I shouldn’t be overly surprised that my anonymous blog would eventually present me with a conflict of authenticity. When I began my blog, I thought I’d be a funny, sarcastic mom like Dooce. Later, I contemplated a transformation, self-actualization angle, but then Kelle Hampton Bloomed. The other educators who paved the way for teacher blogging leave mine fields of rubber rooms, pink slips, non-re-elects, and five-to-ten with good behavior.
Little hope of being a pioneer of anything. Lifestyle make-over, spiritual awakening, career overhaul, sex re-assignment. Name it. Someone else got there first.
Every day I think, “Tomorrow I’ll write something for publication” and then I scribble in my journal and dig myself deeper into the pattern of apathy and lethargy. The momentum of stillness. Shit, how do I know what’s ground-breaking, prosaic, trend-setting, unique, or middling until I write it?
Start where you are, the mentors all say: It’s the end of another school year. My 14th. The last two weeks feel like a relationship where you both know it’s over, but neither one of you has felt up to having “the talk.” Everyone is hoping that they’re doing enough to pull off a D.
My ex, Donny, and I were in The End Times so obviously that when one of us started a conversation, “the talk” hung in the air like something going bad in the fridge (or maybe the garbage disposal or the trash? Anyway, definitely in the kitchen). Imagine my surprise when he showed up on a Wednesday worknight with take-out and a movie rental which transitioned into mutually initiated, neighbor-banging-on-the-wall-screaming-“SHUT UP!”-sex. Then “the talk.” Over the phone. The next day. He called me in my classroom.
“But what about Wednesday night?”
“You had my favorite UCLA sweatshirt,” he said. “Anyway, I think you had a pretty good time too.”
I am still embarrassed over the extent to which I lost control of my emotions and the volume of my expletives, in my classroom, ten minutes before the start of Open House. He was pretty clever about not only how to get his favorite sweatshirt back, but when to initiate a dreaded phone call. It had a built-in expiration.
Well-played, Donny.
I think the killing blow was his smugness. Or the fact that he was right. No, it was that he beat me to the punch. I’d carelessly (intentionally) shoe-horned us into a 7-month relationship that should have been a one-night-stand. And I did have a good time. I couldn’t justify my bitterness, which pissed me off even more. Donny never promised anything, never said “I love you,” never kept a toothbrush at my place. The disputed sweatshirt was not a gift. He hadn’t left it behind. I’d worn it home when I was cold.
He never moved anything into my apartment except DNA. He once came to my house for a sleepover and handed me a magazine I’d read and left at his place with the accusatory, “You left this at my apartment.”
Today, The New Yorker, tomorrow The Knot?
Okay, fine, it was Us Weekly. What’s your point?
I wanted my indignant rage, but I didn’t get it. There is satisfaction in being the wronged party that I couldn’t feel with Donny’s rejection because we were wrong from the get-go and I was the one who should have broken it off. The only humiliation more demeaning than dating beneath me was getting dumped beneath me.
I still work with Donny, though I see him infrequently. We teach in different departments and don’t have friends in common. If we end up chatting in common areas, coworker witnesses’ frozen smiles say, “Please don’t let this get weird; but if it does, please don’t let me miss it.” Donny told me a story last week in the sign-in/mailbox room that ended with “I knew you of all people would get where I was coming from” (I did, but not for any of the reasons he’d hoped).
The ignominy and anger I once felt is as absent as the passion. There was never much of the latter. He was a place-holder-boyfriend for me, and I served a similar purpose for him. Although he was a tad more prudish than I about his holding places. Even my wall-pounding angry neighbor could tell I was theatrical.
Donny and I each married and procreated with the next person we got into a relationship with. His bringing her to our school’s prom less than two months after the Open House phone call hurt my pride more than my heart, but I couldn’t tell the difference at the time. It felt genuine, tangible, bona fide.
The phase I’m going through in my life right now is symptomatic of my journey into middle-age (though I looked it up, and I’m still two years too young to be middle-aged. Whew!). I’m intensely conscious of my transition from sexual being to invisible woman, a transition men don’t automatically have to make. Being married doesn’t erase my past. Monogamy is a choice, and it’s jarring for someone who enjoyed the game as much as I did. I feel like an essential part of me is slipping away and I can’t stop it. Donny is an artifact of that part of myself. I’ll always have that unspoken intimacy with him. If I know men, and I think I do, when he sees me, sometimes he probably thinks of the parts of me he’s seen very, very close up. I’m grateful for his discretion and for the balm of time, marriage, and children. Simultaneously, there is a side of me that would get a salacious thrill if he were to whisper to a colleague, “You know I hit that, right?”
The fact of another person in my present who recalls the me who was naked and single and 29-years-old corroborates her existence. And from angles even I never got to see.
