my own. But, apart from personal temperament, I think there are some excellent reasons for having a little more faith in ambiguity, all around.

Not knowing means we can experiment. If we are already sure that the earth is flat and traveling to the end will cause a person to fall off into an abyss, there is no reason to circumnavigate the globe. It takes a doubter to come up with that. All explorers are, by nature, doubtful people–the ones who want to see evidence with their own two eyes–our kindred souls rejecting their breakfast pablum in search of more savory fare that may conceivably exist, if only they look far enough.

Science is a function of uncertainty. Whether or not you think you like science, my strong guess is that you enjoy electricity, access to emergency health care and Starbucks WiFi, all of which are the products of somebody at some point supposing that a) this is not really all there is and b) it could actually be better. People who push the boundaries of the world forward, causing creation to unroll in a direction heretofore unimaginable, are not contented souls. They have itchy minds, full of wonders and doubts and problems to solve. I write because my mind itches something awful and the only way I know to scratch it is to inflict the questions I have on the rest of the world.

When we don't know, we can ask. Asking is a profoundly powerful act–one that binds communities together in humble service and mutual respect of one another. In a family, in a church congregation, in a classroom, in an office, if you want to empower the people you find yourself traveling along with, ask them. Ask them for advice. Ask them how to work the TV. Ask them what they really want from their community. Then listen. We cannot ask if the answers sit on our tongue, melting like lozenges that make everything taste like oranges. Our mouths have to be clean. I have learned to ask children for help and to tell them I am not sure and, because of this, they see that they can become a person of importance with me. They are dying to be asked for their assistance, and I find adults to be no different.

When we don't know, when we are not sure, we can have compassion. I may think you were rude to me just now, but what if really you are in terrible pain? What if I misunderstood? What if your intentions, all along, have been aimed toward helping me and I could see you as nothing but a bully? Ambiguity makes me pause. The data is not clear. Is that child behaving this way in class because their parents are bad parents or because the delivery of my curriculum is not working for them? Is it ADHD or boredom? A terrible attitude or perhaps a crippled sense of self? If I am not sure, I look again. And again. Doing so makes me a better teacher, mother and friend.

The long arc of justice is and always has been a function of the shedding of our collective assumptions. We don't think black people are lesser creatures deserving of bondage and abasement. We know they are. We know gay people are crazy. We know what kind of parents are the wrong kind. We know so much of which we have no experience at all. We are never free from the repetition of the same cruel injustice over and over until we stop knowing. If history is any guide, we should be very, very concerned about the things that we think we know.

Faith in ambiguity is the doubt of the mindful, the practice of asking "Why?" of everything, but most especially, of ourselves. Faith in ambiguity, is not, however, a license not to choose. The worst thing we can do, in my opinion, is fail to choose. In the absence of choice, Life drags us along by our ankle and we hit our heads repeatedly on the concrete as events fly by us, which we have observed but never been the author of.  Life presents you with decisions, and, if you are like me, you consider everything from the polarity of the earth to the astrological signs of the people involved, and then belabor that decision until it is worn down to a tiny nub of a thing, chewed through with agitation. And then you just select and live with the result. Every time you do, you end up upright, able to say, at least "Oh, well, that was not the best decision I ever made."

Faith in ambiguity is also not ignoring the facts. It is not sticking your fingers into your ears and saying that nothing is clear so you are going to ignore overwhelming evidence in favor of whatever inclination it is easiest to bear. Not knowing leads the scientist to conduct her experiment, a mathematician to find his equation, a philosopher to observe and enlarge on our views of humankind. It does not, on the other hand, alter the course of history in any meaningful way to throw out the controls, pretend that two equals three and suppose a new and implausible kind of human. It's just make-believe.  Faith in ambiguity is about facing the facts. If there is crap on the living room floor, it is about saying so, not imagining that really there is a Tootsie Roll. What is in question here is really the motivation of the dog.

I need to write to soothe my itchy brain, and I am so grateful that you show up and apply aloe. What I really want for this blog is to create a space on that internet that holds apart the crushing walls of surety and ill humor and allows us to laugh at silly, stupid things and to speak our mind respectfully without fear of retribution. I want to have this be a place where people come to take a second look, and sometimes to stop and giggle between those hard glances. So, I have this mission to spread a little faith in ambiguity out into the world–just cast out my little whirling dandelion seed of an idea upon its breezes–and see what happens.

Are you in?

Fences You Can't Pass

I wonder how the family dog must feel the first time he encounters the invisible fence. There he is, just moseying over, as he always has done, to pee in a nice, shady spot on the tire of your car, when suddenly an unpleasant static charge jolts through his body. Does he immediately connect this sensation with the necessity  to remain within a defined area? If he is my dog, he will try it twice and then look around dolefully, as if the world has suddenly become a place full of cruel electric spankings visited upon very nice dogs. He will whimper and skulk off to mope under a patio chair, defeated. Invisible things are hard to navigate. Give me a nice chain link fence any day. I want to see where I cannot go. I like neither the indignity and surprise or the sudden electric shock of the buried electric alternative.

I don't want to talk about dogs, though. I want to talk about social class. I keep stepping over the boundary. Static charges prick my senses over and over, the adrenalin of my awareness that I am out of place. If I am faking it well enough, no one else notices. Or maybe they do. I am so charged up with my fear of their noticing, I don't think I can see if they really do.

