ninaherenorthere.com

About a week before Christmas, I stopped being able to cook for myself and clean my dishes. All of a sudden pouring a drink into a glass turned into a Herculean task and I started to chug chocolate soy milk directly out of the carton, occasionally following it with a swig of peppermint schnapps. Inside my San Francisco house, I found myself wearing two sweatshirts (one with Santa dunking a basketball), two pairs of sweatpants and a fleece hat at all times. I snacked for days on homemade fudge and baklava leftover from a party I didn’t attend. Doing anything outside of the recline position was a major accomplishment. The only activity I could commit to was renting DVDs. I have now watched Blood Diamond, The Family Stone, The Namesake, much of Season 3 of The Office, the Bourne Ultimatum on Christmas Eve, and as my own self-reward, a rent five movies go to the theater at no additional guilt, I saw The Savages on Christmas Day.

I don’t particularly like it when others are off from work–Labor Day, Independence Day, Presidents’ Day, Good Friday, Martin Luther King Jr. Day—all the major holidays really. Keep that stock market ticker streaming. I’m not a holiday person, which means I get called a Grinch around Christmas, I get depressed on my birthday, and I’d prefer to be sleeping before midnight on New Year’s Eve. It’s the whole mass celebration, complete with overcrowding in public places, and communal bonding business, not to mention a break from work that I don’t need. Every day is a holiday for the unemployed, and the only way to take a break from irresponsibility and relax from relaxation is to develop bed sores.

Chistmas is the worst of the worst when it comes to holidays. Some of it is just the pre-winter doldrums, the time between Thanksgiving and Christmas that I still equate with university finals and the waiting period before I can reasonably expect the pow pow to blanket the mountains for good riding conditions. Maybe because I’m long gone from college and I’m car-less, financially challenged, and far from the sickest of peaks, but it’s the cultural and familial traditions that got to me this year.

Kristina (the g-friend) flew East well over a week ago to be with her family. They do the whole tree and wrapped presents thing, the kids running down the stairs while their dad video tapes on Christmas morning. They prepare for this day with talk of carolling, dreams of snow, and marathons of White Christmas, Holiday Inn, It’s a Wonderful Life, Muppet Christmas Carol, and Elf. Pretty standard, except that there is a pre-viewing competitive test built around these movies, and each sibling’s standing in the family is determined by the test results. This is very similar to the way my family does things—when we’re not having a physical or intellectual contest, we like to rate and rank the gourmet food bought by each person—and we are able to transcend the religion/tradition divide in the relationship.

This is the part where I invoke Adam Sandler and do the woe is Jew thing. I will say that people tried. People wished me a “Happy December 25th” and offered me stale gelt, and this year I arrived too early for latkes and apple sauce at one party and too late at another, but at least the parties happened. In the past few years, my main gripe about Hanukkah has been the timing of early December, so early we’d be better off celebrating it in combination with Thanksgiving instead of as the premature cousin of Christmas.

But the sad truth is that my family has no Hanukkah traditions either, unless you count the four or us figthing over which side to light the menorah from before my mother implores us to use our “singing voices” for an off-key, off-tempo blessing read in transliteration off the side of the candle box. I have not been home in many years to light the candles with my family, and instead I am used to receiving an email addressed to the “heathens” and kindly informing my brother and me the wrong day that Hanukkah begins.

As for the tradition of presents, we had a point system. My brother and I each had approximately 8 points worth of presents. So, if we wanted a Nintendo, that might be like 6 points. A game might be worth 2 points. Rather than providing my parents with a list of our desires, we would shout out presents to calibrate the point system, compiling our list from the most undervalued of gifts. By early January we had usually overshot our allotted points and my mom would say something like, “I think you’ve used up all your presents there kiddies.” And then to prove we were true Jews, my dad would buy us a few more presents.

After Hanukkah ended, we did not put up stockings or trees or drink eggnog or say Merry Christmas. We went skiing, or flew, or ate Chinese food on December 25th.

I’m not sure why it took FOR-EVER for Christmas to pass this year, nor do I know why I was incapacitated for the time leading up to it. But I’m elated that it is over.

