Assigned Blog Post #7: Oh dear. WRITING.

I am not particularly good at maintaining focus on the purpose of things. For instance, I realized today after reading Professor Cross' email that a lot of my blog posts don't have anything to do with writing. THIS IS A PROBLEM. fuhhhhhhh. Also, I need to read The Writing Life. I read a little bit of it....but I need to admit, I kind of disagreed with a lot. Maybe this is why I haven't been reading it....

While I think the examples and....snippet-story-things that Dillard presents are nice, to some degree, I get kind of uncomfortable when I read them. I can understand what connections she is trying to draw with the examples, but there's something instinctive about how I instantly object to her use of the second person. It's automatic; I see the "you," and inevitably I think, no, not me. Please do not tell me, Ms. Dillard, that you know everything about my writing. I guess I can be overly individualistic at times in the sense that I really object to being generalized. EVERYONE IS SPECIAL!!! I'm not really sure if everyone is as special, as unique, as different as I'd like to think. Because if we were all completely different, it would be super difficult for masses of people to reach a consensus, or for people to have similar tastes, or for people to have similar interpretations and perceptions of things, right?

But again, my individualist side is already making an argument against what i JUST SAID. While, I acknowledge that people can have similar tastes AND be different and as special as they like, and that I am probably overreacting, the second person in this situation gets on my nerves. I can't help it. The YOU, YOU DID THIS. YOU DID THAT. YOU. YOU INCHWORM. YOU are fixing the walls of YOUR house, with YOUR hammer. YOU are a painter, working from the ground up. When YOU are stuck in a book; when YOU are well into writing it....what YOU had planned will not do.

No. >.< Not me. NOOOOOONONOONOONONOOOOOOO, no-no, no. yes, I'm being childish and narrow-minded, but there's something about that YOU that just goes so against my instinct that I really need to keep bringing it up and ranting about it. Maybe this is Ms. Dillard's writing life. And maybe there are times when I am also in the situations that she describes. But the YOUs and YOURs are like throwing knives, I feel like I'm being pinned to the wall, like this particular writing life is being imposed on me. Like a one-way road. Like there's absolutely no other option.

The images that she uses are nice. The path, the canyon, painters, photographer-mountain climbers, the inchworm, prayer, shoe salesmen, the Algonquin woman (<--who was epic, I wish I was as resourceful and determined), etc, etc. And I guess if Dillard were talking about herself, I would look at them, think they were nice, and move on in the book. But these images are kind of too artsy for me to relate to.

I am not a surgeon with a probe made out of a line of my words. Surgeon implies precision, carefulness, a stunning eye for detail, hard work, ascetic determination. I'm like a surgeon who got an online degree, with no actual experience. One who leaves the surgical scissors inside the patient's body and then just stitches the person right up!(<--THIS ISN'T REAL LIFE). I'm the awkward passenger who freaks out when the cabdriver starts randomly singing, who sits huddled in a corner of the taxi wondering how I should respond and how long it's going to take me to get to my destination. Often times, I'm not a delicate inchworm saying "End of world? No further? Yike!" When I get into a slump, I'm the fat caterpillar who gets annoyed and angry, rash and unreasonable. I'm the one who says, "End of world, YOU'RE A BUTT. Grass, I QUIT. Becoming a butterfly is for SISSIES."

So my writing life is not as beautiful as Ms. Dillard generalizes. My writing life is obnoxious, stubborn, haphazard, like I'm throwing cards on a table one by one, hoping that somehow they'll stack by themselves and make a house, hoping that a little bit of magic will help them stick together, and once I'm done smashing the base into a vague semblance, maybe--if I'm lucky--the roof won't fall through, and the queen of hearts will lie across the top like so, or the joker will balance like that, on the side. Or maybe not. Maybe I lost about half my cards, and maybe that's just made me lose my marbles, and soon I'll be losing my story, my enthusiasm, my determination, my temper, my sleep. Maybe I never actually had an ace card up my sleeve. Now that I take a look at the hand I picked out, I'm sure to lose.

But other times, when the moment's just right, I'm randomly dealt the ace of spades. I slap it down, DEATH CARD, I've got it. But unlike the graceful, progressive processes that Dillard describes, this whole card deal is so random, so chancy, so risky. All of a sudden, without even going to a casino, without placing a bet, I'm a gambler.