I am a woman destined to feel out of place. One frequently hears the heartwarming story of the first child of an immigrant family to go to college. Imagine this in reverse. I am the child of an educated family, and I have managed to distinguish myself by being virtually the only relation to fail to earn a college degree. My maternal grandfather was a noted minister, the kind of man who had influence over politics from his pulpit, and the author of ten or more heady and beautifully written books. His wife, my grandmother, had a degree in Latin and was a gale force of intelligence in her own right. These were educated people. My father's parents, I believe, were not college-educated but his father was a relatively successful businessman and smart as a whip. My dad went on to study music on the graduate and post-graduate level. My mother worked, while I grew up, as an instructional assistant, just as I do, and then completed her degree, graduating summa cum laude in English with a creative writing emphasis. Brilliant, talented, and certified.

I grew up in a household where correct grammar was spoken, classic literature was read to me, and critical thought was encouraged. I always assumed I would go to college. Two things got in the way. As a teenager, I developed disabling depression and then drug addiction. By the time I got clean and sober, at the age of seventeen, while I did go straight to community college, I lacked any meaningful experience of hard work. I tended to take classes of interest to me, with no particular goal in mind, maintain an almost 4.0 grade point average, and drop anything that bored me or with which I had made any academic fumble. I was aimless and immature. The second death knell in my academic future was my extreme fertility. I got pregnant at twenty-one, when I could easily have finished college already had I had any sort of plan in mind, but hadn't, and ended up on bed rest for pre-term labor. I had a little boy. Then another.

The next years of my life were consumed with children. I was basically a child myself when I had my first son. Still believing that the world would rise up to cradle me should I prove my inherent worthiness to it, I fumbled forth, armed only with an array of cloth diapers and wooden toys, to be the right kind of mother. Here's what you may not understand about this if you have done this the right way yourself, marrying first, completing college before that. When you essentially give up your future to raise a child, you damn well put your heart and soul into it. This makes you less likely to return to school, not more. Having had to answer every kind of question from the well-meaning "Are you sure you are doing the right thing?" to the utterly appalling "Do you know who the father is?" (Yes, I'm engaged to him!), I was prepared to prove to the world that raising children was the best use of my time and talents. The rest is history.

The one time when, after I divorced, I prudently returned to school again and decided to major in Sociology (hence my interest in class), I was again interrupted by becoming pregnant and ending up on bed rest. I bore baby boy number three. I always meant to go back. I waited until we could afford it. I waited until the kids were older. When I was diagnosed with the multiple health conditions that now cause my life to be a daily compromise between my grandiose visions of clean houses and brilliant blog posts and my need for rest, I let the door on my academic future shut gently and finally behind me.

I will never have a college degree.

I work as an instructional assistant. My job employs my mind in a brilliant sort of way. Interweaving a gift for humor, love of children and the lightness of heart it takes to work with them, a knowledge of child development, and something critical to learn and be good at, I am privileged to be able to work with as many as thirty students a day teaching reading skills, and see a concrete difference made with the work I do. I love my writing as well. I feel like it provides something both for me and for the world–on my best days– that I want for the world to have. Parenting is perhaps the best of my jobs. There is nothing more worthwhile than the privilege of helping to shape a human being, to see who that person is growing to become and try to provide some resource for their greatness. I  am, I think, a good mother. These are engaging and worthy acts. They do not, however, come with award, certificates, recommendations or special associations.

None of this has ever bothered me a day in my life. Until I tried to fill in my profile for LinkedIn. Suddenly my life started to have the quality of poverty. No awards. No certifications. No degree. Do you think people will be impressed if I write that people say I am very, very smart and always show up on time?

Sitting amidst groups of women at the Erma Bombeck Writer's Conference, I was lost in a frenzy of rules I didn't understand. Books were mentioned I have not read, although I read avidly. (I have apparently read all the wrong books. How was this accomplished?) I cannot remember which is the correct fork to use when they give me two forks at my place setting. When is it O.K. to place my cloth napkin on the table? I do not have a business card. I have only one cardigan. Will anyone notice? What is the protocol for awaiting a cab at a nice hotel? Apparently, one does not have to stand out on the curb. The driver will come in and retrieve you. Who knew? I felt continually as if I was impersonating someone else. I might be caught out at any moment. Although I was enjoying myself, the tension felt like something I could bite.

People have said very encouraging things and this has been immensely helpful. I have been told I am a good writer and sweetly reprimanded not to be so self-effacing. It occurred to me only this morning that what I am pressed up against is larger than an issue of self-esteem, although it certainly is an issue of self-esteem as well. It is an issue of class.

Class is not so permeable in our society. Data proves this. It tends to stick to generations moving down, more so than in some other countries, more so–much more so–than we like to think. Granted, it sticks much less so than in many, many less fortunate places. Education is, in so many ways, the golden ticket. This is not a political blog, and I am not going to illustrate the inherent unfairness of education for you here, but suffice it to say, that it's not a level playing field out there, but if you can get an education, in a lot of ways, this can be a ticket to an elevation of class. I did the opposite. Through choices I made of my own free will, I moved myself downward. It is not so easy to get back up.

I have two final thoughts about all this. One has to do with my parenting. I go to church and otherwise associate with a community of perfectly lovely people (and I don't say that tongue in cheek–I mean they are. Perfectly. Lovely.). They are, as far as I can tell, all educated people. I believe it may be true that my family is perhaps the lowest class family in our congregation. Again, I don't mean this in terms of anything snide. I mean that we struggle financially, that we drive old cars, and that neither my husband nor I have degrees. Sometimes, someone will say that they very much want their child to take a year off of after high school before going to college, that they don't think grades are all that important, or that, having gotten a PhD themselves, they think college education is overrated. Whenever I hear this, I want to turn on this person and scream like a crazed banshee.

