Pain Makes Me Angry

You know, I'm basically pretty happy with life right now.
I like my job. Me and The Hubby are doing excellent. I love my clothes. I think I'm pretty. I have plans for the future -- a vague one for the career, and a specific one regarding my health, fitness, and general well-being.
But this freaking pain makes me so impatient and grumpy and generally a such a raging bitch, that I wrote a massive email to a friend today, chock full of negativity. Meanwhile, I'm trying to convince him of my woo-woo, flaky belief that if you put positive thoughts in the universe, positive stuff will come back to you. Irony, thy name is Erica.
And I've been listening to Crosby, Stills, and Nash almost all day, which makes me feel very mellow. I don't understand why I was such a Negative Nancy in that email. Oh, right, the friggin pain.
Grrr.
So anyway, I'm going to dinner tonight with the in-laws, including sister-in-law, to celebrate my niece's 5th birthday. (And she, by the way, is the absolute cutest being on the planet.) That will cheer me up. I greatly enjoy my in-laws. They're hilarious and sweet and very, very loving.
So that's my Friday night. Hopefully I will be less of an angerball tomorrow.

Blahblablah

I've been totally out of it since yesterday. I don't really know what's going on, but my brain just feels sluggish. The Hubby was trying to talk to me while we were making dinner tonight and I think I just looked at him for a couple of minutes. Special.
I've been trying to decide how I'm feeling about the Eloisa James book I finished last night. The cross-dressing plot worked pretty well without being too homophobic. The big climactic fight between the hero and heroine, however, didn't make a lot of sense to me. I don't feel like I understood at all why the hero got so upset with the heroine. I may need to look at it again and work out some thoughts.
Neither of the two Eloisa James books I've read in the past couple of days has affected me as much as When Beauty Tamed the Beast did. They were both good reads and I'm glad I read them. I enjoyed them. (Well, I think. I'm still puzzling over the last one.) But When Beauty Tamed the Beast was incredible. I mean, I get teary thinking about that book, it was so good.
I found a couple of places where romances are being critically analyzed and my inner nerd's heartstrings have been tugged. Tugged, I say! Now I'm having all kinds of fantasies of doing critical work in romances, writing papers and going to conferences and stuff. I'm such a dork. But it's very cool to know that people are looking at romances seriously, and critically.
I'm trying to read Beyond Heaving Bosoms again, a loving and critical look at romances from the women who founded Smart Bitches Trashy Books (and I swear, Sarah Wendell is my sister from another mister or something, she's so awesome).
I'm watching a bunch of shows on the Travel channel about super-expensive stuff. I have decided that if I was ever ridiculously rich, I want a villa in the south of France. I love the Provencal vibe. This one villa we saw on this show could be rented for like $12,000 a week, and I swear it is my total dream home. Everything about it is completely perfect. The dream. I love the style of the house. I love the colors, I love the architecture, I love it all.
Yeah, this is ridiculous. I'm just babbling now.
I don't know what's up with my brain. It is not functioning. Not functioning at all.
Yeah, I'm giving this up today. Hope everyone had a lovely weekend. Maybe my brain will be working tomorrow.

