The Project - Day 1

February 25, 2010

The Project - Day 1

I saw a movie clip today comparing how much time students spent facebooking versus how much time they spent writing for school and it hit a little close to home. I used to write a lot, poems, stories, journal entries, reviews, whatever fit my fixation of the moment. Many of these writings are lost, but others are mouldering away in boxes, mostly cribbed into small steno pads that I used to take with me everywhere. Often these were the same pads I used for rehearsals or studying music on the subway, so you might find a stab at a sonnet side by side with an IPA transcription of Dich teure Halle. I’m not sure when these efforts started to fade. It might have begun as early as my departure from New York, as so much of my writing time was found on subways, subway platforms, city buses and impoverished afternoons in parks or museums. I am not saying that cars are not conduits to creativity, but they are not exactly the proper venue for sweating out iambic pentameter.

It could be that going back to school contributed to my written decline. Nothing stifles creativity like academia, or so the romantic vision of the creative artist would suggest. However, I know the nail in the coffin was the 7 lb. 14 oz. bundle of joy I received three years ago. I became a chronicler of his infancy, working on an elaborate website, combining the creative forces of motherhood and words--I would be a mommy blogger, or at least a mommy chronicler or something. Then the day came when he learned to move from one place to another and my life as I knew it ended. Happily, with joy, but definitively ended. Clearly I was not cut out to be a mommy blogger who somehow juggles the laundry and her freelance job and children dressed in organic cotton, all while sharing clever bon mots on the subject of poo and discount codes for cloth diaper covers. I therefore abandoned hope of being elevated to the electronic status of supermom and contented myself with making occasional stabs at the laundry.

At least this is the narrative I constructed in my head. Creative woman, slowly dies at the hands of her precious darling child, smiling all the while, “really, it was worth it. . .” Cue curtain.

I suppose it could be true, but it isn’t. I didn’t stop writing. I write constantly. I write emails, I write facebook statuses, I write comments on other people’s facebook statuses (statii?) I write long, keening letters to people who inspire me or piss me off. I occasionally write comments on people’s blogs or I write website copy or small recountings of our day for affectionate relatives. I write all the time. I just do it in such a manner that I am in no way accountable to my artistic self and that allows me to maintain my own self image as a creative martyr to domesticity. I’d almost admire the skill it takes if it weren’t so completely shallow and pathetic.

So this is the plan. Every day I will write a page of something, just to write. If it embarrassingly ungrammatical, irksomely self-indulgent or just plain sucks, so be it.