The point 5/18/12

What's the point of putting myself through the constant pressure to write? I don’t have the time. I often don’t have the energy, and definitely don’t have the money to live the writer’s life. But what the hell is the writer’s life? That’s not really even worth answering.

What I do know is that I have things to write. I’ve been haunted lately, more and more by the question of M&C. It’s pushing me everyday toward some sort of cliff edge. I wonder what will happen when I get there. I wonder if this edge will involve me discovering something about myself, or if it will simply result in one more frustrated realization that nothing can be truly known. Nothing in what we call reality goes without the caveat that uncertainty is always in the mix, always a factor determining an outcome. This I think is one of the reasons I am the way I am. That we do not know, will never know all there is to understand is actually a source of encouragement. That people and nature are endlessly quirky and full of unpredictability is what I rely on.

On to what I’m currently writing. The piece, Teacher’s Lounge, is encouraging but also case in point about my own struggle with procrastination. I think this is what I need to focus on: get a story finished. Move on to the next one. Period. There are several stories I need to revise that seem to be promising, but still need quite a lot of revision. I will be reading at an event next month something that will be one of these revisions. Teacher’s Lounge will not be ready by then, I’m afraid....I have several to choose from. I just need to comb through and resume the revision. But what the hell is keeping me from it? 

It’s Friday, today, and I think I’ve taken advantage of the time to escape from the house to write at Starbucks for a while. It’s okay, but I have to buy a drink to be here. Now that I don’t waste money on alcohol anymore, it could very well be worth it to me to take advantage of this place. Stopped at Village Coffee a little while ago, too, and although I want to support the indie biz, it just isn’t conducive to melting into a corner to write for a while. Great place to meet a friend though. Also, because I have a cell phone now, it may well be a good place for me to hang out and still be accessible to the fam. There are reasons I need to be aloof from the house. Not sure what these are. Perhaps being away gives me the sense of mobility or maybe a sense of independence (albeit fleeting) that I need to be creative. At any rate, I do like the ideas that are coming to me here.

It’s a rare day that I can do this, but I may just make it more of a routine. One of the aspects of my life that I began to write about earlier is that I need to be alone to swim in the unknown; I need to have this space, wherever I am. What I think may be happening--finally--is that I am carving out this space, digging in, digging out of wherever it was that was keeping me down.

So. Onward. Teachers Lounge is a satirical piece about a teacher struggling to make her way in a school system that neither values her as a teacher nor gives her any incentives to innovate or develop. It’s about a dystopic educational system that is at once a provider of specialized knowledge and a killer of the critical intellect. Our heroine is naive in the beginning as she is given the temporary full-full time job as a scab teacher (hired by a union for substitute teachers) and commences upon her temporary career as a full-time teacher of the third grade.

Excited at first, she's ecstatic about her new room and students, enchanted by the many electronic aids supplied by Pepsi Corps, the school’s owner and operator. She is married with one child just entering kindergarten. Her husband is some sort of seasonal worker (house painter/landscaper/bicycle repairman?) so she is elated at having the “windfall” of this temporary fulltime work. 

The year is around 2020. The schools have recently been renovated and refurbished using allocated tax money. All of the “old” teachers, those hold-outs of the previous failed public school system, have either quit or retired with sizable PURS packages. Our heroine is of the new teaching force, one trained for the coming age of neo-capitalist doctrine and armed with all the current theories of intellectual development as it pertains to the civic-consumerist ideals established by the neo-cons in the re-aligned Department of Education. It is a brave new world.

Reading Brave New World.