Photo by Mr. Pete G

Two months ago I started reading Julia Cameron’s The Artist’s Way, the seminal book on spiritual healing for the creative force in all of us. I found myself blocked, frustrated, and constantly nursing this place of fear inside of me when it came to sitting down with any piece of fiction I wrote. This fear manifested in physical symptoms—clenched stomach, quickened heartbeat, an icky feeling in my chest—that encouraged me even more to abandon writing and pursue other avenues of satisfaction (shopping online for boots anyone?).

The Artist’s Way speaks directly to this kind of creative atrophy and anxiety. Even when I found myself outwardly rolling my eyes at all that Great-Creator-Within business, inwardly I nodded along as she talked about nurturing the inner self before outward production. This made tremendous sense to me. So, without my usual trepidation or excuse-making I dove right into one of Julia’s two prescriptions for the creative soul: Morning Pages. Her other exercise required a weekly excursion, called an Artist’s Date, that you made with yourself to try something new each week. I didn’t prove so diligent here.

For some reason, Morning Pages clicked with me. Each morning, (okay, most mornings) I wake up, brew a pot of coffee, and load a Pages document—password protected, of course—and write three pages of whatever pops into my head. Sometimes I write about my daily tasks ahead. Other times I write about something bothering me too newly formed or personal to disclose to anyone else. I’ve even written about having nothing to write. What I write isn’t the point though. I just need to show up to something, every day. A commitment, a practice, some continual thread in my life, a constant I can look to and learn to count on.

I can’t point to anything in my life two months later and attribute some change directly to this practice of Morning Pages. But I can testify to a daily sense of satisfaction and accomplishment with the completion of those pages, and that something in me has changed. Cameron says in her book that it’s almost impossible to write about something every single day and not eventually be forced to make a change. I’ve found that to be true, and some of these changes have happened almost unconsciously. I discovered that my attitude has changed completely when I went back this morning and read my very first week of Morning Pages. Two months ago I was pessimistic, depressed, angry and overly critical of the people around me. My Morning Pages for the month of January look nothing like this at all.

Dedicating your mornings to this kind of daily practice can give you a sense of accumulation and allow you to discover meaning in your daily life. It also creates an almost effortless record—of your moods, your worries, your daily life. I was surprised when I read about an unusually pleasant dinner I hadn’t thought of since that night. Those pages can serve as reinforcement of the positive, reminders of the small experiences that make life worth living but also become overshadowed by the larger and more emotionally taxing events of our lives. There is also an immense satisfaction in the act of building. Over the past two months, I’ve built a document over 30,000 words and almost 100 pages long.

Every morning, the best you can.

Notice up above I conceded *almost* every day. I seem to operate at about 70% of the time. I’m terrible about the weekends and not as dedicated midweek. Set a goal of every morning, five mornings a week, or just every Sunday. Whatever your goal, try to reach it. My Morning Pages take me well under 30 minutes, but I’m a super typer. (Thanks should now be given to my cruel high school typing teacher who would bark out the letters and slap a ruler on her desk to beat time. This gesture also subtly conveyed to her sophomore typing class that if we missed a single letter, she just might beat time on our knuckles. I was scared to death of that woman and even hated the class, but there is no denying my 80 WPM.)

How to—

Write in whatever medium you feel comfortable. I’ve gotten out of the habit of longhand writing, but Cameron recommends this way in order to allow your brain time to slow down and think. If you write comfortably this way, do it. If you like to type on an old Remington despite the key jams and ink blotches, then that’s the best way for you. Do whatever way you find most comfortable and know that this is the right way. But, if you decide to write longhand make sure you find a place to keep it so that you feel safe writing. Nothing kills this whole self-reflection process like a deep fear of prying eyes.

Nothing to write about. Not.

