A few weeks ago I was dorking out to prepare for my boyfriend's birthday and, since one of his presents was a gift certificate (to American Science and Surplus) I decided to tuck it into a nice card, and then decided I should make that card. I bought pretty, heavy papers, scallop-edged scissors, some stencils, an X-Acto knife and a cutting mat.
I used to love collage. It might have been my first craft love, somewhere in the same mix as beadwork. I never got very good at the latter (though I made some cool, funky necklaces) but I think I had a reasonable eye and hand for the former. In high school, and well into college, I spent many a Sunday knee-deep in cardboard (cut-up cereal boxes or the covers of last term's notebook) and old magazines, making postcards to send to my friends elsewhere.
So once I had a final product I liked enough to tuck into the envelope and call it good, I started thinking: What happened? When did I do this last and why did I stop?
Now, that middle question -- I didn't need to ask. My brain's a Collyer mansion. I remember everything. Every mean thing anybody said to me at any age (six, nine, twelve years ago or last week -- it doesn't matter), every kind deed or gesture or word. Like a lot of hoarders I spend time sifting and sorting these memories, weighing their significance, but so rarely discard one that when I discover I've forgotten something, I'm exhilarated.
I hoard tangibles too. Collage was a great excuse.
So when was the last time I sat down with a stack of magazines and a pot of rubber cement? It would have been 2002. Seven moves ago. The postcard I sent accelerated a correspondence and friendship that became a delightful, doomed relationship that's now a startlingly durable friendship. We've all muttered "there's dust on my guitar, you fuck" one time or another. Have I discovered another symptom of Just How Badly That Whole Thing Fucked Me Up -- or is that a vindictive reading of circumstance?
Five -- no, six -- of the seven moves took place in the year immediately after I made that postcard. Wasn't that why I stopped hanging onto magazines, to particularly interesting papers, to foil candy wrappers or what the hell ever? Wasn't I tired of the haul? Wasn't the financial and emotional chaos that catalyzed and accompanied those moves the real reason I dried up creatively? And after stabilizing quite a bit, after breaking the anxiety-laden hoarding habit, why take it up again?
But when I sat on my bedroom floor a couple of weeks ago contemplating stencils and layouts, collage wasn't about this nauseous fear of forgetting, or of discarding, not anymore. Once, I thought throwing things away was both wasteful and dishonest. It isn't. It's about revising. Keep what you need or love. Chuck the rest.
I take 2002, 2003. I keep the bleach-white Idaho sun, the walks from Sun Valley to Ketchum and the big, unleashed, well-behaved dogs wandering the sidewalks unattended. I cut away the cold entitlement of the children I worked with, but I keep its funnier manifestations. I cut away the nastiness of nearly every young employee on the resort, but I keep the boy I had two long, substantative talks with and never saw again. I keep some of the fall -- the rain-soaked bike rides to campus, the watery Portland sunshine and the old-friends-who've-just met euphoria. I discard my (now former) best friend's heightened silences and the way she eventually, unceremoniously dropped me altogether. I keep the spring.
I think: Why didn't I play this years ago, this game of keep this, chuck that? I'm not pretending none of it happened. I'm admitting I no longer need it.
The other day my boss walked out of his office and said, "Christen, what's the German word for wishing ill will on people?"
I don't know if he asks me these things because I'm just conveniently located, or because it's so obvious that my head is full of goofy trivia, or that my head is full of a particular kind of goofy trivia, like German words for habits I happen to possess: schadenfreude was my gleeful, correct response. It's also a hobby of mine.
But that word, as I understand its definition, may be too small. I'm interested in the whole process of failure: where bad ideas come from and why they persist despite all evidence. It's a fun exercise, and it's not just about being a jerk.
But being a jerk is a big part of it. And there are some kinds of stupid that aren't all that interesting -- but that I can't get over, until I realize I'm guilty of them myself.
File the following in that category: Recently I stumbled (quite accidentally) upon two social networking site profiles (with attendant blogs), in quite close succession, by people who advertised themselves as writers, with books to sell, but told us nothing about the works themselves. No excerpts, no summaries, nothing to tease or bully us into buying it other than a brief admonition to do so.
The hell, people, this is Web 2.0. You've got so many free self-marketing tools at your disposal -- with pretty much unlimited bandwidth -- and you can't even bother to give me a glib 20-word summary about the product you're hawking? Selling Yourself Properly (hell, at all) is kind of a passion of mine. Others' failure to do so in the context of grandiose claims about their achievements or achievements-in-progress -- oh, these things keep me up late at night.
What keeps me up all night is my realization that the content on this website -- which I intended to be a much more professional, bloggy-style blog than the one I keep over at that teenage girl website with all the goats -- is scant and hasn't been updated for more than a year. And the protagonist of my novel in progress hasn't updated her blog in more than a year either, partly due to hosting issues I've been too lazy to address. So I'm just as half-assed as those folks I lost all those hours snarking at and disparaging.
Somewhere, I presume my doppelganger is rolling her eyes and shaking her fist at me.
That's right. I know two German words. So buy my book.
