Writing Everyday

I have an acquaintance who, whenever anyone says they are a writer, he says, "Oh, yeah, do you write everyday?" Like he's challenging you--which he is. He thinks that if you don't write everyday you're not a writer. I think it's a great idea to write everyday, but the questions is what? I write emails everyday. I write responses to instant messages. I write texts. I pretty sure my friend wouldn't classify me as a writer. The last time I talked to him I told him about going to grad school and writing and he said, "Oh yeah, do you write everyday?" even though he's asked me that three times before in the last few years. I told him that I don't write everyday but that I think about writing everyday. I don't just think about the act of it but I think about things to write about. I'm always thinking about things to write about, constantly, but it's the act of writing that is the hard part. Anne Lammott said that writing is just holding the lantern for your characters that are digging the hole. My characters are in the dark most of the time.

I think that I find my friend's question so annoying because he's not a writer. He makes no claim to be one, nor has he ever attempted to write anything since college, that I know of. I think he just doesn't get it. I mean, even if I wrote every single day, would I then be a writer? Even if I never published anything, ever? I think he asks the question because he knows people will say no. No, they don't write everyday, and then he's caught them, he's made them admit that they really aren't what they presume to be.

He's a real asshole.

Take offs and Landings

On my third day of SPRING BREAK Paterson and I drove down the Historic Columbia River Highway. We drove back into town on Marine Dr. and stopped outside the fence of the airport and watched planes take off and land. Seeing a plane on the horizon we would try and guess which airline it was. We were never right. I would guess Southwest and it was be obvious from before the planes were even near the runway it wasn't Southwest. They have grey planes. We weren't the only ones watching. A few trucks pulled up and men ate their lunches from Burger King while watching lift off and touch down.

I'm afraid of flying. I have been for about nine years. It's not a 9/11 thing. Although I have spun some crazy scenarios in my head about terrorists taking over planes. On one flight from Burbank to Portland there was a man who had boxes and boxes of Krispy Kreme donuts. I was sure that he had poisoned them and was going to offer them to us or force us to eat them, we'd all die, or pass out and he would take over the plane. I know, it's a ridiculous plan that doesn't make sense. But I'm not scared of the terrorist stuff as much as I'm scared of the plane have some sort of mechanical error. I don't even like writing about it. But even with this fear I've alway had an attraction to airports. Not the inside, food court, Brookstone, souvenir part of them, but the runway part, the take off and landing part. I plan to take my lunch to this spot in the near future.

SPRING BREAK: DAY ONE

Since I work as a dance teacher my breaks are the same as the school breaks. This week happens to be SPRING BREAK. So, even thought I'm not in school I get the same excitement and recklessness that traditionally goes along with SPRING BREAK. I really shouldn't be excited about it. I am forced to take a week off and I don't get paid, yet the studio still charges the clients for that week. Dance teachers get a raw deal sometimes.

Every SPRING BREAK I come up with some goals that I want to accomplish during my time off. I usually aim too high. In my mind I was going to lock myself in my room and write a screenplay during this spring break, but I don't see that happening. So I decided to go not worry about goals and just sort of float along, day to day, and see what happens, realizing fully that this is what I kind of do all the time anyway.

So far today I have worked out and gone to see if I could get my glasses fixed. My glasses are 1960's style black frames. They broke last night when I accidentally used them to help myself get out of bed. I only paid $16.99 for the frames (actually Dane bought them for me for Christmas when I pointed them out in a shop at the mall), so it's not too surprising they broke easily. I paid nearly $200 to get the lenses put in though and I really don't want to have to buy new glasses. The new lady at the glasses shop suggested I go to the store at the mall and buy as many pairs of these frames as possible so I can just pop the lenses out of the broken pair and into a new pair whenever they break. Great Idea! So I went to Lloyd Center, not the mall where Dane bought me the frames but the closest mall to me and they have the same store, Lids. Aren't all malls basically the same? I think Lloyd Center has a little more character because of it's location.

For my birthday one year my dear friend Billy agreed to get his ear pierced. I got to pick the earring--I chose this little gold cross. We went to the Piercing Pagoda at the Lloyd Center. Billy was surprised that it hurt so much. I had a great photo of his face right as that gun was pushing the metal through his lobe. He let the hole close and I think he might hold it against me that I made him mutilate his body. While on this birthday trip I was riding the escalator, licking a cone of frozen yogurt when the young man behind me observed, "Damn! You are fucking that ice cream cone up!" I informed him that it wasn't ice cream, it was frozen yogurt. So, I always look forward to going to Lloyd Center because you just never know what it going to happen, though usually, nothing does.