I have a friend who went through a “stalking Michelle Tea” phase. Not in a trench coat, sunglasses and binoculars kind of way; she was more of a literary groupie. Which is funny because Valencia is the only book I’ve known her to read from start to finish. Ever. (I guess I can’t be mad she still has my copy.) I met another person who claimed to be stalking Michelle Tea. In practice, this means showing up at her events, and because there are so many—the Radar Reading Series, the Radar Salon, Litquake, the readings for her semi-recent novel Rose of No Man’s Land and for the anthologies she’s edited (Baby Remember My Name, It’s So You, Without a Net, the list goes on)—I can see how a fan might feel creepy and obsessive. But I never felt quite like a stalker until this weekend.

I’ve been going to Michelle’s events for years and have always admired her entertaining on-stage presence, the cookies and the commentary. I haven’t read all of her books, but I respect her writing, specifically her articles in The Believer, her introductions to anthologies, Valencia and Rose of No Man’s Land. Her descriptions ooze in a way that makes me feel as if her character is feeling a moment more than I have felt the entire last year of my life. And she’s really skillful at being just crass enough without being over-the-top unreadable. There is a scene in RNML when a character removes her tampon and throws it at some losers, a disgusting moment that comes off as queerly chivalrous and which left a mark in my mind as indelible as the crimson smear on the dude’s white tank top.

Lately, I’ve been obsessed with Michelle Tea’s blog. Did you know she had one? I’m not sure if this is common knowledge or not. It’s sort of hidden in the back of Leisha Hailey’s closet or underneath Katherine Moennig’s pillow as part of the Our Chart site, as in the L Word. I confess to watching the show, and last year that meant ducking through the crowd at The Mix one minute before show time, finding a prime seat that nobody else would consider a seat, a sticky beer-soaked step, and leaving at the first roll of the credits. In my spare time, I do not read L Word teasers, commentary, or download screensavers, but I am in a daily habit of reading the Our Chart blogs, namely Grace Moon’s (editor of the dyke mag Velvetpark) and Diana Cage’s (Sirius radio host and author of many books including Girl Meets Girl: A Dating Survival Guide). I started reading Michelle’s blog around the time of the recent Sister Spit tour.

So, I saw Michelle Tea out this weekend at an airband competition—think heavy metal rock costumes, aggressive lead vocals and full back up bands riffing and drumming in a kind of Def Leppard mime. Actually, I’m only pretty sure that I saw Michelle there, maybe like 97% sure, or 93% sure. My confidence has dropped as the week has progressed, due to no new knowledge, but rather the difficulty I have in believing in myself for long stretches of time. I would’ve been 100% sure, except Kristina was absolutely positive it wasn’t her. Our conversation went something like this:

It isn’t her. Yes, it is. Stop looking at her. You stop looking at her. I’m not looking at her. I’m positive it isn’t her. Be quiet. She can’t hear us, it’s not even her. It is her, please stop looking. Will you calm down, you’re acting ridiculous. Just stop staring. You’re wrong. Can we please stop talking about this. (For a more realistic re-enactment, read this paragraph twice. Reading it a third time will simulate the conversation Kristina and I will have once this is posted.)

That week, I had read a Michelle post about how after due to some reasons I won’t mention here for fear that I’d be committing some blog gossip sin, but that you can read about from her directly, she could finally read again. As reading is one of the only activities that keeps me sane, and is probably as important to me as it is to her, I thought to congratulate her. I didn’t know if this was appropriate since she didn’t appear to be working, and at that moment, I felt downright uncomfortable that I knew so much about what she’d been up to lately. When and what and how someone is reading is as personal and intimate to me as seeing what underwear she or he is wearing.

Only once had I summoned up the courage to say something to Michelle. It was at a Rose of No Man’s Land reading at a Different Light Bookstore, and I didn’t bring my book because I’ve never been into the whole anonymous, what’s your name again, book signing thing. But as the line formed at her table, I ran out the door, up the hill to my house, grabbed the book and returned. A few stragglers remained in line. The guy in front of me was exactly the kind of fan I didn’t want to be—pushy, ingratiating and disrespectful of the unspoken time limit rule.

“Do I know you?” she asked me. I thought to say I look like every other dyke in SF, but instead I said that I’d been to her events so many times I must just look familiar. I told her I loved the book, that I was a writer, and then proceeded to name-drop every person she knew or had read in my MFA program.

