what i like to do.

I feel there's been an overflow of fluctuation lately: in the weather, in our moods (HELLO), in the way things are going, splitting off in an unknown direction at the last second, all tangled with that jerky feeling you get on the splintery tracks of some carnival ride, first up, then around, then suddenly you're upside down regretting the decision you made to get on board in the first place.

When things are going this way (and I suppose, in a way, they always-kinda will), deciding what would be most productive of me is an altogether difficult task. Unable to choose, the results are usually this: I scroll through half a dozen pages of job openings, understand less than 4% of them, apply for 1 that seems mildly attainable though not desirable, due to heavily encoded criteria description, the 2.5 hour commute from my high school home, the fact that I imagine the office to have fluorescent lighting, etc. After said train wreck, where I inevitably eat my weight in something like, I don't know, Cheez-its, I start wondering if my time would be better spent invested in something else. That something else always ends up being my own writing, which I assume would have to be more productive than obsessing, or despairing, over the lack of change on my horizon. Not always, of course, or forever. But one more week of silence, one more day when no one ever calls, not even to say, "Thanks, but no thanks," and I think there won't be enough pretzel wraps in the world to console me.

If you have ever spoken to me, even if only once, you would know that pretzel wraps are my comfort food of choice, an addiction that can only be properly explained face-to-face, with no apologies.

Anyway: it's safe to say that frustration can set in only if you let it. Only if you let it ruminate, only if you welcome it every time it comes by, demanding to be recognized and acknowledged and fretted over. All things I have become pro-ish at, these days. It's not constructive, of course, mentally or motivationally. It doesn't help. I suppose it doesn't always hurt, either, for the sake of argument. There have been instances where frustration is the exact push I need to continue the fight. When the frustration is from the fight itself, however. Well, then I'm stumped.

Still, even though I have yet to peruse the current openings today, due to other forms of hard and intentionally distracting work (I have spring-cleaned ALL THINGS), it's rarely an activity that has left me feeling hopeful, at least lately. I can't stop doing it, I know, and I won't, but what I want to believe is that other forms of dedication can remind us of what we're meant for, can inspire us to carry on through the wasteland.

That being said, when there are times I just can't bring myself to focus on what an assistant copywriter does (and no, it is never just "to copy-write" and it is never just plainly stated or explained), I have been doing my best to commit to my own writing. Which, yes, includes these particular blogs, which have saved me in more ways than one, but also my writing in other forms, in poetry, in feeble description of place, of heart, of real characters, of observation. As it turns out, writing this way is monumentally and often terrifyingly introspective. Even just jotting down a few thoughts in the morning, when your mind hasn't fully registered who and what you are today, will knock you back with their honesty, with the pure simplicity of the ways our brains can wander out and spill our guts, even before coffee.

I keep up this kind of writing for many reasons, and among them is so I can (continue) to find out what happens to the people I've made up. They're nowhere near from complete, of course, and it's a nice opposition to that feeling you have when you finish a really great novel, story, letter: you almost wish it didn't have to end, because you've fallen for the characters, for their charm and real voice and outright flaws. You want to know what else happens to them, and you scan the next (blank) page for any clues, you keep an ear out for rumors of a series. Despite knowing this sense several times over, I find the only connection of characters I ever appreciated were Salinger's subtle Glass family ties.

This is different, though, and hugely so. As far as I'm concerned, it can go on forever. I can write the eternal American novel. The only problem: the whole write-what-you-know card is a bit two-sided. Yes, it makes for believable prose and sincere story-telling. It also, however, forces you to tell your truth. And as it turns out, people, my truth doesn't allow me to constantly create sunny fictional characters or situations. It happens that the written life, when done honestly, is a difficult one.

Sometimes I find myself stopping for a break, or for a day, and wanting to walk away from these people, and these places, all of which are a combination of my imagination and my reality. Sometimes, they're really really awful. Sometimes, I see a lot of myself in them, which is really no different than the latter statement. It's hard to see yourself in printed black and white. It's a tough realization that what you know, when all put before you, is a less than perfect gospel. It's an irony, that you write to avoid your other commitments, and it turns out that those commitments and problems and roadblocks have surfaced in your story, have fueled the plot, have invaded your personalities, and here you are, trying to describe the exact feeling you daily fight, trying to find a synonym for yourself. What you put down, whether you like it or not, is a version of your own experience, suffered and joyed through the eyes of the person you've literally bequeathed it upon, this person you've both blessed and cursed all at once.

What. A. Circle. As one of my (current, and perhaps always) favorite songwriters, many of which happen to share the same namesake, Ben [Kweller], drawls: I don't know what to do, but I know what I like to do. So, there you have it. I like to write, and I don't know what to do with it. So I write to escape that predicament, and the stories I concoct end up echoing the way things are. So maybe I'm not writing a story about a girl who wears a visor and systematically hates the way the world works. Maybe I have.

The point is, it's all leaning in the same direction. Whether I write to avoid work, I work to find writing, I find hope and frustration in both. Maybe, in my own writing at least, a little more hope. Not because finding my exact sentiments on a screen in front of me is necessarily comforting. But it has forced me to change my perspective, ever so slightly, it has made me engage from an outside view, from the creator's eye, from the one pulling the puppet strings. So make it all perfect, I want to say. Fix their problems, solve the criminality of it all, tie up the loose ends, make everyone live happily and blissfully. But how then, I have to ask, will they ever learn?