I tell my kids: It does matter. It matters more than you can imagine. It will matter over and over and over, when you are eating dinner with friends, when you want to put your kids in a sport, when you want to go see Europe. Your education will give you choices. If you have a choice and you want to move off of the grid and build a house with your own two hands and grow quinoa, do so with my blessing. I mean this from the bottom of my heart. But please, please, please allow yourself that choice before you do so. No matter how smart and how talented you are, no matter how much potential you have, life wants you to show your credentials. Have some. Know how to work. Know how to jump through hoops. Hoop jumping is a really useful skill. Know and protect your passions like fragile shoots from hard frosts, but do not be afraid to do what you have to provide for yourself. There is a great deal of inspiration to be found in the luxury of not having to work your ass off doing manual labor, day after grinding day.

Here is my last thought: If this is hard for me, (And it is. It really, really is.) what is it like for someone who has a raw talent but cannot use standard written English well? What is it like for someone who did not have the advantage of my exposure to Shakespeare, to Greek mythology, to history? Are we really saying none of these people can write?

I can get on the grammar Nazi bandwagon as quick as anyone. Or at least I could until I realized I was surrounded by my betters in the writing world. I am annoyed by misspellings, driven crazy by misused apostrophes. But what if all I am doing is setting up invisible fences all around me? Fences past which you can't pass if you are dyslexic. Fences you can't pass if you are raised in East LA, exposed to a grammar that follows rules we might find equally hard to follow. Fences you can't pass if you are still learning and growing as a writer. (Aren't we all?)

I think I will stop cracking wise about people's misused apostrophes. The world would be a richer place if it were filled with the voices of all of us–voices edged with the hard beauty of the street vernacular and the southern drawl and the fascinatingly off-kilter English of the immigrant. Imagine the written world a cacophony of voices and all of us a little more able to listen for the beauty in every one.

Images are used according to allowable terms from MorgueFile.

Amplifying the Reach of Your Blog: a to do List

I learned a lot about blogging at the Erma Bombeck Writer's Workshop last weekend. It wasn't a blogging conference, per se, but a writer's conference, which I think, is part of why I enjoyed it so much. But there was ample information about blogging. Since we all must blog. It has been commanded.

When I was there, I thought of all my readers who are bloggers, which is a good-sized chunk of you and almost all of those who comment. (Apparently, non-bloggers don't comment on blogs. It's a thing I have not yet fully understood. Perhaps they are simply less compelled to be verbal all the time? You guys tell me.) Anyway, this post is written particularly for those of you who blog. I want to share what I can with you of what I learned there.

At the conference, I attended a session with Nettie Reynolds, who is so demonstrably awesome that she had actually re-written "I Got You, Babe" to be pertinent to our blogging concerns and sat, quite naturally and elegantly, with a ukulele perched on her lap while she spoke with authority on social media and blogging. Famous people people pay her to tell them how to do this (use social media, not play ukulele). I will be merely piece-mealing for you bits of what she said, sifted through the wrinkled cheesecloth of my exhausted brain. In essence, her presentation was better. I will not, for instance, do Sonny and Cher for you.

I also attended a session with Debba Haupert, who is the creator of Girlfriendology–a wildly successful online resource for women–and a master of the use of social media. Both of these successful women had a wealth of information on how to get people to read your blog. Assuming you want people to read it. Blogging can really be a good way to create a springboard from which to launch a credible career as an author, and I think a lot of us have that in mind. I certainly do. Whether we naturally love social media or not, this is how it gets done. Unless you are "discovered," which I can't help you with. I learned just enough about writing a book proposal to decide never to do that, so I can't help you there either.

Additionally, I have to credit Nicole Amsler with some of these great suggestions, which she bestowed upon me along with a pen (lost mine–shocker!) and multiple enthusiastic introductions to other attendees. Nicole is also an authority on social media. I am reminded vaguely of Yoda, except she is much better looking.

I already knew to cross-post on platforms like Blog Her, to tweet (more than once a day–people don't see your stuff unless it happens to pop into their stream), to have a Facebook fan page for your blog and post to that, and to visit and comment on other blogs. However, I learned quite a number of things that were unexpected.

1. Your blog roll is really important. It needs to be vibrant and stay updated. (Mea culpa.) One third of the items on it need to be major media sources. This seemed counter-intuitive to me, since I am not a topical writer but a more of a idea writer. However, Nettie says it can really help you to meet your goals. It seems linking to some sources that share the kind of content you are interested in–the kind of places that you want to know about you–is a very good idea. 


2. Guest post. You knew this, right? But not just for your best blogging pals. Shop for places where you can post and get your writing in front of other people, then send in your best quality, 100% proofread work, with images attached in an email. Be aware of the style of the blog you are posting for and work with that style. 


3. Define and create new terms on your blog. Find a new way to talk about the same old thing, and then tag using that term. Nettie has helped clients invent terms that went viral, and when that topic was discussed, her client was called to talk about it.


4. Create an editorial calendar. You don't have to be chained to the calendar, but it helps to create a rough one to work with. Here's what should go on it: Features. What are the features your readers count on you for? These are the areas you post on again and again, the larger categories. Work these into a calendar and then, when you have a great idea about a post on your chickens' mating rituals, pencil it in the right spot for the next time you are scheduled to write about pygmy hens. 