On Audience and My Navel

Oh my god. I had this excellent post and it all just vanished. Sigh. Damn it.
Anyway, let's try this again.
Jenny Crusie posted this (http://www.arghink.com/2012/02/09/blog-ramble/) today, and it's been making me think. It's been making me think a lot, actually.
You see, I am apparently running this blog all kinds of wrong. Instead of asking "Why would people want to read this?", I'm saying, "I have stuff I want to say." Now granted, I created this blog as a place for me to figure out what I want out of life, to try to achieve some direction and maturity before I turn 30, so it's mostly a lot of navel-gazing and me, me, me, me, me. But I have on occasion addressed other people's concerns about the tone of the blog, and then I addressed concerns that I thought my defense of the tone brought up. But for the most part, I'm just rambling away about something that's all about me and my pretty, pretty navel, and probably has zero affect or interest for anyone else.
Also, I never expected to attract huge numbers here. I knew that this was going to be for me, so I didn't think too many people would be too interested in what I had to say. (I'm actually shocked that I've heard from as many people as I have, and that all of them have been male.) I did try to keep it somewhat apolitical, because since this was a place for self-reflection, I didn't want to get into the kind of debates that political topics can become. I have no problem with them in other spaces, but I didn't feel like it was right for what I was trying to do here. See, not a lot of concern for my audience here. Sorry.
Anyway, I'm thinking about this more seriously than I may have before because I've been considering starting another blog -- one dedicated to reviewing books that I'm reading. And while Journey to Thirty is purely for me and my sorting myself out, I would want this reviewing site to be a little more inclusive to others, because I would like it to eventually do something for me... like show authors that I understand how stories work and that I could be paid to edit their e-books for them... So, for that project I need to think more about audience than I have been, and that's going to be an interesting thought experiment.
Anyway, I'm not starting it anytime soon, so I have plenty of time to try to work out all the kinks and to try to come at it from the right side, like Jenny suggests in her ramble.
Speaking of this blog and its purpose, I feel like it's really been doing some good. I feel like I'm starting to focus a little more clearly on what I want to do. I always knew I loved reading and writing, but I don't think I ever really understood just how much story meant to me. Now I know that I'm eventually going to write my novel, and the others floating in my head, regardless of what happens with them. They can get published or not, but I will write them because I must. I know that I am passionate about stories and I will defend them to the death, and talk about the books I've loved, and the books that fell down. So reviewing is looking really wonderful -- and it's something I've considered doing before, so it's not totally out of the blue. But all of these things are something that's going to happen because they are things I love doing. They can wind up being my career one day, or I can go to library school and become The Cataloging Goddess of All Time, which I would also enjoy, but I will still read and write and discuss books.
And for not even a month into this project, the fact that I found these truths out already is pretty exciting and encouraging. Who knows what else could happen?

Don't Should All Over Yourself

I was going to write a post about guilt, feeling inspired by something Jenny Crusie wrote and posted on Reinventing Fabulous (http://reinventingfabulous.com/?p=899), and because her post got this song stuck in my head and I can't find it anywhere ("I'm unworthy. Yes, no matter what I'm doing, I should certainly be doing something else. And it's selfish to be thinking I'm unworthy, all this me, me, me, me, self, self, self, self." It's hilarious and wonderful and if you find it, please let me know.) But my first few lines sounded terrible, so I deleted it and now I've been staring at a) a blank screen or b) my best friend telling me to write about buying a vineyard and moving to Italy because that's our new "plan" for the last 10 minutes or so.
Ugh. I should have something to say. I started this whole stupid project.
Oh, look what I did there. I should-ed. Bad, bad business.
And, interestingly enough, should-ing gets us back to guilt.
Why do we feel guilt? Because we should have done something, and we didn't. Well, where the heck does this obligation came from? From whence the should? Is it from society, from our loved ones? Well, sometimes yes. There are a lot of should's that come along with being a woman. We should be pretty, but not high-maintenance. We should be sexy, but only a little bit, and only for our chosen partner (who probably should, according to some small-minded jerkwads, be male). We should be sensitive, but not whiny. We should be confident, but not cocky. We should be assertive, but not bitchy. But I think, most often, those damn shoulds that pile up so high that we want to scream, come from ourselves.
For example, my husband has never once said, "I want dinner ready when I get home." For one thing, he knows better. However, I make it this big should thing. I should have the apartment clean when he gets home. I should have dinner ready, or at least well on its way to being ready. And on the occasion when I don't feel particularly well and I lay down as soon as I get home, I feel guilty for not having accomplished that should.
And when I think of all these damn shoulds, I realize that I had shoulded myself into a pretty serious depression a few years ago. I'm not discounting the fact that I probably had something chemically wrong with me, but there was a lot of should-ing going on as well.
And I'm still bloody doing it. Look at my reason for starting this blog: I should know what I want from my life by the time I turn 30. Well, what happens if I don't? What happens if I never really know what I want? What if I'm never a real "adult"? Am I just creating another massive should that I may never accomplish, and therefore creating just one more massive occasion to feel guilty?
I don't know. Maybe.
But maybe now that I know about the dangers of should, maybe I can look at the blog as more of an exercise. Not that this process should result in my being an adult, with a clear sense of purpose and follow through, but that this space is a place for me to explore any and all possibilities that I see.
Even buying a vineyard in Italy. ;)

