love and other painful collisions.

For some reason, I've been thinking about old boyfriends. 

And not in the way that you (they?) might think that I'm thinking about them.  

Mostly I'm just thinking about love and its randomness and strangeness and general grotesquery and how good cool sheets feel against your feet on summer nights.  

Saying you are thinking about love is much like saying, "Oh, I'm just thinking about quantum physics and how it relates to that drop of dew on the dead needles of the Christmas tree I threw out behind the fence." It's too much to think about really and half the time, no one knows what they are talking about, least of all me.   

Don't cry.

This one really isn't sad.

 

None of the boyfriends I mention here were serious.  (I won't talk about the serious ones because I know they read this blog.  Or at least, I sometimes assume they do, and then I feel weird, wondering what they are thinking.  Assuming that they are mostly thinking, "Well, bullet dodged.")

There is no chance whatsoever that any of these three men read this blog, so we are in safe territory.

If they do read this blog, they ought to pretend they don't if we happen to bump into each other at Thrifty's buying quinoa and endamame salad.  (I'm hungry, and Thrifty's makes a good quinoa and endamame salad, which is why I mentioned that.  Besides which, eating quinoa and endamame makes me feel like a better person than I actually am, which is actually just a contrary-sort of person who is really terrible at love.)

So.

I gave a boy a mento.  

That's how we met.  (We were in an economics class together, but I hadn't really noticed him.  I'm the kind of person who either overly notices other people or completely blanks them.  There is no middle ground.)  The economics boy was my waiter at Milestones during a period when I was obsessed with veggie burgers and didn't realize yet that I was allergic to them.  I gave him a mento and he told me he was in my economics class and asked me out.  I think he was the first person who asked me out while sober in such a straight-forward way.  

He was the manager.  I associate him strongly with cilantro.  So much so that even now when I eat cilantro, I think about him.  (Back then, they cooked everything with cilantro, which was considered very trendy, if a herb can actually be considered trendy.)  He was Dutch and very kind and much too old and serious for his actual years.   He wore a tie unironically.  He grew up to look like Colin Firth, I know this from Google.  Google is useful when it comes to old boyfriends.

It ended because of a club called Chocolate Milk where my friends and I would go dancing on Thursdays.  It was a gay club and we thought we were exceptionally cool to be straight girls going to gay dance clubs.  He liked the club a lot and for a while, I thought that was the problem, that he was gay, but then I caught him trying to befriend my best friend in a way that was more than friendly.  I always knew, with him, that the other shoe was going to drop.  Because he'd been sober when he noticed me, he was obviously broken in some insidious way.  I'd known it all along!  I was sophisticated, enjoyed cilantro and gay dance clubs, so I didn't need him!  I don't think I cried when we broke up.  I don't really remember. 

I am excellent at forgetting. Forgetting is a skill that should be more embraced than it actually is, I think.

The cute Morman boy had a pet cow growing up who he later slaughtered and ate.  He was exceptionally good at Jeopardy but I am not a believer and he was a really terrible cook.  Whenever he spoke, I couldn't shake the idea that although he seemed sweet, he would happily turn on (and consume) his best friend.  He'd said that she'd been the best pet ever.  He trained her to do tricks.  I don't know how you can teach a cow tricks and then eat her, I just don't.  He's probably reading this.   Well, what can I do?  He shouldn't have eaten the cow.  

He ate the cow.

I couldn't possibly have loved him, knowing that.  But I was enraptured by his ability to play trivia games without ever making a mistake and the absolute certainty by which he lived his life.  He seemed like a good choice, if only I could get past the beef thing and the gulf between our religious beliefs, which could not have been more vast.  

I also can't remember how that ended.  I am almost certain, in that case, I felt nothing.

I'm not sure why I even mentioned him.  I think I was trying to go in some sort of order, in case you are fact checking.

The bouncer was someone with whom I had the kind of chemistry that altered the fact that he was not my type, was clearly bad news, had bad skin, and did not pass my best friend's standardized test for boys-I-should-date, which I didn't realize until much later meant boys-who-preferred-her.  I don't know why I mention the bouncer because we did not date.  

Ever.  