5. Develop a blog mission statement that you can tell people. This was a huge blunder for me. 200 times over the weekend I was asked "What is your blog ABOUT?"  and I found myself muttering that it isn't really about anything...it's just my writing. Wrong answer. Actually, it occurs to me, my blog is "ruminations on life, spirituality, pet hoarding, and parenting from the standpoint that the worst enemy of freedom is certainty." I finally started telling people this. By the way, the speech needs to fit in a tweet. 140 characters or less. (Also, have a damn card to hand people when you go to a conference. Fail #2.)


6. Link to outside sources. A lot. And name the source. Choose people who you want to call you and ask you to appear on their show, write for their publication, or date their cute cousin. (The cousin thing is my added suggestion. It's good, huh?) But do this authentically. Don't do it if you actually don't mean it, only if you actually admire and want to reference their work. (At this rate, I am a total shoe-in to have Tangled Lou introduce me to all her hot relatives, by the way. This plan was unintentional, but I am thrilled.) These people, it turns out, have Google Alerts set on their names. They notice when you name them. And major media sources are required to reference online sources in their work. Maybe they will want to contact you for your views on duck euthanasia. 


7. Be on LinkedIn. It is a huge source of writing work. Yay! Another thing to join. I can hardly wait.


8. Build your own list. This suggestion comes from Debba Haupert. Facebook, Twitter and wherever else you belong–they all own their own lists and they change the rules constantly. You should have your own list of readers so that you can contact them directly and send out a weekly newsletter. For instance, you can email all the people in Houston, when you are in Houston, and demand that they meet you for coffee, and pay as well. I am still wrapping my head around how to do this list thing.


9. Adjust the schedule of your content to fit when people view. To know this, you can survey your readers. Using your list. Woo hoo! When the Hey do you guys read me??? Consider yourselves surveyed.


10. Use Pinterest. It is driving an exponential amount of traffic to blogs. If you are stumped for an image to pin, you can use a simple background (use an image you have the rights to), work it up in Picasa,  PicMonkey or another similar service, with a quote from your blog post and then watermark it with your URL. Pin this. It will drive traffic back to your blog. You can post videos to Pinterest as well. 


11. Try to link when you tweet. You can link to old posts on topic with what you are tweeting about. On Earth Day, when wishing everyone well, why not link to your post on making your own toilet paper?  


12. Use only 30-50% of your social media time to promote yourself. Use the rest to promote others and to engage with people. Make it a conversation, not a door to door sales pitch. You're not as cute as a girl scout. Yes, you can spend your whole life doing this social media schtick. Nettie suggests using an egg timer to set limits on your social media time. Start with 30 minutes three times a week. 


13. Choose ten pillar posts (your best ones) on your blog and optimize these with SEO. Click the link for a tutorial, complete with obnoxious voice tones, on what this means. Also optimize all your static pages (the ones that stay on your blog like Home, About, Contact etc.). Don't worry about doing this for the rest.


14. Switch to Word Press with a straight URL. Meaning faithinambiguity.com (which I actually already own but haven't moved to yet) not faithinambiguity.blogspot.com. Why? Blogger/Blogspot blogs don't search as well. Simply switching the same content over to Wordpress unchanged can improve your search results. Also, apparently, Blogger is not thriving and, if Google packs in this offering, your front door just disappeared. If you own your URL, no matter what, your front door stays open. Additionally, Word Press is the standard in blogs. It is considered to be more versatile and have better plug-in capabilities. 


15. Be clear why you are doing this. Who do you want to reach? What do you have to say to the world? What would you like your results to be? Do you want to have a certain number of followers, a certain amount of attention? Do you want a book deal? Do you want to self-publish and have a market for people to purchase your work? Do you want your blog to be a portfolio for you of the kind of writing you can do? Take some time to think about why you are doing this and how much is for personal fulfillment as opposed to meeting certain goals. 

I don't know about you, but I have a lot of work to do, apparently. I want to look at how many times a week I can write well and if I can leave myself time to work on other writing projects. I want to get ahead of just thinking of whatever is on my mind and posting that, and start adding a bit more intention so that this blog reflects more of my best ability. I need to clean up the design of my blog and transfer platforms. And I need to join LinkedIn. Damn it.

It is a bit overwhelming, but I am taking it bit by bit and doing a lot of soul searching about what I want from my writing. I don't want to compromise my voice. I am not a tip writer (except today, I guess.) I am not interested in trying to win a social media Homecoming Queen contest. However, I would very much like more people to read my work. So, if I can do that in smart ways, with total integrity, then I am in. 

How about you? What do you think for yourselves when you receive this kind of advice on your blogging?

Images are used according to allowable terms from MorgueFile.

Best Moments from the Erma Bombeck Writer's Workshop

Best Moments from the Erma Bombeck Writer's Workshop, 

not in Chronological Order

1. When I was sitting in a self-publishing session next to Barbara Cooley, waiting for things to begin and complaining how very social and self-promoting writers have to be now, when she launched into the idea of tweets from famous authors. Hemmingway: "Book out. Buy. Now." I really hope Barbara writes up this concept because it's brilliant. Imagine, if you will, J.D. Salinger's tweets.


2. Sitting at dinner with with Nicole Amsler, a fast friend at the conference, when she dished that she was once hired to write copy for anatomical dummies, including one named "Prostrate Paul." This story is pee-in-your-pants funny, and it is her story, although every writer there was itching to grab it. We demanded that she write it. It is basically the funniest situation I have ever heard of in my life. Here's a teaser. "Screwable anus." My stomach still hurts from laughing.


