I should include a photo with this (and borrow Mrs. P’s camera). But why, oh, why, are there retailers/shops that specialize in art supplies, but not writing supplies? Or, maybe there are, and they are for offices. But I mean writing! I realize that a lot of creative writing (especially professionally) has gone digital. But, if I’m correct, so has professional “art.”
Hypergraphia, wanderlust and a job that ends in five weeks. These make for good journaling but bag blogging. Sorry.
Not blogging; not journaling. Writing. There was a time in my life when it was all I wanted to do and all I thought I was good at. Then I met other “writers” at college, started dating a writer, majored in philosophy, and that was that. That was thirteen years ago.
I never even tried. Not really.
Before Charlotte was born, we bought her a new Moleskine (sized A4) for a first-year journal, and I bought a new camera with the cash I was planning on buying an acoustic bass with. My better half is a talented historian, and I’m a little obsessive and compulsive. We planned on recording everything. Everything.
I didn’t mean to, but I’ve found myself watching important moments through my camera’s LCD screen, and I’m so behind in journaling (and I haven’t cracked Charlotte’s volume open) that I can’t stand to sit down and begin to write anything at all. Today, I noticed a nice red stuck pixel in the middle of my camera’s pictures. Great. I know that bad pixels are a fact of digital photography, but a red one right in the middle is disconcerting. I spent the night trying out CHDK, but their website and download pages have been down all night. And the firmware version is conflicting with what it’s supposed to be. Canon said to send it back to them. Okay, that’s like $15-$20 in shipping and a week or two (or three) without my camera.
In itself, that’s not the end of the world. I could do something scummy, like buy my camera over again and return the one I have now, since my return period is over. Aside from being scummy, I’m sentimental, and I don’t want to do that. This camera took Charlotte’s first picture ever. But I find myself hoping that she doesn’t do anything too memorable in the meantime. And this is stupid.
For another thing, if it were me, I’d rather hear the story from my parents than see the photos. My parents took tons and tons of photos of their boys as children. But my own memory and hearing my parents tell me things that I don’t remember serve me better for my nostalgic needs than photo albums. In fact, there are some I’ve probably never even bothered to look through.
I’ve developed a strange “I’m getting older” and “important things are happening now” penchant for writing everything down and recording everything (that sounds like it’s own blog post) over the last few years. I worked all day and spent half the time Charlotte was awake messing with my camera like her childhood depended on it. But worrying more about some photos and posting them on Facebook seems like a waste of energy to me these days.
But, you know. Tell me that.
I was at a community meeting with a co-worker last month, in a church basement. Some funny little man mentioned the word “gumption.” I wrote said word on my meeting agenda, and my co-worker (who’s a community artist and illustrator) drew this sketch of a man puking. So I wrote a caption:
gumption. (noun): The state of puking out one’s very soul, eg., “She sold her soul but then got the gumption and had to welch on the deal.”
(Larger image here.)
(More from artist Quentin Gibeau here.)
Revising my dissertation, I wonder if working in higher education/community engagement, outside of an academic discipline, hasn’t been better for my prose writing? I have to write for university administrators, nonprofit and community partners regularly, not to mention sometimes writing in order to convince people to do something they don’t really want to do. There’s a lot of pomp and false wit in the dissertation that I would never put into something for other people to read on paper like that these days. Of course, blogging is full of pomp, almost necessarily so, so you probably haven’t noticed, as I haven’t until this morning. :)
[Larger.]
I finished a big project at work yesterday with a remarkable amount of sanity left. So I am feeling very boastful this morning. This is my “title” instead of “hubby.” It’s more bubbly.
Photo Friday: The Extraordinary.
I am finishing up Bruce Chatwin‘s Anatomy of Restlessness. Being jobless and stuck in my apartment most days while Mrs. P is at work, I found this book both thrilling and depressing. I am a big Chatwin fan, but I especially enjoyed this posthumous publication because of the honesty of a few of the pieces, such as “I Always Wanted To Go To Patagonia” and a letter wherein he spells out the plan for his great book on nomadism/restlessness that never got written. I mean, Chatwin was a little…pretentious at times, such as when, in The Songlines, he spelled out how awesome his black notebooks were in such detail that an Italian company was able to reproduce them ten years later. I mean, I confess an addiction of sorts to those little treasures, so I think this is a good thing. But in an interview, maybe. In the main text? Pretentious? Or maybe brave? A little soul-baring? Chatwin says that the man he was talking to looked at him, when Chatwin told him about his precious notebooks, as if he had never heard anything more pretentious. Did that happen, or did old Bruce imagine that in some kind of self-consciousness?
Maybe even when he is fictionalizing his “stories” he was still honest to some degree, more so than one would believe when I started writing this post. Maybe he was a complete liar. I don’t know. Either way, you should still definitely check out this book. Or anything else by Chatwin you can get your hands on. I found this book, first edition, sitting on a stack when I walked into Normals one day this fall, after looking for that book for a long time. I exclaimed out-loud, “I’ve been looking for this! It’s like it was here just for me.”
But now I am restless. Very. When I read the first essay last week, I went shopping when I was pretty sick (and got sicker) because I could not stand the idea of staying home all day after reading something like that. Is that sad? I have finally gotten around to filling in a travel journal from our research trips in fall 2006. They were a bit of a pain at the time, when I was trying to get a dissertation written. But now I wish I could go back to New Haven for another chilly Friday morning wishing I brought something other than sandals. Or to New York for a thunderstorm on Broadway, ducking into the largest Barnes and Noble I have ever seen. Or to Boston, within a mile of where I lived for two years, remembering all things I loved and hated about that place. Hours at my favorite cafe’ there.
For now, I have to settle for books and other people’s experiences. And, of course, remembering my own.
[Larger images here.]
Fatherhood
