Woops, awake.

"Writers are such private, solitary people. they may become things other than that, but writing almost without exception gets done because of an inward-ness, a sense of privacy that you retain, even though you know that the piece you write may go public. The perspective the writer has on himself or herself seems crucially important to me, regardless of other people's perspectives." -- Ann Beattie in her essay "Melancholy and the Muse"

Sounds like me. Mostly solitary, cynical, content in smaller groups. Or if I'm in a group setting, I'll try to just be with a few people at a time. Shrug. This is how it goes. I'd question it if I cared.

Oh, another part of this essay I found funny was this another part. It's exactly how I feel whenever I sit down and look at my enormous, rambling mountain of notes and transcribed interviews, when I sit down in my non-work clothes in the dead of night to write an article:

"Past writing performance -- at least, in my experience -- counts for little. Neither the routine, nor the triumphs that sometimes results from adhering to that routine, can be depended upon. I have sometimes taken down books I've published from the shelves and been amazed that there was time when I apparently wrote on sentence after another, followed by even more sentences, to form a paragraph. Such an odd activity: needing to simultaneously remember and to forget something in order to bring into focus what did not happen, but might have."

Reading this essay, I almost felt like this woman had tapped into my brain. I found it particularly amusing, the part where she talks about her lack of a solid schedule and working in the dead of night in her underwear. Sounds exactly like me, and it's no wonder I'm an insomniac -- it lends itself nicely to what I like to do, though, doesn't it? I hardly ever write an article during the day. I feel creatively stifled...and man, doesn't that sound pretentious? Shrug.

Moving on.

I have this steel trap memory for the most random things ever said to me. I remember my 6th grade teacher told me next to start a thank you note with the words "thank you" (sorry, Mrs. Albee, I've broken that rule a few times out of laziness). My 10th grade English teacher told me not to start a sentence with "there is/are" because it is an immediate snooze fest for the reader. Again, sorry, Ms. Scobell, broke that rule, too. I remember when I moved to Long Island from Michigan, I wrote a note to her and I didn't include one form of the verb "to be," because of an assignment she had given us where we weren't allowed to use any form of it. Talk about a stretch -- that just meant I'd use "to have" in its various forms, more often.

Another thing that stuck with me -- my 9th grade teacher told me I'd never truly appreciate literature because I told her I was sick of talking about symbols in our assigned books. What possessed me to say that, I don't know, but I tend to speak without editing my thoughts, at times. That really incensed me. I also remember being infuriated when she docked me a point on a spelling quiz because my cursive letter "i" looked like an "e," even though she agreed she could see the dot above it.
Oh, that's another thing -- ever since probably 3rd grade, I've written in cursive unless there's some reason not to, like when a college professor told me my handwriting was hard to read (woops). I read an article about a year back, or so, about how cursive writing is going to be a thing of the past and I thought that someday I'll be that 80 year old who still writes in cursive, like some sort of relic of the past. Granted, my penmanship probably could leave something to be desired, but I don't care too much. As long as we have word processors, there's no need to worry about such things as penmanship (crap, there I am, giving in to the argument I just presented -- oh well).

I'm not sure what the point of this blog entry was meant to be, but oh well. Sometimes ya gotta do what etc.