Tag Archives: writing

A Good Neighbor Policy

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I first met the older woman who lived next door when her son inadvertently parked in our space in the shared garage of our apartment building. Frustrated, I knocked on her door to complain, but when Pearl answered, she was hobbling. She had just broken her ankle and she needed the space. I felt like a big jerk. It shouldn’t matter, after all, whose parking space was whose. We moved to another empty space in the lot. A few days later, Pearl slipped a handwritten thank you note under our door expressing hope that we might continue our “good neighbor policy.” She invited me for tea, but I never went.

In the months that followed, I saw Pearl in the hallway or on the stairs. Her ankle had healed and she began walking around our neighborhood in her brightly-colored sun hat and dark glasses. After the parking incident, we said hello to each other in passing. Then, slowly and hesitantly, we started to exchange pleasantries. She asked me what I did for a living, since I was home during the day. I told her I was a graduate student and writer who studied science and medicine in China.

“I am from China,” she said. “And I am a writer, too.”

A few days after we discovered our shared mutual interests, Pearl knocked on my door with a book in her hand, an autobiography of her life growing up in a village during the Chinese Revolution. Her latest book, she said, was the story of her time as a famous revolutionary’s wife. Then she asked if I might accompany her to a reading of her work in San Francisco.

“You see,” she said, “my son cannot attend. He is too busy. And I am afraid to come back to Berkeley at night by myself.”

“I’d be happy to come. We’ll drive you home,” I replied. “Good neighbor policy.”

Months, then years, passed as I struggled with my degree requirements and the onus of writing my own memoir. Pearl and I became closer through our chats about books, China, life in California. When she asked me what I was working on, I explained that I was trying to craft an account of my own childhood, about learning to survive the separate early losses of my brother, my mother, and my father. Unlike most people who heard my story and either felt sorry for me or were simply shocked by all the tragedy, Pearl placed her small, wrinkled hand on my arm as we stood in the bare stairwell of our building. She looked up into my face with sharp eyes and said: “I know what it is to lose people, to have a difficult youth. We are a lot alike. You are strong, so I will not worry about you.” Whenever I saw Pearl after that, she asked me how the memoir was coming along, what I was reading in my classes, when I would head back to China.

Then one afternoon Pearl left me another handwritten note – almost identical to the first in its brevity and formality – asking me to stop by. She was moving to a smaller apartment and wanted to give me some things. When I entered her home, books were everywhere – on shelves, on tables, on her desk, on the floor.

“I can’t take everything, so I want you to have some books. As many as you like,” she said as I started combing through the titles. She had original editions of Jonathan Spence’s famous works on China, all of Van Gulik’s mysteries set in China, and a host of old, dog-eared paperbacks of classics – Gide, Gogol, Flaubert, Kafka, Beauvoir, Herodotus. I was in heaven. As I piled up stacks to take with me, Pearl talked to me about losing her husband, about grief, about aging, about living alone.

“The time comes,” Pearl said, watching as I flipped casually through her reading life, “when you have to let go of the past. It is too much to carry into the future. I love these books, but it is time for me to let them go.”

Pearl moved out and I forgot about her books for years, buried as I was in my own reading and the writing of my dissertation. But as I prepared to relocate, I started going through my books, Pearl’s books. They are filled with underlines and scribbled notes. As I read her underlined passages, I realized that Pearl had not given me books, she had given me her intellectual history, a roadmap of her thinking, a key to becoming a better writer. In her last act of good neighbor policy, Pearl had given me a part of her past so that I could use it to write my own future.

Suffering as Social Currency

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Suffering, it seems, has transformed into a form of social currency. For women, primarily, but a few men have started to see the appeal of admitting to a certain level of misery to gain likability. Is it me? Or do we all seem more likely to trot out our sad stories not only for catharsis but, increasingly, for profit?

Perhaps this isn’t really a *new* trend. Certainly suffering has been a bit more of an asset since the advent of the best-selling memoir and the ad-revenue-generating reality television show (or blog). Pretty much everyone knows – intuitively, by now – that to win anyone’s vote or garner a lot of publicity, one has to open up about life’s trials and tribulations.

I could list examples here, but they are too many and too obvious. You all know what I mean. In reading this post, I’m sure you’ve already had a few examples spring to mind. You might even have a few “real-life” examples of people you know using their troubled childhoods to explain or excuse some present-day behavior. Don’t we all, on some level, engage in a pornography of suffering?

