harbored

All day I work at my computer or sometimes other places in my house and mentally collect bits of things I think might be something I could write about. And then I don't write until so very late that remembering anything is hard. Today would have been the same, but I only slept about three hours last night and ended up falling asleep for a while and now my state of consciousness is a bit upset. So here I am.

I remember I wanted to write about Grace Hopper. You may not know who Grace Hopper is, in the front of your brain, but if I tell you it is better to ask forgiveness than permission, you will know who she is. Or debugging computers. Or my favorite of late,"a ship in a harbor is safe, but that is not what a ship is built for."

Sometimes I feel like a ship. Or the harbor. I think if I wanted to focus on that phrase I could write a whole essay about being a harbor. This week for example, my husband is in Cuba. Nice, yes. And I'm home. Agoraphobic a little bit, and sort of challenging myself to see if I can get through the week without leaving the house. Hunker down with my writing, my work, and let my sons run what errands need to be run.... there is a kind of magnetism to the idea. Showering and bras, optional. (Not really, sadly, both would drive me insane to go without.)

But my daughter wants to meet up and write on Wednesday. I've signed up for a law class on Friday. And the week I had laid out in my head to be so productive and ... quiet... seems to be slipping away.

But it's only a week. I'm reading Nick Hornby's Juliet, Naked, and the characters in the book are faced with 15 or 20 years of life which they feel has slipped away from them. I am glad I don't feel like them, but then I'm only half way through the book, so I don't know if I will keep that sentiment. Here is a description I bookmarked, thinking when I did so that I wanted to collect quotes describing the sea. It is delightful to find one that is original: "The sea was hurling itself at the beach over and over again, like a nasty and particularly stupid pit bull..." Charming, yes?

My son is upstairs playing a mournful melody on his guitar. He learned to play classical guitar in college... something I encouraged right along with bribing him to take literature courses. (I do believe in Liberal Arts.) We've bought so many musical instruments for the four of them over the years, it is nice to hear one. Though the melody makes me feel sad... until his phone rings and I hear him laughing.

Laughter of my children is like a buoy in the harbor.

Farewell Geocities and Ode to the Corporate Wife.

It was ten years ago that I realized that "real" writers had websites, and I knew nothing about them. So I took a class, learned basic html, volunteered to edit for three different ezines, one of which I actually learned from, (and is still in existence) and decided to put my own writing site together. I was deep into writing sunrises then... I think there are 6 years of them in the files and I was committed to posting them. I never posted them the day I wrote them though. I wrote one day, then came back the next day and edited. Between times I'd write the journal entry or essay or story that the sunrise seemed to suggest, so the postings were always a day behind, a little cleaner and a little less random. At least in my mind.

The site was named the same as this blog, and lived on Geocities. Geocities, as a free site anyway, died this week. I pulled all the pages.. now I have two complete folders of web pages, one for my law site, one for the writing, that I really should take the time to upload. But i'm too busy playing around with twitter, facebook, plurk, and these new blogs to actually do something that I SHOULD be doing. I have finally requested the release of the domain name from Martindale for my legal site though, so ... progress?

Speaking of Loose Ends....A friend, in chatting innocently the other day, touched a nerve that I didn't realize was still raw. I hope I didn't let on how unsettled it made me when he referred to my Corporate Wife status. I was a little surprised he honed in on that... I seem to spend less time on that particular aspect of my life now than I ever have. I had also forgotten about the book I was going to write ten years ago, parodying the whole lifestyle. Can't decide if i just got lazy, busy, or swallowed the kool aid.

Determined to find out why that phrase unsettled me in the circumstance, particularly because I sprinkle it into my own conversations with some frequency, I did what any self respecting lazy over achiever does. I googled "corporate wife."

As I suspected, the literature on the topic is dated. The articles I found, mostly dealing with the uber rich breed, didn't reach past 2003, with the most in depth one done in 2000.

Hmm, I mused with myself... I wonder if my research from back then is still on my computer?

Hurray for Spotlight, and Mac :) Another seach of my hard drive and I found that "corporate wife" has been consistently in my subconscious, making its way into two nearly complete short stories, both of which I like (though one of which I clearly was having hormonal spikes as it turned the corner from emotional to erotic in ten pages or less!), one "novelette" and is a recurring theme for the women in my almost finished novel. When I planned the original book, I had NOT intended to include the usual crap... ."have your husband approve what you wear" (really?) but instead some of the more human aspects, which ...well... are funny. Or were to me, in my disrespectful attitude toward everything remotely discriminatory.

Has my attitude hurt my spouses career? Looking at where he is and where he came from, I am pretty sure the answer to that is no. I'm also pretty sure I'm well known among the industry as being outspoken (rude? nah. Sassy, maybe.) and more fun to sit by at a dinner than the usual pretty wife. And I'm lucky, in that we didn't either one ever set out on this road, and have written our own rules along the way. We get by with a healthy dose of "whatever works" tempered by "say yes whenever you can."

And I started thinking about the friend who jarred this memory, and about how he is doing a bit of the gig himself, and about my daughters, and think maybe I should update those files, send out those books, and write one more. I have research from ten years ago... how much fun this will be to go back to my chosen interview candidates and update.

If you think you have something to add... you know how to reach me.

Gaps

"Could fulfillment ever be felt as deeply as loss? Romantically she decided that love must surely reside in the gap between desire and fulfillment, in the lack, not the contentment. Love was the ache, the anticipation, the retreat, everything around it but the emotion itself. "

From The Inheritance of Loss, Kiran Desai

i should blame stewart

But I suppose that wouldn't do. He did after all, post a pretty sunrise/sunset before he closed me out of his blog. tsk tsk.

But one of my favorite quotes... okay, one of the thosand quotes i have stuck here and there on postit notes, stickies in mac vernacular, is this one:

When you blame others, you give up your power to change. -Douglas Noel Adams
So Stewart is off the hook, as are the rest of the writing group, and the pompous neighbor who had the audacity to die without letting me know.... imagine that! And so are my brothers and my sister and the cyberlaw boys and and and.

Writing became another chore I was fitting in, and the minute it became something to cross off a list was the minute it no longer felt like art, but craft. Now i'm sure there are elements in all writing of both, but the important point is what it FELT like. And when i no longer felt that i was creating, it became just another boring exercise.

So why now?

Because i find myself speaking in poetic quotes, things i've heard and said aloud so i would remember them. I am meeting new people behind the veil of sleep, characters fully considered, fully alive, tempting me like a man who wants me, but doesn't want me to know it.Poems in magazines in drs' offices, repeating like new budding branches. I am again drifting to literary fiction, putting aside the non fiction, the popular novels, even the classics that have kept my attention for the last year. Clean, clear writing, mesmerizing characters, plot i have to think to follow.

it's what i want to be when i grow up.

Do you think it is time yet?