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Let's be honest.

I haven't updated this thing in weeks, months even, because I got it in my head recently that I needed to write profound things. I mean, so much sad, meaningful, happy, moving stuff has been happening in my life lately that I was pretty sure it would be a terrible joke to just sit down and write I LOVE DIET COKE over and over again, which is what I've been tempted to do. I've been reading lots of good things lately . . . oh, you want to know what they are?

The Story Behind the Story: 26 Stories by Contemporary Writers and How They Work
Life of Pi
Ulysses

Okay, I should in all honesty point out that the last one I'm only attempting to read, because I really have absolutely no idea what's going on. But the first one is this delightful, hastily-bought-from-Malaprops collection of writers who are on staff at Warren Wilson, which gives me hives just thinking about it, like why can't I just own the idea of possibly getting an MFA, and I knew that Andrea Barrett was on staff, but Antonya Nelson? At the end of each story, the writer includes an essay about how it was born, and to say it's compelling and inspiring stuff is a wild understatement. Reading fiction from writers who seem only a few degrees of separation away from what could be my education, if I wasn't so lazy and bad at money, is terribly overwhelming. More than once I've slammed the book shut with a big sense of dread and excitement. I can't really even talk about it without losing my ability to breathe well.

And anyway, the point is that I've been feeling lots of anxiety about this diary, like it's supposed to be some receptacle of great writing, which isn't even historically true so I don't know what that's all about. I think I just want to be doing something worthwhile, instead of just surviving, which is exactly what I feel like. I have all these events coming up in which I need to be creative and talented, and I mostly just dread them all. I feel like I've created this alternate persona here in NC, and spending so much time with my family lately (2 trips in 6 months, crazy) reminds me what a big schlub poser I really am. Any minute now the curtain will be lifted and all these poeple will figure out that I am just one big fat lazy mess of a human being, like, I'm someone's assistant, which should imply a predisposition to having one's life in some semblance of order, but instead it totally isn't, and buying that cute new dresser only cements the fact that I have a giant pile of papers, pens, hair elastics, bobby pins and whatnot on my floor that need a home, which they've never had, and they'll just end up shoved in the drawer of the old dresser anyway. In this job, I should at least be Ashley Parcell, not this girl who has meaningful piles on her desk as if she's working diligently and instead is just drinking 7 cans of Diet Coke and thinking grimly about the state of everything and wishing, for the love, that the phone would just quit ringing already.

On the freaking front page of WebMD today there's this whole thing about depression, and don't get me started about how WebMD makes us all sure we have whatever terrible disease of the week they're currently advertising, but I know that one of the symptoms is that you can't get out of bed, and all I know is that for the past 3 days I have switched off my alarm and haven't awakened again until 10 am, which, if I had a less-understanding boss, would have surely gotten me fired by now, and I don't really think that I'm depressed, but I am in some kind of a funk that extends its knobby fingers into every corner of my weak life, and no amount of Laverne & Shirley can get me out.

How's that for meaningful? Oy.