3. Listening to Gina Barreca at the last dinner of the conference. She is my new hero. She said many brilliant and hilarious things, but the best by far was when she said (I paraphrase) that for years she had had a sign that said "Work like you don't need money, love like you've never been hurt, dance like nobody's watching" and she thought that it was true but things were in the wrong order. It needed to say "Love like you don't need the money, work like nobody's watching, dance like you've never been hurt." Isn't that so much more true?


4. Meeting people. I met fabulous women while I was there. I ate breakfast with Amy, who writes at the very funny blog 4th Frog, and also with Paula Reece of the equally funny Boogers and Burps. I got to know the dry wit of Jeanne of the Raisin Chronicles over a couple of meals and the sharp intelligence and perspective of the author of the Wisdom of Moda. Please check out all of the blogs I have linked to. These are very talented women. 


5. Ilene Beckerman saying to the audience in her sweet and frank way, " I don't think you're going to make a lot of money writing. I really don't think so." Honesty is so refreshing in a world where everyone wants you to believe the sky is the limit and then buy their book on how to get there. 

Since so many of my readers are bloggers, I will work on a post bulleting the top things I learned in my sessions at EBWW, but if you are are a serious writer, you need to get yourself there in 2014. The connections you make and information you glean will be well worth every penny you spend. And, hopefully, you will get to see me.

I plan to be famous by then. Or at least make enough money from writing to buy my own lattes. So I can give up pole dancing on weekends. 

Synergy

Sometimes the Universe humbles me with its random endowments of unnecessary beauty. When again I have looked upward, bored, expecting to see the mediocrity of a sky cast in the usual tones of blue made dour by rain, the Universe occasionally surprises me with the lavishness of a rainbow. My breath catches as I am forced again to recognize that while this world may rain down hurt without so much as an explanation, it also invests its resources in the refraction of light that makes an arc under which we could imagine one could walk to another plane altogether.

I forget, sometimes, how I can be surprised.

Yesterday I was traveling to the Erma Bombeck Writer's Conference. A tightly packed plane ride taking me from Albuquerque to Atlanta had been survived without incident. I had walked through the Atlanta airport, passing trains packed as if full of cattle, miles of moving walkway and escalators as steep as fire escapes. Humans jostled one another, forced a shoe ahead to get one person ahead in line. Repeatedly, I was bumped and knocked. The rule of travel, it seemed, was every organism for themselves. Finally lowering my body into the seat of my second flight, bound for Dayton, and gingerly organizing my belongings about me, I extracted a fantasy book and prepared to cocoon myself in the world of demonic evil and tormented good, apart from the crush of bodies all around me.

"I think someone is in my seat," she said politely.

My neighbor and I looked up. A polite, composed woman with eyes accustomed to laughter stood in the aisle beside us. The man seated next to me was in the wrong seat. They switched seats and she sat down. She and I exchanged pleasantries as she got settled and extracted her own book.

"Are you going home or leaving?" I asked.

"I am going to this event called the Erma Bombeck Writer's Conference," she said.

Synergy. The rest of the flight was spent getting to know Nettie Reynolds, who was to be a presenter at the conference and the first one on my list with her presentation on blogging. We talked about the conference, about writing, about blog promotion. Nettie works with talented people—some of them incredibly accomplished musicians, artists, and business people to help them use web strategy to get their message heard. She is the source of a wealth of knowledge in the area where I am in sorest need. I absorbed all of this information with rapt attention, grateful that she should take the time to share it with me. Then we spoke the rest of the flight about raising children, about surviving divorce, about faith. We talked about things I rarely discuss with anyone, things I can't even write about.

Occasionally, you meet someone with whom you feel immediately comfortable, someone you know is already a friend before a friendship could reasonably have formed, before you can remember their whole name. I recognize this feeling from my writing. The reason I get up at 5 A.M to write every day, whether sick or well, is because as words spring from my fingers onto the computer and into the world, I re-create the world as authentic for myself. The little corner I have written is perfect for me, and I can inhabit it with my whole soul. It is wallpapered in Truth and decorated with Meaning. I took the real world and made it mine, with nothing but a thesaurus and the patience to re-work one sentence fifteen times. When I find a friend like this—whether old or new—it is like already arriving in a corner of the world made up just as I needed, with the wallpaper just different enough to be refreshing.

"How are you getting to the conference?" she asked me.

"I was just going to catch a cab, " I told her.

"Well, " she said, "They are sending a limo to pick me up. Why don't you ride with me?"

"Ummmmm....sure," I said. My ordinary ride is a 2000 Dodge Caravan with a cracked windshield and weather stripping which is falling off like the skin of a snake suffering from leprosy. A limo. Sure. I guess that would be fine.

Arriving at baggage with Nettie, she sweetly informed the limo driver that I would be riding with her. And then, up walked Karen Walrond. This was all a somewhat surreal experience. I follow Karen on Twitter and Facebook. She is this gorgeous, inspired writer and photographer who I discovered through her photographs of Jenny Lawson, with whom she is close friends. All of her subjects are beautiful somehow and infused with a sort of love that has always made me curious. How does somebody photograph people and have you feel that these photos are of their souls, not just their bodies? After spending the limo ride with her, I didn't have to wonder anymore.  Karen obviously sees people as beautiful. Her demeanor is like the warm breeze that tells a seed it is time to waken. People, it seems, would come alive around her, ready to be seen for who they are.

I was in the presence of accomplishment and talent, so enormous it threatened to use up all the oxygen in the small limousine, and yet what I felt more than anything was the profound joy of shared humanity.

