Delusional

                I find myself writing and writing and writing, and yet I have nothing accomplished.  I have two hundred pages of garbled ranting that I don’t know what to do with.  I rearrange and rewrite and insert and think, but when I’m finished, I’m nowhere near a completed version of anything.

                My story is nonfiction, that much I’ve figured out.   I can’t write anymore shitty fictional stories until I tell the real version of my life.  The problem is that I’m not a rock star or an actress or even someone who anyone knows.  No one will care (okay, maybe about 12 people will care), but other than that there is no audience for my ranting.  And frankly, I will piss a lot of people off and no one will ever look at me the same, so I’ll have to quit my job and move. 

                I wish I lived in the time of the philosopher – was there such a time?  If I went back to the time of Socrates and Plato and Aristotle, they wouldn’t listen to me because I’m a woman.  I’d have to go back to like the 1930s.  Europe, I suppose, since Americans didn’t even want women to vote in this country for the longest time.  Actually, female philosophers have never been a thing people care about.  Female philosophers usually manifest as writers of fiction, like Margaret Atwood, and I cannot write like her.  She is amazing, and I am … not.

                All I can do is just keep trying, I suppose.  Maybe when I get hit by a train or something, someone who is a better writer than me will find my huge pile of shit and make something of it.  Until then, I’ll just run on this fucking hamster wheel.  It’s unbelievable that I am still wasting my time with this.  I’m going to go watch the rain outside – it’s more productive than staring at this screen.  And much more beautiful, even through the gloom and thunder. 

book it

My next book is going to be a series of essays – I’ve already organized the main pieces; now I just have to write the transitions.  A month maybe at the most and then I’ll beg publishers to print it.   

And then I’m going to write a book about education and how badly it has been bastardized and destroyed by ignorant number-crunchers.  And then I’m going to get fired. 

I can’t wait. ;) 

You Again?

                I chew my fingernails.  I drink too much.  I eat too much.  I take too many drugs.  Even as I write this I am intermittently chewing my fingernails and sipping on a glass of wine.  I have dozens of detrimental behaviors which I cannot stop doing.  I used to never watch television, but now I have a 30-item queue on Netflix and I surf HBO and EPIX on demand just so that I don’t have to listen to the thoughts in my own head.  I have ventured into a banal valley of my life, but I can’t seem to do anything about it but watch movies to distract myself, mutilate my hands, and drink myself to sleep at night. 

                It’s a First World Problem; I get it.  People across the world starving to death and struggling to make ends meet while I have a cushy job teaching school in America.  I should just shut up and be happy, but … whatever.  Every time I look at my husband I want to scream.  He makes me sick to my stomach, because he reflects all the reasons that I am disgusted with my life.  None of that is his fault, but that hardly matters. Our relationships with others are just weird projections of our own personal junk.  While I may make a difference with students at school sometimes, I never seem to make a difference in my own life.  I have been walking into the same wall over and over like a child’s animatronic robot for years, and it’s just getting old.  Somehow my life became a self-constructed prison.  I want to just roam about for a while and extract myself from the tethers that bind me to this stifling place.  I hate it here.  Or maybe I just hate who I am becoming here. 

                I think I could hate it less here if I could occasionally get away, but I can’t.  When I read the stupid, vapid People Magazine about the “tragedy” of Heidi Klum & Seal’s (or Johnny Depp and Vanessa’s) separation, I am nothing but jealous.  Tell me again how Jennifer Lopez divorced Mark Antony and is now running around a man half her age.  I don’t feel bad for these people - I envy their ability to change their lives and live in the moment!  Separation and divorce is not necessarily a bad thing!  I understand that it is hurtful and causes scars, but who would we be without those scars?  We’d be boring, if nothing else.  Maybe people aren’t meant to live their whole lives with one other person.  Maybe THAT is the crux of the issue.  Maybe people SHOULDN’T try to stay together no matter what (or even worse, “for the children”).  Maybe our children deserve more than a compromise as an example of how to live and love.  Maybe if our children saw us actually living the way we want to, they would be more inclined to take risks and make something more of themselves (and be less likely to settle in their own lives). 

                I might still drink too much and chew my fingernails if I moved somewhere else, but at least I would know that I tried to live out loud rather than moping into oblivion.  Every day older is another reason to stop being mediocre and start off on a new path.  It’s not fair of me to turn all my negativity and distain for my own life choices on to my husband just because he happens to be there and will take it like a slug.  Everything that is wrong with my life is wrong because I have allowed it to happen.  It’s all on me.  Knowing that my life is a collection of my own decisions doesn’t make it suck any less to look in the mirror and wish I could step through to the other side, but I am heartbeats away from profound change.  For better or worse.  

Owning It

I haven’t contributed to this blog site in a while.  I try to forget about things, and it’s easier that way.  If I blow off writing, that (subconsciously) means that I don’t have to worry about being more than just a shitty writer, because no one can judge me.   Even so, I often get criticism on the things I write, which I can handle online, but not in person (idiotic introvert).  My first instinct with criticism is to debate it.  Yes, I may teach debate, but I didn’t do that shit in high school.  I didn’t even know debate was “a thing” until I got hired to do it for a school.  Turns out, I fucking rock at it. 

But that wasn’t supposed to be the focus of my writing, which proves I have a terrible propensity towards ADD (or some self-diagnosed and medicated version of the psychiatric diagnosis).  The point is that I have not been writing.  This (somehow) proves to me that I don’t even have the one Harper Lee book, let alone the 7.000 Stephen King novels.  I will never be a writer.  I can’t harness the crazy like some people can.  (Or, more profitably, “the drama/stupidity”) 

So … what will I do about this?  In all likelihood, nothing.  My reason for continuing to teach is much like that of teachers who totally suck at their job:  I HAVE BEEN GOING TO SCHOOL FOR TOO LONG.  Remember when you were a senior in high school and how bad you just wanted to get out?  Well. I “graduate” with my seniors every year, only I have to come back the next year.   That must be one of the reasons that people subconsciously teach elementary school – high school students are too much like reality and the less thick-skinned can’t even take it.  I get told every day that I suck.  It’s not an in-your-face suckage – it’s more like a constant subliminal message.  They don’t want to be listening to me.  They would rather be anywhere but where they are.  While second grade carries a certain lovely innocence, the eleventh grade is a shit-fest.  All you have to do is step back and remember…

I happened to be “popular” in high school (if that means having a bunch of friends from different social cliques and sort of bleeding into all of them and none of them).  Being popular in high school DOES NOT prepare a person for reality, because the reason a person is liked by their peers is totally fucking arbitrary.  It’s all about “right place, right time” type of thing.  Reality is both amplified and suspended in high school.  It defies logic, even as I revisit high school as an adult – every single day.  I wonder if parents of high-school aged children even think about the shit their children tell perfect strangers every day.  If they knew, they’d never send their children to school again, out of sheer embarrassment. 

Somehow, I want to try to own the process of being:  1) a superficial hypocrite for doing all the things I tell my students NOT to do in high school, 2) doing the same thing to my own children by acting like I don’t see all their mistakes (and made the same ones), 3) and being a jackass throughout most of high school (and college).

I just want to write a novel and get it over with.  Cut the string and move on.  (Not so easy.)  After three novels, I still suck.  Maybe the book ought to be about the structure of American education and how bad it rots.  Or maybe it should be about why I can’t write a book.  Chapter after chapter of excuses blaming other people, when really my life is what it is because of choices that I have made.  It’s all on me.  I did it all.  I drew a box and then stood in the middle of it until it looked like the only place which was familiar.  I put the chloroform hankie over my own face, so I have no one to blame about anything.