After months of intense flirting -- flirting is the wrong word here (and always makes me think of hummingbirds) -- one night after the club closed, I went with him and his bouncer friends to a Chinese restaurant where they served us beer in a teapot.  This was to be the start of something, it was understood.  We thought we were very outre drinking beer in tiny china cups meant for tea.  (This outre-ness is a common theme of those years for me.  The actual enjoyment of a thing mattered much less than the appearance and relative coolness of the thing being enjoyed (or not enjoyed, as the case may be.))  He ate a burger with onions and his friends teased him about the onions and about me.  I can remember what I was wearing, which was a long floral dress, motorcycle boots, and a leather jacket, borrowed from my best friend.  I was impressed by a person who would go to a Chinese restaurant and order a burger.  

These were not my people -- I was rarely without my best friend and when I was, I felt unmoored -- yet there I was, without her (although in her clothes), with the sweaty palmed, acne-faced bouncer.  It's not even that his hands were sweaty, it's that his skin had an odd quality to it.   Both papery and wet.   He apologized about the onions and said he'd meet me at home, he had to go back to his place first. I was nervous but happy.  Then something happened.  I don't know what it was.  I do know that when he showed up, I pretended not to be home.  He threw things at my window and I lay on my bed and cried.  I listened to the things making contact with the glass and realized that I would never let him in.  It was summer.  It was really hot, but I had closed and locked the windows before he arrived as though he might scale up the side of the building and come inside.   I lay in the clean sheets and moved my feet around to the cool spots and listened to my own pulse.   He threw things for quite a while.  Not chairs or anything big, but probably rocks, although I don't know where they would have come from.  Maybe it was coins.  People always have coins, but who has stones?  I never saw him again after that until recently when he (or his doppleganger) reappeared as a policeman who gave me a ticket for talking to my mum on my cell phone while I was driving.  I didn't know that I knew it was him until much much later, at which point it was too late.  

It makes no sense to me why I can remember that night but not one of at least 15 break ups I had both before and after that.

That's life. Mostly, things don't make sense. 

All this was meant to lead me somewhere, but it didn't.  These weren't even real relationships.  They were pre-relationships.  They were some place and time where I existed before I'd ever actually been in love or knew anything about heartbreak and life.

I still don't know much about love, actually, now that I think of it, but I've had more practice, although now when someone says "I love you", my kneejerk reaction is to say, "No, you don't." Which sounds less insulting than, "Don't be ridiculous!" which is what I used to say back when I was a mature sophisticate who knew how to dance at gay bars and sip beer out of Chinese tea cups. 

I think my point is that there are always people that through the years, no matter when you see them, you are drawn to them.  And not in a romance-novel type of subtle "We were drawn together like magnets!  Squee!  Cue fireworks!" but more in the kind of force field of things colliding that have to collide, you can't stop them, where you have to actually step back because otherwise you will crash into each other so hard, bones and hearts (probably yours) will be smashed apart, jaggedly tearing through the skin of everything you are pretending to be.

It's mostly best to avoid those people (friending them on Facebook is not a good call, for example), in case you were looking for advice here, which I doubt you were.  Either avoid them or celebrate them because they at least remind you that you can have feelings like these, even if they are for the wrong people at the wrong time in the wrong places. 

I mean, we all make our choices.

I feel strange now, like all these people from my past are suddenly going to Google me and find this and read too much into it, and then I'll have to blush and look away, or just hold very still and pretend to not be at home.

I think next time I teach a class, I'll say, "Write something you'd be embarrassed if anyone ever read."  

You should try it, too.  

Why not?    

vertigo.

There is a feeling that something is wrong.  The world is vertiginous, slipping, unsure.  

Look at Boston.  It's hard to not look at Boston.  I mean, obviously.

It's hard to work and walk and think and write and to not think about Boston.  I am maybe slow to process, but in my mind, when someone says "Boston", I think of the boy waiting for his dad to cross the finish line, then what happened to him next, then I cry for a bit.   Or I don't cry, but inside I'm bent double, screaming.  The image won't leave me.  

I wasn't going to blog that because it feels gratuitous, but there it is.

