Even flow.
Saturday, Sept. 15, 2007 - 20:50

These are notes, we tell ourselves, that we will compile someday into something. Someday, one of these days, it will become obvious to people other than ourselves that we are writers.

As writers, we are dramatics. We have good reason, see, because - we won't tell you this - we don't actually write anything. We've been compiling notes for years and years and years and thus far nothing has been written. When we realize this, which we regularly but infrequently do, we stomp around and pout and suddenly write something honest. Except it's not honest, it's full of delightful self-loathing that we read again and again, marveling at the brilliance.

Our problem is that we think we don't know what to write about, but we secretly do know. What we will end up writing about - the only thing we could competently write about - is ourselves.

We will meet one day half a decade from now in an airport. We will sit at a clean shiny bar dressed in sleek business skirts. We will size each other up, drink gin and tonics, and laugh at ourselves.

Gertrude Stein says, "Besides writers have an endless curiosity about themselves and anything that is written about them helps to help them know something about themselves or about what anybody else says about them."

***

But YOU. Here it was a Saturday evening in September, 7:30 and the sun is going down, and I'm putting laundry away and looking forward to the nothingness that will be my Saturday night. You would be derisive and snarly about my qualms about the changing season. I will write about you and you will know it but what you won't know is that I'll really have written about me. It's not about you at all.

I've met a new boy, see, which always upsets things. One of these days I've got to realize that I will never be a movie star.

But my grandma sent me a family picture from three weeks ago and I keep looking at myself. In it, I am trying but failing to be a model. My hair is fabulous but parted just a little too close to the middle, my posture is regal but just a little too slouchy, my expression is compelling but just a little too unfriendly. Overall, I look like a bitch, and no one will know that it's the best picture of me in years. It will only enforce the belief that I never smile in pictures. A shame.

In reality, I was sitting in the chair uncomfortably, looking at the three cameras taking pictures of us, trying to smile enough but not knowing how without feeling like a fake, wishing I didn't have to be there, knowing how bad I look in pictures, knowing that every picture I've been in for the past four years has been enough to make me never want to be photographed again.

Imagine my delight, then, when I get the picture in the mail and there I am - at first glance a goddamn model.

I will never be a movie star but you will never appreciate the talents I would have shown had I been one. It's a goddamn shame.