What's my problem? By Catherine on 3/02/2008 07:57:00 PM
Karma is a bitch. Between being sick for most of late autumn/early winter, having surgery, spending a mint to fix my car(six trips to the shop since August) only to have to buy a new one anyway, and having only two friends show up to my birthday dinner, I'm feeling like a karmatic loser. I know I'm not perfect. I'm far from it. In fact, on a day to day basis, I tell myself exactly how imperfect I am about twice as often as your average Joe. But I really thought I'd get a call, no matter how shitty my karma is. Not a text message, an IM, a voicemail-- contact. Real contact. Today I turned 24, the lamest birthday I've had in a long while, and the person who made me feel so bad for the last few days didn't phone and say hey, we're still friends. Hey, I know things have been tough for you. I understand you've had a hard winter, maybe I could have been more available, too. Maybe I'm being too harsh on you, because I haven't tried to find out where you're lost at, locked inside your head all the time. By the way, how is that novel coming? Is it done consuming your soul yet?Maybe I don't deserve it. Maybe she's right, and I care more about myself than I do about my friends. It's my fault I'm lonely and isolated, because I spend so much time living inside my head letting my words coagulate into stories that I don't remember to have any real stories of my own. When I was a kid, before high school came along, I used to think that my only real friends were books, because a book always says the same thing, doesn't waffle or have transient, lukewarm opinions. You don't have to worry about someone else's words betraying you, the way my own often do. Books are constant, and if you're lucky, the story is timeless and you learn something new every time. The only thing my book is teaching me is that I love it more than I love my life, and that's a problem, because I can't turn into Sarah and let my magic guide me. I thought my magic was my words, but now my words are killing me slowly-- first cutting me off, then sneaking up behind me to finally stab me in the back.
I'm thinking of giving up.
Labels: friends, signs, words, writing
The moon was thin last night By Catherine on 1/12/2008 08:50:00 AM
I've been feeling pretty yucky lately.It's not really important why, but the last 6 weeks or so of posts does a pretty good job explaining. It was buildup mostly, something small and something small and something small can often make you feel defeated before you even wake up in the morning. We've been really busy since I got better, but for the first time Christmas and the New Year brought change and death and a general feeling of mortality that is hard to grasp as a younger person. You feel like your whole life is ahead of you, impatient for everything and desperately wanting to grow up and then... When you're 23 you still feel like that in a lot of ways and have the freedom and means to act it out. You never expect people your own age to go, and yet here we are.
That's a long explanation for why I've lately been feeling, for lack of a better word, condemned. Condemned to die, and it could be sudden and tragic. It could be Adam, my mother, the cat, it doesn't matter. I can successfully put it out of mind up until a point, but lately I've been consumed by it. I've been thinking about my grandfather constantly, because he really epitomized to me as a small girl what a man was: he was strong but gentle, fair, devoted entirely to his wife and family, and very very smart. He left law school to raise his family and took care of them well. He learned the art of bonsai and kept meticulous care, lecturing around colleges to other scholars of the art. He read constantly, loved PBS, kept a "Victory Garden" with me in his backyard. He was the best man I could think of. If I could make anyone proud, it would be him.
So yesterday a friend and I were talking about writing, and she asked if I was planning on trying to get published in literary magazines or newspapers, etc. I've got a lot of balls in the air, but I obviously haven't been feeling very confident and have just sort of pretended that I don't have time. I told her no, and was honest about why. Two hours later I received an email from the editor-in-chief of Quill and Parchment, who is a member over at pathetic.org where I keep my poems. (It's good because anything on the site is copyrighted to the author due to the terms of service, so there's no better place to keep them as far as I'm concerned. Paper burns.) Anyway, this editor wants to publish not one, but TWO of my poems, one in May and one in July.
I was shocked, because I didn't solicit the invitation, she just read them at pathetic and liked them and asked. I said yes of course, there's no reason to say no, but I thought it was funny and ironic that I'd just been doubting myself aloud earlier that day. It's not The New Yorker, but for all the work I did to get it, it might as well be. (I really do heart irony.) Adam decided we had to celebrate, and I finally started to cheer up. It was pretty great. We decided to try an Indian restaurant in Worcester with fantastic reviews, but when we got there it was closed for renovations. We were momentarily slowed, but Adam suggested O'Connor's, which is the opposite of Indian. The place is decorated to the hilt with Celtic knots, Gaelic sayings, and every inch of wall-space is taken up by framed advertisements, maps, beer mirrors, and anything related to anything Irish. We hadn't gone in years so I agreed and called ahead to get a spot on the list. On the drive there, I decided that yes, my granddad would be proud of me.
It was packed when we got there, and a waiter accidentally knocked over a stack of menus, which I caught, to the great amusement of the owner. He found us a big table in a quiet part of the restaurant even though there were two-top tables scattered near the bar. When he sat us down, I looked over Adam's left shoulder. On the wall was a framed coat of arms, bearing the name O'Shea. That was my grandfather's last name.
I don't believe in signs.
But that is an awfully strange... Coincidence.
Labels: memories, poetry, publishing, signs, weird coincidences, writing