The mall was more crowded than usually because it was the first day of SPRING BREAK. The ice was being cleaned and kids were eagerly awaiting to go in circles, around and around, on the rink. I went to the store where Dane purchased my glasses and they didn't have the frames. The sales attendant informed me that they might get some in a week, and that their store was the only Lids store to be getting them. I was pretty sure he was lying. There was a Dianetics booth set up that was advertising free stress tests. As I walked by on my way to Lids I noticed an old man sitting with a young man and nodding. I guess he was getting a stress test. A lady asked me if I wanted one and I thought about it and how it would be something fun to do on SPRING BREAK, but I didn't want to have to wiggle my way out of becoming a Scientologist. The stress test looked like they made you hold on to metal jump rope handles while a needles bounced up and down on a machine. Beyond the Dianetics booth there was a Pirate Store, a store that specifically sold things for looking like a pirate, and all the sales people were dressed like pirates. The mall is such a bizarre place, it's like visiting another world, a future world. I feel like if people from the past came back and walked around Lloyd Center they would be so baffled, speechless. On the way back by the Dianetics booth the old man was sitting, eating a sandwich and watching the kids skate. Another man was grabbing the metal handles and I heard him say, "This really works, huh?" On the way out of the mall I noticed there as a vending machine for Nestle's Quick. I thought, how strange, a chocolate milk vending machine. The future is a crazy place. Luckily, I get to go back there tonight because Paul and I are going to see a movie there. Lloyd Center twice in one day? Spring Break really does rule.

It's in the Cards

Before going to my reading yesterday Paterson and I got lunch at New Seasons. He said, "What if they tell you that I'm going to kill you?" I laughed and he said, "They might ask if you've seen the movie 'Sleeping with the Enemy.'"

I then thought wouldn't it be amazing that if instead of mythical creatures on cards, like "witch of the woods," "earth dragon," or "forgiveness fairy," they had tarot cards that had movies on them and depending on how the cards were drawn or laid out that is how your life was going to go.

So imagine Paterson was really going to kill me, during a "movie card" reading I might draw the "Sleeping with the Enemy" card. And my future would be told: I'd have to teach myself how to swim secretly to fake my own death only to be looking over my shoulder constantly and be crippled in terms of creating new relationships. And then I would kill Paterson, thus freeing myself. That's how the movie ends, right?

I just remembered that the one other time in my life I had a tarot reading was when I was living in LA. My ex-roommate did it. She was really into shit like that. She had this dresser she'd painted purple then stenciled suns and moons all over it. She had a mosquito netting over her bed, for style not function. Going into her room was like entering some kind of new age lair. She was always reading self-help books and she really loved tuna noodle casserole. When you read tarot cards you have to have a question you are asking so I asked what was going to happen on my impending road trip to Oregon. The cards said I was going to deflower a virgin. I didn't deflower a virgin but I did, while drunk, make out with a good male friend of mine. Between sloppy, drunk kisses I kept insisting, "It's in the cards. It's in the cards."

Earth Dragon

This post is the account of a tarot card reading. I went in thinking that tarot cards are the lamest of the lame and I left feeling basically the same way. But the only psychic I ever trusted moved to Hawaii and I wanted to see what a "clairvoyant" thought regarding my decision to go to grad school. And it gave me something to write about.

My reader's name was Logan. He wore a newsie style hat, a flannel shirt, and jeans. He turned his cell phone to silent as the reading began and I'm pretty sure he burped in the middle of it. Not that burping should make a difference. We all get a little gassy from time to time. He asked me what I wanted to know and I said, "Whether or not I should go to grad school." He said, "Go to grad school or do what?" I said, "Do what I am doing now, just keep doing what I'm doing now." He seemed confused; we got started.

He fanned out a deck of cards in front of me. The cards were big, like over-sized playing cards a child might use. He told me to pick one and I drew from the middle.

"Ah, the earth dragon," he said. Yes, he had a goatee but he didn't stroke it or anything. On the card there was a dragon, sitting in front of a cave. It looked more like a bearded dragon, like an actual lizard, than a Rhodesian Ridgeback from Harry Potter. "The earth dragon lives in a dark cave and protects and hoards treasure. What it means metaphorically is that you have a lot of treasure inside you and you hide it from the world."

He then drew cards from another deck and set them up in a pattern of two together. I can't remember what all of them were and what they represented. I think the first two represented where I am now and there was a card that showed "self-reflection," and then there were cards that showed where I was headed and what the energy behind it was. The cards that I remember most were the ones about hiding treasure and the one about being generous and giving the world my "treasure." During most of the reading the lady who runs the shop was on the phone and the walls were thin and you could hear everything she was saying. I could tell Logan was having a hard time coming up with what to say next.

