Free time, free writing, and the life of the unwillingly unemployed

Let's get this out of the way: I still don't have a job. I have tried, and I'm still trying. But, this nasty ol' job market has successfully kept me down and out of the paying, working world.

That said: I have officially completed all of my assignments from the fall semester classes! I'm ecstatic for the free space in my thoughts, not to mention my time, a precious interval I must not waste before the spring semester begins in January. So, today is a "do whatever I want" day, which really just means I email my advisor about details for my internship next semester, I clean the kitchen, and I sit on the couch and stare at the dreary rain that's held on for a third day straight. But, at least I can enjoy my Christmas decorations, and plug in the lights because it's so dark in my house.

Whether you like it or not, the lack of a job to get up for in the morning, and to serve as a grounding structure for your day, can test the self-discipline of even the most driven person. I, for instance, wrote in a post not too long ago about trying to give myself a list or schedule, but being unwilling because I feel tied down on a schedule. But, now that my semester is over I have whole, yawning days I must fill. Now, I say all of this to preface: I actually have a plan.

Lately, I've been trying to reinstate writing in my life. It's been two years now since I left the MFA creative writing program I was in for a couple semesters. I left that program because I felt I wasn't mature enough as a human or as a writer to produce the massive amount of life work an MFA requires of a writer. Shortly after I left, I began a stint as a temp Technical Writer for a large company, during which I started this blog. Although I had just left the creative program, I saw myself bloom as a writer, and I was conceptualizing and writing every day. During this time, however, I was also accepted into the Masters in Library and Information Science program at USC, and when I began to prepare for that program I put my writing life on hold. Now, I realize, that was a mistake. Thankfully, not much time has passed and I believe I won't have too long to be back where I was when I started this blog. Writing was breathing for me, and when I wasn't writing, I was reading new fiction and peeling my eyes to see and synthesize everything I could.

I am planning, and in the process, of working writing back into my life. The plan I spoke of is simple, but has not been easy at first. I am remembering, as I begin again, that trying to write after a too-long hiatus is akin to your first run after a season of little or no running. Here's what I have planned so I can get myself fit again:

1. Write, write, write...write...write...and write some more. Most things count. I have started keeping a freewriting journal in a Word doc. There are many websites that offer writing prompts and exercises, and they are just as good as anything else. Yesterday I was using some free (no cost) writing prompts at a site called The Journal. 
2. Remember that everything is practice, and don't try to expect everything you write to be perfect. Just write. In time, you will see your writing get better, but it can't do anything if you don't write.
3. Read a lot, and widely. Don't just read the kind of thing you want to write, but read in other genres, and read nonfiction, too. 

You will hear those pieces of advice from anyone who knows what the writing life is all about. I'm simply retweeting it. 

Blogging is included in writing, and I'm sure you've noticed the increasing number of my posts lately. But, it's only a component of the writing life, a type up stretch for that run I was talking about. 

So, I apologize in advance for clogging up your RSS feed in the next few weeks. (I flatter myself that someone actually has my blog on RSS feed). 

Now to put a hurting on that dirty kitchen...

Buffing a shine into the old Holiday - some real-life pre-Christmas thoughts

What a grey day. The trees, the only things I can see out my bedroom window, are now fully leafless, jutty and brittle under a lint-colored sky. I have just finished wrapping what presents I've been able to come up with yet, and my husband's asleep on the couch after wrapping one of them. One of them.

We are curious creatures this season, expected to be ready to drive out to anywhere my mother wants, to look at Christmas lights - a little town in the mountains has the cutest, the best decorations and luminaries - because it's the holidays. When during the rest of the year would any friend or family member hold you to these standards of gathering and being joyful about it?

One could call me a Scrooge. Bah, humbug.

