Just Another Day
The director of my PhD program once told me that writing should be a habit. The best writers set a time to write every day and stick to it. He described a peer who woke every morning at the crack of dawn to write for an hour, sometimes producing nothing more than a sentence or two. I was in my mid-twenties, a young mom, a wide-eyed impressionable student. I made note of this advice and scribbled it in my planner: 5am — write stuff, maybe just a sentence or two.
I liked this idea, just like I like the idea of organizing my closet using a rainbow scheme, or writing all the quizzes for a semester the summer before school starts. We all agree these are good ideas, and we all want to be that person, even if we also acknowledge that that person probably isn’t much fun to get a drink with, but I’m just not sure they are me. Actually, no, I am pretty confident they are not me. My productivity and my creativity are very much like my puppy-buying-habits: impulsive, passionate, maybe even a little obsessive.
Last year, I stumbled across a story I wrote in grad school. I liked it. My mushy mom-brain was shocked that it could ever have produced such work when it now struggles to locate the computer bag slung over my shoulder. But something happened, a click, or a tingle, or whatever sound neurons make as they fire off shots of crazy, and suddenly I had written a multitude of short stories, a children’s novel, and a book of poetry. Then the buzz of productivity and inspiration faded as I shifted gears into survival mode — aka. spring quarantine with a full time job and four children. I think somewhere in my Google drive is half a story about the child of an alcoholic living in the Ozarks dealing with quarantine, and there it remains.
I am not returning to that abandoned plot, at least for now, but I am going to try to reign in the crazy a bit and inflict some of the structure I always advise for my students on myself. So here I am, sitting in front of my computer, reflecting on the day. Here’s what jumps out.
I picked up the hand towel in the kitchen 15 times this evening while cooking dinner. It was slung over the handle on the dishwasher, and then it was on the floor, I’m not sure how. Then it was on the floor with all the magnets from the fridge. I know who the culprit was that time. Then it was on the floor by the kitchen sink, and my three-year-old was covered in bubbles. Then, as I was crawling under the kitchen table looking for the cap to the brown marker, because there is truly nothing more infuriating in life than a still juicy marker without a cap, I saw it once again discarded in front of the stove. Perhaps, I comforted myself, this was a sign that someone in my family was washing their hands without a bribe or threat? I spelled U-N-I-C-O-R-N, then D-R-A-G-O-N, then U-N-I-C-O-R-N, than D-I-N-O-S-A-U-R, then U-N-I-C-O-R-N, then M-O-N-S-T-E-R, then there it was, on the floor. So I picked it up and stirred the sauce and spelled U-N-I-C-O-R-N once more. Then, I poured myself a glass of wine and accidentally knocked the towel down from it’s new location, the fridge handle. I picked it up, spilling some wine in the process. I think I may have misspelled S-Q-U-I-D while cleaning it up. This continued for the duration of dinner-cooking-time. A new puppy will make this more bearable. I am sure. A new puppy, my new puppy, would never pull down the hand-towel. In fact, I think our first order of business will be to train him to retrieve the towel, clean up spilled wine, and spell words on command.