The Pressure is On
Billy Joel can take a hike
I feel like the cat in Schrödinger’s box. Recently, I have found myself hyper-aware of the fact that I am writing. Do you ever get this way? Where you scrutinize your every thought until you are living the meta version of yourself? You’ve become a character? You’re watching yourself type. Second guessing the thoughts before they are fully formed by your fingers?
Too busy watching yourself work to actually get any work done?
(To try to get out of my head, I just saw The Fall Guy at the movies and it did meta right—the more car-chase movies and TV you watched from the 80s, the more you will enjoy this film. I highly recommend it if you’re up for a Hollywood blockbuster movie that breaks expectations and delivers nostalgia…and is about a guy who gets too into his own head.)
Schrodinger’s cat (You guys know this philosophical science thing right?) is supposed to be an example of how subatomic particles behave in quantum physics—existing in two states diametrically opposed at the same time. But people tend to use the term for anything that changes when it is observed. (Like teenagers who can’t perform onstage, though they sing the living daylights out of their showers.)
Speaking of showers and cats. I looked up “raining cats and dogs” and it is more complicated than you think, but may have been coined by Jonathan Swift and has nothing to do with thatched roofs.
Anyway, I brought up the nameless cat (which is rather genius of Erwin, to not name the cat so that people are required to remember his last name instead!) because I too am in a state of being and non-being. I have a long list of all-too-important things that need doing and instead of doing them, I am thinking about doing them while I do other, less important things.
For instance, today instead of writing, I moved a desk into a place where it got more sunlight so that I would be able to write. Meanwhile, my real desk is completely covered in clutter—everything from candles to extra batteries to weights to pistachios to a hammer. And a great deal of paper. Most of it unfinished tasks, like this blog, which I am writing at the messy desk not the pristine one. I’m not sure why.
This week I also saw the musical Lempicka. What I got out of the play was that people are writing exclusively show-stopping numbers and it is burning out the voices of even the best actors. The story was an historical drama about an artist who didn’t allow a little domestic tension or fascism ruin her career. Two and a half hours of passionate belting. It was a tour de force, but by the end I was taking bets on whether their voices would hold out (they did, barely).
And in ridiculous news: this week I lost my phone at the Brooklyn botanical gardens (along with the photos of the flowers I took!) and after reporting it to the security guards and retracing my path several times, I called the phone insurance I keep meaning to cancel. The nice woman with her soft British-Indian accent asked me if she could call me back at the number I had just reported lost.
At Apple I wasn’t able to file the claim. I had to file it online—and though the Apple Store told me they have every single phone in the back, because I was using insurance I was required to have the new-old phone mailed to my apartment. This was going to cost me $150 and would take a minimum of five days. I did not scream. Instead, Apple sold me a new-new phone to use in the meantime which they swore I could return for full price when the new-old phone came in. After buying said phone, I had to walk back to ATT to get it turned on. They texted all my other devices a security code, which was idiotic since obviously I didn’t have my kids with me (who have the other devices on the plan) nor could the kids text me back the code they’d just gotten. We worked around it and they remotely wiped my lost phone and for 24 hours I had a really fancy phone (which was slower than my old phone because I kept having to reset the passwords for every single app). And just when I had finally updated all the apps and gotten everything working, less than 24 hours after getting the new-new phone, the mailman brought me the new-old phone. I went back to ATT to set up the new-old phone and return the new-new phone. They made me cancel the insurance on my new-new phone while they set up the new-old phone.
Everything was copacetic until 5pm when the Botanical Garden Security team called to inform me that my old phone had been found and could I stop by to get it.
Writing:
Women On Writing interviewed me. You can read the interview here along with my prize-winning essay on writing with kids in the house.
On May 14, tune in for the Season Finale of the Spring 2024 Pen Parentis Literary Salons in which I get to interview some incredible writers:
On May 21 you can see me live and in person (and drinking frozen ginger mules) at Barrow’s Intense Ginger (I too am an intense ginger). I’m really looking forward to this reading - we each have twenty minutes! I’m excited to read a whole story.
I want to thank all of you who subscribed to this blog - paid or unpaid I highly value the fact that you read it. Thank you.
Random Final Thought:
You're not saying you have writer's block, are you? Is there a difference between strugglung and having writer's block? The theory of writer's block seems to go beyond normal struggling, however. I think the idea is that it is something that should NOT happen. Something that we do to ourselves, because we are in our heads. I speak from a place of deep identity, not just fighting this a bit in the domain of writing, but having OCD, which is an attack of self-consciousness, and I think really the foundation of writer's block.
The Pen Parentis consensus seems to be that one refuses to have writer's block -- all a rebellion against the the extreme time demands of being a parent. The idea being that having writer's block is just too easy an excuse. And I do understand that getting words on a page is a triumph no matter what they are, and shows character, and that this is different than just having a blank screen. I think one of your authors said one time, that if you have writer's block, just choose not to write good books. Just write badly. At least you're writing.
Writer's block, at bottom, is a kind of madness. Or we fear it is .That's what I meant when I said it is "something that should not happen."