Although I’ve written a couple times that I couldn’t think of anything to write, most of the times I can. Our brains are wheel hamsters on steroids, constantly whirring with all kinds of thoughts. There is always something to write about. In the beginning, write about how pissed off you are, how your partner leaves the effing milk out to let it spoil, how the bank overdrew your account, or how you got a bad haircut. Think of these mornings as dumps for all those negative feelings. By getting all of these thoughts cleared out of the way, you open your mind up for something more positive. If you share space with others, password-protect these pages so that you are the only eyes that ever see them.

Eventually rev up your engine and get ready to drive

I got a little tired of my own whining even though I never went back to read it. I knew it was there, front-loaded all over my then 60 page document. So I decided to change directions. I started writing about my goals, my dreams, the things I wanted. Attainable things like a house with an office that gets tons of sunlight. Completely unrealistic things like a Pulitzer prize. Everything in between. The act of wanting is incredibly powerful. When we don’t name the things we want, we are almost sure never to receive them. Plus, it’s just fun to daydream sometimes. Put me in a way better mood than talking about how pissy I was. Start pushing your Morning Pages to talk about the way you want your life to be and see what happens. I credit this more than anything else with changing my perspective.

Just like that old adage about life, this is a journey not a destination

Seriously. Don’t look for some direct means of measuring the success of your Morning Pages. Don’t even think of them in terms of success. (By doing so, you unconsciously signal to your little dude within that you will measure this in success or failure, opening up an outcome you will label failure.) Writing these every day is about growth, but also about dedicating yourself to something. One of the greatest unintended consequences of these things for me has been just proving that I can stick with something. That’s worth my 30 minutes every day no matter what.

Good luck and happy writing. You won’t regret it.

It’s true, we all have resolution fever right now. New Years is my favorite holiday. I’ve always been attracted to new beginnings and opportunities to foster new identities, not to mention the scratch New Years resolutions offer for my compulsion to list make. But because I’ve indulged in resolution fever with total abandon, my resolutions end up looking like impossible overhauls, requiring not adjustments and dedications but an entirely new person that is not me to carry them out. They are also so vague as to be rendered meaningless. Every year is the year I will:

Get in shape.
Stop smoking.
Quit drinking… so much.
Exercise.
Write more.

The list goes on and on. But without specific strategies to attach to these desires (I think they’re far too broad and vague to truly call goals), each year becomes yet another steeped in almost immediate failure.

Or at least I perceive it that way.

This year, I want to try something a little different. Rather than the sweeping changes made in the ecstatic rush and exuberance that accompanies the beginning of anything, I made only one resolution this year. One for self-care. Yes, this is even more ambiguous than “get in shape,” but it’s also all encompassing in a way that “get in shape” is not.

Yes, it’s probably because I’m now thirty, finishing graduate school, and noticing that the differences between my activities and what the kids are doing is now immense.  But it’s also that I no longer want to be doing what the kids are doing. I mean, how many all-night 80s dance parties can you go to before you anticipate that you’ll want to die the next day?

Last year, a friend and I were gabbing on the phone together talking about the things in life that we want. Many of our immediate wants were simple and material: more income (on a graduate stipend, more income is like chump change to regular working folk), more energy for her to spend time with her kids, more hours in our day. But what we wanted most we’d spotted in other women and intuited we lacked. Call it whatever: self-love, confidence, inner peace. You know it when you see a woman who has it. She walks tall, speaks easily, and usually she glows in some manner or another without being airbrushed or pregnant. We wanted that. We wanted it desperately. And although I couldn’t articulate it at the time, I understood then that we were not in a place to get it.

Without ever acknowledging that we thought so, both of us believed that we didn’t know how to achieve this intangible quality, but, even more importantly, we believed we never could. These kinds of largely unconscious beliefs are what can keep all of us from changing, achieving, and even dreaming. Some little, shriveled, crapped-on version of ourselves stands up and yells out, “Oh, no! Not for you!” It’s the kind of voice that prompts, “People like me don’t _____.” Take a yoga class, get a pedicure, go back to college, start your own business. It’s how we defeat ourselves. It’s how we don’t care for ourselves.

