Warning: Self-indulgent melancholy alert!
My current book-bag reading material is The Big Cats and Their Fossil Relatives, by Alan Turner. I’m beginning to think that reading books in the field that you spent most of your life planning to enter and then threw over impetuously in order to write novels you haven’t finished and get a degree that leads to meaningless and oppressive office jobs is a bad idea. So are sentences that long—do what I say, not what I do.
I know I get the same heady, pretentious joy from reading great works of European literature and obscure Russian books in public, but there’s something even more pretentious and smuggifying about sitting in Starbucks poring over drawings of Dinofelis skulls and comparing the zygomatic arches. You feel arcane, keyed in to secret knowledge. Small children gape at your book, and casual glances from latte-waiters are baffled.
I’ve left the brotherhood of bones, I am a pretender. I miss the exclusivity of it—“You guys all gave up on paleontology when you turned 6, but I’m hardcore!” Half the world is writing a novel in their spare time. Or at least it seems that way in Starbucks.
Comments
I feel your woe...
...well, a similar woe anyhow. From the time I understood the concept of career until sometime during my college selection process, I had every intention of going into nursing. Now look at me, I work at a lab bench and wonder about my choice each day as the bus passes the nurse’s school. Usually I decide the choice was right.
Re: I feel your woe...
What was it about nursing that appealed to you? I hear good nurses are in pretty high demand these days, which seems to indicate that not a lot of people want to be nurses…
Re: I feel your woe...
Of course, one of the problems is the fact that there is, as yet, no way to know whether the choice is right or not. Patience is key, and it’s not something I’m good at.
Part of the reason I ended up going for an English major, out of all my many passions, is not just my drive to write, but my feeling that I can to some extent still own the other topics I love, because language is all-pervasive. I can write about anything.
Re: I feel your woe...
You’re not even into your mid-twenties. I wouldn’t start obsessing about your lack of prolificity quite yet. Hemingway had to fight in a war and starve in foreign countries for years before anything good happened to him (and he still ended up on an island with polydactyl cats). Fitzgerald needed about forty-three binges and ten years writing the equivalent of bad true confessions stories. Burroughs required heroin addiction and a supreme court hearing. Dylan Thomas barely got anything published and he still died on a train platform with the illustrious last words ‘I’ve just drunk 18 whiskeys. I think that’s the record. I love you.’ So I wouldn’t worry.
Re: I feel your woe...
It’s not where I am that worries me so much (tho’ as noted above, patience not my thing), it’s the rate at which I’m moving—lately I am afraid I have bogged down. I think largely it’s because I haven’t entered most of my novel into this dread machine; I filled a journal, so I am carrying around one that doesn’t have the other 200 pages of written text; but I haven’t entered it into the computer, so I can’t print it out or access it remotely.
I was also feeling low.
Of course, as I don’t plan to abuse any substances more rigorously controlled than chocolate, maybe I’m doomed to obscurity.
Re: I feel your woe...
Chemicals are immaterial to writing, a feather clutched in Dumbo’s trunk.
English degrees do not all lead to lame office jobs. It took me a while, but I am editing. Watch me edit. Ha! THe thing that really held me back was not doing any internships or similar during college. Of course, I didn’t know then that I wanted to edit for a living, but something more interesting than retail was in order.
But that’s all spilt milk.
ONWEIRD!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Re: I feel your woe...
These days I cast about me for palatable day jobs. Within the last few days I have considered interior design (probably requires going back to college) and real estate (do-able). If you go back further, especially to my periods of short madness and inspiration, I have considered chiropracty, and being a police detective. And being a pirate.
Oddly, I think I‘d like retail better than what I’m doing. However, it does not pay money in the amounts I would like.
We’re just joshin’ about drugs. After all, my normal dreams beat Xanadu to a pulp. I can come up with totally weird grist for my mill through the all-natural addictive ingredient SLEEP.