I am just somebody who didn't finish college. I have a hole in my sweater. I don't have any business cards. I am just the mother of three. I have made your coffee, waited on your tables and taught your children. I have never made more than eleven dollars an hour. I have fibromyalgia. I have a blog. I don't make a cent as a writer. My life is full of doctor's appointments and cat hair and the dust that collects in corners no one has energy to clean. Cracks form in the wood of our white trim and then darken with dirt. I came here because my father believes in me more than I could ever have begun to believe in myself. I came because I love to write.

Synergy. Sometimes, over and over, there is nothing but air and water and light. Sometimes there is rain. Darkness covers everything. That is part of the poetry of being alive—this sadness, this cast of grey, this separation of light from dark, water from air. But sometimes, just sometimes, drops of rain become tiny prisms, and we can see light shiver into color, its bend made visible to the naked eye, the stuff of fantasies. Sometimes we show up as our ordinary selves, with our low expectations and limited experience. We have never seen anything but Kansas, black and white as far as the eye can see, all we have ever known or felt we had a right to expect. And even so we walk right into Oz.

A Train of Consciousness Running Off the Tracks

Photo Credit: Flickr by ewout

My brain this morning is unemployable, my hands shiftless and agitated. I sit staring at the aggressively blank page of an empty Blogger post, repeatedly sniffing the acrid, floral conditioner still clinging to my hair and rifling through my brain for some trace of inspiration. Finding none, I check email. Nothing doing. I read several posts in my burgeoning Google Reader with some satisfaction, but, immediately, more take their place, like water emptied from the bucket left out in a rainstorm, like the heads lopped off a hydra.There is a hopeless quality to this. I check my schedule for the day and add several tasks to my Google calendar–none inspiring–so that the day, at 5 A.M. already stretches before me like a road in Kansas, visible as far as the eye can see and filled with laundry and errands. How can you hate a day that still remains dark with the cloaking of the night before? This requires enormous projection.

My alarm was set for 5 A.M. I woke at 4:15, after hours of fretful, intermittent sleep. Consciousness kept encroaching on me like invasive weeds, thrusting taproots into my slumber. Dumb mistakes I made at work. Embarrassing social missteps. Worry over traveling tomorrow. I pulled the offending thought roughly up each time, leaving the root embedded in the soil, and each time there it was again, showing new growth. Sometimes a dandelion, sometimes a thistle. On this occasion, during the wee hours of the morning, I had no desire to think through these concerns. I merely wanted to sleep.

Coffee tastes like bile. I could check Facebook, but I already know I won't care about anything. Somehow the same forty-odd people who emerge from the melee will say the same sorts of things they always say, and I will not have anything to say back. Maybe, though, someone has had a baby or died. Maybe something actual has happened. I set the thought aside. My cat is chasing what appears to be a large chunk of dirt, that perhaps came in on someone's shoe, around the living room. This activity, which has no real purpose, seems meaningful to him. I suppose it is just as useful as jogging. This thought amuses me for a while. Perhaps groups of upper middle class women, decked in head lamps, expensive trail shoes and hot pink running gear are gathering now in the early hours to enjoy one another's company and to chase stray objects around darkened living rooms. For cardiovascular exercise. Checking their heart rates on their Garmin training devices, one asks another, "Shall we go 'round the couch once more before we quit?"

Lack of sleep, I think, may have driven me moderately whacked. I understand that studies have been conducted at universities on cats wherein they are deprived of sleep, and that these cats invariably go insane. I can no longer remember where I read this. I may have made it up. I have several thoughts about this notion now. I am deeply troubled and fascinated by the idea that money might be found at public universities to torture cats. Also, I wonder how you can tell if a cat has gone insane. Does their behavior in any way differ from normal cat behavior, which normally verges on schizophrenia? Do the cats report that they are seeing things that no one else can see, that they believe that aliens are controlling their brains? Or do they just meow incessantly, piss themselves and attack for no reason, all of which could easily be within the normal scope of cat behavior in my experience? At any rate, I suspect I may be going the way of these cats. I have to meet with my boss today for my work evaluation. I may suddenly let loose a long meow and rake him with my bitten fingernails before running madly from the room.

And now it is time to get up and do something other than type random proof of mental unfitness into the Blogosphere. Time to feed dogs, release pet ducks, cook eggs. Time to pace like a jaguar about the house, appearing goal-oriented, appearing productive. It is a bad idea to publish everything you write, but I can't afford not to. My family is too poor to afford wasted writing. We save every bit of writing like soap slivers in order to mold them into an ugly, mottled lump of grey soap that I can publish to various platforms. We turn stumps of sentences into compost casseroles, the bones of old essays into stock. Our standards could be higher, but nothing is wasted.

Not one single word.

Why I am Not Mentally Stable Enough to Go to a Writer's Conference

In two days, I am going to be waking up in Dayton, Ohio–a lifelong dream. Bear with me here. There is a reason I am making this pilgrimage to the Midwest in April, when I have no vacation time. I am going to be attending the Erma Bombeck Writer's Workshop there, with a number of grown-up, accomplished writers who probably aren't really just part-time instructional assistants. I confess that I haven't read most of them. You see, I hardly have time to keep up with the bloggers I am already trying to follow, who keep producing posts, one after the other and dropping them into my Google Reader, as if it were the nest box of an over-productive hen house filled with chicken essayists. Each deleted egg smells of betrayal. This is one more reason, in a series of reasons which might constitute an excellent sequence of blog posts, that I am not a real blogger.

