Great Hera!

And I Was Wearing My Favorite White Pedal-Pushers!

Does anyone else remember those "embarrassing moments" columns that were, for a time, ubiquitous in all the teen girl rags? Actually, maybe they still exist. Anyway, readers would write in with rilly, rilly EMBARRASSING stuff that had happened to them. Usually, said tales occured at school and involved some kind of menstrual mishap.

I used to assume I would eventually the reach the point where I was no longer be embarrassed by anything anymore, because I would just...you know. Evolve. Into complete awesomeness. Weirdly, this has not happened yet. In fact, there are moments that, years later, still make me cringe. These tend to fall into two categories: moments wherein I was completely embarrassed at the time or moments that I only cringe at NOW because I realize how stupid they were. And most of these moments, unsurprisingly, involve some kind of nerditry.

Here's one that hit me just this morning. This is an example of not being embarrassed within the moment, but thinking about it now, I just cringe, cringe, cringe away. I was hanging out at a rowdy, un-air-conditioned burrito joint with a bunch of people, probably people who I wasn't yet close to and wanted to bond with. This was in my early 20s, when the need to define myself, to make my various interests known to others almost immediately upon meeting them, was great. Because then we could talk all about the amazing social metaphors in Star Trek and the total, you know, edginess of the Marvel Knights imprint and become best friends. Anyway. Somehow, Kids in the Hall came up. Somehow, I "cleverly" quoted a bit from Kids in the Hall. Somehow, this ended up with me and another guy in the group getting into a Kids in the Hall quote-off (or maybe "bit-off," because you know we totally did all the voices). FOR FIFTEEN MINUTES. While everybody else watched in bemused silence. At the time, I probably thought that they thought I was pretty fucking cool for quoting all this hilarious stuff from a culty comedy troupe that they had never heard of (well, except for that one other guy, obviously). Now I realize this was quite possibly one of my tool-iest moments. And I feel like an asshole (an asshole who could do a pretty decent Chicken Lady, though).

Thankfully, no menstrual mishap was involved, though I bet you were all expecting that since I used it to hook you in. I don't always bring it back around, sorry to say.

Need to Write: Magnets vs. "Itchy and Depressed"

Where have I been? Working. Writing. Not here, obviously, but still. Somewhere in there, I took a trip to the Bay Area. Oakland -- home of my coming of age -- always puts me in the navel-gazey frame of mind, so things might take a turn in that direction up in here. Just for a bit, anyway. You've been warned. Look away if such things repulse you.

Here, for example, is the anatomy of one realization I had recently. I have always admired, yet been perplexed by, people who say (with great fervor, usually, and a slightly demented glint in their eyes) that they NEED TO WRITE. And I have long thought that I am not one of those people. I write to make my living. Sometimes it's fun, sometimes it's not. But that's what it is. If the NEED TO WRITE people could suddenly not write for some reason, I imagined that they would immediately drop dead, their fingers twitching in a vaguely keyboard-like formation. I also pictured it like a compulsion: every day, every hour, the NEED TO WRITE people are drawn to their keyboards (or steno pads or beautifully-bound Corinthian leather journals with hand-pressed parchment pages) like magnets and the words, they flow and flow and flow. There is no stopping them, because the NEED...it will be satisfied.

Then I read this interview with the great Libba Bray, and she put it an entirely different way. Says Libba, "I'm one of those people who has to write. If I don't write, I feel itchy and depressed and cranky. So everybody's glad when I write and stop complaining already."

Wait! This...sounds like me. It's not so much that the writing happens because of the fear of dropping dead or because of a, er, magnet. But I have noticed, more and more, that I am a completely annoying and cranky person if I'm not writing. Or if I'm coming up with other, procrastinate-y things to do instead of writing. Once I just...start writing, well. I feel better.

This seems really obvious now, but reading this quote made the tiniest of lightbulbs go off over my tiny head. And it inspired me to write more. Does this make me less cranky? I don't know. Ask my friends!

Today I'm running up against another issue, however, which is ALSO making me itchy and depressed and probably pretty annoying. I've been making really good progress on the second part of this, but I've just hit the biggest, meanest wall. I know the beats, I know where I have to go, I know what has to happen. But I can't make it happen today and it's PISSING ME OFF. I suspect I need to give it a little bit of a break, but how do I do this when I'm right in the middle of this one important thing and just really, really wanting to make what has to happen...happen? I suspect I will be cranky until I work through it. Does this even make sense? Or do I sound like the nonsense-spouting Dungeonmaster on the old D&D cartoon?

The sort of point is that I'm writing, which makes me not-cranky and not-depressed, yay, but then within the writing, this stupid wall comes up and accomplishes the same nefarious goal that not writing would. So how do I overcome that? Let me know. My friends will thank you.