A Room of Everyone’s Own: The Writer as Public Fixture

Essays
April 9, 2012 | 19 4 min read

The portmanteau “coffice,” which sounds at first like a cute one-liner, turns out to be so useful for describing contemporary reality that it may, like “staycation,” soon appear in dictionaries. Originating in South Korea in 2010, it refers to a coffee shop employed as one’s office. It’s also a verb: to coffice. Bootstrapping entrepreneurs throw the term around, and though I haven’t heard writers use it yet, I suspect they will soon. Every time I stop into a café in New York City, I see them, ears tethered to computers, faces aglow with laptop light. When I speak of “writers,” of course, I am not discussing crafters of emails or grocery lists. I am thinking of aspiring novelists, creative non-fiction writers, and poets too. “There they are,” I think. “The cofficeurs.” And what I have always been tempted to say to them is: Go home.

Writing in public feels like a performance, but, when we’re dealing with literature, the performance is not what endures. To put it another way: the final outcome is the performance. I can’t help but assume when I see the coffice-bound writer as one who privileges persona over results.

However, when I asked writers I know about their own relationship with public writing (after all, some of my best friends write in coffee shops), I was surprised by the range of answers. One explained to me, on a crowded subway train, that the temptation of Internet pornography was so strong that a public environment helped him avoid autoeroticism, and kept him focused and productive. This did little to assuage my aversion, but I was interested to hear that internal distraction can be just as much an obstacle to writing as external distraction.

Another writer pointed to the brute economic necessity of the coffice. This is a salaried reporter with benefits, required to travel locally, who makes a living posting short compact creative news pieces to a blog with as many as fifteen deadlines a week. Wherever he can grab a moment to write, he does. “Sometimes I need to leave my apartment to get work done, to just change the space.” I pointed out that very few writers are writing a novel because rent is due. His response: “Novelists are exactly the same as reporters. Just take away reality, the galaxy of issues that go along with dealing with actual people and their lives, and deadlines.” Ultimately, he said, “If you’re saying that NYC supports a large number of creative types who end up working in public, yes, you’re correct. Should they shut up (their laptops) and get a job in a cooperative office space, maybe. Me, I’m thrilled Variety [Cafe] has free WiFi.”

A third more casual writer — my partner — suggested that cofficing may be less a decision about process than a conditioned behavior, the byproduct of college culture. Many educated individuals were brought up in dorms, libraries, large classrooms, campus lawns, study halls, dining halls, and community lounges. To think and create in public has become a norm. Indeed, the implied presence of an immense public when working on a computer with Internet access is almost inescapable. Yet this only seems to sustain my view that writing in public is, like many other habits of college students and Internet users, an attention-seeking performance.

cover Is that so wrong? Coffee-house culture was vital to European literature of the last century, Ernest Hemingway , perhaps the patron saint of cofficers, not only wrote in public, but wrote about how he wrote in public (maybe even as he was writing in public). Hemingway was a great talent, but also a showoff who required validation, and in his youth liked to execute his art before an audience between shots of “rum St. James” and eyeing a pretty girl “with a face fresh as a newly minted coin,” as he writes in the first chapter of A Moveable Feast (a text that no doubt helped fuel the trend of Americans writing in cafés).

But writing in seclusion was the true ritual throughout even Hemingway’s life. In his 1954 Nobel Prize Banquet Speech, Hemingway said, “Writing, at its best, is a lonely life… For [a writer] does his work alone and if he is a good enough writer he must face eternity, or the lack of it, each day.” Virginia Woolf, who also knew from solitude, even went as far as to write that a marginalized individual could only contribute quality literature to the world by first having A Room of One’s Own.

