1. Writing is much more anti-social than photography. Even though I am thoroughly anti-social when I am shooting, I am either working, or I am not. I am not framing things in my head, or planning out the editing I am going to do. So when I am not working, I am talking or reading or watching TV, or dancing, or any number of things that can involve other people. Now that I am working on words again, I find that I am never not working. Which means that it is on my mind at any given moment, and so even when I am trying to stop, and have a conversation with someone else, it intrudes on the conversation.
2. I forgot why this was going to be a numbered list.
3.
4.
Essay #2 is about Women and Death, because that's the assignment. It can be a very tangential relationship. I think it will include something about squishing my calligraphy pen into cuts I've made in my arm so I can write out "for lifes not a paragraph and death i think is no parenthesis" in blood, which was really hard because the blood kept congealing in the pen, and in my cuts, which were very shallow because even my angst is wimpy. That's why there are so many cuts. The story will include something about my current dental woes and my new-found talent for bone assimilation. It may also include, although I can't say why, the story of my first real concert when I was fifteen and I fooled around with a stranger whose face I'm not sure I ever saw. I think I should learn something so it can include some factual components as well. I suppose once I figure out what the connecting thread, besides "things about my body," is, I can learn something about it.
I also need to remember to go back to CHAPTER 3 and possibly emphasize "this is how things were, this is how things are," and also add more personal details. There's a bit I had when I was trying to write the Sheila story, talking about my office with my name on the door that I share with the grad students sometimes. And something about frozen rain making bumps on everything like braille. That would probably fit. I couldn't use it for the contest, because I put the words down before the writing period, but I can go back and add them now.
5. Oh yeah. I remember why this was going to be a list. I was in need of make-me-feel-better food, except not so in need that I was willing to give up another full week of dieting. Which means that now, when I feel bad, I eat fish, all the fish. I got sushi and smoked salmon. I left some for later. And then because I couldn't have a pint of ice cream, I had a glass of chocolate milk and then later a bottle of cream soda. Which, honestly, might have added up to a lot of ice cream. But somehow it feels like less of a loss.
6. This is the bit I might re-write into CH.3:
You are sitting in your office at a large public university in a small Midwestern town. Outside, little bumps of frozen rain cover the outside of your car, forming an epic poem in braille, or you think it might be, if you could read braille.
It’s your name on the door, although you still share the room with a scanner that cost more than you make in a year. The TAs who got kicked out in order to give you this office still come in sometimes to use it. You apologize for the mess, and they apologize for invading your space, which is the best that anyone can do.
I'm not sure what details to add to the college part. Maybe something about my dorm room? The pillow that a professor brought for me because I didn't have my stuff from home yet? More about Sheila? That would fit. I'm still a bit ambivalent about writing about her. She hated it when I wrote her into my stories. It was never her, not exactly, but I'd find some detail to work in, and she'd catch it and make me change it. Except even if I change her name, it's still her. I can't take that out. And the only people who would be able to connect my memory of my best friend from college who isn't my friend anymore, are the people who knew us both, and they'd know whether I changed names or not.
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