Listen, I am no stranger to this myself. But relating tales from my childhood is a relatively new phenomenon for me. For years, all I wanted was to seem normal (whatever that is), like I had a “normal” life. As Oliver Sacks once wrote about his patients, I spent a lot of time “acting being normal.” In the past decade, however, we have – as a culture – started to be more “open” about our abnormalities, our uniqueness, our peccadilloes. That’s probably a good thing, or at least has good effects (feeling closer to others, a relief that we are not alone in suffering or troubles, etc.). However, I also feel like the memoir/reality TV craze has upped the ante. It’s not enough to share the past, we have to dramatize and enact it in order to gain legitimacy as “sufferers.”

Sometimes I feel like we’re all engaged in a contest to prove Who Has Suffered the Most. Like there is an award for this, outside of life experience and insight. (Well, maybe there is. I know quite a few people – myself included – who got literary agents due to an interest in their abnormally sad tales.)

I remember when I first realized that my painful childhood could be an asset. It was while reading Dave Eggers’ A Heartbreaking Tale of Staggering Genius. He had taken this awful thing in his life and turned it into a best-selling narrative. “Hey,” I thought, “I can do this. I’ve got a heartbreaking tale.” Clearly, I was not alone. In many way, Eggers’ and Frank McCourt opened the floodgates to a deluge of sadness, struggling, and sickness. We read about cancer, about being widowed, about alcoholic parents, about abuse, about homelessness, about depression, about divorce, about losing a child, about attempted suicide, about anger, about self-starving, about pain of so many varieties that I have lost interest in taken a full inventory of them.

Not to sound like a curmudgeon who doesn’t care about people suffering, but lately I’ve started to ask myself: So what?

Writing a memoir was the catalyst for the question. In unearthing and examining my own suffering, I started to wonder what purpose it all served. Sure, it was – in some ways – therapeutic for me, but why did I feel the need to share my pain with others? To what purpose? To what end? Then, as I struggled to find a narrative arc to the story of my childhood, I began to feel uneasy about my participation in the genre. Was I just dragging these stories to light so that I could gain readership? And if so, what the hell did that mean about me? About my potential readers? About all of us together?

Medical anthropologists are no strangers to thinking about the pornography of suffering (in fact, I stole this term). Why do pictures and narratives of people suffering move us? How do they move us? What work are they really doing? Does all this visible suffering make us numb to the real thing? (For an academic take on this, see Carolyn Dean’s article here.)

I participated in a “beauty” contest recently, and I noticed that in many of the women’s narratives of why they felt beautiful after 35 (which accounted for 50% of the judging), they often made recourse to their suffering. I am not saying I am innocent of this, since I, too, wanted to “win” the contest. I intuited, like almost everyone else, that to “win” people’s vote, I needed to relate a story that people could empathize with. Some of the contest entries are thus blatantly all about suffering and “survival.” It almost seems as if some of the women were trying to “out suffer” each other. Which is rendonkulous.

Needless to say, and especially after my literary agent quit the business last spring, my own memoir of suffering has stalled. Until recently, I wasn’t sure if I wanted to continue writing it. I wasn’t certain that I knew the reasons WHY I wanted to write about my life in the first place. I didn’t want to use tragedy as social currency. And I definitely didn’t feel entirely comfortable with the idea that I might profit off my brother, my mother, and my father’s untimely deaths.

In the end, I did decide to take up the project again, but in a different form. It’s becoming less about a pornography of my suffering now than an exploration of how we all deal with fear (of death, of flying, of losing our car keys, of cancer, of spiders, of *fill in the whatever you are afraid of here*).  I reorganized the story so that now I’m telling the history of viruses (what I study professionally), and why in the world a former journalist would ever want to spend the rest of her life writing about disease. Why? Because I want to understand fear. I’m interested in how we all get on with our lives despite the fact that we all know horrible things will eventually happen to us or to people we know. Maybe that’s why people can’t get enough of suffering; we want to know that we are not alone. I just think we need to be more introspective about our own interest in watching or hearing about other people’s suffering. Like regular porn, more isn’t necessarily better.

Which is Harder? Revisions or First Drafts?

