Yeah, okay, so maybe this is the June/July entry. I dunno. We'll see, I guess.
I took today off. I took yesterday off, but that was the Fourth of July and it was okay. But I didn't go to my friend's party and so I felt crappy about that decision today, plus I let a very nice woman know that I wasn't going to be able to use her services anymore because she sucks. No, I didn't put it that way, particularly because she doesn't actually suck, she's just very inconsistent and that's just not good enough. And I think it's possible that she has a crappy home life and that that interferes with her being able to do a good job, but she was very gracious about it and that just makes me feel worse. Meanwhile, I'm still working with someone else whose work isn't all that good, but only when I really need her and only for some clients. I don't know why I couldn't continue that way with this other woman, but I didn't feel right dodging her requests for work and hardly ever giving her any. It's better that she look for work elsewhere.
Damn. I even suck at rationalization today.
At some point this afternoon I started to think about how we turn out as adults and how they may or may not be different from who we were as kids. A few years ago I tracked down in the Internet someone I was friends with as a kid and she was living near a current friend of mine in Pennsylvania, so I went to visit one evening. She had become both a doctor and a lawyer and had a fabulous house and husband and kids. She had been that way as a child, she was very smart and she had two parents and a younger sister who smart and they were all very normal. And we talked about some of the people we'd grown up with. Janie, who was athletic and loved animals was now a PE teacher somewhere. Lori F., who was a terror and a bully as a child, had grown up to be...a bitch. And then there's me, a social misfit who spent a lot of time alone and I'm...a spinster with a cat.
No surprises.
So now I'm reading Ann Patchett's "Truth and Beauty" and I'm about halfway through, but she talks about making the decision at some point to really devote herself to her writing in order to change her life. And that's what she does. And she writes about various writing colonies, places where people get to go spend a month or several just writing. I don't know if I'll ever be able to do that, but I do know that writing is what I have to do and just sitting around thinking about it ain't going to get me into a different life.
Of course I've made this commitment before and I'll probably have to make it again. And, really, the prospect of going down this path scares me. But there's a poem I wrote, in fact it was the first poem I wrote as an adult, for my very first college class (which was when I was 25):
Marbling
I pour the milk into my glass of iced coffee
And watch it eddy down through the liquid and ice,
Marbling the coffee until I blend it with my spoon.
And I touch the fear in me
At the prospect of creating,
Of putting my lonely words on paper
In such sequence that they make sense
And touch a chord in you.
I listen to the tinkle of the spoon
Against the ice and glass.
Everything sparkles and shines with the expectation,
The hope for a song.
I hold my breath against that expectation
And the song comes no more
Until the next time.
The song does keep coming back. I know it does.