“Wow, what a great opportunity,” she said. Before I left, she said that now that we knew each other we could say hi. But we didn’t, for at least a year, and although she recently nodded to me at an event (and I almost turned around, even though there was no one behind me), we did not say hi at the airband competition. Maybe it wasn’t her after all.

In the next few days after the airband competition, I asked myself why I cared so much if it was Michelle and whether or not she noticed Kristina and I fighting about her. Then I read an essay that Stephen Elliot wrote in this Sunday’s Chronicle, a first-person reflective piece about the do-it-yourself, open-mike, chapbook environment and the community that was built around the bars and spoken word circuit of the mid to late 90’s, when none of those he mentioned like himself, Justin Chin, Beth Lisick, and Michelle Tea “were connected” in the larger literary world or had MFAs.

Elliot captures the desire, desperation, drive and especially the atmosphere I’ve always romanticized and associated with the underground writing scene. But in my thoughts, I tend to focus mostly on the women, symbolized by the early Sister Spit tours (that I never did see).

One of the most rewarding aspects of my MFA experience was the community of writers and what we shared of our words and of ourselves. But occasionally I felt as if something were missing, a connection to the city and to a diversity that went deeper than the academic canon. Sure I read a gay or lesbian here and there, too much Richard Rodriguez, some Virginia Woolf, a dash of Gertrude Stein and Gloria Anzaldua, as well as a kick-ass MFK Fisher story about oysters—need I say more—the only one we discussed in a queer context.

I remember a meeting with my favorite teacher, a woman with a Ph D and vast knowledge of female writers. I asked her for a list of contemporary lesbian writers and she hadn’t a clue (other than Eileen Myles, who had spoken at my school and sent all the straight middle-aged teachers swooning). She didn’t know Michelle Tea (that is until Rose of No Man’s Land received a favorable review in the the Sunday New York Times). My teacher called over another woman, an older lesbian (who would probably scoff at being called queer), who had little positive to say about the state of current lesbian writing beyond Sarah Waters and didn’t think highly of Michelle Tea. I know our difference in opinion had much to do with age, personal taste and the whole lesbian-but-not-queer thing I can’t get into now. But still, we were in San Francisco, and we were dykes. Did this woman have no idea what Michelle has done for the literary and queer folk of this city?

I do. And maybe that’s why I love her so dearly, and why I cared about seeing her out, when if I bumped into Michael Pollan (whose work I also read and admire) in Berkeley, it wouldn’t faze me. I want to be apart of the queer writing community and the San Francisco writing community to which Michelle Tea has made and continues to make such a strong contribution. I want us to say hi, for real. And until then, I guess I’ll just continue to show up at her events alone, stand in the back, observe, and join the rest of the crowd stalking Michelle Tea.

Every writer should have one of these toolboxes, metaphorically speaking, or not metaphorically speaking, in which case you might want to try a hardware store, a drug store, or The Container Store. Here’s what I keep in mine:

Dictionary: Preferably one with a lot of words. For years, I had a flimsy paperback desk reference that lacked all the important words. After I did an excessive amount of research looking for the best deal, the best brand, the best quality, considering extras like usage notes and CD-ROMs, I decided on the American Heritage Dictionary, Fourth Edition. Because of the pictures. Some of the pictures are entertaining, like the guy with the “handlebar mustache.” Some of the pictures are useless, like the one showing Brett Favre for “football.” If you don’t know what football is, then you need more help than a dictionary can provide. And sorry to be picky or anti-cheesehead, but Favre is a “quarterback,” not “football.” I like the pictures of animals, like the “large mouth bass” and the “skink,” otherwise after reading the definition I would just imagine a boring old fish and lizard. Pictures of hats are always helpful to me because I have a hard time distinguishing between the different kinds, and pictures of presidents who served before my birth and aren’t on any dollar bills are godsends.

Electronic Dictionary: The hardback one is great for show, and if it has a lot of words (like I recommend) makes for a good footrest when your desk and chair combo is too high. But are you really going to flip through hundreds of thousands of words every time you don’t know one? Sorry to every teacher, professor, instructor and anyone who’s every believed in my intellectual capabilities, but I’m just no going to do it. There are too many words I don’t know and I wouldn’t get any reading done if I looked them all up. If you’re skeptical, know that I was, too, at first, and it took me awhile to see the life-altering power of the electronic dictionary.