I don't think I got anything thing out of this that I didn't already know. To make this decision, like any decision I need to be reflective, and to not listen to what others want me to do. He also said something about the marriage between my feminine self and my masculine self and becoming whole. It's easier to make decisions when you're whole. It was really just a whole lot of baloney. I don't think I would have felt the same if Eliza would have done my reading--there was something more honest about her, more specific and less vague.

Paterson pointed out that I dropped $20 for a fifteen minute reading yet I'm unwilling to spend $20,000 on an education.

Magic Touch

I was recently admitted to the MFA program at Portland State University. I took the recent publication of a story I wrote nearly three years ago as a sign that maybe I wasn't half bad at this writing thing, and did I really want to teach dance for the rest of my life? So pushed out three applications and nearly $500 in fees (the fee to apply for Hunter College in NY is $125. No, I didn't get in). After I my applications went floating out into the ether I started to second guess my thought process. Sure, I had a story published. Yes, that story was nominated for a Pushcart Prize, but really, I hadn't finished anything more than an email in three years. When I found out I got into Portland State I was elated. That was my number one choice, mainly because I didn't want to leave Portland. I didn't want this whole grad school thing to disrupt my life too much. I like it here. I like my job and my friends and... my job. I feel lucky. I didn't want some back burner dream of someday completing a book-length work of fiction to interrupt the good thing I had going. After I found out they weren't going to give me any money I had to pause and really start to weigh the pros and cons. I talked to a poetry student who had recently finished the program. She said that she probably wouldn't have gone if she had to pay. She said that she as now applying to teach at various colleges in the Portland area and was also applying at New Seasons and Whole Foods. Then she flip flopped and said that it was a great education and if I could afford the debt it was worth going, then she said that there was someone important on the other line and she had to go. She'd put me in touch with a fiction MFA student. She hasn't yet. I talked to a professor I had while at USC. She didn't beat around the bush. She was like a hard-nosed detective in a noir movie, ready to sell it to me straight. Look here kid, it's a crazy world out there. It's ridiculously competitive she said. Not getting an assistantship does not mean I'm not a good writer. With an MFA you won't be teaching at the upper levels of continuing education. You'll be teaching at a community college or online to the wives of truckers in Oklahoma. She said that just getting into grad school was a feat and she thought I would regret not going, that my writing would benefit greatly. I would benefit greatly. Was twenty some thousand dollars really so much? I felt like I needed some guidance, but not from someone who knew me, or was a writer. I needed someone who was impartial and unbiased. I remembered a girl I'd met at a bar about a year ago. Her name was Eliza. She was an ayurvedic pulse reader. When I first saw her she was taking her friends pulse and saying things like, "yeah, I can see that clearing up for you," and "you're feeling way more open and creative." I asked her what she was doing and she said she'd show me. She took my left wrist and then started to rattle things off about me. I am allergic to sugar. If I have sugar it should only be fruit. I was feeling uneasy because I recently lost my job. I wasn't blown away by either of these revelations. It's common knowledge that sugar is terrible for you and in this economy it's pretty easy to guess that someone had recently lost a job. She and I talked about my sister a little bit and then she let go of my wrist. I asked her more about what she did and she would say that she just knew things, ever since she was little, and that we all had this capability but very few of use learn how to use it. She kept on saying, "You understand, you're an artist." But she never once asked me what I did for a living or even as a hobby. She said that when she was little she would cry all the time because she could feel the pain other's felt when their cats died. "It felt like cats where always dying," she said. "At that table over there," she nodded with her head, "someone's cat recently died. And there is a long triangle going on." Eliza can do it, I thought. She'll tell me what I'm supposed to do. So I dug out the card that she had given me and I put her number in my phone. I was nervous to call for some reason. I didn't want to do it when anyone was around. I didn't want anyone to know about it. I called four days after putting the number in my phone. She didn't answer and I left a message about how I'd met her in a bar and how I wanted another reading if possible. She called me back in less than five minutes. She'd moved to Hawaii. "Oh really, which island?" I asked. People who know Hawaii always ask questions like this. I was going to tell her that my sister, the one she said had chronic fatigue syndrome, had lived on Maui for eight short months. I didn't though. I just said good luck and she told me I was sweet for remembering her and to go to the place where she worked and to talk to Joan if I felt like I needed guidance. Guidance is exactly what I need, but it feels even stranger to go get a pulse reading from a stranger. But really that is what Eliza was--a stranger to me. So I'm back to square one. Should I go to grad school or not, with the added question--should I go to an ayurvedic pulse reader to tell me if I should go to grad school or not?