Still Singing

My most tortured relationship is with the written word. This says a lot, as I have lots of tortured relationships. Ask around - you'll see. But writing - ungh. It's what I do, it's what I have been trained to do, it's what I do best. And yet I start a creative project - a novel about Socialist Socialites, or an essay about working for state government, or a poem about my last day visiting the state-run mental health clinic - write some solid material, and then abandon the endeavor in order for something less fulfilling. Like scrubbing the sink. Or picking fleas off the dog.

On the up side, I've done a lot of interesting things to avoid writing. I learned how to paint signs by hand (with the logic that people don't read manuscripts, but they can't avoid a sign.) I started a business designing costumes and hats. It didn't last six months, but it did result in my completing an essay about homegrown Jazzfest commerce titled "The Shilling Fields." (Published on a website that was later hacked, another gem lost into the gaping maw of the internet.) Most recently I foolishly left unemployment - and all that time for writing - to work for the U.S. Census, an endeavor rich in writing material if it weren't all supposed to be confidential. They made us take an anti-blabbing oath, which I interpreted to mean that it's fine to tell amusing anecdotes to friends over drinks, but not so prudent to write down and publish what I learned from knocking on my neighbors' doors. Which is too bad - Census Day 2010 would be a blockbuster!

So even when I'm not writing, I'm writing. Hence the torture. If I could just chuck it, fuck it, I'm off to law school, I could move on and join all of my fellow Americans who choose to make a bunch of money being an asshole. Case closed. But no. I keep returning to the page, choosing instead to make no money being an asshole.

The good news is that I found something I can commit to, through rain and through shine, through drama and through daydreams: my yoga practice. When this world ends, you will find me on my yoga mat lifting my arms to the nuclear-cloud sky. Of that I am sure. The person I am with a yoga practice bears little resemblance to the person I was before. I no longer I eat meat - not even delicious crispy bacon, juicy, deep red steaks, or my first love, greasy fried chicken. Nor do I ever sleep until noon - sleeping-in for me now means arising at 7:30. And strangest of all, I find myself being nice to people - even bad-driving, rude-mouthed, ugly-faced assholes - despite all the clever, cutting responses pressing hard against my mouth.

Have I lost my mind? More relevantly, have I lost my edge?

A solution seems obvious. "Jeez, Miss Amanda, why not write about yoga?" I tried that. I signed on to be the New Orleans Yoga Examiner for examiner.com (see for yourself at this link) and could have used this as a way to integrate myself into the yoga community - even local yoga celebrity Sean Johnson thanked me for writing about his band's new yoga CD. Yet, I couldn't get over my resistance to the bizarre logic of content-providing, where blog titles need to be as bland as possible so to be found by search engines. Clever titles were good for selling newspapers, but search engines need titles with the most obvious words that people are searching for. I also couldn't get over my resistance to examiner.com pretending we were getting paid for our work when we weren't. (I never received a dime.) Now I could do yoga every day for the rest of my lives and it wouldn't matter: being lied to about pay will still bug the shit out of me.

So why not do my own thing? Why not, indeed? It's only taken me several months to sit down and get started. Today I resume the blogging project, as I prepare for an extended trip to India where I plan to write as much as I can. Though I hear that India has a way of changing one's plans...making me wonder if I'll be able to keep up the blog. Can I do it this time? Stay tuned, my friends. Stay tuned....