My first one was free. Sort of. A few years ago, I was unemployed and I volunteered to let a marketing company follow me around the Discovery Store with a video camera in exchange for $50 in cash and a $50 gift certificate. Unless I wanted astronaut ice cream or a CD that played soothing tropical rain forest sounds, there wasn’t anything to buy for under $50. Except for a cheaply made electronic bookmark dictionary. I got it and took it to cafes to read the newspaper and on airplanes. Even though it lacked many words, I used it until the battery died. Then I set out to find the best electronic dictionary on the market. I didn’t need any translation functions, and fearful of sounding like a robot, I decided against the audio kind that pronounces the words for you. Mine is made by Sharp and uses the Oxford American Dictionary, the Oxford American Thesaurus, and Garner’s Modern American Usage. It’s amazing, so easy to use that I even look up the words I think I know, but apparently don’t.

Paint color swatches from Sherwin-Williams: Initially, everything in my stories was red, blue, and yellow. I was able to move away from the primaries and utilize the entire rainbow, even indigo, but then I hit a wall. I wanted to jump from 5o cent colors to 5 dollar colors, like taupe, mauve, cyan, and periwinkle. But without Sherwin-Williams, I wouldn’t know what I visually meant by them. From their 1,200 colors, I can always find one to use. I don’t think about the samples as cheat sheets, but as a way to jog my imagination to the infinitely colorful world in which we live.

Wooden Book Stand: There’s this schmuck of a man who frequents one of my favorite coffee shops. He always throws his newspaper across two tables, huffs with enough force to disturb the entire place, slams his muffin plate down and sets up a pretentious metal newspaper stand. Then he reads while chowing down on his breakfast. I’m not a big fan, but he gave me the idea for a book stand. It helps with the numbness and the tingling in my left arm when I’ve been lying in bed reading for awhile. Sometimes switching the book to my other hand helps. But I can’t do that for long. I like to hold with the left, flip with the right. There’s nothing superstitious about it, it’s just more comfortable. So, the wooden stand, I place it on my stomach, and voila, hands-free reading—no more tingles.

Reference Books: If you haven’t already figured this out, the term “reference book” is really a euphemism for procrastination device. My faves include On Writing (Stephen King), Writing Fiction (Janet Burroway), A Glossary of Literary Terms (M.H. Abrams) which is like the Cliff Notes to a Ph D in English Lit, The Writing Life (Annie Dillard) and If You Want To Write (Brenda Ueland). To be honest, I can’t remember the content of the last two, but the titles move me every time. They make me feel like I’m leading a Writing Life, and Ueland’s book inspires me to shout, “Yes, I want to write,” even though paper is nowhere to be found. For a real time suck, consider adding the Chicago Manual of Style to the collection. The Elements of Style is too slim to be of benefit here, but it always helps with the “is it lay or lie” problem. Feel free to place any synonym for “reference book” in your toolbox—cleaning supplies, a TV, crossword puzzles, In Touch Magazine—anything that can prevent you from writing. Call the section what you will. I’m not here to tell you how to organize your toolbox. Only to give you some ideas for it.

If you want to share any contents of your writer’s toolbox or tell us about the design or your pen of choice, please post a comment.

I’ve been paying close attention to first sentences lately. The Best American Non-Required Reading usually includes a collection of them. One that I remember, first from reading the story, and then from seeing it included in the Non-Required anthology is, “The sun is shining, mynah birds are hopping, palm trees are swaying, so what.” It’s from “The Minor Wars” by Kaui Hart Hemmings, and it’s a short story in a collection (The House of Thieves) which is responsible for turning me on to the genre. I like the sentence because it sets the mood. And although there is a high likelihood that it didn’t happen this way, I like to picture the writer in a crappy mood, getting a writing prompt to “set the scene,” and coming up with an opening sentence like that, from which a whole story unfolds. I’m a writer, not a critic, and so I have a tendency to ignore an analysis of the text and instead imagine or empathize with the writer at work.