These days, many of our most prominent writers seem to have gotten the memo. With the exception of Nathan Englander, who I’m told is a regular at the Hungarian Pastry Shop in Morningside Heights, there seem to be surprisingly few published writers operating in coffee shops. In my casual research I came across How I Write: The Secret Lives of Authors edited by Dan Crowe, wherein famous living writers were asked to comment about their own process. Among the sixty-seven or so contributors, only two writers allude to writing in cafes or coffee shops. Nicholson Baker describes his earplugs as useful “in any loud place,” but does not reference a particular public location. Elif Shafak explains, “I am a nomad… libraries, cafes, streets, trains stations… everywhere can be my writing abode,” but like she said, she’s a nomad. Willy Vlautin writes at a racetrack. From A.M. Homes to ZZ Packer the other 64 prefer solitude from their pre-published days to the present, sometimes referencing objects they keep on their desks or pictures hung on a wall in a private room as things that serve their process.

As these writers know — as Hemingway and Woolf knew — literature is a relationship both with solitude and with the rest of the world, and I suppose what bothers me about the laptop hive of the “coffice” is that it offers neither. So when I see writers hunched over their third refills, maybe I don’t want to say, “go home,” but “stay.” Close your laptop, observe humanity, have a lengthy conversation with a fellow customer or artist, then go home and get the work done.

Image of Ernest Hemingway in London at Dorchester Hotel 1944 via Wikimedia Commons

is an associate writing consultant and adjunct lecturer at Columbia University and Baruch College. His fiction, nonfiction, and poetry have appeared in Details, The Bellevue Literary Review, Nerve, Forklift Ohio, and Court Green. A short film he wrote, "REMAINS," was in competition at the 2012 SXSW film festival.

