I haven’t been posting as regularly as I did earlier this year. I have no reasons, only excuses.

Now that I’m working again, it’s hard to keep blogging on a regular basis.

I keep writing things and not posting them because they aren’t “good enough.”

I have so many left-over things that I still need to do to get the house in shape.

I’m working from home so I don’t get to see people during the day and that makes me crazy so I have been trying to spend my non-working hours seeing people.

Is there anything left to say about Harvey Weinstein? Will my curiosity about whether justice would be as swift if he looked like George Clooney really provoke any new thought?

Excuses all.

At lunch yesterday – a lunch I force myself not to work through because there lies the path to madness – I set myself the goal of going through one of three boxes of writing that came out of the file cabinet that I discarded over the summer because it was falling apart. This writing is old writing, from years ago – so long ago that some of it is scribbled in the back of notebooks which are otherwise filled with notes from college classes, and much of it is printed on dot matrix paper.

At that time, I was writing on a regular basis, compulsively, any time that I wasn’t studying or partying or reading, I wrote. I wrote and wrote and wrote and wrote. Much of it is bad – imaginary conversations with guys I was dating, things I wanted to say to them and didn’t, conversations that started in very familiar ways (“We have to talk,” he said) and then spiraled off into weird directions, (“I wanted to go to prom, you wouldn’t take me,” she said. “My chest hurts,” he replied, “I think I’m having a heart attack. Help me.” “This is what it feels like when your heart breaks,” she said and blew away like dust in the wind).

In twenty minutes, I managed to review two inches of paper, discard two notebooks (one, mostly notes from African Art; the other, Criminal Justice – the parts that weren’t class notes were the stories described above). Then I got distracted by a musical I had written when I was maybe nineteen, a musical, a complete musical, about a “family restaurant” where kids hang out all evening because there’s nothing else to do in town but “dance where the K-mart parking lot lights go off and on and on and on and on and on we dance ‘til dawn” – yow! I couldn’t throw that away; it was too precious. This is going to be harder than I anticipated.

But all that writing paid off. During the period where I could maintain two to three hours of writing per night, several of my stories and poems got published and I even received payment for my work. Then my boyfriend bought me a TV and the amount of time I spent writing quickly diminished – man, was I mad at him! (He couldn’t understand why and probably still doesn’t.)

Having worked for a bookstore, I often found myself the recipient of confidences from outsiders who harbored dreams of quitting their day job and becoming writers. “Do you write a lot?” I’d ask. No, they didn’t have time; that’s why they needed to quit. “Don’t quit,” I’d tell them. “Write. When you find that the writing has pushed everything else out of your life, then quit.”

The hardest part of working, for me, is that it becomes about writing. And, when you’re writing work stuff all day, it’s hard to keep writing about not-work afterwards.

Which is my biggest excuse for not writing my blog.

No resolution.