saturday songs: on a freezing chicago street, margo and the nuclear so and so’s; when sal’s burned down, dar williams; no better, the garden verge; reading you, we’re about 9; photobooth, death cab for cutie; listen, sister, don’t date a hipster, menage a twang; skinny love, bon iver; horse and cart, angus and julia stone.
Writing sex scenes in public is awkward. I’m constantly worried that someone I don’t know is going to see what I’m doing, and that concerns me, although it probably shouldn’t. The point is that someone who isn’t me is going to be reading them, eventually.
The grammar of these scenes is an intense project in itself. I’ve spent what seems like an inordinate amount of time contemplating things that I don’t normally pay so much attention to until the final stage of editing, like tenses. There’s a lot of energy going in to making it witty and funny and sexy and genuine, but I’m constantly worried that it’s all going to turn into a trashy romance novel instead of the literary representation of the adventures of two neurotic people in love.
I’m figuring out, slowly, that all this late night rambunctious typing and musical schizophrenia (hipster? folk? Britney Spears?) is necessary-to give me a break from my regular thoughts (scary and askew), and allow in something unmitigatedly joyful.
I’ve been having a crisis about time spent, how slow everything seems, how long and stretchy and powerless and chaotic and random. JF sent me an essay/advice column from the Rumpus (go there now and read everything), in which the writer tells her 20 something self what she now knows as a 40 something. On one hand, I am so tired, constantly, relentlessly. And on the other, there is this.
“The useless days will add up to something. The shitty waitressing jobs. The hours writing in your journal. The long meandering walks. The hours reading poetry and story collections and novels and dead people’s diaries and wondering about sex and God and whether you should shave under your arms or not. These things are your becoming.”