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After my friend’s mock job talk today (for non-academics: a job talk is basically like an all-day interview for a professor’s position at a college and involves giving a talk on your research as though you were ‘teaching’ a class), we went to a café to have lunch. As we discussed what kind of revisions she might need to do for the talk, we had a short debate over the relative difficulty of writing first drafts (of anything – papers, articles, novels, poems) and revising drafts. Which one is harder to do?

For me, it’s revisions. I hate them. They are necessary, but they are evil. They make my writing stronger, but I loathe sitting down to attack a draft. Why?

Because it’s harder to know where to start or what to “do” to fix it.

Usually, if you change one thing, you need to also retool the things around it. So, depending on the problem or the rewrite, you have one hell of a task before you. You have to start somewhere, but the “beginning” usually isn’t the best place. Do you tackle structure first? Or clarity? Or add in what is missing? Or subtract whatever isn’t necessary?

This usually leaves me with a pounding headache and a need to get in my car and drive to the border. I’m pretty sure you don’t have to revise drafts in Mexico or Canada. (This only applies to Americans, however. Mexican and Canadian citizens have to do revisions in their own countries. The border is magical, a ‘get out of anything you don’t want to do’ car, in case you were wondering.)

My friend, on the other hand, argued for first drafts. Why?

The dread of the blank page. The need to write BEFORE you know what you are saying. The stopping and starting and staring at the cursor. The cobbling together of words to create sentences that you then find yourself wondering if make any sense at all. The feeling that you need to do anything at all rather than write that first draft. Like clean out your filing cabinets or scrub your kitchen tile grout with a toothbrush.

For me, however, first drafts are always easier. I think that I hate revising because I work so hard on my first drafts that I fall in love with them. It’s like taking apart the house you grew up in brick-by-brick. It hurts. I want to keep every sentence, even if I can’t. I hate cutting paragraphs; you may as well tell me to give away my cats (whom I adore, BTW). It’s an impossible situation. It makes me grouchy.

But I do it.

Because as writers, we have to and it’s part of the process.

As someone once told me, writing isn’t about being “happy” writing, but about doing something that is important to you. So whether you hate first drafts or revisions more, fellow writers, god speed. God speed.

And I’ll see you in Cabo next week.

 

Why the Dilettante Isn’t So “Daily” – Future Projects

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I decided to choose Daily Dilettante as my domain name for this blog for two reasons: 1.) It sounded good. Come on, what self-respecting, book-loving nerd doesn’t like alliteration? ; and 2.) I wanted to push myself to write “often.” Maybe not “daily” – but I didn’t want this to devolve into a situation where I post on a “monthly” or “bi-yearly” basis either. So, then, it was an aspirational choice as well.

This blog provides me with an outlet for writing that is not related to my dissertation. And for the past year, the dissertation project has been a 270-pound gorilla taking up space in my study. When I try to write something else, the obese gorilla slaps me off my swivel chair until I repent and promise to only write prose related to flu and global public health. Trust me, he’s serious about me finishing this damn thing.

Don’t get me wrong, I love my dissertation topic. I do. I just don’t want to focus on it 24/7 and slowly drive myself insane. Sure, addle-brained professors make good movie characters, but not-so-great “real-life” teachers or researchers.

In the next few months, as I wind down the first draft of my dissertation and start writing the next two chapters of a book based on my dissertation, I want to spend more time writing for the Daily Dilettante. Hell, it might even start to resemble an actual “daily.” The dilettante part, for good or for bad, I already have down cold.

Projects on deck here (for the three loyal readers I know are out there):

1.) Divorcing Duran Duran. My humorous retelling of my up-and-down, fictional relationship with the band’s bass player, John Taylor, told in relationship to the various themes running through DD songs. Really, the essays will be about my doomed search for “the perfect relationship” and a PC-version chronicle of my awful dating history.  My ex-husband once lamented that he could never compare with the fantasy of JT. Years later, I finally realized that he was right. I had to divorce Duran Duran before I would ever be able to find and keep a “real” relationship.