I'm so so so sorry about the boy.  About everyone, but mostly the boy.  (Let's pray for the boy in heaven, says The Birdy.  I'm going to do it, says The Bun (who is also 8, like the boy was 8).  We wait and he says, God please let the boy play with Tika in heaven.  And I cry again, silently silently and say, OK, let's have a sleepover tonight, which is fast becoming my answer to everything, the big bed piled up high with kids, dog and me.)

This happens every day in different parts of the world, explosions and limbs landing bodiless on roads.  This happens.  

What kind of world is this?

A fine web of cracks is spreading, cobwebbing its brokeness over the transluscent everything.  

What remains to be seen is if it will (like the bones in my ribs which, laced over with the white lines of healing, look like pieces of art) be stronger or more broken when all this is done.  

By which I mean, seeing the goodness in people is always beautiful.  But the sadness will remain.

And when is it ever done?

By tomorrow, people will have stopped talking about Boston, except for those in Boston, of course.

Look for beauty and kindness and goodness.

Sometimes it's harder to find than others.

Squint, if necessary.

On the way to school, we play a game where we find beautiful things.  These things are often easy and obvious (flowering trees, anything pink or red, spring flowers, a girl with long hair that is blowing in the wind at the bus stop, a blue bicycle), but sometimes they surprise you.  

BEAUTIFUL, they'll shout and then point and I'll say, What, what is it?  The garbage can?  

No, Mummy, The Bun says.  The way the sun makes the colour of the garbage can look like it's a jewel.

No, it looks like it is UNDER WATER! says The Birdy.

A JEWEL!  UNDER WATER! (This, they can agree on.)

I mean, obviously.  Yes.  The beautiful garbage can.  

They cannot for the life of them believe I didn't NOTICE it until that moment.

And I can't either.

Look closer.

Oh, the light.  Always the light.

BEAUTIFUL LADY! shouts The Birdy, pointing at a woman bent over her walker at the curb.  

The car hits a bump and The Birdy's nose bonks against the seat in front of her and she screams and wails, grabbing at her face, the outrage of the CAR SEAT hitting her in the FACE.  Can you even imagine?

BEAUTIFUL SCREAMING BABY TANTRUM! yells The Bun and so she takes a swing at him and misses and I have to pull over and breathe deeply and calmly because lately something has happened to my inner ear and stress makes me spin, out of control, falling, like the time I went on the ferris wheel (months after my ex and I split) and had a panic attack at the top and he reached behind The Birdy's back to rub mine in a way that he never did when we were together.

Love is like that, sometimes too late.

I am seeing a naturopath about the vertigo.  I am waiting for him to give me a tonic or a shot or a pill that will anchor me back to the ground and stop all the things around me from moving quite so fast.  I think it's just that I'm missing something, like iron or magnesium or a sense that the weather and love and the shattering world will one day right themselves.

I lit the fire today after my rainy hike in the woods, it's that cold in here.

I am going to make some bread.

I want to lie in a hammock in the sun and read lazily from a pile of books, pages rustling in a gentle breeze, and be sipping something cold and delicious.  I want to look up at azure sky and down at white sand and laughing kids, digging to nowhere.  I want to have nothing on my schedule and a bank account that overflows.  I want to take up yoga just to see if I can stretch anymore or if years of trying to hold myself still have atrophied my entire being.  I want to sleep until I'm no longer tired.  I want to lean backwards into a waterfall and feel the push-pull of the earth, sun shining through droplets, my feet distant and distorted in the flow.  I want to be able to close my eyes in the shower without tipping, unsure, the world tilting away from me.  

Do you know what I mean?

Everyone probably feels this way.  Not particularly blog-worthy.  Lately I have felt not particularly blog-worthy myself.

How are you? 

in all the dark corners.

Steubenville is on my mind.

By which I mean, the girl (mostly) and how it's going to be for her because now that the court case is over and she has been vilified by her friends, her peers, and the friends and peers of the rapists-who-happened-to-also-play-football-when-they-weren't-commiting-sexual-crimes, now what?  How will her life be in Steubenville -- which is taking shape in my mind to be a Seuss-like town with gnarled trees and dark corners, where the shadows stretch long across the sun-slapped road and reach around your throat when you are sleeping, choking you, muffling you, raping you until you are quiet, or at least too scared to speak very loudly -- with the crowd still cheering for the poor, weeping boys who are being asked to do some minimal (laughably small, really) jail time for the sexual offense they perpetrated on her?