It’s also how I managed to spend a large portion of my life drinking too much, smoking too much, partying too much, eating too much. I didn’t practice self-care. I never listened to my body. At one incredibly dysfunctional year in my twenties, I actually enjoyed debilitating insomnia. I pushed and pushed, never asking myself what I wanted. I couldn’t have answered then anyway.

So, even while I read the top ten resolutions to make now! and the eight ways to lose ten pounds in three days now! (because I love me some glossies) my single resolution for 2011 is care for the self. To listen. To make the choices I would make for anyone I loved.

2011 will the be the year of self-loving, in all of its manifold forms. You know what I’m talking about.

Like every blogger worth her salt in megabytes, I’ve been absent in the world’s blogosphere. I even had to abandon my Loaded Lit project, partly due to time and partly due to the fact that I royally effed my business trying to transfer to a pay site. Perhaps someone who knows nothing about CSS shouldn’t be foolin’ around with it, yeah?

But in my absence I’ve been doing other stuff. Like editing Bayou . (My PSA for the day: Want to get published? Follow directions. Journals put guidelines on their website for a reason.)  I’ve also been writing over at InvadeNola again, this time a book review for  Sean Yseult of White Zombie fame. I interviewed her, too. Yes, that Sean Yseult, and yes, I am now roughly 67% cooler for having done so. I can say this without bragging because the chance to interview her was a huge honor. I even got to tell her that as a teenager I basically wanted to be her or Joan Jett. Yes, I’m also fully aware I went all fan-girl on her. I just don’t give a damn.

What else? Writing shitty stories I wish were better, making pickles with friends, going to readings, and just generally trying to figure out how to live a life that is both productive and fun. A hard balance. I tend to lean toward the fun side of things, all boozin’ and dancin’ and fast women.

Anyhow, if you’re so inclined, pop on over to my review of Sean Yseult’s I’m in the Band. If you like what you’re reading, drop a comment at InvadeNola for me to let them know you dig books and you dig me talking about them. Or if you don’t like it, I’m tough. Do your worst.

While you’re there, check out some of the other kick-ass articles in this week’s issue.

Perhaps that doesn’t make sense. Writing doesn’t make sense. I went to a birthday party last night hosted by a woman I barely know but much admire. First, the menu. She’s a born and bred Memphis girl, and to honor the city she loves she smoked meat for thirteen hours and demonstrated the proper way to eat real barbeque. New Orleans thinks that it barbecues, but it really just grills, and while both have their merits, they’re fundamentally different. She also served Muffalletas, which if you have not come to New Orleans and eaten you have not yet lived, although this variety was served vegetarian.

Most of the people attending were either writers or avid readers or both, and I noticed how comically singular the separate conversations were. The difficulty of a blessing, the demands of facing a blank page, how thankful we were to cry in front of our computers every day. But inevitably, meeting fabulously wonderful and intelligent people who in turn think you’re pretty rad as well leads to more personal questions about your work. I honestly never know how to answer these things. Even most of my family and friends have yet to read my work, and I maintain a certain embarrassed secrecy about what it is I’m “doing.”

For people who are not writers or who prefer television over books, what I’m doing must sound a little frivolous, unfocused, impossible. And so I hesitate to answer their questions, shy to admit that I’ve yet to be published, because then I would have to explain my own personal rankings of work, evaluations of the journals, how ultimately despite the encouragement of peers and teachers, I don’t feel ready to have a work in print. In other words, I’ve written a dozen stories, valued sections, fallen in love with characters, and broken my own heart, but I haven’t found the work that I recognize as truly my own. Casual conversation would force me to admit that I’ve written thousands of pages by now and don’t consider but maybe five or six of those pages truly good, and certainly not in the context of their wholes. Admitting this makes me feel insane.