The next first sentence is from “High in Hell” by Kevin Fedarko, originally published in Esquire and included in this year’s (2007) shockingly good Best American Travel Writing. Warning: Do not read the following sentence if you have severe asthma, a serious breathing condition, or are reading it aloud with food in your mouth:

“So if you ever happen to find yourself skimming through the troposphere high above the Horn of Africa, the engines of your cargo jet clawing at the currents of sub-Saharan air rolling off the lip of the Ethiopian plateau and down toward the Red Sea, there will come a moment when you’ll have to admit that the cockpit of an aging DC-8 with a broken oil-pressure gauge and a washed-out picture of a Ugandan mountain gorilla emblazoned on the tail offers a damn fine view of the most wretched place on the planet.”

I do not recommend writing a sentence like that unless your passport is so full of stamps that you can legitimately call somewhere the most “wretched place on the planet” and you are going to write a brilliant story about delivering, distributing and chewing khat-a drug illegal in the United States–in Djibouti, where it is the “opiate of the masses.” I’m still spinning from that sentence.

This is the first sentence of the book I’m reading now: “It took me a long time and most of the world to learn what I know about love and fate and the choices we make, but the heart of it came to me in an instant, while I was chained to a wall and being tortured.” That’s an opener to an epic, right–love, fate, and torture, all in the first line? It’s the kind of sentence you can use when there are 932 pages to follow. It’s from Shantaram by Gregory David Roberts, a book my brother convinced me to read by showing me the first page. If you expect people to read your tome, that hook better be damn good, and it is. I’m about a third of the way through the novel, and I’m sure I’ll have more to say beyond the first sentence.

“My friend Herb McGinnis, a cardiologist, was talking.” After reading that, my first thought was, that’s a lame opener. I find it interesting that the guy is talking, doing something, which throws the reader immediately into the action, and most of the story is Herb talking, so the first line works. The next few lines aren’t particularly engaging. “The four of us were sitting around the kitchen table drinking gin. It was Saturday afternoon.” This is the part where I tell you the lines are from Raymond Carver’s short story, “Beginners,” in the current fiction issue of the New Yorker, which hit the ground of my foyer about 2 hours ago. I’d never read any Carver, and thought I should, since he’s famous. And since he’s famous, I thought he must know what he’s doing.

Anyways, I read the story and wasn’t super impressed by it, or not as impressed as I thought I should be. That’s when I noticed the context for the recent publication in the New Yorker. “Beginners,” the story I read, had been severely edited by Gordon Lish and had been published years ago as, “What We Talk About When We Talk About Love,” in a collection of the same name. There is now talk of publishing Carver’s stories from that collection in their original, unedited and “true” form. All of this backstory and the historic literary drama is in the New Yorker, and the website includes Lish’s entire line edit of the story. Which is educational and fascinating and certainly raises issues around editing, editors, and the artistic intent and interests of the author. Since I started this post about first sentences, I’ll return to my point. Lish’s edited first two sentences are: My friend Mel Herb McGinnis, a cardiologist, was talking. Mel McGinnis is a cardiologist, and sometimes that gives him the right. Although I’m sure I won’t agree with all the edits (and I do think it’s a bit aggressive to change character names and titles of stories and well, everything), I do think the edited opening sentences read much better.

There is one more first sentence to mention and not include: mine. You might have read it on the post that mysteriously disappeared this week. The opener didn’t quite jive with the content of the post, which I don’t think is necessary when blogging, but I was writing about a youth organization and the opener was inappropriate. When I was testing out Google searches, including one for the youth organization, my post came up on the second page. I became fearful that a parent might Google the org and find my blog. Taking down blog posts is an awful habit for a neurotic, paranoid person like me to get into. But I panicked. And even if I do put the post back up, the first sentence will be gone. Those first sentences are all too important.

My girlfriend says that I have a tendency to treat our serious (read: emotional) discussions as if I’m conducting a business meeting. I’m not sure I agree. I don’t presents our points of contention in Powerpoint slides and nobody jots down minutes, but I did consider titling this post: Status Update.

First order of business: My girlfriend’s name is Kristina. And it has come to my attention that her roommate, Caitlin, is troubled by my use of the phrase, “My Girlfriend,” because it makes her imagine Kristina as a lingerie-clad bed dummy (that’s paraphrased). She isn’t, and going forward I will use her name. I just, well, I felt sort of silly using her name as if you knew her. But now I’m giving up the unnecessary pretense of protecting those close to me.