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Essays

Whale Music

Essays
March 22, 2011 | 1 6 min read
1. I have a feeling I owe the US contract for my third novel to Herman Melville. Call me a lucky bastard. Galore opens in the mists of early European settlement in Newfoundland when a group of starving fishermen butcher a beached whale and discover a man in the creature's belly. The man is alive—pale, mute and stinking to high heaven—but alive. And the book gets a little nuttier from there. Even those publishers who liked the novel saw little upside in terms of marketing and sales, and it was hard to argue with their reservations when they passed. I had almost given up on publishing in the States when Galore found its way to a young editor at Other Press who forced everyone in-house to read and, at the very least pretend, to love it. She's been out there ever since, like some Ancient Mariner, haranguing strangers with the bizarre story, God bless her. Her admiration for the book made me actively wish to never disappoint her. But in a discussion with my publicist about feuds in literature (there's plenty of that in Galore as well), I innocently admitted I had never cracked the cover of Moby-Dick. News travelled. My editor wrote to let me know she is a Melville devotee. A hardcore devotee. Evangelical, even. Apparently being from New Hampshire goes some way to explaining this. Regardless, I had clearly dropped a notch or two in her estimation. “I've read 'Bartleby the Scrivener',” I wrote back. “Isn't that enough Melville?” If it's possible to give an “are-you-fucking-kidding-me?” look over email, she gave me that look. And I was forced to stand behind the shabby little bulwark erected to protect myself from the raging sea of classics I've ignored over the years. “I don't read anything longer than five hundred pages,” I said. “Life's too short.” Just before Christmas a package arrived containing what I imagine is the only extant edition of Melville's leviathan that—excluding preface, reviews, letters, commentaries, and scholarly articles—comes in shy of five hundred pages. The tiny print like lines of black pepper ground over a white sauce. It made my eyes water just to look at it. But I felt I owed her a literary debt, and I waded in. 2. Unlike Melville's cetaceans, the whale in Galore doesn't occupy much fictional real estate. It gets barely a mention through the generations that follow that opening scene, before reappearing on the last page where it acts as a kind of folkloric talisman to bring the book full circle. There's nothing like a whale—that “portentous and mysterious monster,” as Ishmael calls it—to bring something full circle. From June to mid-August, the ocean off Newfoundland's east coast is teeming with whales on the northern end of their annual migration between Labrador and the Caribbean. Humpbacks are the most common, arriving in the hundreds to feed on schools of herring and capelin and making a spectacle of themselves in the process. Whale-watching excursions on the Avalon Peninsula's southern shore are packed with tourists willing to pay to take it in—the whales steaming in pairs, or in pods of half a dozen and more, raising their massive flukes lazily as they sound into deeper dives, lolling within arms' length of the boats, the white undersides of their flippers showing pale-green through the water. People watching with a giddy, almost religious wonder, as if they'd been granted a vision of the Virgin Mary or an audience with the Dalai Lama. By virtue of their size and antediluvian appearance, their murky origins and occult habits (90% of their lives is spent underwater), whales have been freighted with more than their share of creaturely hagiography. The whale has always borne some imaginative connection to the “unspeakable foundations, ribs, and very pelvis of the world,” from the Biblical Jonah to indigenous creation stories, from East African myth to deification among peoples in southeast Asia. Their hold on us seems as strong today as it was on Ishmael himself, in that urge to “grope down into the bottom of the sea after them.” My father and I took some friends on one of those excursions twenty years ago, sailing out of Bay Bulls just south of St. John's. It was late afternoon and the whales were at their most active, chasing the boat, rolling to slap their flippers on the surface, breaching their full sixty foot length into the air before falling back in a spray of foam. Their size made everything they did appear to unfold in slow-motion, as if the physical laws of the universe were altered slightly by their sheer bulk. They arched under the keel of the boat, passing beneath our feet with an unhurried, implausible grace. Dad grew up on the ocean and whales were no novelty to him, but even he was visibly moved to be so intimately in their company. Ostensibly Moby-Dick is a defence of the ancient and “heroic” whaling industry. But the strongest sense it left with me is one I recognize from my own limited experience with whales: how a visit to that other “and still stranger world” of these unlikely creatures makes your own existence seem a more singular and fragile and magical thing. Ishmael's meditations on the transcendent wonders of the whale read like a nascent call to arms for the modern environmental movement. And they seem completely antithetical to his equally deft descriptions of the slaughter and butchering at the heart of the Pequod's voyage. But in Melville, reverence and barbarism sail hand in hand. 3. The 20th century came late to Newfoundland. The communities my parents knew during the 1930s and 40s would not have been out of place in mid-19th century New England. Until a single generation ago, outport Newfoundland was an Old Testament landscape in the same way that Moby-Dick is an Old Testament novel: full of the “heartless voids and immensities of the universe” which underline the Biblical assertion that “As for man, his days are as grass.” As a youngster, my father visited a whaling station on his way to the Labrador cod fishery, and he sometimes spoke of the enormous warehouse where the whales were rendered, the insufferable stink of the place. The way sheets of blubber were ripped off the carcass with a block and tackle, as if they were pulling up sections of old carpet from a floor. My mother remembers a time when schools of pothead whales were herded out of the open sea by men in dories, banging pots and pans over the surface to drive the whales into a cove's shallow water where they were slaughtered en masse. My parents grew up without the luxury of sentimentality and they never expressed shame in talking about these things. At most I sensed a shy self-consciousness in them, to admit they were born in a time when decent people embraced barbaric practices. Willingly and enthusiastically. The same paradox see-saws through the length and breadth of Melville's novel—a sense of the mystery and sanctity of life hard alongside a zealous destruction of the most mysterious, most wondrous of creation's mortal creatures. The starving settlers in Galore have no idea how to go about killing the beached whale they find in the opening pages. They drive a stake that sets it bleeding steadily and they decide to wait then while it expires, before rendering the animal for food and oil. Collectively, they have a sense that to do otherwise would be a desecration of what they see as an unexpected and Providential gift. That savage contradiction lay at the heart of life in Newfoundland for three hundred years or more. I was innocent of this connection while I was writing, of course. But in hindsight it makes sense that a Melville aficionado might take note of Moby-Dick's internal schizophrenia in parts of Galore and consequently see some value in the novel beyond questions of marketing upsides and potential sales. I was just lucky enough to find one. (Image: Humpback Whale, Megaptera novaeangliae 29 July 2010 from mikebaird's photostream)
Essays
| 1 6 min read
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19 comments:

  1. As a “cofficeur”–let’s play that one out as quickly as possible– my rebuttal is simple: if you’re getting work done, the rest of the world can go euphemism. It’s not performative–it’s necessary.

