Feeling Like Writing

My blogging self keeps having identity crises, which means primarily that I don’t know what to blog, so I blog nothing.  Who is WhatWhileWeSlept?  What is her audience?  What is her purpose?  Or is it just me, here?  Could it possibly be just me, just writing?  That would be the simplest thing, and probably the best, but would I be a writer if I were just me?  Is this a real conversation?  Maybe Floury and WhatWhileWeSlept should get together and argue about their selves.  Today, I’m going to throw self-conscious reservations out the window.   Even though, yes, I did just type two sentences and then erase them.  But I’ll call that editing, not self-conscious reservation.

I’ve been getting out of the house to work, lately, and that’s been so good for my work.  I love my house, but trying to do work there has been getting increasingly difficult, as I have to keep getting up to turn on a light, or turn off a light, or make some tea, or look through my records, or angrily kick my records, or go clean the bathroom.  All these things must be done — understood — but what must be done more is work.  I would like to get three grant proposals written by the end of February, and the sooner I can do that, the happier I will be.  I need to change my employment information at Interfaith, I need to file my income taxes, I need to file a FAFSA.  The sooner, you know, the happier.  Maybe when all this is done, I can get another paying customer, or start my Etsy shop again, and make some more money.  Which will justify my coming to a coffee shop to work more fully.

Today I noticed that Regions still hasn’t applied an ancient deposit to my checking account balance, which means that after buying a cup of coffee an hour and a half ago, I had $2.64 in the bank.  The thrill, you know, of discovering that.  Just now.  The jump of the heart, the sting of the fingertips.  Maybe I could sell my hair.  For twenty dollars, to Mme. Sofronie, Hair Goods of All Kinds.

In other news, the boy across the table from me is reading Gravity’s Rainbow, and when he asked if I was reading anything, I said Harry Potter.  Rather proudly.  There aren’t many books I’d be proud to volunteer when a flannel-shirted young man asks what I am reading, while he is reading Pynchon.  “Oh, just something I picked up — letters of Derrida and Cixous — just a little light reading,” I should like to say.  While I have definitely been using these stories lately as an excuse to not face certain painful matters of the heart, to sit instead alone and (the most shocking episode) drink wine and eat cookies, they deserve a better sentence about them here: they are adding a spice, or a breath, to my consciousness.  The last book I read had one of the most moving atonement/redemption motifs I’ve ever come across, and I’ve come across a few.  I’m reading them faster than I’ve ever read anything (that I remember), putting the current 700+ page book on its front cover in just a few sittings.  The series is involved, intricate, complex, and it’s only now, four books in, that the story is beginning to unfold.

I started this series in order to acquaint myself with some pop culture, I’m really out of the loop, and to find out why most of my best-loved friends dress up as McGonagall and Snape and stand in line for the next book to be released … or the movie to open … or send their husbands to stand in line for the book after their water just broke & contractions are starting … anyway, I’m finding out.

Seamus Heaney

So, I have poem for the wonderful man in my portfolio & am (I hope) revising it for the last time, today.  I found a photo of him, and thought I should show it to you.  Check this brilliant codger out:

…addressing the Law Society in Dublin this year.  The Law Society?

Another Such

After feeling a little insane for a couple of days, I’m back online.  I don’t have anything to make this post cohesive except that I don’t feel insane anymore and want to write things, tons of things, thing having to do with this city and my soul and people I see around.  My new roommate, Claire of Polish stock from Lille, locked the wrong lock today (because I forgot to tell her which one was working) and Marshall (providentially there) had to climb in a window to get the door open.  And this is after somebody stole the lock off the bike she was riding.  This is frustrating, and I hope her first year French students don’t make her hate Knoxville.

Joel came by to say hi after having dropped off the face of the planet for a couple of months and sat in my kitchen, talking about how he was wasting time and didn’t want to become like the guys he hangs around with, who are thirty years older than him and still wasting time.  He’s going to try to get into a community college in the spring and then go to UT for law school prep.  He’s always wanted to do this, he said, and what he’s doing now is “getting really old.”  He’s so long, so big, he just kind of drapes over whatever chair he’s in and talks sometimes into a corner of the room and sometimes into your face with those bright blue eyes.  I’ve missed him.  And this talking made me three minutes late for my interview, which means the Lord God will have to speak to this woman about me, because I suck at interviews and wish I could do things the right way, once.

Now I’m doing some things at Java and have pizza dough rising in the window at home.  I’m going to bake the dough rounds, cover them with ricotta, basil leaves, sliced cherry and sun-gold tomatoes from Annette across the street, and Emily, here is your Coincedence walking her bike up the sidewalk, looking cuter than I’ve ever seen her look.  I wish my complexion was like that, brown but evenly rosy with heat or exercise … instead of just white or red, always freckled.  Since the thunderstorm things are picking up and rushing off away, blue sky and sunlight here again, heat here again after that cold wind.  Today is a day I’m going to not be anxious, then.  I’ve been reading the sermon on the mount and can a person believe?

Natalie is flying to Wales in two days.  Wales, and I am reading about whales, the humpback, razorback, sperm and narwhal, almost two hundred pages into Moby Dick and being shocked that people used to do this, go out in clumsy wooden boats and stab at whales with long pointy spears.  And kill them.  Harpooneers.  I hope that something I do will amaze some great-grandchild someday.  I hope to do something someday that lasts.

Proper Literature

from audreyhepburncomplex