Day: October 31, 2013

Essay: A project for an ebb tide.

I’m about to embark on yet another project.  For those of you who know me, this isn’t much of a surprise.  I’m very project-focused.  In fact, were my blog a drinking game, most of the regular readers would be half-soused if the drinking word was “project.”  It’s not surprising that the universe found me a job at a school that uses the Project Approach to educate its children.  I’m all about the focused effort toward a goal that is the project.
I’m a bit at an ebb tide right now.  In fact, last night I started to write an essay about my ebb tide, but found I didn’t have enough energy to parse out what exactly that means and then format those thoughts into legible sentences, let alone paragraphs.  I can tell you that I don’t have a lot of extra oomph right now.  And that I don’t want to be a lot of things I usually am happy to be.  Farmer for one, that’s currently on hold.  The yard is a mess.  Enthusiastic athlete, that’s another one.  Running (jogging, really) has been on hold, because every time I do it, I hurt my foot.  I’m just doing a bit of walking in the mornings for now. Homemaker, there’s another thing I’m not really interested in right now.  I’m cooking at a minimal level to feed myself and doing just a bit of cleaning to keep the house in barely contained order.  But that’s it.
I think this feeling will pass. It feels temporary.  I might just be overly tired—I haven’t really been sleeping very well the past few weeks—or hunkering down for the cold winter.  Maybe my ancient farmer within wants me to rest after the harvest, despite the fact I never really got around to harvesting this year.
So while I’m waiting for the flood tide to return, here’s what I’m doing:  I’m writing 500 words a day from tomorrow until the end of the year.  That’s 500 words times 61 days.  I’ll have 30,500 words come December 31.  30,500 words of what, you ask?  Well, that would be the new novel I started in July and wrote daily until school started to ramp up again.  My plan is to get a first draft (hence the project) and then do something I’ve never actually done:  revise that first draft into something actually good.
I’ve written about 17,000 words already, mostly in chunks larger than 500 words.  That plus my 30,500 to come will have me ending up short of the NaNoWriMo goal of 50,000, (and with two months instead of one) but that’s fine.  Ebb tide is saying NaNoWriMo isn’t really doable this year.  So I’ll adapt.  I know I can write 500 words in about 20 minutes and I feel like I can find 20 minutes per day from now until the end of the year.  And I know that I feel better having written.  And I know I just want the thing to get written.  And then I want it to be better.

I might have time to throw in an essay for the blog now and then, but if I don’t, maybe I’ll post a bit or piece of what I’m working on.  But perhaps not.  We shall see.  At any rate, I’m off on another adventure.  Wish me luck.

45RPM: Runaway Train, Soul Asylum

Where I match a song to a specific memory.

My brother is two years younger than me and we inhabited different worlds for most of our growing up.  I was books, he was sports.  I was rules he was push.  I was lonely, he was surrounded.  I was nerdy, he was popular.  I was struggle, he was ease.  By the time we had both settled into attending the same high school (he a sophomore, I a senior) we had our routines down and our orbits really only crossed at the dinner table and on vacations as well as a random day now and then when we did something together.

Except for a few standouts, most of his friends have melded into one friend amalgam.  They were of the same time, the kind of hippy, kind of athletic popular kids, who did much more socially than I ever did in high school.  Our age difference seemed vast at that time, and I always felt a combination of bemused at their childish/grownup antics and kind of inferior to their social status.  I mostly left them alone, though we weren’t unfriendly to each other.

Some of them sought me out, for whatever reason.  I found a journal entry that described a party my brother hosted while my parents were out of town (the exact kind of party, in fact, that kept my parents from leaving town for nearly all of my high school experience) where two of his friends found me in my room and chatted me up.  I even printed out and saved what they wrote when they were messing around on my word processor.  They cracked me up, even twenty years later.

I have a clear memory of one friend–name lost to time–encountering me on the stairs as I was leaving for work.  He gripped the Soul Asylum album Grave Dancer’s Union in his hand and was giddy with delight over something.  “Look!” he said to me, pointing to the CD cover.

“Butt.” he indicated the naked girl on the right.

“Butt” he indicated the naked girl on the left.

“No butt.” all that was left was the girl in the middle.

I smiled and nodded and continued on my way, confused as always by my brother’s friends.  And I think of that encounter every time I think of this song.