My Year Of Everything

1) “I am not a woman who enjoys process. I am a writer who does not enjoy writing.” 

I feel you Adrienne Martini. I love writing, but I love avoiding writing even more. You know, obviously. But I promise to do better going forward. 

2) “Devoting an entire vacation to playing golf strikes no one as odd. Try doing the same with sheep and yarn…Nobody tells golfers they are wasting their time. Nobody tells fishermen you can buy fish at the store and asks why anyone would bother doing it. At the end of the day, all debates exhausted, the only difference that I could divine seemed to be that golf was done mostly by men and knitting mostly by women, and that made one valid and the other vacuous.” 

By this logic, the stuff done mostly by gay kids- drama club, creative writing, pop-culture obsession- is considered both vacuous and inherently disordered. No wonder we get so weird and riddled with self-doubt.

3) “That’s what I like about [the] Mary Tudor [pattern]. The pattern is for just one size. That’s it.” 

“But is that going to look good?”

“Probably not. But it’s about finishing it, not wearing it,” I say.

Word. The possibility that this project might someday turn into a book, while exciting, is making me evaluate it as it goes, making me less enthusiastic about plowing forward with it when I’m not sure how the end result will read. Some things are just about doing, about finishing. Like the Marathon: I knew I wasn’t going to win, or even look good in the dri-tec t-shirt. I just did it, and I used to just do this, and I need to get back to it. 

To be continued, really.