But worse than admitting so many futile hours seeking the exact right way to capture an emotion or an image through such an inadequate means as language is explaining to a fellow writer what it is I’m working on. Why? There should be camaraderie and there almost always is, since I’ve been extraordinarily lucky to meet supportive and talented writers throughout my life. But they recognize the slant of my eyes, the trip in my words. I can’t yet name what I’m doing. I’m still unsure. They recognize a will not yet form, and this embarrasses me.

I was talking to an impressive woman last night, middle-school teacher, mother of two small children who just finished her novel and placed in a prestigious contest. Her first instinct was to help. I need to brainstorm my novel, we’ll get together, talk it out. Perhaps I have too many of those beloved characters wreaking havoc on my pages. She had named it a novel. I had called it some beast of a thing that keeps growing. The woman hosting the party came by then and said, Girl, stop trying to tell it what to do. The thing is going to be what it is going to be, and with that she walked off to ignite the kitchen with her infectious laughter.

So, publicly, I’m not saying I am writing a novel, but I’m finally saying that if it should please itself to become one I’m receptive to that frightening reality. What a small admission, right?  I could be admitting adultery or criminal behavior, some juicy personal information these blogs were made for. But instead I’m just admitting that I may or may not be working on a novel. But here is why: the reality of existence for one working a novel looks a lot like this: hours typing away, grunting in frustration, days not writing, days writing again, years worn away on mountains of paper that keep growing, all to discover that no one is interested in the small, strange place where you grew up where a polluted creek glows in the moonlight and cops beat up teenagers just to take their drugs. Or, someone is interested and they now demand that the point of view be switched, that instead of the deeply personal first person choice you agonized over for months, writing and rewriting from first to third to back again, is not the right point of view, and now you are expected to write it again, another year of your life spent in a small, suffocating office, surviving on coffee and sneaking cigarettes and wondering if indeed you do look fatter in some picture someone took of you on the rare occasion you left the house.

My hostess last night compared it to trying to understand the world through a microscope and a telescope at the same time. Why would anyone want to do that?

In other news: how have I managed to drift from this space for over a month and a half? And still little changes. Tomorrow something more substantial, after a day of writing fiction and papers. For tonight, I head off to read Colum McCann’s Let the Great World Spin.

In the photo is Walter, her spunky kitten who helped me cook. Next to him is the bounty I received from Hollygrove Market. $25 and you get a box of mysterious produce, no joke. The world is full of wonders.

Walter and I made Hot and Sour Mushroom Soup, and let me be the one to tell you, that shit was delicious. It did not, however, take me all day to make. Because I was talking on the phone and playing on the Internet and drinking some delicious white wine I scored for $7, it only took me two or three hours. It should take you much less.

Let me be the one to tell you: Walter can drink. He and I finished off a bottle of wine, but we also read an absolutely fantastic short story by Junot Diaz called The Pura Principle. Lately, I’ve detested The New Yorker‘s fiction. It’s often formulaic and lacking in something I can only define as heart. They are technically flawless, proficient stories, but they have no heart. Tin Man fiction. Andre Dubus had heart. Junot Diaz has heart. I see it often in stories sent to Bayou. Not a comma misplaced in them, but there is something depth-less about these stories. I want to be moved in some way by stories, whether that is intellectually or emotionally or in some other way. There is nothing worse than finishing a short story and thinking, Meh. Invoking a meh is a short story’s worst crime. I’ve invoked a few in my own time.

Finally, as a means of topping off this already magnificent weekend, I planted a few containers of herbs and vegetables in my backyard. I love beautiful days.

March is one of my favorite times in New Orleans. The first time I visited was in March. I ran through the Garden District in the rain, marveling at the enormous mansions. I also got incredibly drunk and acted like the foolish twenty-two year old that I was. Oddly, not on Bourbon Street.

I took this photo jogging my three miles yesterday. This is a street near my house, one of my favorite streets, because of the gorgeous Live Oaks.

