Blah Blah Blog: No More Good Writing

In my last on-line journal, I whined about my inability to lose weight. I went on Atkins Induction for five straight days (twelve times), then decided my running was suffering and ate cereal and grapes. Then my legs swelled, and I tried South Beach for awhile. Lots of non-conviction. The journal was on a low-carb web site, so my ramblings were about food.

In this journal, there's a little more pressure. People are commenting that my writing's better here, that these are little essays. And every day, when I want to post my menu and nothing else, I think better of it. Nothing poetic about an avocado smoothie (though I did write an avocado haiku once). Nothing rhapsodic about Fitday totals.

OK. I can rise to the challenge of an essay. I know how to start and finish. I know little tricks that make readers want more while they're reading yet feel completely satisfied when they're finished. I'll be teaching those techniques to the students of my essay-writing course at Towson. They'll all leave better writers; I'm confident of that. (Even if I were the example of what not to do, they'd improve.)

I write a little like a teach. My students are sometimes surprised to hear my opening monologue—a story about my daughter's star falling, say, because she wouldn't stop whistling. Three times she whistled; twice she had to move her star. Why didn't she just stop? Because she had just begun. She said, "I was afraid I'd lose my whistle." So when she puckered her mouth to remind herself of the shape of a whistle, and when she exhaled to remind herself of the feeling of a whistle, the tiny whisp of a whistle came out, and she was caught.

My students look around the room at each other after they chuckle, all of them thinking, "What the hell does this have to do with writing?" And then I pass out a drill, a clever little word game assignment that forces them to translate hoity-toity billion-dollar lines like "Scintillate, scintillate, asteroid munific" to the more mundane but familiar "Twinkle, twinkle, little star." (Neophyte's serendipity, I tell them if they get a correct answer.)

Once again, they look around the room at each other, wondering what the hell it has to do with writing. And then I tell them that thinking has to do with writing, that sharpening their brains with word games and inticing them with the meat of a cute real-life story will do more for their paragraphs than a textbook. And then we move on to the textbook, which I correct along the way.

And then, end of class, I finish the story I told at the beginning. I tell them that I am worried about my daughter's falling star—not because she is going to be in constant trouble for disrupting the class, but because I'm going to be known as Whistler's Mother. Not a pretty picture. I don't look good with doilies on my head.

But frankly, I don't plan that sort of thing. It just happens. They just wrap up nicely, as if my brain has got it all worked out but hasn't let me in on it. I even make the connection that, like with whistling, if you don't practice writing, you'll lose it.

This entry wraps up the same way. I came here to say that I'm sick and tired of the pressure to write something engaging and interesting, when I really want to write that I spent yesterday dropping things and cutting myself (an 8-oz. Father's Day crabcake for $17 hit the floor, along with a tub of coleslaw). That I ran 5.5 miles this morning with my new Rio and learned that it only holds 55 minutes worth of music (grrrrr) and that I couldn't even keep up a 10-minute mile pace. That I went to Target and Rite Aid and spent more money than I had on a shirt, running shorts, earplugs, a toothbrush, toothpaste, hair dye, headbands, barettes, and cheap (but groovy) sunglasses. That I spent $40 on writing and running magazines (these go hand in hand, since I do most of my writing in my head while I'm running). That I bought nitrate-free salmon and bacon from TJ's so I can be on Atkins again. And that I came home and fell asleep in the sun while reading Runner's World, and woke up with a roaring headache and my period (which explains yesterday's clumsiness).

I really just wanted to say that. And this:
Breakfast: 1/2 crabcake, chocolate banana smoothie with Genisoy powder
Lunch: 1 oz. fontina; 2 cups salad with grape tomatoes, 1/2 oz. feta, and 2 T Litehouse dressing; and 1 mushroom-asiago sausage (blech), with 1/2 slice of cheesecake for dessert
Dinner: same salad as above, 2 Boca burgers with Swiss cheese, and the other 1/2 slice of cheesecake for dessert.