The victim wasn't quiet (or she was at first, and then she wasn't, and who can blame her for that given the volume of death threats and her now-newly-terrifying reality) and certainly the internet wasn't quiet, but Twitter is not going to be walking down the hall at the school in Steubenville with this girl, a school where the football players are Charlie-Sheen-like-Gods -- clearly morally corrupt, yet still meant-to-be untouchable by the laws that govern society and make us human.  The girls at the victim's school, well, I am struggling with the girls.  Who are they?  Some of them seemed awfully quick to turn on this one girl for telling.  The ones who tell are sluts and whores and deserved it -- by being unconscious, she was practically begging for it, no? -- and (ha ha! OMG, HILARIOUS!) why don't you just pee on her while she is out of it, buoyed by the laughable self-importance of highschool football and the other people who play it and by those who think that highschool football (or movies or music or whatever glossy-performance-based art exists that perpetuates this entitlement) matters ENOUGH that the players ought to be this untouchable?  

What will it be like there now?

The reason why the internet can't stop talking about Steubenville is because Steubenville is everyone and everywhere is Steubenville. In a culture where celebrities can beat their girlfriends and movie directors can rape-at-will ("Well, it's not rape-rape.") and nothing is off limits if you have even a modicum of celebrity, if you have something that people want to watch you performing then you can't possibly go to JAIL because then you wouldn't be able to entertain us, the slathering masses who are starving for entertainment to distract us from a world where sixteen year old high school students can commit horrific crimes and genuinely, authentically, 100% believe that they are not accountable for them because they are on a football team that wins little games, little games that kids play and adults watch and celebrate.  And priorities shift and kingdoms fall because perspective is lost, humanity fails, and crimes perpetrated by the famous and/or popular don't count, and there is a percentage of the population who THINK THIS IS OK. 

And worse, scarier,truer, is this:   At any time, anywhere -- Hollywood or Steubenville or any and all of the stops in-between --  our daughters are vulnerable to a world where people will laugh and clap and want to piss on them for simply being there, for being present, or for being pretty, or for flirting, or for getting drunk, or for passing out, or for not clearly articulating "no" because if they don't then obviously "yes" is the default, "Yes, I want you to hurt me.  Yes, I want you to break me.  Yes, I want you to defile me.  Yes, I want it on Twitter and YouTube and Facebook and TELL EVERYONE!  YES!"  because obviously by not saying "NO" at every second of every day, that's what every girl and woman and victim wants, needs, deserves:  YES.  

I mean, obviously, it wasn't the boys' fault.  She was drunk.  And, as everyone knows, it's completely impossible not to rape a drunk chick. 

In Steubenville.

In Hollywood.

In the world.

In all the dark corners of Seussville, in your house, on your street, on social media, in the middle of the day, on a stage, for an audience, in the light. Anywhere, everywhere.

But the boys cried in court and got good grades and they'll now be registered sex offenders!   

It isn't fair!

The fact that they ARE sex offenders notwithstanding.  The fact that what they took from that girl, from all the girls, from humanity is so much greater than what they will have to give back.  The fact that we live in a world where the sense of entitlement bestowed to the athletically gifted or financially empowered or the beautiful is the most poisonous gift in the world, dragging all of us into the dark, and taking from us all, again and again and again and again.

Because they can.

Because CNN says they should have got away with it.

Because all over the internet thousands of people are piping up with, "Yeah, but she was a slut! They got good grades!"

Because the world we live in is one where, in the court of public opinion, the talented are all "good" and the rest of us are just present for them to consume at will.   

Because of Hollywood.

Because of Steubenville.

Because of everything that has gone so terribly, utterly, inexorably wrong. 

addiction and marriage: vulnerability vs. happiness! sharks vs. zombies!

I have too much to do right now.  I am busy.  I can't write a blog post.   Not today.   So, self, take the one you were going to write about addiction and cotton batting and marriage and write it another day or not at all.   

It was going to have zombies!  And sharks!  PLUS vulnerability!  And happiness!  It may just have been the best blog post ever.

But likely not.

Still...

Oh, OK.  

Fine.