March is also the time when our weather is perfect. Absolutely perfect. It’s not the wet bone-cold kind of cold we get off the Gulf in the winter, and it’s not the suffocating heat we get every other time of year. March is–just perfect.

It seems my path to a healthy  and active lifestyle is being impeded at every turn by my own worst enemy: beer. This completely shocked me. See, myself and beer have been close friends for many years. I’ve made some of my best friends through beer’s ability to loosen the tongue and encourage strangers to bond. Beer has allowed me some of the best sex ever. Beer has made me think I can dance really well, talk to famous people without embarrassment, disclose personal and potentially embarrassing secrets about myself and others. You get the point. Beer and I have had a good time.

But lately as my life fills up with things that need done, things I want to do, and my belly keeps getting saggier (I think they call that turning thirty), and I wake up with hangovers, I’m starting to think beer and I shouldn’t really be friends anymore. In fact, I thought this a few times last night. The first: stuffing my face with my favorite pizza place, Fellini’s. The second: being wasted in a friend’s bathroom on god knows which number of beers, thinking, What the fuck am I doing here? Three: waking up this morning on that friend’s couch with a horrible hangover so that I blew off my run today, at the best hangover food ever at Please-U diner, didn’t write any of the critical responses to the short stories I have due or finish reading my book. Instead I complained. What a un-fun day to be around me.

So, I think beer and I should break up for a while. At least until I can not get trashed and stuff my face with pizza, because that is some bullshit. I was like a pizza monster in Tokyo last night.

I’m running my first half marathon in October. There, I’ve said it. And in public. Drinking beer isn’t going to get me any closer to that goal. Who knew? The parties, the cigarettes, the staying out until 2 am, these are bad ideas? And for years I thought they were just wicked rad ways to spend my time. Turns out they are, but only if I want to have this exact kind of lifestyle well into my fifties. I kind of don’t. Being twenty pounds overweight, smoking, and general unhealthiness suck ass. Big ass. My big ass.

At least I can now say I’ve written something today. Every day: track food, write, work out in some way, even a walk. Just three things I have to accomplish. Seriously, I need to get my shit together. Someone should come be my life coach.

I am one of those people who love to plan. I make lists and then lists for my lists. I download every iPhone productivity app I don’t have to pay for and a few that I do. I indulge my insomnia and make plans.

Like this:

I will stop poisoning my body with cigarettes and alcohol and terribly delicious but unhealthy foods. I will run. I will write every single day. I will give myself permission to pursue the things I supposedly love, like books and stories and ripe vegetables. I will exercise every day because I know this is the only thing short of jumping on the medication train to a numbed place I don’t want to inhabit that can allow me to deal with my fucked up brain. I will stop saying bad things about people. I will especially stop getting drunk and talking shit, my mouth flapping away, the sound akin to the yells a baby makes when they first figure out the volume choices at their disposal. I will stop sucking so much ass.

If you wanted to skip that above paragraph and get to the quick jist of what I’m saying, it’s basically that I would like to stop being a miserable fucking cur.

But being a good person is hard work, and drinking is fun! So is smoking. So is eating a pound of cheese, at least until the constipation later, but even then, don’t you feel like it was worth it?

I’ve had this amazing best friend for years, a beautiful woman who struggles with her weight and her sense of self, who wants to eat better so she doesn’t croak of a heart attack by age forty and so her girls grow up with a mom who can honestly say she doesn’t hate herself. She and I talk constantly about the things we should be doing. Then we order pizza with extra cheese, and maybe I get drunk and she eats ice cream, and instead of finishing Robert Olen Butler’s A Good Scent From a Strange Mountain even though I know that this collection will help further my understanding of the intricacy of voice in short fiction. Even though I’m kind of in love with these short stories. Because, well, I’m a lazy fuck. It’s true. If I had a television, I would probably watch Two and a Half Men because I hate that show and want to punish myself.