No, it's not true. I bought the claymation Rudolf the Red Nosed Reindeer this afternoon, and played it as I taped and cut (quite irregularly and badly). The movie used to be longer, I thought, their journey to the Island of Misfit Toys more rigorous. At moments, the music smudged and skipped, due to the deterioration of the old original from which it was copied. And I had thought, when I was a kid, that happened because we had recorded our tape on the VCR from a TV special, sponsored by 7UP.

Last week my mother gave me a shoebox taped shut, full of ornaments she had given me each Christmas as I grew older. We expected our ornaments on that wonderful morning of Gameboys and colorful sweaters, my sister and I, but the tradition was of my mother's making, not wanted enough to appreciate among our other gifts. So, when my mom tried to hand me the shoebox, I even told her to, "keep them, they belong on the tree at your house. More at home here."

After Daniel and I got our Frasier Fir home last night, I sawed off the bottom stems and nestled it into the tree stand in the living room. Somehow, I managed to get the odorous, sticky sap on my hands, my jacket and, miraculously, in my hair. We then began to attach the ornaments we bought for our first Christmas tree together in 2009, and I opened the shoebox full of childhood ornaments from my mother.

With many things, the older I get, the more they lose their shine. My parents, I will admit, change character in my perception over time, and become more human and less omnipotent than they once seemed. I feel, at moments, that I have learned everything about them that I can, having lived most of my life with them. But, as I emptied the box I realized, for the first time, the care and love my mom had stored up for me in it among the ornaments. I found myself telling Daniel a little story from out of my kidhood as I pulled out each one, a physical twinkle of a memory I'd forgot I had.

And I have made a new memory, putting them on the tree in Daniel's and my home for the first time.

I'm amazed the gifts made it under our tree. If the cat wasn't bedding down on the wrapping paper, the dogs were chewing on the ribbons and playing dangerously close to the boxes. I even had to yell at the greyhound because she had her stinky mouth all over one of my new slippers. Seriously, I don't have children but, really, I do have children.

I'll continue to push Christmas to myself. I've neglected it a couple of years, and the time just shoots right by, depressing and unmarked. I can even try to ignore those irritating commercials that replace the words to Christmas songs with advertising slogans. Even if, somewhere in the back of my mind I think, "Why am I putting a tree inside my house that probably has spiders in it?" I know it's because I believe in the tradition, too.

I was raised on the culture of Christmas, and in an effort to not be a sad, nihilistic human creature, I say, "Let's buy some shit no one needs, give it to each other, eat some candy cane cookies and sausage balls and sing along to the Carpenters!"

The past, the cold can make you stronger

I just found out, Margaret Atwood, the author, is good at more than one genre. I read a book of hers called The Handmaid's Tale back when I was in the Creative Writing program. I say "back when," and really it was only two years ago when I left it but it seems like a longer time, enough time, at least, to change the course of my life. That novel by Atwood is a dystopian, post-apocalyptic account of a human society in which women can't easily have babies anymore. Rich and influential women take handmaids, instead - like the story of Sara and Abraham in the Bible. When I read it I was amazed, and I just couldn't stop reading because I wanted to know what would become of the handmaid who showed me her story, because she was unnamed and could've been anyone, even me.

But I've also just heard Garrison Keillor read a poem by Margaret Atwood, "In the Secular Night". Atwood as poet lets in on what happens in those unaccounted-for hours, what my mom calls "the wee hours of the night," when a person is less structured. The poet mutters to herself as she walks upstairs, eating a bowl of baby lima beans and cream with her fingers. She mutters and contemplates things that, like miraculous epiphanies, only come together when one has been awake long enough into the night. And of course, like every writer, she waxes nostalgic for a spell inside the poem.

I was just telling my husband the other night, in one of those rambling monologues I subject him to because I see no one but the dogs most days, that nostalgia and the past are inescapable for me. I can't hear, read, smell or watch anything without being kicked back to the first time, the formative moments of that spice or movie where I applied it like lipstick to the experiences I was having. But this is good for a writer. The ability to see the past as a catalogue of events meaningful when strung throughout each other in myriad ways is, indeed, what charges writers to write. The recurring themes, images and symbols in a single life and even throughout history beg for significance, so we write them into story.