Paperback Writer

I have always wanted to be a writer. Always. I wanted to be Jo March or Anne Shirley when I was a kid. I don't remember a time when I wasn't reading. I mean, I know developmentally I had to learn to do it, so there was an obviously a time when I couldn't, but yeah, I've always been a reader.
I think to want to be a writer, you need to be a reader. You need to love words, and to love how words can deliver a story that takes you completely to a different time and place. You need to be able to become so engrossed in a story that you'll totally forget that you need more than three hours of sleep to be able to function properly at work.
And that, folks, is me.
There are books, that are not "classics" like Little Women and Anne of Green Gables, that I keep from my childhood because they are my oldest friends. I was a military brat growing up, and there was a period of time during my middle school years, where I was switching schools every year, making and discarding friends as the districts continually changed, and as kids who'd been dorks like me became "cool." So, a lot of the time, I focused on my books as the constants in my life.
There is a book that I picked up from the library in League City, Texas, when I was in third grade. It was probably a bit over my head at the time, but I remembered a girl named Claudia who could talk to animals. A few years later, I may have been in eighth grade, I went into the brand new Barnes and Noble in Brandon, Florida and found a book called The Heart of Valor about a girl named Claudia who could talk to animals and her siblings. I snatched it up, remembering that I had read it before and that I loved Claudia. At some point, between moves or purging sessions once I went to college, I lost my copy of that book. And I was really sad, I felt like I had lost one of my friends.
I woman who wrote The Heart of Valor, L.J. Smith, also wrote The Vampire Diaries and The Secret Circle (also a favorite of mine, I finally gave away my copy of that trilogy when I moved last Memorial Day. Yes, I am serious), both of which are apparently popular TV shows on the CW. Therefore, there's been a renewed interest in her work, and... Guess what was republished? The Heart of Valor, baby! Guess what I have on my bookshelf? Oh yeah. :) And every now and then, when I'm feeling snuffly and sad and homesick, I'll pull that book out and visit my good friends Claudia and the other Hodges-Bradley kids.
So, anyway, that's what I've always wanted to be able to do: to write something that would touch someone, that someone would look at and think of as an old, dear friend. I remember after 9/11, when we all walked around shell-shocked, when we sat and discussed what life was supposed to be, when I was personally starting to crumble, I told someone that all I wanted out of my life, was to write something that made some girl somewhere feel like someone understood what she was going through, that comforted her what she was going through, that comforted her when she was feeling sad and alone.
Now, I've never had any delusions of wealth or anything to be gained from writing, so, growing up, I always said that I wanted to write and [fill in the blank] with whatever else my flavor-of-the-month career was at that moment. But writing was the constant. I wrote poems on Post-Its while working at a record store. I wrote a million different first chapters. I would always write. But, for some reason, I totally shelved my ambition to write.
Well, not for "some reason." A very specific reason: disillusionment.
It's not what you're thinking. Despite all of my emotional issues and my occasional basket-case-ness, I have a pretty thick skin when it comes to critiques. I took a couple of poetry workshops in college. The first go-round was good. I learned a lot and wrote some stuff that I loved. The second go-round pissed me off. The problem with "literary" types? Apparently, some random bullshit words on a page is brilliant. For example, we workshopped some guy's poem, and no one knew what it was about. We were all guessing, maybe it described a kiss? The writer said, "No. It was an elevator." And everyone fell down all over themselves talking about how amazing and postmodern and whatever it all was. I was going through a random happy period in my life, and my poetry reflected that. It wasn't Hallmark, by any means, but everything that was positive was called lame. And I was like, so what, you can't write a poem about a happy relationship? You have to be miserable, or so freaking obscure as to border on ridiculous, to be considered talented? And even though I was starting to get over my snobbery regarding romance novels, I wasn't over it enough to try to write one. Somehow I thought I was better than Jennifer Crusie, who had an MFA.
Yeah, I was an ass. I admit it.
So, anyway, I shelved the whole writing thing for a really long time. Every now and then I'd start playing with an idea, but nothing has ever come of it at any time. I lack follow through.
I had started to look into becoming a librarian because I liked books. I decided maybe I didn't want to write so much as I liked to read. I liked research, it seemed to make sense. I still like my job as a copy cataloger (I call it a librarian apprenticeship), but I'm starting to have those ambitions again. So, I'm thinking about dusting them off and seeing what happens. I just need to start following through.