Here goes:

In a battle of sharks vs. zombies, my money would be on the sharks as I don't think zombies can swim. Zombies, being human (or formerly-human at least) may be prone to overthinking, and thus not get the job done, fearing drowning and the probable outcome of trying to swim with loose (or missing) limbs.  Whereas the sharks would just chomp and chomp, swimming on to a victory that they will not even celebrate, as sharks are not prone to emotional rounds of self-congrulatory champagne and back slapping (or hugging, as the case may be).

In this case, it seems preferable to be the shark.

On the other hand, if it was a land war, the zombies would have a distinct advantage (if you assume that in order to stage the battle, the sharks are dumped in some kind of a field, where they will actually simply suffocate and die, giving the zombies free access to their brains).

There are a lot of things to think about when it comes to zombies and sharks in this scenario.

The world's insatiable appetite for zombies is something new.  Maybe we were tired of all the pretty vampires with their rampant sex appeal and undead ways.  Are zombies the answer with their ugliness and decay?  If so, why?  Discuss.  Make this your thesis, if necessary.   

I have some thoughts about addiction and marriage.  They have to do with vulnerability vs. happiness. 

(The person who I was talking to about addiction and marriage will know this is for her, but hey, you might find it useful, too.)  

When one person is not vulnerable, thanks to drugs or other cushioning, and the other one is, the happiness quotient within the coupling is significantly reduced.

When one person becomes the zombie, the other one naturally becomes the shark.  Don't question this.  It's just how it is, particularly in this post.  No one wants to be a shark.  But the thing is, you won't be able to help it.   It just happens.

Or it could.

Let's start with that as our hypothesis.

(I hope you don't find this useful as I hope this doesn't pertain to you, personally, the person who reads my blog.  I hope this is not your life, spent with eyebrows pinched together, waiting something out that you are positive will surely pass someday.)

(If it is you, there is no shame in saying, "Look, this is impossible.")

(It IS impossible.)

(And look, life is short and all that.)

This is what happens when you love someone who is an addict:  

(It doesn't matter what they are addicted to, it could be marijuana or Minecraft or hot tamales.  Irrelevant, your honour.)

When you love someone who is an addict, you are loving someone who has carefully sought out the one thing that will create -- for them -- a very thick layer of cotton batting between them and vulnerability and sharks and the world.  They have artfully wrapped themselves in this thing, this lovely soft cottony thing, making them resemble Egyptian mummies (are there any other nationalities of mummies?). Quite comfortable, especially for them.  And quiet.  And dark.

Vulnerability-free.

Like zombies, they are the undead, without the benefit of first being dead and thus starring in no end of e-books available for 99 cents on your Kindle.

They are the undead because they are there, but they aren't really there, is what I mean.

Mostly you won't even be able to see them as they pad around softly through their days, amidst all their sweet foggy cotton, cushioned safely from storms and bad moods.

During times when they aren't high/playing/eating, you will get a glimpse of their face, batting removed, this person who you either once loved or still love or never loved, come to think of it.  

These glimpses may keep you involved and in love.  I don't know.  Maybe.

Or maybe not.

Because these times are fleeting, when they occur, when the person is suddenly truly THERE, you will quickly push all necessary information in their direction.  This information usually contains bad news because bad news is the most important to get across with some degree of urgency.  This news must land!  The toilet is clogged!  A raccoon has died in the chimney!

"Why are you always attacking me?" your own personal zombie will say, looking panicky and not just a bit angry.  And then he will rewrap himself in the batting, protecting himself from you and your frenzy of pressing issues and needs and thoughts.

"But," you will try to say.  "I'm not.  Not really. It's just, you know, my new job's a hassle and the kids have the flu.  Also, there are mice in the attic."

"Call someone for help," he'll say in a muffled voice, and he'll turn the channel on the TV while simultaneously playing Angry Birds on his phone and messaging the girl who works for him.   You will retreat to bed and read a book or write a book or both at the same time.  He will retreat to FB and send a flirtatious message to a woman he went to highschool with.   You will start having feelings for everyone who is not him.  He will feel attractive only when you are not in the room.  You will forget how not to be sad and snappish.  He will forget how not to be annoyed that you exist, wanting as he does only to exist with other mummies, bumping into each other gently and softly, and only occasionally feeling frightened when a baby cries.

