mimsy and outgrabe

My latest blog posts have felt so solipsistic, particularly in light of the fucking chaos and violence in the world that has always existed but seems, thanks to irresponsible and inconsistent mass media coverage, as if it's escalating inordinately of late -- but I'm keeping up with them as a record of my writing process, which is useful in hindsight but feels something like a giant, unrelenting hangover right now.  Sometimes Twitter provides catharsis. Part of this headache-like pressure is very much due to the upcoming script development lab. I told A. earlier in the week that I was thinking of emailing the program and asking them if I could switch from the script development lab to a writer's residency, and he was of the opinion I should just stick with the original plan. He can probably sense that I'm a gigantic coward and that I don't want other people -- particularly people who know what they're doing when it comes to drama -- to read and critique...

Next year, I am going to set my school email account with one of those automatic "out of office" reply messages that states I'm unavailable during the month of July and that I will respond to emails, AND DO SCHOOL-RELATED WORK, beginning Aug. 1. Really. Someone remind me about that, please. 'Cause I'm sure I'll forget and be all like, "oh, whatever, I can handle it," and then come mid-July I'll be a freakin' nut case, all stressed out because, very clearly, I CANNOT HANDLE IT. I'm having trouble focusing. I can't figure out how to see projects, even very small ones like folding laundry or running an errand, to the finish. I begin something, and naturally Vampire Baby or Little Miss Talkalot or The Boy interrupts as it is their wont and their right to do, but then I forget. I move on to something else. And as a result, my entire house looks like one of those antique shops that has shit piled upon other shit -- you know, those c...

I can say the same about running. I was doing pretty well for a while there, waking at 5 a.m. when A. went to work, writing/revising/or at least thinking for and hour and a half, and then running on the treadmill in our basement for forty minutes or so . . . and then it's like a switch was flipped and I haven't really followed that pattern for the past week. Some mornings I've awakened at 5 a.m. only to do something other than writing, which has demanded (as tasks do) to carry over into running time, so that neither writing nor running is done that day. And then other mornings, I sleep. This morning I slept. Apparently, I need sleep. I keep trying to convince myself that I don't, but hey, I'm getting old, and I think it's time to face the facts that old people need sleep. Or rather, maybe this is the precipice before I fall into true oldness, where I'll need sleep in the middle of the day because I can't fall back asleep at night. This week is the w...

I suppose I'm feeling guilty lately because this blog is supposed to be about that weird, manic intersection of teaching and writing and raising children, but when things get particularly busy at school the writing and even, yes, the raising children parts seem to get less of my attention. It feels like my life is less and less of an intersection of these things. Instead, issues at the college take up all my concentration and those issues aren't even about teaching . I haven't known what to write about in this blog and so I haven't written, period. And then I realized last night that these conflicts, these issues at work, seem so large when they first occur -- problems with students, problems with other faculty, problems with the bureaucracy of the college -- that my little peanut mind shivers inside its shell and kinda shuts down all of the parts (the miniscule little peanut parts) that could possibly deal with anything other than that "big problem". Or, ...

This weekend, writing was a struggle. A number of fits and starts, a lot of crossed out lines, deleted lines, revised lines, cut and pasting, etc. I jumped from drafting on the notepad with a pen to typing on the computer and back again. And in between the moments of inspiration and hair-pulling, I put away (finally) our Christmas tree, packed up decorations, did the dishes, and washed load after load of laundry and then had to fold the damn stuff. This is all to say that eventually Chapter IX of the fairy tale was completed (woohoo!) along with one of those mother/daughter conversation poems that are supposed to interrupt the narrative. I'm not sure how successful either is (again, I'll wait for A.P.'s thumbs up or thumbs down, and my own distanced judgment after a few days have passed between the writing of the draft and my rereading it), but it felt really good to have been productive . . . at least, once I felt like I had been productive, and not just spinning my tire...

Today brings me one poem closer to manuscript completion, which is, you know, a good thing. A couple of items of interest/concern, however: 1. Today I wrote some lines that actually scared me. A little. I don't want to be too dramatic about it, so maybe, instead, let's say that I was exceedingly uncomfortable with those lines. Now, I've been in enough writing classes to know that those kinds of lines are usually the ones where you're taking risks, and usually risk = good & praiseworthy & character-building if nothing else. Well, I'm not so sure that applies to me here -- in fact, I'm sure it doesn't. These lines could turn out to be perfect crap by the time I reread them tomorrow (or this evening, more likely, 'cause I'm kinda obsessive like that). And there's a good chance they are crap -- they won't just magically turn into it! Anyway, my concern, or interest, is in the fear/uneasiness. I think that I was uneasy with what I wa...

This is not a good way to begin the week, I suspect. Last week was a major hiccup in the writing/sabbatical process. The Doodle became sick with a fever around Monday evening -- and so he was home from school until Thursday, and I didn't get much accomplished on Tuesday and Wednesday. I struggled with revisions of old poems in between playing with Legos and completing puzzles with the boy, so there was some writing done, although honestly I don't know how productive it was. My major accomplishments ended up being 1) lit-mag research -- I found some really interesting new magazines (more on them later) 2) submissions and 3) the organization and "clean up" of my computer files (I had multiple drafts of poems saved between my laptop and my zip drive, and this clutter was a source of major confusion lately). I had about one day of good writing -- Thursday -- and, true to form (no pun intended), I spent the entire day focused on working out a stanza to one of the ...

Yesterday I worked myself into a frenetic, worried mess. I spent my writing hour(s) doing more reading than writing, which in itself was okay -- I was reading critical essays about fairytales, and taking notes and thinking about how my own fairytale poem should be shaped. But then, after the quiet period of the morning was up -- the boy and the girl having decided between themselves at some point that this would be The Day of Fighting and Not Listening -- I attempted to write out a schedule for my sabbatical. The results were rather disastrous. That is, to my apparently fragile psyche they were disastrous. If you look at it from the standpoint of my house and the kitchen cabinets I gutted and cleaned throughout the entire afternoon, the results were fabulous! (More overwhelming stress, please! I'll have this house whipped into shape in no time!) I went kind of bat-shit crazy on the inside. This sabbatical scares me. I think I've voiced that as a joke before, but I'm jus...