But I digress. I am going to Ohio. To get there, I am taking two planes, and, quite naturally, flying from New Mexico to Georgia first, so that I can see more of the country aerially. This will also allow me to get to the conference well after registration has ended and dinner has already started, and perhaps been cleared away, because I love nothing more than making a splash with my entry. This statement is intended to be ironic. In reality, if there was a way that I could arrive already knowing exactly what the wallpaper was going to look like, so that it would be easier to devise make-up which would coordinate with it, that would be my overwhelming preference.

I suffer from fibromyalgia, migraines and facial pain, so my plans for this conference thus far have focused on surviving the travel without breaking into open tears in the Atlanta Airport. I am beginning to suspect that this is not in keeping with the spirit of the thing. This revelation came upon me rather suddenly this morning, when I happened to see a tweet from a fellow participant. (This was nothing but stray happenstance, as my use of Twitter is somewhat poorer yet than my use of Google Reader.) This participant may as well have been cavorting on a trampoline for all the enthusiasm conveyed in her series of tweets for...meeting the other participants.

This had not actually occurred to me as a good thing. Rack that up with other social networking fails, in case you are keeping score. So far, my greatest level of enthusiasm had concerned the availability of a comfortable bed and my own hotel room. Honestly, it's not that I don't care about writing. Or writers. I do. I am very interested in any information I can glean that might allow me, ultimately to improve my craft and support myself with it. And the kinship I feel with fellow writers is hugely helpful to me–from the comfort of my own living room. I just am having one of these Survival Moments, where pain and anxiety over pain have twisted my focus inward, and my inner resources are more or less amassed in service of mundane feats such as feeding my family and going to that place that sends me paychecks as often as I can. In short, I am an asshole. Which is what I realized this morning.

I have to ask though–when did being a writer start to become such a demanding social enterprise anyway? I have visions of gifted authors throughout the ages–twisted by mental illness and alcoholism, some of them hermits, others misfits–and it is impossible to imagine any of them gathering at "conferences." If J.D. Salinger's success had depended on his polite willingness to reciprocate comments on mediocre blog posts, I believe we would not have had Catcher in the Rye. I would feel entirely better about the conference, if I could shield myself with the safety of a known person. For instance, if somehow I could have succeeded in forcing Tangled Lou to attend this event with me, I know that everything would be O.K. In high school, I was given to running a sort of sub-curriculum for myself, which consisted of lurking in corners discussing events in impassioned tones and walking the hallways wearing no shoes. If I could complete the Erma Bombeck Writer's Workshop in this fashion, I think that I could be all right.

So, if you are someone who is attending the conference, look out for me. I will be the awkward looking 36 year-old woman with long, curly hair in disarray and the same facial expression President George Bush Sr. wore just before who threw up on a number of Japanese dignitaries. If you want to make me feel comfortable, ask me about duck husbandry or the development of phonemic awareness skills in kindergartners. You might think of me as a small, lost child. Try not to convey that this is your impression. I can get snappish with anything I perceive as patronization. Or maybe, on second thought, it would be safest to leave me alone. At least I've warned you of who to look out for, lest you find yourself entangled in awkward silence or disagreeable rebellion.

However, if you want to join me to lurk in corners, barefoot and swill espresso, while dissecting the worthiness of every statement uttered in your presence, shoot me a line. You're my new temporary best friend.

How to Completely Misunderstand Capitalism

So, recently they published my salary in the newspaper. They did this, I guess, so that, in the interest of transparency, all of the citizens of New Mexico can know my name and later check to be sure that I am giving them their due, since they are currently shelling out $10,588 a year for my labor as a reading instructional assistant. I won't say a whole lot more about that. I could, but I won't.

My husband works for local government. In all honesty, we are both lucky to have stable work and live in a great community. Also, I truly love my job. It gives me something I am accountable for–somewhere I am known as a reliable, competent person and it makes me feel happy and worthwhile. I enjoy the kids I work with, and I go to sleep every night knowing that I make a difference. It's better than crack, actually. Well, truth be told, I have never used crack, but I am supposing it's better. 

Truly, Mike and I are blessed in many, many ways. However, we have crappy stuff. 

Our thirteen year-old minivan has a big stupid crack across the windshield that was caused by one tiny pebble many years ago. We have never shelled out the $300 to replace it. Things have been falling off of the van for years–weather stripping, the passenger side visor, various knobs. The side mirror is cracked and we stuck a new mirror with an adhesive back on top of the old, cracked one. The heating and cooling system periodically makes so much noise that it sounds as if a dead body is rattling around in the dash. One has to decide how important it really is to be cool, when weighed against the assault on one's senses. Our small house is filled with areas of duct tape over glass, chipped porcelain, uncovered insulation, and un-patched sheet rock. Our carpet looks like it has been used to wipe down a muddy pig, which is not too far from the truth. We are the people of the broken things.

Because of all this, I would not necessarily be opposed to making money for some of the fifteen to twenty hours a week I spend writing, even though I also do this because I love it and I want to. Consequently, I realize I should submit some of my writing for publication. This, however, is a bit overwhelming to someone as mentally scattered as myself. Below are some thoughts I wrote on this earlier this month to my friend Tangled Lou: 

I was looking through Writer's Market this A.M, trying to find a target for either a re-worked version of my What is not Simple piece or a piece on the decision to home school, explored from a personal, non-polarizing angle, and what I find is that mostly the expectation if you are a writer is that you should work your ass off for free, carefully acquaint yourself with each publication's last six months of offerings, and do everything but offer blow jobs for the privilege of being published. Of course, I will happily follow all of these rules and submit my blood, sweat and tear-covered writing for rejection, in the faint hope that someone will publish it, so that I can say to myself, with conviction the words: "I am a writer."