The Friendly Pedant by Mrs. Odie 
Got a Long List of Dreck Troubles
Some writers travel seamlessly between fiction and nonfiction. For the past few months, I’ve been scribbling scenes and ideas for fiction into a notebook and the results are not what I’d hoped. There is something that rings so false in my fiction writing.
Yes, I do recognize the irony in that statement.
You get my meaning, though. If the memoir is fraught with the troubling claim “my life is interesting,” as Joe Fassler writes in Atlantic Monthly, then fiction is equally laden: My imagination is interesting.
No, it isn’t quite that. My ideas would make at least as good a read as some of others’ shit I’ve slogged through over the years. The problem is in the execution. My dialogue sounds cheesy. The descriptions are stilted or banal. The vocabulary is pedantic.
Why continue with something I’m so clearly bad at? Because no matter how much I make that argument, Odie insists I take my turn at laundry, dishes, and cooking. But seriously, folks. Why write fiction if I suck at it?
Good question! Man, you ask good questions. Go, you!
Every writer dreams of penning the next Great American Novel, whether he admits it to himself or not and I am no exception. I also have the urge to write stories that I don’t or can’t live, as well as to disguise and disown the ones I did. To protect the innocent. And the guilty. And the ones who plead “no contest.”
My story is magical realism-esque, philosophical, and kind of porny. That last won’t surprise those of you who read my last blog Seeing Myself from Other Angles. I should probably write a “Shudder Warning” or “Cringe Warning” at the beginning of any such future posts for those of you who actually do know me. Just be happy I edited that post to be way less explicit. I’m not trying to get on that 50 Shades bandwagon. Lee Child wrote that if you can see the bandwagon, it’s already too late to hop on it, but that isn’t the reason my story has those elements.
My friend JG posted on Facebook that she and everyone she knows hears the words “lonely Starbucks lovers” in Taylor Swift’s song “Blank Space.” The actual lyric is: “Got a long list of ex-lovers/They’ll tell you I’m insane/But I’ve got a blank space, baby/And I’ll write your name.” JG and others hear “Got a list of Starbucks lovers. “I get mishearing lyrics because I thought Pharrell Williams was singing, “Bring me down, Canan.” He could be Turkish. I didn’t know.
Melissa Dahl of New York Magazine writes that based on her research, “our expectations have such a strong influence over what we hear that they can alter our interpretations of the sounds.” I know for a fact that JG does NOT have a long list of ex-lovers. As for whether the current and only love will tell you she’s insane, no comment.
Evidently, those who listen to Taylor Swift or admit to the same do not have long lists of former bedmates making armchair psychiatrist diagnoses of them. Dahl later writes that’s the reason so many people mishear the lyric. Long lists of ex-lovers? No experience. Starbucks? Indubitable experience.
I never misheard the lyric.
Would they tell you I’m insane? Let’s say that I can think of at least one person who has never shared my bed (nor the counter of a public restroom, the hood of a car, a shower, a jacuzzi, a tent, a catwalk in an auditorium, Space Mountain…) who will tell you I’m insane. If I even think of just Donny, my co-worker ex from the last post, and imagine him replaying my shrill invective delivered via classroom phone 10 minutes before Open House, I end up firmly in the “Yes column.”
What makes a “long list”? The answer is different for men than women, and so is the judgment. That is the subject of an upcoming post along with my thoughts about the most obscene sexual act that no one is allowed to talk about due to the vomit-inducing yuckiness of the topic: married sex.
My fiction story isn’t about married sex. It’s about a compelling protagonist who has some obstacles to overcome. It has a beginning, a middle, and an end. Some friends become enemies. Some enemies become friends. At the end, the character is richer for the experience. (Thanks, Stewie Griffin).
In Hollywood-speak, it’s sort of The Matrix meets Memento with elements of The Notebook and Aliens thrown in.
Reading over what I’ve written so far of my fiction, I feel frustrated. Why can’t I take those scenes I see so vividly in my head and hear so clearly in my mind’s ear and put them on the page? It’s an existential problem that my beloved T.S. Eliot expresses so perfectly:
“And would it have been worth it, after all,/Would it have been worth while/After the sunsets and the dooryards and the sprinkled streets,/After the novels, after the tea cups, after the skirts that trail along the floor — /And this, and so much more –/It is impossible to say just what I mean!”
Eliot’s frustration at the inadequacy of language to convey experience makes the hairs on my arms stand up. If a master like Eliot struggles with it, I will try not to feel too bad about my own trials. My plan is to keep scribbling my fiction, no matter how bad it is. If I keep practicing and keep writing then one fine morning… I, like other writers, will just beat on, a boat against the current, “till human voices wake us and we drown.”
Share this: