Getting Started: An Unexpected Party

It's New Year's Eve. 8:15 pm or so. I've gotten started on the reading challenge. I'm about to go out to dinner for the holiday, and I've only got a few minutes to write, but I wanted to start writing when I can hear the ideas formulated in dialogue with the books, or arising from memory for whatever reason.

I've just gotten to page 15 of The Hobbit. Bilbo has been moved by the dwarves' music, and Tolkien continues: "Then something Tookish woke inside him, and he wished to go and see the great mountains, and hear the pine-trees and the waterfalls, and explore the caves, and wear a sword instead of a walking stick." And even though I have long experienced the wanderlust, the memory I have is the reading log we had to keep in the 5th grade--and it's a fond memory, even though I often found the daily log tiresome and stressful.  (I was a nervous, almost ulcer-inducing kid.) I have really missed reading--and the pleasant feeling of time spent intellectually productive.

I remember the books I read in the fifth grade--my tween crush on Encyclopedia Brown, and the admiration I had for little Superfudge, daring enough to climb a sculpture in Central Park and jump off. Sure, he lost a few teeth, but little boys inventing parkour push themselves over a line of daredevil that I don't. This is the year--age 41--I plan to get into handstand.

There was Mrs. Frisby and the Rats of NIMH, and The Lion, The Witch, and The Wardrobe. Ms. Butler's class was as adventurous and alternatively-organized as our Catholic grade school ever got. So here's my 'unexpected party'. This could work.

 

 

6:11 pm. Awful day. Exhausted with coping. I want writing to be a refuge. I want a hobbit hole. It was a difficult step to even pick up the phone and make this entry. I want to be able to read as a refuge, too. Hobbit hole, hobbit hole. What Tolkien was illustrating about human nature through his depiction of the hobbit race is so accurate. I want Reading and writing to be soft, furry, eating often, and kindly in touch with the landscape. I want the internet to The that landscape. I want my blog to be a kindly hobbit hole. I want a cure for anxiety, rage, and interruptive behaviors. 

January 11, 2017. 6:56 am. Been up since 4:30 am or so. Some days I do this.

/complete blankness, again.

It's horrendous. Couldn't write; can't continue reading; can't complete anything. Brain writes a few sentences, then points my inner eye-thought toward something--but then blankness; the sentences gone; can't type them; can't find them. 

January 13, 2017.  3:02 pm. Back on a better sleeping schedule. (Rule of thumb: when you wake up in the 4am hour, just take action not to *remain* awake. Bedtime tea usually succeeds.) 

January 16. I'm still about to tackle the "Over Hill and Under Hill" chapter, and I'm also stuck in the kitchen with my parents. A perfectly, regrettably-frustrating re-enactment of the themes of the past decade in my writing career just happened; I don't know if I'll even be writing that scene right now & don't necessarily have to (and *that* assertion would be a re-enactment of all the problematic themes from writing groups in the past 15 years, so hey--up to time we are right now, and I'm typing anyway. I should stop for a big self-congratulations.) I have come upstairs.

Pause. Publish. Regroup. Revisit what I was about to write. (Though, as I was standing about in the kitchen at that point, on some level I probably knew "a scene" was about to happen.) 

What I was about to write: concerns the title and its extra-content relationship to me and my life. 

1. My name is Jill.

2. I went to a high school called St Joseph Hill.

I don't just gloss over the word "hill".  This, you might think, is quite absurd--and it is. But do you know who else wasn't glossing over proper names? The philosopher Jacques Derrida. 

February 26.

I have carried this book almost every day since New Year's Eve. It is very easy to think this lugging is a metaphor for not having written my own There and Back Again yet. (That's the book that Bilbo writes about his journey.)