I will keep trying. One of you probably needs to sponsor me, perhaps call me every day and give me specific task items that I can complete in this area. Right now, Submitting Written Work lives in the category of Things That Fill Me With Terror, along with Blog Design, Blog Promotion and Networking. So, I think I need to keep thinking of other things that might make me some money. What I'd really like is to be discovered in a "Wow! You're great. Let me pay you lots of money to do just what you're doing!" sort of way, but I fear this may never happen.

I would be willing to run ads, if I liked the ads. I hate paper towels, so I don't want them on my site. I also don't like packaged snacks or disposable diapers. I would be willing to advertise treatment facilities of good repute or wildlife centers or progressive think tanks. And these are always looking to run ads on small blogs with a monthly readership just under 3,000 page views a month, so I'm pretty much just waiting on a call there. I wouldn't mind running ads for other bloggers, artists, wonderful non-profits...

In fact, during this thought process, I have gotten so inspired in realizing that I could use my blog as a pulpit to promote the people and organizations I care about, that I am all ready to offer ad space for free as a public service...and this is why I suck running a business. If I was a hooker, I'd probably just start giving away sex to poor homeless guys who couldn't afford it on general principle. I'm that good at this.

I think I'll just go back to my socialist phonemic awareness curriculum. In the meantime, please send checks. Make them out to "Hopelessly Deluded Ninny."

Writing: When the Muse Strikes

First–go read this post on Periphery. Then come back. Thanks again, Tangled Lou, for making my brain work this morning. What are the nuts and bolts of my writing and editing process? How do I write? How much do I edit? What kind of writer am I?

I write because it is in my schedule to write, generally, not because the muse strikes. This is because I am the mother of three, I guess. When the muse strikes, her ass has to wait until there's a free moment. I do remember what she was talking about though. Sometimes I even scribble down notes.

I compose in Blogger. I'm so used to it that I compose in Blogger even when it isn't for my blog, which is dumb. It's like my blog owns ALL my writing. I should probably stop doing that, if I am going to start submitting work for actual pay, huh?

I have no pre-formed outline in my head, or anywhere else, when I sit down to write, although I usually have a general notion, more like a prompt than anything more specific. I grab onto that idea, usually without any real sense where I want to go with it exactly and start writing. I get quiet and listen for the right word. I keep a thesaurus tab open all the time on my browser, to help me recollect the perfect word I am trying to remember, or sometimes replace a word that just sounds wrong in the sentence.

I edit as I go. I get several paragraphs in, having corrected all the spelling and grammar mistakes I find as I write, and start re-reading it to myself. I do this every time I hit a pause and am not sure where to go next. When I re-read, I can hear both what is wrong with what I wrote and what I need to write next. By "what is wrong" I mean a lot of things: the rhythm of a sentence and paragraph, the harmony of words sharing that space together, the consistency of tone. Does the sentence ramble or sound too bare? When does a colorful word add depth and when does it sound overworked, pompous?

Unless I am greatly pressed for time, I re-read and edit like this and then go over the finished product in preview mode up to 10-15 times, each time catching new errors or clunky turns of phrase. I catch the most errors when I read aloud. An average post takes me two to three hours to write because of this. After I post it, my 14 year old invariably says "Did you mean 'on' here, not 'of? etc., etc. anyway." This is why a professional editor would not go amiss.

I scrap heaps of writing. I have learned to be totally unattached to my work until it feels finished. I have spent up to an hour working on a post, realized it sucks lemons, and consigned it to the scrap heap, images, edits and all. I have a graveyard of unfinished posts or posts I started just to remind myself I want to write about that. I rarely get back to the former.

My mom is a writer and, growing up around writers, I learned to be unafraid to toss any amount of writing that didn't serve what I was after. I used to get very upset, when I was younger, and Mom would say "This paragraph doesn't work." A whole paragraph was like a child to me. Now I toss paragraphs on the midden heap with nary a backward glance. Most of this post has been about editing because that is most of what my writing time is consumed with. So there you have it.

The most interesting question TL asks is this:  Does your brain shut down when you write? Or are your senses alive? I am totally alive when I write. Writing is a long racing slog to the top of a mountain, my body coursing with endorphins. The voice of the sentence that wants to be expressed becoming the true thought that appears in text makes me feel like a prophet. I have total faith that if I can hear well enough, I can write.

Tangled Lou has a great dialogue going in the comments of her post on this topic, which I linked above. You should check that out and join in. I have a number of readers who are not writers, but are photographers, musicians, actors, computer programmers, and otherwise talented human beings. What I am curious about is "the zone." Do you do you art, music, etc. in a state of grace? Are you fully alive when you are doing it, and is this why you do it, because you have to? Or is it just for fun? Some of you say you are "not commenters," but I want to hear from you!

However, before you answer–would you please, if so inclined vote for me as one of Circle of Moms Top 25 Funny Moms? I have a garish pink button on the top of my blog. Simply click it and it will whisk you magically away to a web page where my blog is buried way the Hell down near the bottom. You can vote once a day until March 21, 2012. You should not spend all day voting over and over, as much as you might like to, because that would be against the rules. You are encouraged to return every day, say, after your breakfast cereal and vote again. You will be doing this purely to cheer me up. It is essentially meaningless. But, so are birthdays and we all keep right on celebrating them anyway, right? It will make me happy.

Think of it as a pony that you can give me for free.