                        *                             *                             *

It's getting cold below the southern mountains, finally, even though November is well on it's way. Just two days ago, though, I was bearing my legs in cutoffs again, albeit with boots up to mid-calf. The little black spiders, frequently sighted on the ceilings in summer, even thought it was okay to parade about in the open again on floors and walls. I hadn't seen a spider in the house for at least two weeks, and I was quite content with it that way.

For me, no spiders is about the only good thing that comes out of cold weather. It's hard to do anything but sit balled up under a blanket, or bundled in too many clothes for real comfort, when it's cold. So, I try to see the cold weather as a challenge, something that will make me stronger and more resilient. I make myself go for runs in the cold, because it makes the body stronger. Also, I try not to let that holiday languor set in and ruin any useful line of thinking.

Tonight is going to be another cold one, but it's Friday, and that makes everything just a little bit better. Daniel and I are headed to one of our usual haunts, the Hare & Hound Pub and Restaurant in Landrum, SC.

But first, I'm going for a run with some friends. Don't worry, I'm layering on some Underarmor for this one. I might even wear pants instead of shorts.

Plans and Pancakes

No longer the open meadows of thought, free and green for sitting and smelling, holding a watermark concept up to another for a starker, more meaningful picture. Not, at least at a time like the end of a fall semester, where any stray thought must belong to research paper or project formulation and not traipsing in the Free Meadow of Creative Thought. Textbook phrases, quantitative data, and professors' monotones and exaggerations crowd in, demanding their priority as "school things" and "the future of my career."

I'm not really a list person. I mean, I work better with lists, and more efficiently. Yet evening after evening, I fail to make any real sort of schedule for the next day. There is something cage-like about scheduling, and no matter how smoothly things go because I managed a plan beforehand, I never make it habit. So my mind can be found floundering and inconstant as to what I should be doing with my time. The silent, monstrous zeppelin floating over my tooth-brushing, my teatime and my walks to the mailbox, is that I should be doing something for school.

But I do have to have other things, things that get me to the teatime from the tooth-brushing, and to the schoolwork as well.

About a month ago, I bought a 49-cent copy of the novel Rebecca by Daphne du Maurier from a Salvation Army, on a whim because I have sort of always wanted to read it. My English teacher in high school assigned it to some of her classes, but for whatever reason she didn't assign it to the one I was in. When I opened to and read the first page a couple of weeks ago, I had already been reading another book on my Nook, but the plot was slowing up. Reading, waiting for something to happen in that Nook book, was like searching for arrowheads in the backyard.

Reading Rebacca has been just the distraction I've needed. It's a haunting mystery that was written in the late 1930's, and the protagonist is a young woman, awkward, thin and pale, who falls in love with and marries a widower almost twice her age, and goes to live on his estate. But no matter what she does, the girl cannot escape the ghostly memory of Rebecca, her husband's late wife who was killed in a boating accident. Or was she murdered?

Okay, obviously this is a purely self-indulgent read. But who doesn't need those? I'll finish the other book, of course, which is Swamplandia! by Karen Russell. I have a nasty habit of starting and rarely finishing - whether it is in reading or writing. So, I'm trying to shake this.

Swamplandia!, as it happens, is actually a really good book, just slow near the last quarter.

As a last note, I want to mention that I made pancakes yesterday morning, just for me and no one else (especially not the dogs). After smattering them with butter and maple syrup, I sat in the quiet at the end of the kitchen table, and indulged my breakfast fantasy (which is, it so happens, a rather dominant one). I thought of this blog, a namesake of the morning pancake, and let my various, schedule-less selves settle and resolve into a complete girl-woman-creature. I found a moment, and heard my voice, singular and peaceful, in my head.

My voice, no one else's.

