organizing in the new year

No one's home, so instead of showering and getting ready for my day, I am sitting in bed trying to write and listening to my favorite Bright Eyes record, the especially breathy and tortured Fevers and Mirrors.

Yesterday we cleaned out the basement and I found all this stuff I'd been looking for and sure I'd thrown away or stored at my mom's. We had to make room for the tenant in the basement so I couldn't just move it around, I had to take it upstairs and do something with it. There are certain projects I've stored down there, knowing that when I have extra time, I'll probably fill it with something else.

One thing I did that was kind of fun and full of reminiscing was sorting through my school notebooks from when I moved in with Eric. It was really fun to find old history test scores (I progressively got better, from B's to A+'s), astronomy notes and even a couple notebooks from my writing classes.

Will I ever need this stuff again? Probably not, so I just took out things I found interesting in my writing notes. I'd totally forgotten that I'd wanted to write a story about how my mom and dad worked with a traveling roadshow carnival around the city of Chicago. And all the ideas I'd had for my travel writing. And all the ideas I'd had about things that happened to me when I was a kid.

I didn't find a lot of actual writing, because that's all in folders in my room already, but the funniest was this review I had to write for my potential memior. It was so great. I was such a smart-ass.

"Her cynicism and angst feel like dirt under relatively well kept fingernails, a tone that forces one to question whether her life is worth whining about."

I'm really looking forward to my last semester at Columbia. I'm going to have my last Fiction writing class and I can't wait to see what is evoked there. All the things I've wanted to write are still with me, waiting for the day when I sit down and write them.

Some of you might be familar with my liquor store story, which I did about forty pages of, but there was still only one customer the main character waited on so far. I based a lot of that work on stories my brother told me from his time working at a liquor store. Imagine my surprise when he told me his girlfriend of late wrote up some of the stories for a writing class she was taking. I wanted to go and strangle her and tell her those were my stories to tell. After that moment of irrationality, I then realized they were my brother's stories to tell, but it was all about who was going to commit them to paper first. Now I realize that this girl is not going to publish her homework for a writing class, but maybe she could.

I think I'm finally starting to feel some urgency about my work. I know that the ideas I have are palatable. For instance, recently a friend of mine went to see the roller derby girls. She thought it would be a great thing for me to write about and even brought me the program, full of pictures of the girls with hysterical captions, like Miss Knocksalot will take out your teeth if you're not careful. So I agree this is great material, take the program, put it in my room and go off to school and work. Yesterday I see a commercial for a new reality television series all about the lives of roller derby girls.

I have got to get my shit together when it comes to my writing and do it as much as possible, despite having all these other obligations I have.

happy new year.