    I’ve always been told, and held as wise advice, to treat writing as much like a 9-5 as possible. As such, I go someplace to write. Sometimes I even put on a tie. I have a hell of a time writing at home because home is where I go to relax, to sleep, to, yeah, fart around on the internet. Just like I am now, before I head to the coffice.

  2. Eric hit this one on the nose. I spend forty hours a week at my desk at work. When I go home, I go to the place where I sleep, eat, watch tv, surf the internet, shower and read. My natural inclination is to do any one of those things before actually buckling down and working on my novel or freelance articles.

    When I put my laptop in its case, grab the bus to the nearest Panera or Starbucks (god help me, I’m not very original when it comes to my sources of caffeine and pastries), sit down and look at a blank screen, something clicks inside my brain and tells me I have to work.

    If that little light doesn’t click on and I want to do something else, I either have to walk around with my laptop or I have to take the bus back home.

    Silly? Yes. Productive? Very. I often find that when I’m the most bored and reluctant to write is when I end up forcing myself to sit there and write out of it and (every once in awhile) surprise myself.

    I see plenty of poseurs and weekend novelists at coffee shops (hey you! Stop stealing the outlet I need to plug in my laptop!). Give us a chance – some of us might come up with something good someday!

  3. Nobody uses the word coffice. This article is about the author’s feelings of contempt and superiority (perhaps discomfort, probably insecurity) when visually confronted by thousands of aspiring writers at work.

    I do 99% of my work at home, and occasionally in a coffee shop. I concentrate better at home. But with headphones to block out the noise, I’ve gotten myself into the zone at Starbucks too. I’m not sure it really matters.

  4. For me, writing in public isn’t about being seen by others as a writer as it is about being seen by others as a person who exists (and seeing others.) I simply can’t spend the majority of my waking, working life alone. I begin writing projects at home in silence and solitude, and I tend to go to a cafe to do things like editing, proofreading, research, revision, etc. It’s just something I need to do so I don’t go stir-crazy. It’s comforting and revitalizing for me to get out into the world where there are other people, and be reminded that minds besides mine do in fact exist. It’s important and humbling for me to acknowledge that.

    In terms of the idea of “facing eternity, or the lack of it, each day,” that’s what my meditation practice is for.

  5. If you can’t work alone, in solitude, then there is a pretty good chance you shouldn’t be a writer. I totally agree with the author of this piece. People who write in public are more interested in being seen as a writer than actually being a writer. I’m not saying that these people don’t write. I’m sure they do. But the scrim of self-consciousness that comes with performing in public is a detriment to the work, not a boon.

  6. Let he who is without writing sin throw the first pencil.

    There you go. Mention me on one of your blogs you hacks.

  7. I spend enough time outside–I work outside, I cycle every day, I go for long walks–and I have no desire to spend a single minute sitting in a coffee shop, working, surrounded by people and noise and (worst of all to my concentration) children. I write at home behind closed doors, usually late at night, when it is as quiet and solitary as possible. I have always felt writing an extremely private ordeal that others have no business observing. While it is by nature a silent and hidden endeavour I still feel somewhat exposed even with but one other person in the room. Of course, I do keep a great deal of coffee on hand. What I really wonder is how writers can afford to frequent Starbucks et al. considering the going price of a grande latte. The book I’m writing already costs me $10 a day in cigarettes.

  8. Except for a snarky comment by sordfite, no one here has mentioned children. I have a few kids and a fulltime job, so coffee shops and public libraries provide a necessary middle space where I can write. My office is full of distractions (aka the work I’m paid to do) and home is where the kids are. I can’t afford a second office/writers cave, so what’s a guy to do? You go where there’s a table and a chair (which you rent one cup of coffee at a time), you bring headphones, and you go to work.