2.) The Rio Project. See entry number one for back story. This March, I turn 39. On that day, the countdown to 40 begins. I’m sure there will be plenty of  “not-so graceful” stories ahead. In the early summer of 2012, on the 30th anniversary of Duran Duran’s album Rio, I will be hosting a recreation of the original video in Antigua. Yep. I’m serious. I’m talking about a shot-by-shot remake of the video. Growing up, I always wanted to become Rio, and it took me awhile to realize that I could do it without the band. This is about embracing a childhood dream and crafting a new destiny – all in one fell swoop. And you, my three readers, how could you miss that?

3.) The Clothes I Throw Out Daily Booth. My closet runneth over. I have too many clothes. And shoes. So in preparation for 40 and moving, I’m going to be wearing everything – EVERYTHING – I own one final time and snapping a photo of my outfits for posterity. My mom used to let me wear whatever I wanted (within reason) with the caveat that she be allowed to take a picture of me before I left the house in the morning. I used to think it was because I looked so cool. Now I know that my mom wanted photographic evidence of my stupidity. I am continuing the tradition here. Think of it as including my mom (she died when I was 14) in my 40th birthday celebrations.

OK. That’s it. Stick with me, kids. It should be a fun and eventful 18 months.

A Cacophony Of Blog Voices

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According to “Freshly Pressed”, today there were 467,441 new posts, 416,073 comments, & 92,239,400 words posted. That’s a multitude of voices joining the biggest online chorus in history. The blogosphere is loud, it’s noisy, it’s chaotic. And I’m adding to all that noise right now. But why?

Why do we “blog” – those of us who do – especially when we don’t do it as a business or to promote anything? I understand why the famous and infamous blog, or why already-famous writers and pundits blog, but why do the rest of us keep sending strings of words out into the world if we don’t have a large built-in readership? As promoters and fans of the wildly popular YouTube and Twitter suggest, isn’t blogging already dead? Are more words being written with fewer people to read them?

In my teens, I kept a journal. I wrote it in the same style as I write this blog. I act as though someone is reading all of this, but really I’m talking to myself. I’m keeping track of what happens to me, or what I’m thinking about, or whether or not a Snowmageddon just occurred. It’s a digital posterity that I’m crafting here, and who knows when or if it will ever be really useful to anyone other than myself.

In some ways, blogging is like all other writing. It’s done out of a need to communicate something; those somethings feel important enough to say “out loud”. It’s an act of faith and of leaning into the future. It’s a way of battling the passage of time, too, since each blog entry is a marker in the sand. I was here.

I’m a graduate student, and so I spend a lot of my time writing in other venues. In part, I blog because it’s an outlet that usually has nothing to do with my chosen career. I blog, too, because it reminds me of my brief time as a journalist, when I wrote stories on a daily basis and saw them in print the very next day. I miss that. It made me feel like a real writer, not just a dilettante. As the world and our lives get more complex, I think the feeling of being an amateur or a novice gets stronger. The more there is to know, to read, to keep up with, the less we feel that we are “on top” of things, that we know anything about anything.

Most days, I simply believe that it is my life’s quest to know a little about a lot. I’m a throwback to a different age when being a dilettante meant that you were a great dinner party guest. I’m not comfortable with the idea that to be successful – as a blogger and maybe as an academic – I need to specialize so much that I know a great amount about only a little slice of the world.

So I read widely and randomly. I write that way, too. And I hope that it’s enough.

Learning to cope with rejection

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Over the past two decades, I have had several very different careers. But, looking back, most of them have required other people to subjectively assess some aspect of my work or ability or natural attributes. As a wannabe model/actress, a writer, a comic, and now as an academic, I have had to cope with a seemingly endless amount of judgment and rejection. And just like romantic rejection, career-related rejection is hard to deal with effectively. The same rules apply to every arena, but are difficult to put into practice.

  • Do not take a rejection personally.

For me, this is the hardest one, which is why I’ve placed it first in the queue. It’s a mathematical truth that not every person who wants to become President or Prom Queen will get the chance. Period. This goes for becoming a successful actor, or painter, or musician, or writer. Or being admitted to Harvard, Princeton, or Yale. Or getting a date with the hottest girl/guy in school. As my grandmother used to say, if you are trying to be the best at any given thing, you can bet your bippy that someone is already ahead of you in the race and that the people behind you might just speed up. That doesn’t mean that you can’t try to win, but you’d better not be emotionally attached to the outcome. If coming in at second or 43rd place is going to break you, then you should think about playing another game. (Coda: Some of you will note that I am no longer trying to be an actress or a comic. I couldn’t take the heat, so I got myself out of the kitchen.)