Second Order of Business: The aforementioned Caitlin is responsible for the title URL of my blog. I specifically want to thank her for releasing me from the long days spent brainstorming and scrapping ideas while my personal theme song played, “idiot, oh idiot, when will you think of something.” Even though she tried to invoice me for her creative services, I will still plug her blog, EverydayCaitlin. As you can probably tell from her title, she is committed to posting everyday. Although recently someone asked her about this and I could’ve sworn I heard her snap, “Sunday is a day of rest.”

Third Order of Business: While I apologize if I broke SPAMing protocol to get you to this site, it has been awesome to receive emails (and comments) from people who knew me back when I was a danger to society. (Now I’m only a danger to myself.) My favorite three email responses/comments in no particular order are:

was just thinking of you today.
really enjoyed seeing you, if only for a hot minute.
read the blog already. consider me a subscriber.
send porn?

i never know how these things work. so if i check out your
blog between my cnn.com and perezhilton.com fix every day, is that the
same thing as stalking? because then i feel weird, and instead of
starting my day off informed and relaxed, now i’m starting it off like
a creep.
i’m so confused.

geez… I fogot the definition of neurotic
until just now.

In Conclusion: Since I don’t have any statistics for the week, I can’t share any empirical results. But if squaring the number of people who emailed me is an indication of unique visitors, then so far I’m off to a strong start.

Addendum: You are encouraged to post comments and/or email me at nina@herenorthere.com.

When I woke up for “work” this morning, I had a voice mail message: one co-worker was sick, the other co-worker was getting sick, and since they were the only two would be at the “office,” I couldn’t go in. It’s like a snow day, my girlfriend said to me, turning off the alarm.

Except it wasn’t. Thursdays are my favorite day of the week. My “work” is an unpaid internship at a literary agency in Tiburon. My “office” is a gorgeous cottage on a winding road atop a hill so steep I can barely walk up it. There are views of the bay. Inside, it is like the unused study in a railroad baron’s mansion (which doesn’t bode well for ergonomics), bookshelves and desks built into the walls, leather couches, a fireplace and hanging above, a portrait of a man–probably a literary figure I should know–who appears to be missing his eyeglass and pipe.

It is a three-step journey for me to get to work. I get up around 6:20, ride my bike a couple miles to my co-worker’s house. We drive to Crissy Field, park, and carpool with the other co-worker over the Golden Gate Bridge to Tiburon. I’m not sure how long all the traveling takes, 1-1.5 hours maybe.

I don’t know how long it takes because I like the trip and I like the office. I like hearing my alarm signal me to prepare for an actual responsibility. I like that I keep busy on Thursdays, and that I escape the aimlessness of my self-structured days. I don’t even mind that I’m not paid. I just pretend the whole day is a book-themed field trip adventure to the breathtaking stomping grounds of the wealthy. Or something like that.

I spend most of the day reading unsolicited novel manuscripts and nonfiction proposals. Most of what I read is pretty damn poor (yet not without merit). I sign a lot of rejection letters. Before deciding I’m a power-mongering killer of dreams, remember that I also receive rejection letters, often after spending an entire day writing them. Being on both sides, as a writer and a gatekeeper, keeps all this publishing shenanigans in perspective for me. Sometimes it really does matters whether the reader has or hasn’t had his espresso before reading your submission.

My favorite part of the day is the morning, before I’m jaded and have paper cuts. When I’m hopeful that even though a best-selling manuscipt won’t be inside, I’ll meet an intriguing person. I have opened submission packages from the delusional predicting apocalypse, serving convicts, veterans (of the Iraq, Vietnam, and Gulf wars), people who write at elementary school levels, and those who have produced thousands of self-published pages. The mail pours in from every state in the U.S and from many countries, from people who have had painful lives, unique lives, accomplished lives. From people who are hopeful, humble, honest, desperate, yearning. Writers.

Not that all of the above makes for awesome literature. But sometimes it seems that in the worst writing there is the most inspiration. If Joe Schmoe in Nebraska is still going strong after pumping out his ninth unpublished horror thriller that is “a cross between Stephen King and Dan Brown,” then who am I to dust the ceiling when I could be writing. Other people are trying. They are sitting at their computers, seeking fame and fortune, desiring to entertain, communicate, connect, exorcise demons, and solidify in permanent ink a legacy that expresses, magnifies, refracts, and elucidates a life lived.