Goodbye Hallowe'en: a past perfect and past present holiday

It is tragic - I must take down my Halloween decorations. Well, I guess not must, but should probably. I do love All Hallows Eve, but if I had all the trappings of it hanging around all year it just wouldn't be as special and fun.

My morbid yard, alas, must return to normal

Halloween was off limits when I was a kid. Because my mother had dabbled in what she called witchcraft when she was a teenager, when she began going to church with her grandmother - the only religious person in my mother's family - she gave up the usual things it is said you must give up when you become a Christian, including Halloween. So, naturally, as her children, we were allowed to dress up (mainly as Bible or history characters) and go to the church fall festivals, but never trick-or-treating. 

It never bothered me really, until I was a teenager and became interested in all things fantasy - especially elves and fairies - and wanted to dress up and go out with my friends. I was also interested in Celtic and pagan traditions and holidays, which included All Hallows Eve. I had read about Halloween, and even in those tracts from church casting halloween as demonic I found it darkly intriguing and mysterious, something forbidden in earlier years and therefore all the more enticing. 

 More creepy decorations

Now that I have my own life and my own house, I will celebrate Halloween every year. I enjoy the shifts and layers that it has acquired throughout history. Some historians believe it could have originated  in Roman festivals and and feasts of the harvest and the dead, but it is more widely associated with the Celtic festival of Samhain (pronounced sow-an). Deriving from an irish word samuin, meaning end of summer, Samhain was a harvest festival falling an the first day of autumn, and was the most important of the four quarter celebration days in the Irish and Scottish medieval calendar. People also believed that it was a time when the everyday world and the realm of the magical and spiritual were closest. Christians and the Catholic Church also influenced Halloween with their All Saints' Day and All Souls' Day, a time for honoring and praying for the souls of the dead. Many would wear masks and other costuming so as to disguise themselves, following lit candles held by others on their way to their place of worship for the next day.

Pumpkins on my table

I think you can disregard what anything has been in the past and accept it for what it is to you now, including Halloween. But, I prefer to keep the doors of history open and, perhaps, the door to the magical realms open as well. Halloween has the qualities of an ancient old town like Dublin, Ireland. Walking down Dublin's streets, you can see a each layer of its long life throughout civilization, from the cobblestones and Dublin Castle of the medieval times, to the many colorful doors of the Georgian era, and hundred-year-old buildings housing cellphone stores. There are aged pubs that still bear the original name from the times of the Irish kings, but show Gaelic foorball games on their flat screens behind the bar. 

Worlds and ages meet and commune on one night, Hallowe'en. 

So, to celebrate it this year, I had my first Halloween party. This is mainly why I spent so much time on decorating. It was largely a success, except for the part where my high school girl-crush walked in (whom I invited but hadn't seen since, well, high school, during which I was much too shy to talk to her) and I am sure that at that moment I was probably the most awkward person she had ever talked to. (Hi Anne, glad I got the awkwardness over with). I managed to get a few pictures of the costumes. Oh, and I'm a new Instagram user due to my sister persuading me to sign up, so the pictures are all at least 45% hipper than their original form (not an official percentage, I just made it up). 

 A Paul Bunyan and Blue Ox, a Margaret Tennenbaum (my sister), a Christmas sweater couple, and a best friends heart.

I was a Victorian ghost, and my husband Daniel was a John "Hannibal" Smith from the A-Team.

Hell yeah. 'Til next time.

Out of Dormancy

A fire-color, blazing on the ground and throughout limbs, would suggest warmth but the air is chilled instead. A plastic skull, a Halloween decoration, in the front garden is caverned under drooping mums. My backyard is covered with leaf carnage, blanketing what little grass we have and bringing it to brown in this season of death-like sleep.

