Category Archives: writing

perception

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one of my favorite quotes is one that i can’t recite exactly.  an old professor said it to me once and told me it was faulkner, and it stuck with me enough that i remember the gist of it, but i’ve never been able to find it anywhere.  so maybe it’s not faulkner.  or maybe it’s not about an elephant.

but the gist of it is this: writing about your own personal life is like trying to describe an elephant while standing one foot away from it.  in other words, you’re too close to the elephant to achieve the perspective you need to describe it accurately.

(update: freddy found what appears to be the quote’s origin.)

on this website i write primarily about things that happen to me.  when i reread what i’ve written, i often fail to notice when i’ve misrepresented something.  after all, i was there.  i know what happened.  i remember how i felt.  my brain fills the gaps in my retelling of events with memories of the event itself.  i try as hard as i can to recognize and eliminate these gaps, but sometimes i don’t even know they’re there.

so it’s not surprising that i didn’t notice anything amiss in the previous post, at least not until a few people’s (re)actions made me realize that i need to clarify two things:

  • i had some anxiety attacks and a few bad days, yes, but overall i am no more mentally ill than i usually am.
  • the breakup was my doing.

point #1 makes me think of something helen jane said to me at sxsw this year.  she came over and introduced herself and we talked for a minute, and then she said, “you’re much less fragile in person than you seem on your website.”

“oh yeah?” i said.  “maybe that’s because my website is where i keep it all.”

in this case, clarifying these points is more important to my personal life than it is to my telling of the story, because as far as i’m concerned i represented my own feelings and actions quite accurately.  but everyone’s interpretations of what i write are filtered through their own personal experience.  sometimes that’s what makes writing such an interesting challenge, and sometimes that’s what makes these clarifications necessary.

misrepresentations are never, ever intentional, you understand.  it’s just that i’m standing too close to the elephant.

at sxsw now

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today at a vietnamese restaurant, other people were talking to each other, and i was writing this:

why don’t i do anything?
when do these people do all the things they do?
how do they have less time than me but more things that they do?
what do i do all day if i don’t actually have anything to show for it?

why i’m not doing much writing

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1.  the loud jingly music from the ice-cream cart that goes by my apartment every day is just too damn distracting.

2.  television is rotting my brain.  wanda sykes says “you can’t blame the blind man for crashing the car when you’re the one who gave him the keys.”  craig ferguson thinks that all this celebrity inbreeding is going to create a brand new race of supercelebrities.  i like scenes from a hat.  tv funny.

3.  my life is really, really boring.  i’m boring.  i’m so boring even the dog thinks i’m boring.

4.  all day i make jewelry and sew and sew and sew, and nobody wants to hear about how i added darts to some pants to make them fit, or that i’m running out of black thread but i still have tons of yellow, or that i somehow managed to acquire a whole lot of bias tape even though i don’t really know what it’s for.

5.  i came to this passage in the great gatsby the other day:

“If it wasnít for the mist we could see your home across the bay,” said Gatsby.  “You always have a green light that burns all night at the end of your dock.”

Daisy put her arm though his abruptly, but he seemed absorbed in what he had just said.  Possibly it had occurred to him that the colossal significance of that light had now vanished forever.  Compared to the great distance that had separated him from Daisy it had seemed very near to her, almost touching her.  It had seemed as close as a star to the moon.  Now it was again a green light on a dock. His count of enchanted objects had diminished by one.

my enchanted objects, i’ve decided, are the things i have that came from people i don’t see anymore.  phil’s bookcase and coffee table, folded and stacked under my bed.  marisa’s coin jar.  the green post-it pad on which yanda drew a picture of a person in profile.  the books that d loaned me, which i never read.  they’ve all acquired special significance based on their previous owners.  i can’t bring myself to get rid of these things, but i can’t think about them either.  it makes me too sad.

anyhow, i was going to write about that.

6.  when i’m on the computer, my time is spent looking for jobs i’m not going to get, browsing ebay for things i’m not going to buy, and feeling guilty about not emailing people back.  how can i possibly fit any writing in with all that other stuff i’m doing?

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