My mom had a snow day today. In New Jersey. But it was warm in San Francisco, hot in the mid-day sun. And it certainly wasn’t a snow day. It was just a day in which I missed crossing the paths of other writers.

Writers like to talk about the blank page. It’s white, the cursor blinks, and there is nothing more intimidating to a person whose self-worth depends on producing words. Except the blank blog.

The archive is what troubles me. Traditionally, archives are places for historical documents. They are kept in governmental buildings, in rooms with high arched ceilings and shelves that buckle underneath dusty tomes. In an archive, one might keep a letter from Benjamin Franklin to John Adams, scrawled with quill pen onto parchment and describing a forbidden sex act with a woman of colonial Virginia. Or one might keep Charles Darwin’s sketches of mating finches. The aged papers and faded drawings of Important People go into these historic vaults, not the Eureka! moments of my morning bathroom experience.

Maybe other bloggers are unconcerned about the Who Cares factor. They don’t seem to have this debilitating archivophobia. The right column pushes down on the page so that the user needs to scroll to reach April 2003. Or the blogger proudly declares, “blogging since 2000,” as if to show he or she watched the legs of the Internet spread and birth the blogosphere.

Well, I’ve been blogging since last week. I just didn’t tell anyone. I was hoping to pad my archives with worthwhile reading material before announcing the site. But it turns out that as a result of some unintended viral marketing, people are reading already. So… here goes.

I do not have a job, or at least a paying one. Recently, someone called me a “lady of leisure.” I prefer an artistic idler or a stay-at-home dad (without child). Because I’m constantly asked what I do with my days, I’ve provided a schedule of a typical day.

7:30 Snooze, snooze, snooze, snooze, snooze, snooze.

8:00 Coffee, cereal, more coffee, more cereal, a little bit more cereal.

8:30 Recount my nightmare in which I worked for minimum wage at the package store (aka the convenience store) near my childhood country house in Connecticut. My girlfriend tells me I’m spoiled. Regret the use of “country house” because it was actually a town house. And regardless of whether I’m spoiled or not, it is impossible to live in San Francisco (or anywhere) on minimum wage.

8:45 Send my girlfriend away with coffee and make my bed, transforming my bedroom into my office.

9:00 Read the news headlines and a story about a bomb in Iraq. Momentarily lose track of the day, month, and number of civilians killed. Then read the list of “most popular” New York Times and San Francisco Chronicle articles so that I’m able to discuss topics that other people find interesting.

9:20 Check my email and feel proud that I’ve read the important New York Times articles before they were emailed to me.

9:21 Refresh my email and hope someone sent me a note leading to my dream job

9:22 Search for ways to improve myself. Accumulate a list of courses that I should take to develop my travel, grant, and humor writing skills. Wonder why a recent graduate of an MFA program needs to take more writing classes. Decide it’s a better career move to teach the classes and send an email with my resume.

9:30 Organize my bookmarks.

9:40 Peruse the “Part-Time” Craigslist job listings. Discover that many jobs want people who “enjoy talking to people” and have “1-2 years experience.” Freak out because neither apply to me, and I’m unemployable. Remember that at least I’m organized and detail-oriented because my bookmarks are categorized. Export my bookmarks in case my computer crashes, proving that I’m forward-thinking, too.

9:50 Expand my search criteria to include full-time jobs and those outside San Francisco. Hope none appeal to me.

10:00 Lower my standards and view the Craigslist “Gigs” and the “Et Cetera” sections. Fill out a questionnaire for a focus group. Contemplate volunteering for a study that does not involve STD treatments or experimental birth control methods. Wonder if it is too late to have my once coveted Ivy League graduate eggs harvested and sold for ten grand. Try to convince myself that nobody wants my eggs because I’m gay when I know that it’s because I cannot hold a job, do not have a career, and cannot talk to people. Check job search off the to-do list.

10:10 Read the blogs of all of my friends and acquaintances and their links to other blogs, bookmarking everything. Ask myself when I’m going to stop talking about starting a blog and do it. Remember the answer: I’ve failed for two months to come up with an the requisite title URL. Remind myself that I can’t title anything and will never be a great writer because of this problem. Start an essay with a dumb title.

11:05 Refresh email and hope for a YouTube video link.