  • Don’t use repeated rejection as an excuse to stop working hard.

Every, single, solitary thing worth doing requires you to be willing to sacrifice large amounts of time and effort. Sometimes it takes hundreds of rejection letters to equate to one acceptance letter. That is, frustratingly, how long it takes to achieve success – especially in a highly competitive atmosphere. Keep pushing at the limits of your natural abilities and you will find you can do more than you expected.

  • Don’t assume you were rejected because you weren’t “good enough.”

The bare truth is: Maybe you aren’t. But, then again, maybe you are. 99 out of 100 people are rejected for any job or position. Only one guy can get it, right? So, maybe you are “good enough” – but you just weren’t as terrific or as “right” for the role as the other guy. If you stay in the acting or writing game five years and you never book a job or have anything published, well, yeah, you might not be a good enough actor or writer. But, in the meantime, are you taking classes? Are you honing your craft? Are you sharing those novel chapters with others and actually listening to their feedback?

No one ever really knows why they were rejected, which is why it is so hard to cope with rejection. The brain wants feedback, concrete answers. Sometimes, there aren’t any. Especially when there is a subjective element to judging what is “good” and what isn’t. It makes me feel better to remember that there are people out there who loathe Hemingway. And who hate Led Zeppelin. When you feel like your work isn’t good enough, try to think of one person – ONE – whose work is universally loved and lauded. And good luck with that.

  • Keep trying to get better.

Self-explanatory. Take critical feedback and use it to get better. Seek out feedback. Keep trying.

  • Keep at it.

Whenever I get a rejection letter, either for a piece of creative writing or for an academic article or for a job, I send out a new submission.  Immediately. I don’t wait around or wallow in self-pity. I just get something else out into the world. Listen, you can’t win the game if you’re not even really playing. No one ever gets recognized for doing nothing, or plucked from obscurity for dreaming about being great some day, or given a book contract for talking about writing a book.

  • Realize that there is NO END to rejection.

Even Hemingway got panned. Amazing talents get dropped from record labels. Michael Chabon probably still gets told “no” from time to time. Big movie stars get turned down regularly for roles. If you want to do something that requires creativity or requires you to be in a competitive field, then get used to polite rejection. Because it never stops. We all just need to get better at coping with it.

(Self-disclosure: This week alone, I received rejection letters from Stanford, Harvard and Cornell for academic jobs. I had a short story turned down by a good literary journal and I didn’t even place in the top 25 of the Tweet Me a Story contest. My This American Life story pitch from last month remains in the slush pile. And so goes the life of a writer/academic, people, and so it goes.)

*For more reading on how to handle rejection, check out Psychology Today’s advice, and Rejection: A Loser’s Guide.

On the Business of Publishing

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During my time as a writer, I’ve had a few different experiences with the world of publishing. Sadly, the rug has always been pulled out from me. Each time that I thought I was well on my way to becoming a solid writer, with an agent I liked (and who understood my work), and a publisher for my work, blammo. I was left muddy and bruised on the playing field, wondering who had just blitzed me.

As a reporter, you have a constant medium for your work. Which is nice, apart from the fact that you don’t always get to work on the stories you like or write as creatively as you might otherwise do. The good news is that, through the painstaking routine of submitting your work to the editors, you learn how to write. Really write. Tight, descriptive prose.

When I transitioned, or tried to transition, into fiction, I had to learn the process of writing all over again. By that time, I was a terrific reporter, but a lousy fictional stylist. I would post an excerpt of one of my first “short stories,” but it would be too traumatic to see that early stuff in print (even on a blog). Through the process of crafting a really messy medical thriller with my first literary agent, I learned to write more fluidly in another genre. I was deep into the redrafting of the book when my agent got fired. When I got back up off the sack, I quarterbacked my book into print through the decision to self-publish. It felt like trying to get a first down when your team is already three touchdowns behind.

After my personal essay on courage was published on NPR, a literary agent contacted me about the possibility of writing a memoir. I did some soul-searching and agreed to turn the essay into a book. To do so, I started the painful process of learning to write creative non-fiction. I got a scholarship to the inaugural Norman Mailer Writers’ Colony and began to hone my craft. The upshot of this was that I discovered I loved writing creative non-fiction. My memoir chapters were good. Dark, but good.

