absolutely obvious things that take forever to learn

Ok, so I have spent fall quarter taking writing courses and indulging my soul, both academic and creative. In both realms the wisdom acquired boils down to the same key point:
DO WHAT YOU LOVE AND DO IT AS BRILLIANTLY AS YOU CAN!!!!
Oh and don't get too bogged down with politics about what's the thing to do to get a certain kind of job or to please a certain kind of audience or to fit into a certain kind of category. Because that's all bullshit and it will slow down this incredible gift of life and opportunity.
With my creative work the message was...if it's good, ultimately it will get picked up by a publisher. With my academic work it was...if it's interesting and relevant someone will value it and you will find a job.
Does it sound like I'm high? I really don't think I am. I think hard work and using your talents to their fullest capacity can and does pay off and ultimately I'm a believer, baby.
If this sounds too American dreamy, I don't care. The best part about the American Dream is owning the damn thing. OWN IT.

Brazilian dreams

I found out today that I won a fellowship that's gonna send me to the beautiful Brazil this summer. I'm going to ride this happy wave of anticipation for all it's worth, baby yeah!!!
I've never been to Brazil, and the goals for this summer could include:
1. Improve Portuguese (well this is obvious and the point)
2. Check out potential dissertation research sites and ideas (the second obvious point)
3. Write a novel
4. Learn the capoeira
5. Fall in love
6. Enjoy life
7. Write a novel about:
    a. falling in love to the beat of a Brazilian drum
    b. autoethnographic self-fun
    c. something wildly fictional where Kurt Vonnegut meets J.D. Salinger meet Lev Tolstoy meet Emily Dickinson meet Louise Gluck meet my mother
8. write poems and prose-poems, and stories, and articles and other fun things
9. draw, paint, dance, smile, laugh

I'm into lists at the moment. Lists this organizational thought process where numbering and sub-numbering is supposed to provide order. I'm so damn excited!!!!

spillville

The best page is the one that wants to take your words and love them. Cradle them in its expansive white arms and say, yes dear words, you're the little screaming infant voices I've been waiting for. You want the page to love and affirm you. Give you that positive reinforcement every baby or writer-baby seeks from the page, the mother, the other. 


I am writing. Pishu, j'ecris, escribo...and while I don't have much time to deliver these fetal first steps into thesis-writing, I can hear the little voices inching out, they are happening. They have wanted to happen and breathe life and make what I went through worthwhile, ever since I went through it. I mean who donates all this time, researching and working alone, and feeling lonely and inspired and anxious and isolated and terrified and thrilled to not finally hope to bear fruit. 


The pregnant nun goes on giving birth through her fingertips.


What if you are just a figment of me on the page? Mary asked Jesus.

script in my head

I seem to be good at...
showing my mind to people like a movie - see the latest episode of my life, friend, here: and then the spiel unwinds. Soon, the close friends who see the show of the episodes of my life that I render in words are asking about the sequels and continuations of the same plot lines, they're asking the same questions, they want to turn the pages. I'm a pretty good self-narrator, narrator of myself. Or at least a pretty consistent one. It's funny when friends run into you at the same time and they are asking about the same page-turning moments in your juicy thriller of a life.
How important is it to be of entertainment value to others? Do we all want a thrilling novel of a life after reading so many succulent renditions of how it could be. Or a thrilling film that shows instead of telling...there is no time to tell a thing in a film unless it's closer to theatre with asides and soliloquoys and a thought-connection with the audience.
The umbilical cord between my brain and those I talk with is mediated by words that wish to be Salinger and Vonnegut and Gluck with some Vygotsky and Durkheim and Foucault....and Freud of course. Do not scoff at Freud if you haven't read him, btw, he remains brilliant.
I know that because I have hardly the time lately to write what I wish to write I have become an endless out-of-breath list of things. I can't get them all in, can barely cram in all the matter, and no time to go back and edit for clarity. Write, write, right.