11:06 Refresh email and hope that an editor loved one of my literary submissions.

11:06 Refresh email before I realize that I refreshed my email 4 seconds ago.

11:06 Refresh email because I find this act meditative.

11:07 Look into self-help methods for an attitude adjustment: consult a list of therapist referrals, check yoga schedules, and contemplate exercise, like riding the recline bike while reading a magazine. Decide that I’m too hungry to workout and that all I need is a shower to change my perspective.

12:00 Make a sandwich. To save time, eat it standing up and leaning over the kitchen counter.

12:20 Contemplate finding a house cleaner and calling the rental agency to fix our two beeping smoke alarms. Instead, check the Craigslist “Office / Commercial” section in search of a clean workspace that doesn’t beep.

12:30 Return to my essay with the dumb title. Take a break every fifteen minutes to go into the kitchen for a different snack: a few pretzels, a spoonful of ice cream, a handful of cereal, a bite of cheesecake, a couple tortilla chips, a forkful of green beans and tofu, a cracker.

2:30 Read over the 800 words I produced while putting on five pounds. Realize the last two hours were a big waste of time.

2:45 Update my Excel spreadsheet that lists literary outlets. Search for a magazine or website that could be but isn’t the right “fit” for one of my finished essays. Send the essay anyway because after an hour I want something to show for my effort.

3:45 Hear the mail hit the ground and run down the stairs. Find a form rejection letter from a literary journal addressed to “Gentle Writer” that says my essay is not the right fit. Write a note on the included subscription offer to “Gentle Editor” telling him the only reason I read the journal was to see if my essay was the right fit, and now that both of us are sure that it isn’t, I definitely don’t want to read another issue. Don’t send because I can’t have him thinking that I had the time to write such a note when he didn’t have .7 seconds to scribble his signature.

4:00 Calculate that if it takes .7 seconds to sign a rejection letter and 99% of submissions from this literary journal are rejected, then the editor saves 69.3 seconds for every acceptance by using letters with his Xeroxed signature. This reminds me how much I love numbers and how high I scored on the Math section of the SAT. Consider pursuing a more analytical field, but listen to my business-savvy which tells me editors must need assistants to sign and most likely fold rejection letters. Search Craigslist for unpaid internships stuffing envelopes at a prestigious review, agency, or publishing house.

4:15 Think about working on my resume but decide it’s best to avoid opening a document that is unlikely to help me get a job.

4:20 Refresh email and hope that a new piece of interesting junkmail bypassed the filter.

4:22 Refresh email and hope that the mother I’m always ignoring has emailed me to say hello.

4:23 Check my unused email addresses and hope that someone important guessed that I had such an email address and wants to offer me a job, writing gig, or book deal.

4:25 Pick up a novel, remove a form rejection letter bookmark, and read two pages. Realize there is no time for relaxing when a job must be found. Skim the acknowledgments section for job leads.

4:30 Check my phone in case I didn’t hear it ring. Check my voicemail in case the call didn’t register. Call an unemployed writer friend to make sure my phone works. Decide to meet up at a café to compare job-search notes.

4:45 Drink a tea and feel proud I didn’t have a beer before 5.

5:01 Go home and have a beer.

5:05 Refresh my email and hope the focus group contacted me.

5:10 Visualize my dream job.

5:15 Refresh my email and hope for divine intervention.

5:16 Call it a day.

About four years ago, I was working on a one-woman show about my dating debacles, perpetual singlehood, and fundamental inability to find a girlfriend. I planned to make a video of me and my substitute lover, Dilderina, but only got as far as the pictures (taken by Zippy). And so, this post completes an old unfinished project. For those of you who didn’t know me for the two years I had dreads, I have a head full of them in this video. I say this to quell the shock. Because when the video played to test audiences (receiving rave reviews) there were some individuals too mesmerized by my dreads and former appearance to enjoy the unfolding of the love story. If the dreads jar you on the first go around, feel free to watch it twice. Or instead of Where’s Waldo, pretend you are playing Where’s Dilderina.

Dilderina is one of a kind, manufactured by Dede on the premises of Vixen Creations. I received Dilderina as a present for my 23rd-ish birthday. I wanted a mail-order girlfriend. I received a paper-mache breast filled with sex toys. In the end, there wasn’t much difference.