Contrary to nature, I have been feeling renewed lately, coming out of a dull, anxious state. Last night I was reading the Lofty Ambitions blog's post, "Neil Gaiman on Being a Writer." If you don't know, I am a HUGE Neil Gaiman fan, so that was initially what piqued my interest to read it. But, I discovered that Lofty Ambitions is a great writing blog, and reading that post I felt overcome by the last paragraph in which the blog writer paraphrases Gaiman on becoming a writer: 

"...if he didn’t try to become a writer, he’d think on his deathbed, I could have been a writer. And he wouldn’t know whether that was true or whether he was fooling himself. So he decided to give it a serious go, to find out whether he could become a writer, to remove doubt. He doesn’t seem to have any other question about what he might have been and is comforted to know that, on his deathbed, he will say, I was a writer."

I was gripped by the image of being on my deathbed and not having at least seriously tried to be a writer. How many times will I do this? I hide from writing, my first love, and am discovered by that often latent passion stumbling upon another writer's blog, or listening to Writer's Almanac on the radio, or simply reading some ill-written words on the page of a magazine. A feeling of being discovered not doing what I'm supposed to runs through my body, left behind and lazy.

So, here I am once again, creaking open the door , which is in need of a little WD40, to connecting unlikely thoughts and details, to making up fun lies of history and the present and future, to leaving my body behind and residing in characters - to writing. I'll have to get back the flow and rhythm of it, and to reteach my mind to think of everyday things as a writer thinks of them. It won't be hard and it won't take long, but I'm out of practice.

Some hopeful news: I will be able to graduate with my Masters in Library and Information Science (MLIS) in August of 2012. I have less than a year in this program, and I'm very happy to have it over with. With luck and connections, I hope to find a job as a librarian next fall. Interestingly, I'm already thinking about going back into an MFA in Creative Writing program again. Not sure if Converse College's program is the one for me, though I started the program there. I still want to teach writing one day.

A friend suggested I do National Novel Writing Month, more fondly known as NaNoWriMo. The problem with that is I have no idea for a short story at this moment, let alone a novel. But, it's been my experience sometimes that beginning to write will alone engender idea and story. Well, I have until tomorrow to decide if I am going to be writing a novel in November or not. If I do, it will be complete shit. But then I'll have the shit out of the way really fast.

So perhaps, by the time all the red and orange from the trees has turned to crunchy ground cover, I'll have gotten it out of the way. After all, I'm not a stranger to this process, just a truant.

Taking steps towards being okay

Only in silence the word,
only in dark the light,
only in dying life:
bright the hawk's flight
on the empty sky.
            - The Creation of Ea, 
              A Wizard of Earthsea by Ursula Le Guin

I pick it off the top of a stack I bought at a giant book sale back at summer's end. The first words I read, before chapter one of A Wizard of Earthsea, are like the red letters.

Talk-therapy with my sister yesterday over pizza brought me out of my head for the day. But by tonight I needed more and Daniel listened to over an hour of descriptions of my screwed-up mind lately. Clearer now, with a promise to Angela to start blogging again this very day, and every day, I am here doing what I have thought about doing and should have been doing for months now.

I began this blog out of conviction that happiness is self-created. In the time since I last posted in February, pathetically about an anniversary post that never happened, I have felt unworthy to post on a blog about overcoming depression. This is because I have been in it. I've been experiencing pretty extreme episodes of anxiety for a few weeks now, and it feels like carrying a giant crushing stone wheel that keeps rolling over me as I try to throw it off. But I have begun the process of trying to outsmart it.

Feeling surrounded and trapped lately by random possibilities like disease and sudden death, the opening verse of Earthsea shushed my mind for the "word," and recalled the contingencies, the appositives that allow life to be the precious thing it is. If it weren't for the bad, the good would not be.

So, in answer to what threatens my happiness and my stability in the dark moments: thank you. Because the evil little gremliny creatures stalk my sanity, I learn I can conquer them.

And mostly, thanks to God for, indeed being God, speaking through who and what God will.

This is the start of something better for me - this moment.

Middle Earth meets the Middle of Nowhere, and notes on thrift stores

A wizard is never late, nor is he early. He arrives precisely when he means to.

