you speak to me in riddles

I have a notebook that I used for school when I was seven. On one of the pages, I completed an assignment about what I wanted to be when I grew up. My answer went along the lines of:

A ballerina, because I like to dance.
An actress because I feel great when I'm on stage.
An author.
A mom with a horse.

Apparently being a mom with a horse is greatly superior to the alternative.

The ballerina idea failed (remember my attempt in Sweden?), but the acting and writing have lingered. Acting: fairly typical desire for a young, theatrical, attention-adoring girl. Writing: rather odd choice of future career for a child. As my buddy Dante put it:


But to dream of being a writer is quite a queer concept. If you dream of being an astronaut, you imagine skipping on the moon or hopping about on Mars. To dream of being a sports star clearly brings forth heavenly thrills of game winning catches and miraculous saves.

Yet to dream of writing is to imagine being so enamored with a realm whose existence doesn't expand passed the depths of your mind, that you are driven entirely by an internal monologue within one's self. It's only a romantic image when viewed with an idyllic lens of what the 'tortured artist' should look like.

To dream to be a writer is to dream to choose to live your life inside your head, rather than to share your action-life with the outside world.


Donc, writing is not only an odd choice for a seven-year-old: it's an odd choice for an extroverted social madcap like myself. And, according to Dante, an odd choice in general. He goes on to relate how watching Office Space (combined with this thought process on writing) brought him to the conclusion that he'd rather be physically living in an external world than in his head. This is not the conclusion that I would draw, mostly because I don't think the dichotomy needs to be so extreme; I hope to be able to traverse both worlds.

In Walker Percy's Lost in the Cosmos, he describes the problematic issue of "reentry" – the great writer's return to reality after transcending this world. As one of my friends described it: Dostoevsky has just completed The Brother's Karamazov and goes to the corner store to buy a drink. He overhears the trite conversations around him and is suddenly brought down from his lofty ideals into a dirty, mundane world. He has difficulty coping with this reentry.

Percy cites authors who reacted to reentry in different ways: drinking binges, traveling, sexual escapades, gambling – these writers have so perfectly described their surroundings, yet cannot reenter without finding a new escape.

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I would like to one day be talented enough to write something which so thoroughly removes me from reality that I find it extremely difficult to reenter. Sounds like an intriguing, natural, productive high. Yes, I do romanticize the tortured artist. And the struggling one. The idea of living in the countryside in Ireland or New England – or anywhere beautiful – and spending my days producing works of fiction, sounds incredibly appealing to me.

Is this along the same lines of monk vs. person of the world argument? Dedicating your life to God through solitary prayer and silence, or dedicating it to God through actions and interactions...

Writer or Actress? Or teaching little ESL kids?

I suppose I could always buy myself a horse and adopt a child. Seems too easy.

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Improv Everywhere: They perform a spontaneous musical in a food court.