“And human kindness is overflowing, and I think it’s going to rain today”
October 2, 2014 § Leave a comment
Hey folks, thought I’d check in.
In the past six weeks or so, I’ve drafted at least a half dozen posts, all at a minimum of 2 pages on Microsoft Word (and size 10 font, no less!), but have since been abandoned because A) I’m lazy, B) the piece lost steam/relevance and option A, C) hasn’t been edited and option A. And after reviewing some of my last few posts, I’ve come to the horrifying conclusion that I mostly write about how I cannot write. Like here. And here. And here again. There’s obviously more, but when you start seeing posts with dates from 2012, shit gets real bleak.
I’m staring at quite the impasse here, because I would really like move past redundancy, and definitely don’t want to give up this site, but I don’t know what to write about anymore.
SO. I’m reaching out. It has come to this. If there’s anything you think I should discuss, please drop me a note at soopastryheart@gmail.com or use the Contact form to your left. My brain wholeheartedly thanks you in advance.
*Title lyric from “I Think It’s Going to Rain Today” by Randy Newman, but covered by everybody from Bette Midler to Val Kilmer to your mom.
Lyrical Lessons
August 12, 2014 § 2 Comments
“Violin” by Amos Lee
My writing has been stuck for quite a bit now. Feels like the words are being held captive somewhere between my ideas and insecurities. Waiting for the dam to break, I suppose.
Friday Afternoon Pick Me Up
June 27, 2014 § Leave a comment
A virtual vault of words expressing the love two people had for each other. Beautiful. Throw away the key.
“She lived on the 82nd floor of the Hancock Center and started sending me daily e-mails, even after we’d seen each other earlier the same evening. Her love letters were poetic, idealistic and often passionate. I responded as a man and a lover. As a newspaperman, I observed she never, ever, made a copy-reading error. I saved every one of her letters along with my own, and have them encrypted on my computer, locked inside a file where I can’t reach them because the program and the operating system are now 20 years out of date. But they’re in there. I’m not about to entrust them to anyone at the Apple Genius Counter.”
— excerpt from Roger Ebert’s Roger Loves Chaz, a recollection of the life he shared and endured with his wife.
“But life is stupid, the irony all lost on me”
June 24, 2014 § Leave a comment
Every so often, an idea will pop into my head at the most inopportune time/place, when my computer is not within reach. Back in the day, I always had a notebook and pen in my bag, but in the last couple of years, I’ve ceased carrying one (a bag). So now, whenever the occasion arises, I am forced to type the idea down in my phone. These “ideas” usually disobey any and all rules of grammar, and are so laden with typos (at this point, spell check just gives me the finger) that when I return to the note at a later time, I have no idea what the fuck I was trying to say.
Other times, I’m in the shower, half-ass lathering my head when an idea that I’m convinced is the best I’ve ever had pops up. When this happens, I will repeat it out loud, over and over, like people do when they’re trying to remember a phone number or the code to a locked bathroom. I will rinse an acceptable amount to stumble out of the shower (many toes are stubbed this way), wrap myself in a towel, and sprint to my laptop, where I start typing away, all while I’m dripping water onto the keyboard. I do this in such a frantic way, that it usually alarms my boyfriend, who always asks if everything is okay. But of course, I’m so concerned with getting every detail out before it’s lost in a mental abyss, that I ignore him completely. When I’m finished, I’ll look up at him staring at me with a look that says, “Yo man, you’ve got to chill the fuck out.”
Unfortunately, this is a scenario that happens far too often than it really should. Every once in awhile, I’ll have to jump back in the shower after discovering a clump of unlathered shampoo behind my ears. If there’s a more graceful way to handle these epiphanies, I’d love to hear them, if only for the sake of rinsing out shampoo completely, as opposed to like, 60 or 40 percent.
Anyway, the point of revealing the fact that I’m a completely inefficient hair-washer is to pose a larger question (and a few other smaller ones): if my brain is full of these super great ideas that force me into a hysterical panic to get them on print, then why is it that when it comes time to expand on those “brilliant ideas,” my mind draws a complete and utter blank? Is my writing career limited to Twitter-esque ramblings and nothing more? If I string around these spurts of incomplete thoughts, will I eventually have a book on my hands? And how long will that take? 20 years? 50 years? Should I be doing some brain exercises that helps improve memory? Is it my memory that’s the problem here or my crippling insecurities when it comes to my writing? And is there an app that could decipher incoherent memos on my phone? Why doesn’t that exist yet? Should I be carrying around a Talkboy? And why do these fuckers from 1992 cost forty dollars?
It’d be pretty awesome if my brain stopped clamming up when it came down to brass tacks, and start functioning the way I know it’s capable of. Or maybe it’s not. Maybe there’s a small little troll in my brain somewhere that likes to mess with me, tease me with the prospect of writing, and then sabotages the actual process later down the line. Or maybe that troll is me, and I need to stop making up these so-called issues and dilemmas (and excuses) and just write.
Whatever, I don’t know, I can’t remember what I thought about this.
*Title lyric from "The Sweetest Thing" by Camera Obscura
Friday Afternoon Pick Me Up
April 18, 2014 § 2 Comments
I remember first reading One Hundred Years of Solitude in the summer before my junior year of high school, on the campus of Duke University while attending a summer camp for young writers (yes, I was this geeky). I bought it from the school’s bookstore on the second day, as a group of girls on my floor were talking about it, raving, about how the writing was so beautiful. I had never heard of Gabriel García Márquez, but I didn’t want to let anyone know. I was out of my element, as the other kids at camp were from nationally ranked private and boarding schools, with curriculums that later made my freshman year of college look like a joke. I remember trying to find shaded areas to lie under, to save myself from the sweltering heat and humidity that I was unaccustomed to as a Pacific Northwesterner. I remember finding some passages so longwinded that I’d have to reread over and over to understand. It took me the entire duration of camp, two whopping weeks, to muddle through the book.
I think it was my sophomore or junior year of college that the book was assigned as part of an English class. I don’t know if it was maturity or the depth in which we discussed the story, but I completely fell in love with the book, appreciating the style of writing on a whole different level than I had before as a teen. Even after the quarter ended, I devoured his other works, but found myself coming back to One Hundred Years of Solitude.
I have reread the book at least a half dozen times since that summer in Durham, all at different stages of maturity and experience. I find something new each time: certain passages will affect me when it hadn’t before, or I’ll pick up on metaphors I hadn’t noticed, or I’ll interpret a scene or character in a different way. I guess that’s the sign of a brilliance of a writer: the ability to have your words be relevant at every stage of your reader’s life, as opposed to one. And that’s what Gabriel García Márquez has left to the rest of the world. Tomorrow, a 16-year-old will pick up his book, the same time a 30, 50, 70-year-old does. And each of them will find a profoundly different meaning within his words. It’s a pretty incredible feat, to have your words grow with the reader. As a writer, that’s the legacy you want to leave the earth with. You want your words to transcend the pages it’s printed on. Long past best-seller lists, long past critical acclaims and accolades, and longer past death.
“Before reading the final line, however, he had already understood that he would never leave that room, for it was foreseen that the city of mirrors (or mirages) would be wiped out by the wind and exiled from the memory of men at the precise moment when Aureliano Babilonia would finish deciphering the parchments, and that everything written on them was unrepeatable since time immemorial and forever more, because races condemned to one hundred years of solitude did not have a second opportunity on earth.”
– excerpt from One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel García Márquez
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