Not forgotten
November 6th, 2008
Dear blog,
No, I haven’t forgotten you.
I thought of trying to explain to you why I wept as I did Tuesday night and decided that it was like trying to explain to my kids why I was crying. I was grateful they didn’t have to understand. I mean, they got that it was historical and all, but I couldn’t explain to them that regardless of what our new president does or is able to do, I was crying because we live in a country where enough people believed in him and believed in a hopefulness I had held myself back from feeling to vote so overwhelmingly for him, I cried because he was able to stand up and give an almost-Bartlett-worthy speech and call for things like humility and service and sacrifice and I’m grateful to think that maybe such virtues are not hopelessly passé. I was crying because even though I was experiencing this history in my own living room with two children asleep on the couch and floor and two nestled up against me, I was experiencing it through Twitter with acquaintances I may or may not have met in person, through Facebook with friends across the country, and as I listened to the happy parade passing a block away, I wasn’t alone.
I thought of trying to share my enthusiasm with you for Michael Chabon’s Maps and Legends, my delight in someone saying “Hey, we read and we write for entertainment, and there is nothing wrong with valuing entertainment” my delight in his essays on Sherlock Holmes and on the His Dark Materials trilogy and on The Road (I have mentioned that I just finished reading the Road and I’d procrastinated reading it for a year and so was shocked at being a little blown away with it?)
I thought of trying to sort out my appreciation for Virginia Postrel’s TED Talk on glamour but she says it all so well, I don’t suppose I have anything really substantive to add.
I thought of sharing with you the catalogue of the pleasures versus the indignities of being corporeal that took up all of my morning pages this morning and my surprise at how I keep bumping up against things I find taboo (but I am so matter-of-fact and open-minded, I wail!) as I try to write even in the privacy of my own journal about them, and wondering at how taboo and modesty and shame seem braided impossibly tightly.
But really, I should be spending my writing time trying to pump words into my National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo) project which is exhilarating and terrifying and exhausting and consuming and which I seem to be able to do only by focussing endlessly on the numbers and sticking my fingers in my ears and humming loudly whenever a little voice pipes up with judgement of what I am writing. I’ve now written 11,907 words towards my goal of 50,000 and every day I am sure I have only one day’s worth of writing more left. I have written enough to get things set up, to have a sense of where I am going but it feels like driving at night on a very dark highway and being able to see only the area directly ahead of me illuminated by my headlights, and quite honestly, I’m terrified of what may be lurking in the shadows.
Finally, I share this from Norton Juster’s Phantom Tollbooth, which I started with the younger two boys last night. Milo has gotten trapped in the Doldrums and is having a conversation with the native Lethargians, explaining why thinking and laughing are against the law:
“At 8 o’clock we get up, and then we spend
“From 8 to 9 daydreaming.
“From 9 to 9:30 we take our early midmorning nap.
“From 9:30 to 10:30 we dawdle and delay.
“From 10:30 to 11:30 we take our late early morning nap.
“From 11:30 to 12:00 we bide our time and then eat lunch.
“From 11:00 to 2:00 we linger and loiter.
“From 2:00 to 2:30 we take our early afternoon nap.
“From 2:30 to 3:30 we putt off for tomorrow what we could have done today.
“From 3:30 to 4:00 we take our early late afternoon nap.
“From 4:00 to 5:00 we loaf and lunge until dinner.
“From 6:00 to 7:00 we dillydally.
“From 7:00 to 8:00 we take our early evening nap, and then for an hour before we go to bed at 9:00 we waste time.
“As you can see that leaves almost no time for brooding, lagging, plodding, or procrastinating, and if we stopped to think or laugh, we’d never get nothing done.”
This sounds disturbingly like my day as I note that I have only an hour left before I must retrieve my older children from school…
November 6th, 2008 at 8:16 pm
How can I relate to that passage so well?! It seems impossible with a family of four small(ish) children, and yet that is what many of my days are like, especially with a newborn. The day is broken into fifteen minute intervals, and since that really isn’t enough time to do anything, I wind up doing a lot of nothing. I think I was just writing about this on my other blog. Or maybe I’m just making it fit because I’m self centered that way. I’m too tired to tell.
Thank you for writing about your election night experience. I’ve wanted to write about it but I just can’t find the words. I keep talking about it with anyone who will listen, trying to make sense of such a profound experience. Reading about it from your perspective helped! I wish that I was in a city that appreciates the victory and not one where racial slurs are being graffitied all over the place.
I am so excited about your novel! When I saw the pull quote in this entry I thought at first that you were giving us a little glimpse of the story. I can’t wait to hear what is happening! Keep on pluggin’ away!
November 6th, 2008 at 9:04 pm
I can’t wait to read ‘Phantom Tollbooth’ to the boys, it’s been so long since I read it. I have so much to read to them that I think I might have to take some time from loafing, lunging and wasting time to read more.
Jenny, I, too, feel my life is in 15-minute intervals, none of which is long enough to focus. but then someone said something yesterday that gave me pause, that biology is keeping us from focusing too well on any one thing so we always have that corner of our consciousness awake to the potential dangers our children might be getting into. and that made me feel, if not relieved, at the very least as if my terrifically scattered brain has a purpose.
November 6th, 2008 at 10:13 pm
***11,907!!!***
Sister, you rock my tiny world.
And you know the quotation from Doctorow, right? About the headlights? Hang on…here we go:
“It’s like driving a car at night. You never see further than your headlights, but you can make the whole trip that way.”
And now to bed, because I have to get up in 8 hours to start dreaming, idling, and dallying once again…. <3
November 6th, 2008 at 11:09 pm
I must have gotten the quotation from Doctorow without registering where I got it from, long sigh. That would be the next of my paranoid fantasies, that every single thought I have turns out to be cadged from lord-knows-where…
Realized the fifteen minute thing was completely my problem today, no interval of time seemed quite long enough for me to get settled and immersed and I know there’s a trick to being able to do things for fifteen minutes, but when I can spend fifteen minutes searching for the right sized knitting needle or for the little boy shoe, or lord help me, the quote on-line that I wanted to cite… it does all just feel wasted. All, of course, it’s exacerbated by the not-sleeping and the husband gone four days now, and four days next week… 1703 words more today, bringing the total to 13,610. Bed!