  9. I believed this to be true until I got a job working at home from a computer. My computer is now Where Work Happens—where I have to think about the sports articles I write, in 2000 word bursts, seven days a week. I can’t think there anymore.

    You’ll see me at coffee shops, with a crappy netbook my parents bought and then hated, every so often, now. It’s not an act, and I don’t like coffee, either. It’s because I just got off work, and I’d like to do some actual writing out of the office.

  10. To each his or her own, of course. But I do such weird shit when I write (palilalia, play-acting and so forth), that I would be quite stunted by self-consciousness if asked to do it public.

  11. Re: Karl Kim, “People who write in public are more interested in being seen as a writer than actually being a writer.”

    Does this really ring true to anyone else? If I read in public, is it not about reading, but about projecting myself as a reader? Never has it occurred to me that when I write in public I’m projecting the image of being a “writer.”

    The person with a laptop at a coffee shop can be anyone: a student, a person who didn’t pay their Internet bill at home, etc. It’s bizarre to me that someone else would automatically assume that he who writes in a coffee shop is a “writer” or would fashion herself a writer.

  12. I recently wrote in a bookstore window for a week. The novel I was working on was projected on a screen behind me; passersby could gawk, read, sneer, or turn a blind eye.

    This was just a cheap publicity stunt, but the exercise was fascinating. One takeaway: It was easier than I thought it would be. If someone “interrupted” me by starting a conversation, I stopped writing. If nobody was interrupting me, I really had no excuse not to write.

  13. I commend those who can write in public places amidst the noise and distractions. I need silence, so I work from my home desk, but it isn’t a given that I’ll find it there, either.

  15. Starbucks is not for writing. Starbucks is for pretending you are going to buy something and then using the bathroom.

  16. I find the hum of life happening around me in a public space to be good for my poetry more times than not. I’m less likely to get caught in a loop or block than when I’m at my desk (which is where I do my work as a freelance web developer).

  17. If I drink coffee in a cafe, is it not about drinking coffee, but about projecting an image of myself as a coffee drinker? I could after all use the coffee maker on my kitchen counter.

    I do 95% of my writing at home. I do the other 5% in cafes, because writing a novel involves spending an awful lot of time shut up in a small room, and look, sometimes it’s just nice to get out of the apartment for a couple hours. I’m not posing as a novelist when I write in cafes; I’m actually writing a novel. I sometimes find that the white noise of cafes can be conducive to writing, and it’s awfully nice to have a steady source of lattes on hand. The work I do in cafes is no less serious than the work I do in my quiet home office. The three novels I’ve published were written both at home and in coffee shops.

  18. Pingback: Writing in public feels like a performance, but, when we’re dealing with literature, the performance is not what endures | RC Gale

