L'Ecole: March 2009 Archives

Hello, lovelies. When last we left our heroine in a huddled sad heap on the floor, things were looking bleak indeed. They're still looking bleak, but her mood has improved ever so slightly.

Put it down to a few uninterrupted days on the bike(s), or to a bit of judicious flirting, or to whatever you'd like.

I've been taking advantage of the still-pretty-fracking-chilly weather to keep knitting a few late-March items for self and friends. Ordinarily among spring's many gifts (hayfever, the nagging feeling that one ought always to be outdoors doing something fabulous, and that since one isn't, one is wasting one's life) is a sudden and total loss of interest in the knitterly arts.

I felt the first fingers of that beginning to take hold a couple of weeks ago, but then it got cold again (not that it ever really pushed fully into warm, mind you; there were just hints and vague promises), and so I kept knitting. And now I have a pretty pair of mittens that didn't photograph at all well in the incandescent lighting, but you may take my word on it - they are sweet.

And I am knitting another pair for a friend who massacred his first pair by the simple expedient of wearing them on the bike in a rainstorm. I am thinking that however pretty that Koigu stuff is, fabled in song and story, it doesn't hold up very well. I mean, one rainstorm, c'mon.

So the replacements will be in less-gorgeous but hopefully sturdier yarn that's already been road-tested by yours truly.

There's a whole thread on Rav about knitting for the bike, and I wonder if I ought to post some real-world feedback from my various knit-recipients. Enh. Too complicated.

I was telling my dad, finally, after 10 days of utter silence, about the various bad newses to which I have been subject lately, and he commented that any one of them would be enough to make a sane person's head spin.

Which would explain the impression of her I've been doing lately. I dunno. It seemed like I should just be able to handle it all.

Of course, that is how it always seems, with me. It's like a disease. I expect that nothing will ever break my back, and then what happens is that my body takes that challenge literally, and I end up with my back out for months and months.

Yes, the poking with needles seems to be doing something. I mean, something in addition to giving me strange bruises in even stranger places. It seems, thankfully, to be easing up my mobility a bit, and if I'd just stop doing laundry and twisting myself into unfortunate contortions in my sleep, the pain might even abate a bit.

Me: I hurt my back in my sleep.
He: Alone?

Sigh.

Top 10 Questions Asked of Lizbon This Week

Q1. Are you okay?
A. Sort of.

Q2. What are you going to do now?
A. No fucking clue. Shut up.

Q3. Can you come out and play?
A. No.

Q4. How is your back?
A. Terrible.

Q5. Do you have your new bike yet?
A. No.

Q6. When will you have your new bike?
A. No fucking clue.

Q7. What are you doing now?
A. Drinking coffee. Knitting. Sending out emails trying to get work. Watching TV. Hating.

Q8. Have you cleaned the cat box yet? (This from Kitwich)
A. No. I still can't carry the cat litter from the grocery store.

Q9. Is there anything I can do?
A. No.

Q10. Are you going to let this stop you from being a fiction writer?
A. No fucking way.

I have no idea how to say this, so I will just say it. I did not get into graduate school. Anywhere.

None of the words one might use to describe it - disappointment, dashed hopes, crushed flat on the sidewalk like old ugly gum - seem adequate.

I suppose I had too much riding on it, on a personal level.

I had a lot more riding on it than the first time I applied, when I got into one school that was far away in a city I didn't like, in a program that would have put me into debt for decades, and decided not to go. I had a good job at the time. I wasn't ready to drop everything, to change my standard of living. I just wasn't ready.

This time, I was ready. I am ready. I have been for a while now.

I don't know what to make of this, except - and please just let me say this without telling me how wrong I am to even think such a thing, without piling on the platitudes. I know it's hard to hear someone you like say such a thing, but I need to say it. Because I mean it. Because this is how I feel.

I don't know what to make of this, except that I am maybe not going to be a writer the way I'd always imagined I'd be. The way I always felt, deep down, at the hard substrate layer of myself, in the bedrock, that I was meant to be.

I am too old for this. I am too old for the plucky, give-it-another-shot-someplace-else strategy. And there is something to the idea that if this is the right time, and I am in the right place, and in the right frame of mind, and ready to do the things it will take, that it should have - and would have - worked. I would have gotten in.

Maybe just to the one school that felt right to me. That was what I expected, actually. Just the one school. And it would have been fine - heck, it would have been wonderful. I was prepared to be delighted.

I was not prepared for this, and I didn't know what to do with myself afterwards, except get on my bike. But I couldn't get on my bike, because my back still hurts, and I don't want to do what I usually do, which is to leap back into my normal activities too soon and keep it from getting all the way better.

So I didn't get on my bike. I got on the couch and cried. I called Boywich.

When things are really, really bad, I told him, he is the only one I can bear to talk to. So he's the only one who knows. And it is likely to stay that way for a few days.

Why am I telling the blog? Well, it may be because I don't really know most of the people who read. I don't interact with you. There are exceptions to that: I do feel that I know a couple of you, and that we are friends. Friends in perhaps a different way than the people I see every week. But in a way that has its own specialness.

That's not why I'm telling you, though.

Sometimes when one is writing a blog, one is conscious of writing to the people who may be reading it. But sometimes one is just writing to oneself. This is one of those.

I just need to write it down, I guess. Which may make me still a writer or it may not. I don't know. I've been wishing for a more creative space lately, a space I felt I could paint in. A space surrounded by more creative types than my apartment is. I was thinking of moving closer to the school I thought I'd be going to. Now, obviously, that isn't a reason, and moving is expensive, of course, but I am still a little attracted to the idea.

We shall see.

Note: Headline stolen right off the cover of Astronomy magazine.