Perfect Imperfection
If you look into someone’s eyes while toasting anyone, your sex life is unaffected. If you respond to a once-in-a-lifetime offer, it will be offered again, and again. You can stop smoking, drinking, taking drugs, eating poorly, start exercising many times. There is no cut-off. I don’t make New Year’s resolutions because they imply, you’re in or you’re out. Guess what? There’s a hallway, a doorstep, a toe dip, an effort that might not be perfect but there is hope and you can always ask for different cards. Everything doesn’t happen for a reason. Sometimes they just happen and they’re terrible and that’s too bad. Hopefully, things will get better.
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Reading Isn’t Writing
Reading and writing are, by their very nature, entwined; but they are separate skills with separate demands. Reading emphasizes close attention to the writer’s main idea, purpose for the communication, tone and method of narrative. Both are recursive activities although a skilled reader who annotates and takes notes may be able to skip a second read while a writer must see each draft as a work-in-progress. How many drafts are necessary is based on skill, experience, connection to the material and time, time between the last edit and the next, time to absorb both the strength and the weakness of the writing. There is a thin blue line in teaching. It may not be as intensely adhered to as say, law enforcement, but teachers rarely criticize each other’s methods of educating students.
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Mr. Moneybags
In 1983 I worked at a squash club. I was twenty-six, trying to be an actress, sober, poor as one could be without living on the street. The squash club guys glanced at me while they read their papers. My job was to smile, give them a towel, remember their names, and ask if they wanted anything else. I was also supposed to say, “Good morning.” They were driven captains of industry who knew to take a towel from a stack. I read scripts seeking my type, perky yet depressed. I wrote complaining letters to friends in other countries, started novels, one a murder mystery with a wealthy, ruthless squash player, dead on a squash court. I showed this to a literary agent. “Find a different genre,” she said.
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