And then?

My agent, whom I adored, decided to quit the business altogether.

I felt blitzed all over again. I started to wonder: Was I the type of lucky, talented writer who would eventually publish a book? Or just another unlucky, talented writer who would remain unpublished for life? It had been a rough series of ups and downs, small victories and losses for me. I began to feel like the QB who is approaching middle-age and starts to worry that he’ll never quite get that Superbowl ring.

In the end, I put the memoir aside and focused on writing the best damn dissertation on the 2009 H1N1 pandemic that it was possible for me to write. And now, still in the draft phase – but confident that what I’m writing is pretty great, I have some positive interest from the editors at a great Ivy League press. I don’t want to get *too* excited about the possibility of getting my manuscript accepted for publication, in part because I do not want to jinx myself.

In other words, here I go again.

I suppose the “moral” of this story, if there is one, is that good writing doesn’t go unrecognized. When you keep writing, sometimes magical things happen. Sometimes, you get knocked back down the field a bit. The important point, I suppose, is to stay in the game.

Clear eyes, full hearts, can’t lose!

For God’s sake, don’t become a “writer”

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Lately, I’ve noticed that there are more and more “writers” in the world.

Everywhere I go – parties, conferences,  Starbucks – I overhear people talking about the book, the screenplay, the article, the short story or the blog post they are working on right now. They lament that they wish they had more time to write. They fantasize about being a “writer”, as if being a writer involved anything more than writing regularly. They talk about the “reader” that they want to attract.

I don’t know what the real reason is for all these new “writers” that seem to be emerging right now. Is it the blogosphere with its promise of instant readership and the illusion that everyone has a “unique voice” or has something to say – no matter how trivial? Are current economic woes producing a common dream of being what we are not? Is it a collective mid-life crisis?

Not so long ago, back when I was still in college, I remember all my friends and family admonishing me for switching to Journalism as my major, with English Lit as my minor.

“What are you going to do with that degree?” my uncle asked me. “Not everyone gets to write for the New York Times, you know.”

My aunt sighed and said, “I suppose you can work in marketing or public relations.”

“Just promise me,” one of my successful friends from high school said to me one day when I was visiting him at MIT, “that you won’t become a dreamy, bohemian gypsy.”

In other words, deciding to become a writer was not considered a good life choice.  Neither was deciding to become a singer, or an actor, or an artist. Now, suddenly, everyone is “creative”. Everyone has some kind of “talent”, as if inside every child was a hidden seed of genius planted by one of the muses.  Everyone wants a book deal. Everyone wants their shot on American Idol. Everyone wants to be “famous”, or at least “reknowned”.

As Julie puts it so well in Julie & Julia: “I could write a book. I have thoughts.”

Well, I’m not so sure. As Jay Z puts it in his song about coming to NYC to fulfill your dreams: “Too bad half of you won’t make it.” And half is a generous number, believe me.

Not everyone is Julia or Jay Z, or Elizabeth Gray, or Stephanie Meyer. Most of us will remain at the bottom of the slush pile. Most of us will be lucky if we ever finish the manuscript that is placed in the slush pile. There’s a reason so many talented people are drinkers or drug addicts, people. Trust me.

My husband, who is one of those talented writers with an MFA from NYU, asked himself – and me – a pertinent question the other day: “What is wrong with being mediocre?”

You see, we’re both terrified of just being “average” at the things we love. But in truth, most of us are only “average”, which is why it’s “average” in the first place. It’s coming to terms with that, and making peace with it, that becomes important.

I’m beginning to think that we live in a self-obsessed age.  As Garrison Keillor playfully suggests, we live in a place “where all the women are strong, all the men are good-looking, and all the children are above average.” Or, at least, that is what we want to believe.

I fear that something about the rhetoric of being “the best” stops us from actually being able to take home the proverbial gold. I worry that our worship of the perfect makes us natural enemies of the “good enough”. And I wonder if all this obsession with our creativity and talent is at the expense of our more practical, and just as valuable, traits.

Any real writer will tell you, you don’t quit your day job to pursue writing. And if you do quit your day job, you certainly can’t complain about the lack of money, the stress, or the insecurities. Writers have piles and piles of rejection letters for every acceptance. And most writers – even the most successful – will give people the same advice: “If you can do anything else and be happy, for god’s sake, do it and do not become a writer.”

