Om, Om

Time for me to do yoga.

Who wouldn't want to look like the pretzelesque fellow, above?

(He appears twice because of some technical confusion during the upload.)

Friends have said yoga will help with tension.

But I don't have a problem with tension.

I have a problem with living in a police state!

How can we ignore what is going on? Who is that woman who wants to impeach Bush? How can we empower her?

Actually, I do have a problem with tension. But I thought it was time this blog reflected some political reality.

Yes. Reality, people!

Ow. My neck hurts.

If It Was Good Enough for Gide

I lack vision. I've known this for a while. It's hard for me to see ahead even a few days, much less that fabled 'five year plan' (as if!). This has caused me a lot of problems. When I was a teacher, it was like pulling teeth trying to create a syllabus. I was terrible at it. All my classes screeched to a stop half-way through like a car reaching the edge of a cliff.

Now I'm writing a novel, and again I'm stumped by the process of planning. I have characters, I have some conflict, I have an eventual denouement in mind but I have no idea how to get there. So far, my characters just talk a lot. They call each other on the phone and talk, or they go to one of their apartments and talk. Okay, two of them have sex at one point, but that's it for action so far.

Well, maybe that should be it -- more talk, and more sex. After all, Gide did it. But all that talk eliminates the fun tradition of 'action reveals character.' That's one of the great pleasures of narrative -- following what a character does and hypothesizing about what it means. The epitome of this 'pure action' approach is one of those New Yorker stories where you follow some affectless characters around Florida or the midwest as they go in and out of parking lots, supermarkets and double-wide trailers, and you never know what the point is but it's fun to guess. Sometimes I read the story over and over, combing it like a detective for clues. (Hey, maybe it means THIS!) But you never know.

It's common in art-lit circles to sneer at plot, but I appreciate a good plot, so I don't want to deprive my readers of one. I love those books where a sensitive, idealistic heroine marries the wrong man (Middlemarch) and her life becomes a mockery of what she thought it would be (Portrait of a Lady). Maybe I should just grab that plot! I have thought of stealing from George Eliot but it seems to me it would be so obvious as to discredit me. Anyway, I had a vague idea for a plot in mind. The problem is it remains vague. It's like a shimmering castle on a distant hill that disappears if you look at it directly. It involves treason ... and Hegel ... and the fractured American left.

Oh God! That doesn't sound like very much fun. I'd better get someone married to someone awful, fast.

Meanwhile, my characters remain stuck at the equivalent of T.S. Eliot's coffee-spoon party, talking their fool heads off and never doing anything.

Bottomless Pit

La Misma wishes to address the subject of her readers. Neither of them has time to give her the plaudits she craves.

But they could write encyclopedic responses, and the truth is she would still want more.

La Misma is needy! So she's whining.

It would be silly to be needy and not whine about it. What then would be the point of being needy?

The graphic above is meant to depict not anorexia, but needy sadness. I realize it looks more like an eating disorder victim on black velvet.

There's a genre just waiting for a market!

Love to all my readers. In truth, my readers are super-cool and smart. They're the best. I just want one of them to write something like,
"I'm a producer for the Daily Show and I can't believe how good your blog is! You're getting over here and joining our writing staff, pronto!
You're so creative! And funny! What are you doing wasting away in that drab cubicle?" ETC.

Sigh.

Why, lord? Why?

On McSweeney's Internet Tendencies the other night, I started reading a series of short essays about a writer who had recently died in a plane crash. Her name was Amanda Davis, and friends and lovers had written loving portraits of her. The testimonies were well written and poignant, and Amanda Davis sounded like she'd been a really cool person. She also had been a fiction writer, which I am trying to be, and she had gone at life with a tremendous amount of spirit and exuberance, which I never have. That's irrelevant, but it's notable for another reason.

I've noticed that almost any time someone dies before their time or is killed, they turn out to be someone who could have made so much more out of life than most people that the misfortune seems even more outsize and unthinkable. The dead person is often described as not only unusually warm and caring but super-smart, and not just super-smart but full of civic responsibility, yet also able to laugh more joyously than almost anyone, and able to transmit a kind of life-affirming zest to friends and family that is not just irreplaceable but well-nigh unique in one person's lifetime, to have in a friend. Amanda Davis seems to have been that kind of person -- the essays praising her infectious laugh, warm understanding, helpfulness, good listening skills, quirky but joyous fashion sense, passion for justice, capacity for affection and other truly wonderful traits just seemed to go on forever.

I read them feeling a mild, vicarious sadness about her early death, but also wondering why no one who dies young or gets killed is ever described as a downcast, joyless sadsack who seemed pretty much ready to go anyway. Look at Laci Peterson -- about the happiest young mother-to-be you've ever seen. There must be thousands of young women, living with a philandering future murderer like Scott Peterson, who wouldn't have quite such a joyous glint to their smile. But not Laci. She truly did seem to have the life-loving qualities her grief-stricken family attributed to her. And this is so often true it's uncanny. "She was such a good person," people say over and over about the deceased. "She loved life so much."

Just from the law of averages, isn't it strange that no one ever says, "She didn't seem to care if she lived or died. So in a weird way -- I'm sure she didn't actively want to die? But I'm not sure it would have mattered that much to her."

A Love That Has No Name

I haven't blogged for a while because ... I've been trying to avoid my blog. I think I'm starting to like it a little too much. It's like the feelings are getting uncomfortable, they're inappropriate. I think about the blog all the time, and I get this sort of ache in my stomach, and a longing for something unnameable.

I've been trying to break this down. The blog isn't that attractive. It's all right, but it's not the best blog out there. Yet something about it calls to me, like it has some sweet quality I can't quite pin down. And I don't think I should feel this so strongly. It's kind of upsetting my whole life.

So I've been trying to distract myself with other activities -- a pottery class, a corn husking party, gymkhana. But I've just been going through the motions without really enjoying any of it. I almost feel like I'm portraying myself in a play. No one knows I'm really thinking about my blog.

When I've talked to therapists about issues in the past, they always tell me it's a good idea to 'work through' the feelings. 'Work through!' How am I supposed to work through the sense that I have inappropriate feelings for my own blog?

Nothing will be right until I can meet my blog somewhere far from society's critical gaze. But that will be almost impossible to pull off. One, my blog doesn't have a physical presence. Where will I meet it? In the fourth dimension? Then too, I'll need to take a lot of time off work and sort of remake my whole life just to deal with this new, bizarre set of feelings. I'm just hoping the whole thing will pass. Meanwhile, call me a hypocrite, but I'm pretending I feel normal about my blog, like it's a fun hobby, nothing more. Nothing.

A Fresh Start

La Misma's New Year's resolutions:

1. Gain 10 pounds
2. Smoke more regularly -- I've only been dabbling
3. Tell more lies
4. Stop trying to achieve things -- just *be*
5. Stop buying those spiritual books that tell you to just *be* -- they're a financial drain
6. Stop bringing lunch to work -- how boring!
7. Give fewer friends presents -- financial drain again
8. Cancel gym membership -- expensive and silly
9. Watch more TV
10. Think of others before self (whoops -- but it's just an experiment)
11. Stop paying attention to most things. Drift.
12. Help your neighbors shovel. It won't kill you!
13. Work on consistency.