I hit a wall.
Not literally, though I ran into a table at The Strand yesterday and knocked down a pile of Sherlock Holmes books. Don't worry. I cleaned it up. But I actually hit a wall with writing anything.
I mean, yesterday I wrote about a headache. Granted, that was real, but I genuinely couldn't bring myself to write anything of note, and tons of things have happened since my blog break: my sister got engaged, I went to New Jersey, I tried to paddle a boat in Central Park. But I can't even bring myself to blog about those things because, well, I just don't feel like it.
It's weird.
It's scary to be in my head when nothing's churning.
I felt the effects today, because with my hours cut, the last of my subway fare gone,
and my book club book read, I set aside my spare afternoon to work on a short
story for a writing contest. My
past few weekends, which I usually keep free for writing, have been a whirlwind
of impromptu trips to New Jersey and a rather prompted visit from my sister and
her newly dubbed fiancé. Writing
has been on the back burner for a while, I guess, which may be why I’m in this
rut.
But I’ve had the idea ruminating for weeks, waiting for a
clean afternoon and the right coffee shop to work in, and without time
constraints or work worries, I was really excited to sit down and
commit…well…something to a blank Word doc. I’ve been making notes in my phone, not to mention scribbles
on the back of my planner, which I can’t make sense of now but are there to
prompt me into some sort of action.
I intended wholeheartedly to write something, but I couldn’t get past
three pages. And even then, I just
kept rewriting and rereading and changing perspective and changing motivations,
until by Document 5, I knew that I had nothing. I was too jazzed by coffee to sit still anyway.
The same happened last night. My friend invited me to a good-old-fashion pun-off that only
an hour train ride to Brooklyn can deliver. She wants me to
compete next month, so we had to do this recon mission for me to see how it was
done, and as much as I love to come up with a pun spur of the conversation, I
couldn’t come up with one. There
were some great categories too, like pastries, hip-hop, and internal organs,
but I couldn’t come up with one!
Okay, I did say that someone was doing “lung-derful” but
that took so much effort.
Meanwhile, my friend’s friend was throwing back beers and saying that
she had the gall to bladder off on some topic, before apologizing, excusing her
jokes as just kidney-ing.
Man. Before we
came in too, she was telling me how she had a lukewarm appreciation of puns,
while I, a proud lover and purveyor of the art, couldn’t come up with one.
She told me not to be so heart on myself.
Dang.
I had the apartment free all evening too, which is rare, and
what could’ve been prime writing time, especially for me to read the story
aloud, were spent with editing a paltry three pages to death and trying to find
a good radio station to listen to, because when you can’t come up with anything
it becomes the environment’s fault for not being conducive to the writing
process.
So I spent the entire evening watching Sex in the City the movie and filling out resumes and eating cookies. God help me if they asked for writing samples, because everything I read was too-something. This resulted in me spending an hour, editing or rewriting, until I felt downright spent.
The funny thing was, I kept record of all of this on a sheet of paper, documenting how productive hour one was to hour five. Funny. I've been sitting on the couch for hours, and my scribbles started out almost optimistically, a to-do list of resume writing, before dwindling down to a simple, note from my past self to my present-future self, "You've got nothing, don't you?"
Stupid past self.
When I left the coffee shop, right before I headed to the apartment, a man waved me down on the sidewalk. I made the mistake of making brief eye-contact with him, though this was haphazardly done because I was really trying to flick my hair out of my face. He waved his arms good-naturedly with a friendly "hi" and stopped directly in front of me to say something (maybe to ask directions or sell me something), but a part of me didn't even process these general steps towards friendly conversation, because I just breezed past him, unintentionally rude, and replying with a "hi" of my own, though never stifling my brisk stride.
I was down the block before I realized what I did. I honestly couldn't think of anything to say to that man! I honestly didn't know what was going on! That's how bad this wall is.