I must like blogging away the Mondays.

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Because I always seem to blog on a Monday morning. Maybe that is because I am procrastinating the beginning of yet another week. Which I’m usually afraid is going to suck.

But not for much longer!

The perk of being in academia is definitely the summer break. This summer, I have every intention of finishing my second novel, about a group of western or ‘westernized’ Chinese women in Hong Kong. The plot is loosely based on Sense and Sensibility by Jane Austen, for anyone who cares. It’s more of a literary novel, but I don’t think that people who like a good ‘beach read’ would turn away from it either. It’s all about relationships and what it’s like to be a white women in a post-colonial setting. From, clearly, my own personal experience with such a thing. It should be fun, and serious, and just a good read. Hopefully, it will also be provocative of discussion about what it means to be a woman, and Chinese or American in today’s world (respectively, I only barely dabble in Chinese-American status, which I know about only from my friends in China classes).

I can’t wait to just sit down and crash it out.

That and a couple of academic articles.

I guess I plan on being productive.

But you know how that works. Doesn’t the weekend always look better on the Friday side of it? By Sunday, I think most people have disappointed themselves. They didn’t do everything on their ‘list’. That’s something that should be on “Stuff White People Like”. Lists.

Well, I say frak the lists. To-do lists outside of work only depress people. Don’t even have a MENTAL to-do list.

Instead, why don’t you try keeping a record of what you’ve accomplished during the day. Shake it up. Yesterday, for instance, I wrote an introduction to a theory paper about the so-called ‘problem’ of China, specifically focusing on the issue of science & technology. I also wrote about the ‘Science Wars’ of the 1990s for my field statement on the anthropology of science. In addition, I read an article in Chinese about China’s economy for today’s Chinese class. I took an hour walk with my lovely boyfriend. I grilled hot dogs and hamburgers. OK, I just ate them and he grilled them, but still.  I also managed to call my close friend Mark and gab.

Looking at that list makes me feel pretty good about my Monday. Let’s see if it lasts. . . .

Procrastination: I’m supposed to be working, but instead, I’m wasting more of my potential.

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Alas, it is a beautiful day here in Berkeley, California.

The sun is shining. I can hear the bells of the ice cream truck outside my window. The kids that live next door are enjoying their plastic pool. It’s 75° and a cool breeze is blowing.

I am inside.

Why?

Because I’m supposed to be writing my first field statement – about the anthropology of science. I know, that sounds really cool, right? Well, maybe not exactly.

Instead of actually writing, I’m still “researching”, which involves a lot of Google searches. And it also involves checking my email 20 times even though no one is writing to me because it’s a gorgeous day and other people have things called “lives”. Apparently, they exist somewhere out there, outside the walls of academe.

Also, it involves opening the refrigerator just to “look”. And think about eating an orange. And getting some more water, or coffee, or diet coke. And sitting back down in front of the computer with a firm resolution to: “Just write something already!”

In the back of my head, I keep telling myself that writing this is no big deal. If it sucks, I rewrite it. Emphasis on “re”, after having actually written something. Oh, I have 38 pages of notes and a complete bibliography. But no text. Nothing. Zip. Zilch. Nada. Zero.

I try to trick myself into writing by thinking that at least I’m not in Haiti lining up for food. That this is ridiculous compared to most people’s troubles. I’m not a hemophiliac, right? Things aren’t so bad. So far, no cancer.

Then why am I making myself miserable?

Do I like being miserable?

I must. Because I LOVE procrastinating.

I also love thinking about all my ‘wasted potential’ while I’m doing it.

‘Potential’ sucks.

It’s overrated.

I think I’m going to dedicate a couple of postings, or maybe another whole page on “Wasted Potential”. Maybe I’ll share stories of famously wasted potentials. Or how to get over the envy that comes along with it, while you are watching other people, not laden with ‘potential’, actually out there doing things and – gasp! – succeeding. While you, me, us, whoever, are all frozen by our collective incapacity to actualize any of our so-called ‘potential’.

Oh, if only I could procrastinate the self-doubt, self-criticism, uncertainty and fear. Or FUSS, for a nice acronym.

If only I could stop all the FUSS, and get down to work.