There’s something happening here

I think for a while there I was just going through the motions of living without actually living, without being able to be fully present in whatever was going on at the moment. I’m beginning to feel like I’m returning to myself. out of deep fog. My book of the week is Awakenings, by Oliver Sacks, another random book chosen out of a Powells.com recommendation. They were actually recommending Musicophilia, his most recent book, but I do this obsessive-compulsive thing on my library’s inter-library loan site where I go back and request the earliest book published by the author. This means I end up with very random library books that show up in the form of phone calls from the library telling me that my book is in. I love it.

The right book always seems to appear at the right moment. My last book, The Thirteenth Tale, was a recent debut novel by someone in the neo-gothic tradition. It was great--just pulpy enough, not too pulpy--to carry me through the last week at the hospital. This new book, Awakenings, is all about the nature of illness and the nature of the medical profession. It’s about this bizarre sleeping-sickness that swept the world in the 1920s. I had never even heard of it, nor had I heard of the miraculous effects of this drug that brought people out of their sleep-like states. I feel a little bit like that’s what’s happening to me, that I’m beginning to wake up to the reality of things as they stand now. I stand at the crux of this decision: do I need to go back to Secret by myself and try to complete her repair? Or do I need to get a job for a month or two to carry us through this difficult time?

I’m trying not to think about it too much. I’m trying to have enough faith that whatever the right decision is will be made clear. When God closes a door, he opens a window? Right? Can I get an Amen?? I’m also trying not to thing that my faith is actually faith and not dreary fatalism. If nothing else, this situation has done wonders for my church attendance.

I am having a hard time writing, too, which is odd considering how much time I have on my hands. I’ve begun to explore the World of Blogs that exists on the internet, the so-called Blogosphere. It’s a bewildering place. I don’t have the sense of isolation that I did when I was scribbling in my little notebook anchored off deserted islands, feeling like it would be months before anyone would read of our arduous adventures. Instead, here, blogging is a thing, something that one does, a blogger something that one is. I find myself trapped on blogs that evaluate the current state of Britney Spears’s underwear or lack thereof, or blogs where girls talk about their weight-loss or lack thereof, or innumerable addictive blogs that chronicle baby doings. It seems so removed from my little notebooks where I’ve scribbled daily depressive missives about our lack of progress.

It makes the prospect of “freelance writing,” my presumptive career, that much more difficult. Is blogging freelance writing? Not if I don’t get paid for it. How do I get a job writing? Is it too much to demand that society provide me with employment doing what I love? Or should all that society offer me be a job at the corner convenience store?