I realize that this post should really be entitled, Domestic Antics, part 2, but that didn't really work out so well. The complete lack of privacy during that little trip, complicated and improved by my beloved nephews who have no sense of personal space or time (bless them) rendered further blogging while in the thick of things impractical if not impossible. This means I'll leave you with the image of me stretched out on makeshift bed amid a tumble of laundry in the middle of the night, starving, and doing my best to ignore the inevitable squeaking of the poor hamster's wheel. I, Abject. Suffice it to say, it was lovely to be there and lovely to come home. The intervening eight and a half hour drive through a snow storm that stretched from Virginia to New York was not lovely. When I finally got here, the entire front of my car was covered with a thick crust of ice. It took a whole day of sitting in the sun and my strenuous efforts with an ice scraper to get it off. My ocd was tweaked with satisfaction, though, at the sight. billy, perhaps, can sympathize.
Since then things have been non-stop. My students are alternately adorable and terrifying. The weather is, by turns, lovely and crappy. People seem to be in the collective state of denial generally brought on by winter's death rattle. B, of course, in particular. Two weeks. Christ. Who ever heard of two full weeks of vacation in the middle of the semester? I'm telling you, Buffalonians are soft. In Montana, they never cancelled school no matter how bad the weather was, we only got one week off during Spring semester, and almost nobody went to college or left the state. So there.
I'm sort of on tenterhooks--not that I know what these are--this week. I'm getting ready to hand two very rough chapters in for comments, so I'm officially in self-flagellation mode. Writer's remorse, maybe? Brief periods of placid self-assurance are continuously swept away by a moment of horror in which I think suddenly of the worst thing that could be said to me about my project so far. With an effort, I quell the panic, and sink once again into comfortable denial. Okay, fellow writers, this would be a good moment for you to come clean about your own writerly loathing and, maybe, self-destructive behaviors. Surely, I'm not the only one, right? Ummm. Right? The above picture of one of my favorite horror villains is intended to give you the appropriate, visceral, organ-cringing sensation just in case you don't sympathize.
4 comments:
I had this vision of spring break being two weeks of cherry blossoms and hikes around the sculpture park. Meh. Not only are we back to winter, but oh, I forgot, there will be no cherry blossoms this year because of the October Surprise. Maybe there will be a sawn off snub limb that present one single blossom. The moment I reach out to it, the wind will blow it away, forever out of grasp. Sort of like writing a dissertation, right?
"Tenterhooks were used as far back as the fourteenth century in the process of making woollen cloth. After the cloth had been woven it still contained oil from the fleece and some dirt. It was cleaned in a fulling mill and then had to be dried carefully as wool shrinks. To prevent this shrinkage, the wet cloth would be placed on a large wooden frame, a "tenter", and left to dry outside. The lengths of wet cloth were stretched on the tenter (from the Latin "tendere", to stretch) using hooks (nails driven through the wood) all around the perimeter of the frame to which the cloth's edges (selvages) were fixed so that as it dried the cloth would retain its shape and size. At one time it would have been common in manufacturing areas to see tenter-fields full of these frames.
By the mid-eighteenth century the phrase "on tenterhooks" came into use to mean being in a state of uneasiness, anxiety, or suspense, stretched like the cloth on the tenter."
Sounds a lot like writing a dissertation to me: just substitute your entrails for the wool.
Self-doubt about writing? How about absolute disgust and shame in everything I professionally write. Between writing positive blurbs for shitty bands at AV, and having to write short descriptions of the videos I make for dull-witted fans, my writing style has evolved into the equivalent of the South Park, "ROB SCHNEIDER DUR BE DEEDILY DURP" style.
Nothing but bad puns, fake enthusiasm, and outright lies. Oh, the lies I tell.
i have thrust the writerly identity from me. or to put it more precisely, i feel like i projectile vomited it out of my body, mind, and psyche many moons ago. As a result, when anyone tells me I write well I tend to look at them with what can only loosely be called scathing pity. I think one day i may figure out sentences. i am looking forward to it.
Post a Comment