This is not a recipe for happiness.

Together, one Sunday afternoon, you will whip up a big batch of resentment in the slow cooker that you apportion into containers and freeze for instant anger on days when you both work late or you have a migraine.

He will be free of his batting again tomorrow at quarter after two.  In the meantime, two pipes will burst in the basement and you will be diagnosed with a dreadful disease and the budgie will fly out the window in search of an eagle, who will not be his saviour (as he imagines), but will as likely eat him.  

"See?" he'll say.  "It's always SOMETHING with you."  He will pound his head into a door and leave a shallow, round dent.  

You are the problem, he'll think, and not the pipes and the budgie's big dream.  He will look for additional padding.  His head hurts.

Then he will rewrap.  You will watch.   It's quite beautiful the way he can weave himself into a home-made womb, all sealed up somewhere away from you and the way he knows that you can (and inevitably will, due to his own actions) hurt him.

Eventually you will get tired of having a relationship with someone who is not actually there, someone you can only see in glimpses at odd hours or when the alarm first blares in the morning, and someone you have forgotten how to love.   (And frankly, you never liked zombies.  They give you nightmares and you don't understand their mass appeal.)

Sooner or later, you won't see a whole world of difference between being alone without him or being alone with him.  But at least when you are alone without him, no one will be given to fits of enormous rage that burst out of the cotton like flames, burning your face and leaving you unrecognizable to yourself. 

Begin the work of finding yourself again.   

On your own, you'll find that you are perfectly capable of fixing the plumbing and rescuing budgies, your own wings unfurling surprisingly in the clearing sky.   You will remember who you were, when you used to be able to fly.  Before.

Which is my way of saying, you will be OK.   Promise. 

There are far too many metaphors in this post, all mixed together without rhyme or reason.  But that's sort of how life is, isn't it?  None of it has to make sense.  Not really.  Not here, anyway.  

what if you want to be a writer?

So listen, I am making up this course and one of the sections is ideas.  It all starts with ideas, this whole idea of teaching someone how to write something, anything.  Everything is an idea.  

To write a story, a book, a poem, a play, a movie, an essay, well, of course, you have to have an idea.  

Obviously.  

It's where you start.

Right?

Well...

OK.

Without an idea, it's just you sitting in front of a screen, imagining what if you have to do a reading?  You'll have to wear something quirky, maybe the dress with the hot air balloons on it? (amusing without being too too) (high heels, of course) (red) (maybe a scarf).  

But public speaking!

What if you hate public speaking what if you fail what if you faint what if you die like that kid in the Red Violin? What if you trip on the stage and stammer what if no one can hear you what if no one comes?

Really there are a lot of what ifs in this whole idea that you had in the first place of writing a something.

And none of it matters because it's just you and a blank screen and... well, enough of the blank screen! Switch over to Facebook, someone has almost certainly posted a video of a cute baby animal doing something ... cute.  Which will save you from yourself.  

What if you actually HAD an idea?  Then you'd have to write a book.  Or at least a story.

And you might fail.

What if you fail?

Baby animals are cute.

What if Facebook didn't exist and what if you actually wrote something and had to talk about it and had to put yourself out there to be judged?

Then what?

Best to avoid ideas, in case of future panic.  

Go ahead and skip section one:  WHERE DO IDEAS COME FROM?

It will only lead you astray.

I've quit Facebook, for now.

I happen to love public speaking, in case you're wondering.  I'm not talking about me here.  

I'm talking about you.  You can borrow the dress, which I have, just in case.

Just write the book already.  Write SOMETHING.

Sure, you start with an idea.  Where do I get my ideas?

Well, I just ...

I ...

Listen, sometimes I wish I could have fewer ideas.  Or at least they would come at a more regular rate and less all-at-once.

The better lesson might be in How To Not Get Ideas.

Here's the truth:  The best way to get an idea is to start writing something else.  Believe me, another idea will interrupt.  Try it.   Write ANYTHING.

Or try to.

Something will happen.

Ideas are like flies.  Once they see that you are opening your rotting, seething, festering brain up to them, they're going to come buzzing in.   Try and stop them!  Maggots of ideas galore.

