an explanation

I had to do this thing for a class, where I wrote about whether I was a "reader" or a "writer." Apparently, no one else in the class has an intense, Theo Huxtable-comparable learning disability, and thus wrote a paragraph instead of, like me, a, well, essay.

But after writing the "discussion response," I decided, you know, if I want to write more often, then I just should. So I started this blog. And I've started trying to write more instead of just writing ideas for things that I should write. Who cares if it they turn out to be shit? If they're shit just don't post them on the internet.

(Also, I really need to stop listening to Queen, Supertramp, and Steely Dan, cos they are definitely not bands that inspire poetic thoughts.)



I tend to delude myself into allowing the word "writer" to define me. I used to be content, when at the doctor's and they'd have you fill out a little questionnaire during a check-up, and they had a little friendly section at the end for "hobbies," with just putting "reading." I was quite the voracious reader. I read all sorts of books, some of which were much too easy for me, and many of which were too impossibly adult. I would read in restaurants, and at the dinner table, and next to blaring stereos at loud barbeque parties, and late late at night, under the covers with "Mr. Lightman," so as not to wake my sister in the bunk below. I always thought my mother was a little embarrassed of this, of the lack of variation in my "hobby" response, as though, even being a fellow reader herself, she yearned for me to be a child who also did soccer or ballet or taekwondo or something else widely regarded as active.

Then in sixth grade I stopped playing with Playmobil and started writing short narrative fiction, and I became a "writer." Even though a passion for movies, and a tumultuous love affair with television, began two years later, it became very easy to classify myself as a "writer." It has this certain mystique. When you say you write people get this mental image of someone brooding and angsty, with a typewriter and a coffee cup (or at least I get a mental image of them imagining this). I can't say I particularly mind that stereotype all that much, though it does seem to often confuse acquaintances into believing I'm a composer of poetry, which I'm not (I'm more the "glaringly autobiographical" short stories/screenplays kind of writer). Calling yourself a "reader" — saying, "oh, I like reading" — has that connotation of a person who has no one to sit next to in the dining hall and so pulls out their companion-replacing, always-friendly novel. Which can make for a nice time, but still has that feeling of loneliness to it.

(Right now, I have checked out from the library, four nonfiction books about smelling, three biographical accounts of J.D. Salinger, and one CD/book set and one dictionary concerning the Swedish language that I really really would like to, but will in all probability never end up using before the due-date is up.

I don't "mostly read nonfiction" or anything, though. It would be more accurate to say I mostly don't read nonfiction. I mostly read fairly-popular, pretty well-acclaimed modern fiction works that somehow, though, the people at my job at a movie theater have never heard of, and never really like when I lend to them. Lately, though, I've been branching out with some literary graphic novels and absurdist plays. But that's hardly straying from home. The same directors direct and the same actors act in the cinematic adaptations of all of these print forms. It's still pretty safe territory for me. It's not like me reading poetry — I have very certain, very few moods in which I can truly appreciate poetry. I have to somehow (impossibly) rid myself of all my alternative-comedy pretentions while adopting some degree of Beatnik, snapping-instead-of-clapping snobbery. This is hard for me to do. Though admittedly, I do own more than one beret, and I have dressed up as "Judy Funny" for Halloween. Yet when reading nonfiction, I become almost surprised with the mood it puts me in, with the degree to which I realize I am a knowledge-hungry person, seeking not just acceptance into the land of the "informed," but just pure information itself. I get excited, by the facts I encounter. Nonfiction-excitement is very unlike its fiction counterpart, during which just the order of words can make me giggle to myself in this weird, almost surreal sort of happiness that causes all others in my near vicinity to shoot disapproving glares.)

Writing, though, it's so different from reading. Writing is such a self-obsessed yet self-loathing, incredibly arduous yet enjoyable task—this transcribing and then editing and re-editing what started as just a nothing sort of sentence, a nothing sort of idea you just thought of. Reading, though — you're presented with this giant something, and you sift through, trying to get the general gist, while at the same time scoping out those tiny little bits of nothing that you have to pause after, to give yourself a moment to absorb the fact that someone wrote that something; to give you a moment to smile softy to yourself. Reading is what makes writers feel guilty enough to write something themselves.

But just saying I'm a "writer," well... it's kind of a lie. It's kind of a fantasy. I'm more the kind of person who thinks about writing all the time, but really only does it sporadically, in little bursts of scribbles, always at the least opportune of times. I'm more the kind of person who has a file box full of terrible first drafts and illegibly scrawled ideas—nothing finished, nothing authored. I'm the kind of person who reads the blogs of people who actually get around to writing things, and thinks, reading those entries, "Wow, that is exactly how I think. That is exactly how I feel." I'm the sort of person who quietly falls in love with the people who take the time to write down the feelings and thoughts I never bother to transcribe. I'm a person who thinks, frequently enough for it in a way to have become a habit, about making my own blog, for others to read, and relate to, and quietly fall in love with the girl with glasses and soft, introspective demeanor who wrote it.

So I guess more so than a reader or a writer I'm a dreamer. I'm a hoper unfortunately holed up in the same mind as a pessimist and an extremely vast amount of logic. I think about things in terms of their statistical probability of happening, and that's kind of a bad environment for a writer to live in. I can't grapple with fantasy. I wish I could be much more writerly than I really am, but I'm stuck with being a reader, a reader who genuinely loves the kind of stuff she likes to read.


P.S. I totally finally figured out how to turn off "smart quotes" in Microsoft Word while posting that. And did anyone catch the oh-so-subtle Supertramp allusion? Anyone?