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Essays

Skills and Interests

Essays
May 20, 2010 | 23 8 min read
1. I was recently fired for the first time. When I was hired I had harbored no illusions this would be a job I would love or at which I would even modestly excel; instead, I thought it was a job I could do to a perfunctory degree of competence. In the interview, my future boss looked over my resume and asked me basic questions about my schedule and experience before describing the tasks and required skills. The subject was popular economics, and the job—as a research assistant—would be mostly image searching, he said, with some fact checking and occasional reporting. When he finished, he turned and looked at me: “Does this sound like something you could do?” We were sitting next to each other in oversized armchairs and my resume lay on the coffee table in front of us. It was the silent third party in these negotiations, and I couldn’t tell whose side it was on. I had recently made its verbs more active and its alignments more precise, and the result was, without a doubt, an attractive piece of paper. My education, work experience, and skills and interests fit onto a single page, appearing neither cramped, nor as if I were unaccomplished. I had experience with both books and periodicals, and had paid my dues while also gaining some management experience. According to my resume, I had the skills to do the job. Still, I hesitated. I stared at the piece of paper, wishing it could talk, that we could excuse ourselves into the other room and confer as to the best course of action. Instead the thing sat there, flat and silent, and I was on my own to weigh pros and cons. Deadlines were not an issue, but the subject matter would be since I am as good at economics as I am at being an astronaut. That said, it was pop economics, which would be a stretch for me but a stretch I could maybe make. I don’t like fact checking but I have experience with it, and while talking on the telephone isn’t my favorite thing to do, I can do it the way I used to run laps around the gym. I met the gaze of my future boss: “Yes,” I said. “I think this is something I could do.” Two and a half months later, he called to tell me our time together was over. The night before I had sent him images of the wrong radio towers from the turn of the century for the second time in a row. It had been late and I didn’t know where on the internet to find the right ones but excuses had ceased to matter: I had made so many mistakes by then that adding another to the list was what the job had become. It wasn’t that I didn’t care about the job or like my boss; I both cared about the job and liked my boss; I was just empirically bad at the work. After we hung up, I stared at the computer screen. I was not happy about having been fired, but I was relieved I wouldn’t have to wake up the next morning knowing it was a foregone conclusion I would spend my working hours professionally underperforming. I had had a feeling this would happen, but it was a feeling I hadn’t wanted to face because it meant admitting that the few skills I had accrued over my thirty years were even less flexible than I feared: Being able to talk to people about poetry or folk music or their lives in general did not translate into being able to research trivia about car seat fatality statistics in the 1950s. The worst part about getting fired, however, was that it prompted the question, “What now?” to which I didn’t—and don’t—have an answer. 2. Starting early—as young as four or five—I was one of those girls who was obsessed with horses. I had the books and the Breyer models and, sometimes, I ran around in the yard or the street pretending to be one. It wasn’t long into the obsession before I began asking my father—architect, urban planner, humble university professor—for a pony. The first time I asked I was six and my father’s response was that if I wanted a pony I should plan on becoming an investment banker. When I asked him what an investment banker was his definition was, “Someone who makes enough money to have a pony.” This was when I understood that money is one of life’s confounding questions. There’s a famous drawing by William Blake of a figure standing at the bottom of a ladder that leads to the moon. The figure is reaching skyward; the caption reads, “I want! I want!” and seems to perfectly illustrate my relationship to my career, such as it is: I am on the ground while this career of mine lurks in the dark nearly 400,000 miles distant. After I got over wanting to be an investment banker for the ponies the profession could afford me, I went through phases of wanting to be a professional horseback rider, a folk singer, a Supreme Court justice, a vintner, a personal shopper, and a writer. While none of these—save scoring a spot on the Supreme Court—is a particularly lucrative career choice, the choice of writer is perhaps the least so of all. This makes it especially unfortunate that wanting to be a writer is the only one that stuck. By the time I graduated from college, enough people had told me I couldn’t make a living this way for me to begin trying to jury rig my skills and interests into skills and interests that paid. I worked as an English teacher, a crime reporter, a waitress, a library assistant, and as a research assistant for authors. With each job I told myself it was temporary: just a job until I could forge a writing career. Alas, the most money I’ve ever earned for a piece of writing I’ve written because I wanted to write it is $50, and that was a month ago. Until recently I had—naively—not considered fully demoting my future writing career to past, present, and future hobby, but the reality is that the time has past come. I’ve paid the rent these ten years