When Gandalf said this he was referring to, well, wizards in particular. But I'm going to apply that to bloggers, too. Well, this blogger at least. So here I am not early or late in my post, but precicely when I need to be.

I do think that Gandalf and the whole of the Fellowship are with me in some way every day. When I'm sitting at my desk at work or I'm bored in my tiny apartment, I sometimes wish that I could live in Middle Earth. Rivendell in particular. Oh, and...after Frodo took the Ring to Mordor and Sauron was destroyed. I don't think I could have fit very well as a character in any of what came before. I kill every plant I touch, so I couldn't be a very good hobbit. I'd never survive the climb over the snowy slopes of the Caradhras in the Misty Mountains because I hate the cold, and I'd be no good at navigation as a member of the Fellowship because I can never get anywhere without the maps on my iPhone.

But I'm pretty sure I'd be a good Elf. I'd have to learn the Quenya or Sindarin but I've kind of always wanted to do that anyway. Wow, I just locked in my status as a big huge nerd, I think. Whatever.

So, my local library in Greenville County recently had a smallish exhibit of artifacts and interesting pieces from the Inklings, the literary group in Oxford England that met between 1930 and 1949 (according to Wikipedia), whose most famous members may be said to be C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien. I do like Lewis, but it was the Tolkien and LOTR materials that I was most interested in, and nearly shrieked into the quiet of the library when I first saw them.

I had to stop my hands from opening the glass case and holding those first American editions of the Lord of the Rings trilogy, and rolling up the posters and sticking them in my bag. I'm pretty sure the library would not be okay with that, if I've learned anything in my studies at library school thus far...and I assure you, I have.

The exhibit wasn't that extensive, but it had some very cool things to boast. It had first editions of Lewis's works as well as Tolkien's, and artifacts from Lewis's home at The Kilns, and some autographed copies of books by the Inklings, and more.

I wasn't sure if I was going to make it to the library to see the Inklings exhibit before it ended on January 23rd, but I just woke up one Saturday morning and knew that was the day, and I was going to make time for it. I took Daniel because he likes Tolkien and Lewis, too. It was a very nice day, one of those days that puts you in a good mood for a few days afterward.

In other news of my life, Daniel and I are in the long process of buying our first house. Offer was accepted and the groundwork of the loan has been done, and now we are in the waiting period for the loan to go through the underwriting office, which, as I understand, can take anywhere from no time at all to forever. It basically sits on someone's desk at the loan office until somebody finally takes mercy on us and pushes it through. Such is life. But, I'm already imagining how life will be in our new house. It has a huge fenced backyard, so Aggie our silly greyhound can take herself out to pee and poop. But, knowing her, she'll probably just stand outside at the door until one of us walks out there with her. She's like a little child.

I'm going to thrift stores and combing craigslist for cool cheap furniture and such. I recently bought a green velvet couch for forty bucks off craigslist. It's in my parents' basement right now until we get the house. I really enjoy craigslist. I even have a craigslist app on my iPhone. Daniel has his game apps like Angry Birds...and I have craigslist.

I went to a thrift store in Greenville yesterday called SOS. My friend had bought this really awesome chair from the 1960's there, so I thought I'd see what else they had. I got there about 20 minutes before closing and didn't see anything that I absolutely had to have. But it's so interesting to go around and look at the stuff that people have had in their houses for years, decades even. One interesting piece was this drafting table. It was huge and old and very used. A piece of paper posted above it said it came from some architect who lived in Greenville who was well-known. Named McMillan or McM-something, I can't recall.

I have no need for a giant old drafting table, but for a moment I felt like I was looking at a museum artifact. I started to just stare at it and imagine what kind of innovations and buildings were conceived and drawn on that table. Thrift stores are kind of like museums in a way...

...that sounds like a completely different blog post.

As a final note, guess what?!! The very first anniversary of my blog The Pancake Plan is coming up soon! I'll be posting on that day for sure, and I'll try to make it something good. ;) It's February 16, mark your calendars!