I wish I wrote better.
What does that mean? I don't know. It's my daily habit to come into work, grab a cup of coffee, Lysol-wipe all of the phones (what! I have a phone thing! They're all nasty with 25 people's face-grease and scuse me, my complexion's bad enough without adding other people's crappy Revlon foundation to it), surround myself with various papers and such so if anyone walks by it looks like I am doing work, and settle in to leisurely fuck around on the internet. This includes checking my e-mail first thing to see if my boyfriend has written me anything sweet (and once in a while he does) (kidding! -- I love you), a quick stop by McSweeneys, and then a trip through all my friends' blogs to see if anyone has posted anything interesting since yesterday. I really am such a blogowhore.
[Side note from project I am simultaneously working on: I have the sentence "Projects that are small enough to fit" in a label I'm making for my inbox. MS Word states that my grammar is incorrect and states "that is" or "those are" as suitable replacements. Is it any wonder nobody talks good English anymore? ;-)]
So anyway, I rummage through the blogs -- every one, even though Chad, for instance, hasn't written on his since January, and Cliff just posted a couple of days ago so he's not due for another week. And ... I just wish I were more captivating. (Does this seem like I'm digging for compliments or anything like that? SO not true.)
Take
Tom, for instance. No matter what Tom writes about -- from deep and beautiful reflections on his meditative experiences to life in New York to gastric troubles with sugar-free jelly beans -- his posts are beautiful, eloquent, funny, amazing. Give him a whirl, you'll see what I mean.
And
Heidi. She doesn't write often, but every single post of hers is a masterfully crafted sculpture, carefully structured, not a word out of place, and even artfully accented with photos.
I just run at the mouth a lot, I think. (Or at the keyboard.) A whole lot of what I write about is pretty mundane, and that's because a whole lot of my day-to-day life is pretty mundane. But you know what? Tom goes to work and comes home just like everyone else. The difference is, I think, that he views the world differently. He meets the gaze of the sad woman on the train and shares a commiserative glance rather than introvertedly hiding behind a pair of headphones and a magazine. He overturns the stones that most people don't even realize are there and finds beauty in the grime underneath. And I want to do more of that too. (Course, he also owns a venus flytrap -- and that's just massively cooler than anything anyway.) :)
Heidi handcrafts her interestingnesses. She painstakingly places each detail of her fictions, sometimes taking days to create something just right. I don't put that level of care into my posts. And frankly, I probably won't, but I admire it.
So what is the conclusion to be drawn here? Less day-by-day crap, I think. More philosophy? I don't know, Vince was always the philosopher, not me. But I definitely believe there's nothing wrong with
noticing more of the world at large. Instead of "got up drove to work answered phones got pissed off went home watched TV went to sleep" (except I don't watch TV), more rain and sunsets, love and anguish, beauty and terror and all the magic in the details.
We'll see how it goes. ;-)