I think I can't put that in the course.  It's a bit too dark.  The flies, the buzzing, the rotten brain.  Too Tim Burton for highschool Creative Writing.

Maggots are really the grossest thing I can think of.

Let's try again, shall we?

Here's the thing:  an idea is just a place to start.  

By the end, your story will be something different entirely, completely unrecognizable, or at least, not entirely the point of what you've written.  So best not to get too married to your original idea -- you in white, your idea in a tux, both of you too young to really be committing like this.

So what I mean is, don't wait for your idea to be the Tiffany diamond engagement ring of ideas, all hard edged and unchangeable and perfect and obviously incredibly valuable.  Just lazily hold hands with any one of your vague, pretty ideas.  Sure you'll outgrow it before you've even completely finished frolicking through the sun-soaked meadow over there, but that's OK.  You're supposed to.

Your idea is not meant to be forever and ever, til death do you part.  

Sometimes it is just a way of getting you to where you need to be to start the thing that will become bigger and better than all the other things that you've started in the past and, this time, actually make its way towards being an entire ...

thing.  

Most ideas don't turn into books.  

The idea doesn't ...

Well, the fact is that it doesn't matter.

This blog post was going to be about hypochondria when I opened the page and began typing.

So there.

That's the truth.

You don't even really have to have an idea, just the vague hazy outline of a form of a something, an image or a person who nudges at your imagination and makes you start wondering, what if? And that starts with a  sentence, and it doesn't even really matter what the sentence is because eventually you will delete your first ten pages, so use this one:  "When he said the thing he said, I just assumed he was lying, and kept doing what I was doing, which was very slowly adjusting the sepia tint on the photo of the boy jumping from the bridge into the fog."  

Then go from there.

You can have that sentence.  I'm not going to use it.  You'll delete it later anyway.

Use it to start all your books.  I don't care.

Even if everyone in the world started with the very same sentence, they would all write completely different books.  

Actually, almost none of them would write books.

It turns out that writing books is pretty hard for a lot of people.  There are much fewer occasions for the balloon dress than you'd imagine, starting out.

The problem with being a writer, doing writing to the exclusion of anything else, professionally speaking, is that the "what if" starts to bleed over into your actual life and then before you know it, there you are what iffing everything.  

I don't know if there should be two f's in that.  Fs.  

Sometimes I realize I have no idea what is correct, grammatically.  That happens.  Then I think, what if I'm doing it all wrong?  What if I forget every rule of grammar I ever knew and can never write anything again?

What if?

I took one of those aptititude tests in highschool that was meant to tell you what your best possible career path would be.  Mine boiled down to two possibilities:  Ballerina or funeral director.   

I think it's too late for me to learn ballet. 

Once, a long time ago, I was at a movie.  (I know it was a long time ago because I haven't been to a movie in years, what with kids and being busy and mostly choosing to spend money differently, such as on dresses with hot air balloons on them in case of glamorous events.)  I was watching the movie and suddenly I thought, what if, while I'm watching this movie, I suddenly lose my ability to remember how to communicate?  What if, when I walk out of this film, I've forgotten even how to talk?  And I am never able to recall, exactly, how to get words from inside my brain to my mouth and out?  

For the entire movie, I fought the urge to blurt something out just to see if I could.

Which is why I think almost all writers are hypochondriacs who are prone to panic.  There is no fleeting thought that ever passes by without us grabbing on to it, applying a what if, and letting it grow unruly and wild like some kind of thorny, man-eating jungle plant in a horror film.

Consider that before you consider writing as a career.  

I won't put that in the course materials, it's just something to think about.  

If you don't naturally what if, then you probably shouldn't write.

If you do, then you must.  Because if you do, you won't ever ask anyone, "Where do you get your ideas?" because you yourself will be so full of ideas, having what iffed everything that ever crossed your path to the point that your ideas will be competing for space with your reality and you will have to start writing things down just to get them out of the way.

If you have no idea what I mean, then don't write.  Do something solid and logical and well-paid.  I recommend becoming an actuary.  Actuaries make a lot of money.  

Believe me, I occasionally wish that I was an actuary.

I don't know anything about the salaries of ballerinas or funeral directors, but they might also be viable choices to consider.

What if?