by looking at my resume and telling myself to “Make it work,” as well as with some generous support from my family. I now see that writing is proving at least as costly as a pony could have ever been. It’s true: I worry sometimes that writing has gone the way of the pony, that it is no longer a way to help work the farm but—as it’s been said before—has become a pastime only for those who can afford it, and among whom I do not number. This is also when I feel as if I am beating back the tumbleweeds of cynicism with a piece of string. I try to turn the analogy around, repeating to myself the cliché that a writer is not what you are but who you are. By this logic, writers are the ponies. Because we can’t afford to keep ourselves, we hire ourselves out to humans. In the best case scenarios we like our humans and enjoy the challenges of what they have us do. Indeed, under their guidance we are able to do things we never thought possible: pirouette and jump over fences as tall as we are. In the worst-case scenarios we end up foul-tempered in a stall, pinning our ears to the backs of our heads and gnashing our teeth whenever someone tries to come in and tack us up. Sometimes, too, while trying to jump fences, we don’t quite make it over cleanly: a rail comes tumbling to the ground or we do. We’re usually able to pick ourselves up long enough to exit the ring with dignity, but in the more dramatic mishaps, there are those inevitable moments after the fall when we are running around the ring, spooked and directionless, broken reins swinging wildly and in danger of tripping us again. 3. I would be lying of course if I didn’t admit I fell harder than I initially may have thought. The days and weeks following my firing were the first time I admitted to myself that instead of building a Blakeian ladder to the moon that could hold my weight, maybe I have been building one bound to collapse, constructed from toothpicks all along. When I build again I want it to be with real wood and nails, and maybe propped this time against a new and different moon. Resumes are funny things because they are pieces of paper on which we are supposed appear both professional and human, which, with any luck, we are. When I look at my resume and consider the left turns I could make at this career crossroads, I am forced to consider what my skills and interests truly are. According to my resume, my skills and interests include, traveling, eating food and drinking wine, playing music, cuddling with homeless animals, contemporary design, MS Word, and MacIntosh and PC platforms. While I like to think these things are true, I hope I have other, less canned attributes. Perhaps, too, when these are combined, a picture of my strengths might emerge with an eye to job placement. I sometimes play with the idea of creating a resume that relegates Education and Work Experience to a few lines at the bottom of the piece of paper, and instead gives the featured slot to my Skills and Interests. Each skill and interest would be put into resume-speak and bullet pointed: Imaginary degree in angling furniture. High tolerance for busy work. Ability to pee efficiently in public restrooms. Precision sweeper. Passion for shunning umbrellas in favor of getting wet. Petfinder.com Open to criticism of clog wearing. Adept at hating brunch. Self-taught in the art of having feelings. Pretty good at sharing. Communicating via face every thought that passes through brain. Eager to jump to tragic conclusions about temporary illnesses. Prompt to excuse self after belching. Laughs loudly, often, at other people’s jokes. Looking at the list now, it seems my skills and interests qualify me for nothing other than being myself, which was at least part of the problem to begin with: I can’t get paid for being me, nor should I be and nor do I want to be. Keeping a running list of my skills and interests is only a beginning. Since I am by now a fully formed human being, it is a beginning I can only hope won’t take another 30 years to maneuver in my favor. 4. I write this as the mail is piling up on my kitchen counter, more than half of which is bills and monthly statements from Bank of America that I am afraid to open. The rest is from my alma mater asking me to give them all the money I don’t already owe to credit cards, hospitals and my therapist. I already know I owe more money than I have and I don’t want to see the cold hard evidence written out on paper. When I visit my parents the time always comes when my father sits me down and says, “So, how’s your bank account?” as if my bank account were a member of the family. It practically is—the ugly stepchild—and I treat it accordingly. I tell him it’s fine or at least that it was the last time I hung out with it. I don’t tell him I can’t remember the last time this was because, the truth is, I don’t want him to have to worry about it and I am wracked with guilt that he does and that he has to. Once upon a time my father wanted to be a painter. He became an architect instead because the schooling pardoned him from the draft and the degree would let him afford a family. I know he has felt conflicted about this decision his entire life—that he felt forced into it by his parents when he was young and trying to figure out how to make his way.  I know because I have watched him struggle for years with how he should advise me to proceed with my life. Moments after he suggests I try advertising or television as a career move, he backtracks and says I should do something that makes me happy, to not give up on this writing thing quite yet. He’ll then hedge--money makes things easier--before telling me again. Keep writing. [Image credits: Images from Fiaschi's book, J Mark Dodds]
Essays
| 23 8 min read
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