Oh, yeah. Best friend. Wonderful person. We’ve been lucky enough to evolve in similar directions as adults despite living 700 miles away from each other. She wants to stop being a miserable fucking cur, too. As a hobby we talk on the phone and say things like, “We are horrible human beings.” Sometimes, when it’s really late and there is absolutely no chance of someone calling our bluff, we talk about how the next day we’ll get up at sunrise and have a green smoothie for breakfast, and miraculously we will weigh less, and maybe we’ll even feed bananas to starving monkey babies in Cambodia, because, dammit, we are fucking invincible at 2 am.

But my best friend lost someone close to her this week. He was twenty-eight years old, a freak accident at work, and it got me thinking: are she and I going to talk about being better people our entire lives and never actually become them? Are we going to have these same conversations in our forties and fifties and then in the nursing home right after we’ve finished pinching the asses of the orderlies?

So I stayed up late last night and lurked around on the Internet, wanting someone to just write a blog about the struggles of being healthy. Not dieting, not fasting, not exercising until you puke. I wanted to read about someone still in the struggle, because I just can’t stomach reading about the blonde bitch with a six pack who used to be a “fat girl,” by which she means she was not a size 2. And then I rediscovered this, an old blog I used to read, now called Cherry Blossoms Runs, and it was exactly what I wanted to read. I stayed up until four reading about a woman who discovered a passion for running and who struggles with her weight, because our body issues, meaning the ladies, well, they are life long.

So, this inspired me. Here are four things I love: books, writing, cooking, and obsessing over my body. So, JezebelsRiot is going to change focus for a while, although since it hasn’t had focus in a really long time, I think any focus is good. I’m going to commit myself to writing here, to chronicling my struggles with being an asshole and with trying to be an all around better human being. More me. Maybe this sounds boring, but blogs are not about you. This one is about me!

My first order of business? To tell you I bought some really awesome running pants today that feel like they are made of alien skin.

Then the dude shows up.

It’s not the blood all over her car, the one supposedly stolen twice from a block that hasn’t seen that kind of crime here in five, ten years. The girl’s talk of gun shots, the traffic. It’s the guy who might have been sitting on the porch when you pulled up from shopping, but limps inside so quickly that all you catch is a glimpse of his long white t-shirt. Every time. One day I walk up the side of the house  to throw away garbage and I catch him on the porch. We’re both surprised. Except he looks angry. I forget his face before I’ve even seen it. Then there are the young boys bird-calling in the windows, not even knocking, to let the hider know who they are. The hider is what’s making me the most nervous.

But in the end it’s the dog, the howling puppy locked in its crate twenty hours a day, right in the hottest sun, howling all night so no one in the neighborhood sleeps. A woman follows me home today. We share a fence, but she lives on the other block. Do I know what’s going on? What should we do? Lady, I tell her, you should leave it alone. Sure, I feel bad for the puppy too, but trust me, leave it alone.

T. got laid off from his painting day job. Before he would leave at six, about the same time as Mike, and he wouldn’t return until three or four to go to his other job at the hotel. In a way it’s a blessing. I wouldn’t stay here by myself if he weren’t right next door. He heard the woman ring my door bell, poked his head out to check who it was.

The howling puppy feels like a bad omen. Like we all might be punished for letting them keep it locked in its crate and crying. A year ago I would have called the police, the humane society. I would have thought that those people get what they deserve. But then I saw that boy’s body pulled from the bayou in Mid-city. I heard the stories about doors kicked in, about men in wild-west-style bandannas walking calmly in front of stopped cars at a light, firing over and over at a man running down the sidewalks. I realized this is all a numbers game.

You’re not entitled to being safe here. That’s not a right for you. It’s like a fairy tale place, and sometimes you can live in the kingdom and attend fantastic balls and dress in costume. And sometimes the wolf moves in right next door.