This thing I’m writing today, this fiction project, has nothing to do with my job. It is accountable to no one, and my progress on it can’t be measured by anyone but me. I could tell someone I’ve been writing all day, and they would have no way of knowing whether or not I am telling the truth. Of course, if they follow me on Twitter, they know that I spend at least thirty minutes of the day trying to figure out The Bold and the Beautiful. (Expect a post on that mess soonish.) Mostly, though, I’ve kept this project private, and I’ve been so guarded about it that I have barely acknowledged to myself that I am indeed working on another novel. My last one, Fluid, is so close to being done that it is laughable. There is one part I need to finish, but because, again, there is no deadline and no accountability, I am content to let it sit. I am confident the solution will come to me largely because the solutions have always come.

Take this current project, for example. I started it a long time ago, before there ever was a Hillary or an Ava, and abandoned it when I couldn’t figure out why the protagonist, Rachel (whose name was Chloe then, even though she is clearly a Rachel), would seek out a deeper relationship with her emotionally distant mother at this particular time in her life when her father has so effectively met her emotional, as well as practical, parental needs for her entire life. Then one day last fall, it just hit me. Out of the blue, I was thinking about Chloe/Rachel while I drove somewhere, and I realized that her father is dead. That solved so many of my issues. That allows him to be idealized in Rachel’s mind without her being delusional, and it explains what draws her to her mother and vice versa. Even though Rachel’s parents—Ryan and Lydia—had been split up for pretty much Rachel’s entire life, Lydia’s relationship with Ryan remained the most significant one in her life. It’s sad but it is what it is. The novel is as much a meditation on Lydia’s emotional dysfunction and rejection of traditional motherhood as a necessary part of womanhood as it is on Rachel’s emotional journey. At least I think it is.

I spend more time thinking about this project than actually writing it. I type out sentences that I immediately erase. No matter how committed I am to letting the rough draft be rough, I can’t let shitty sentences stay on the screen, mocking me with their awkward syntaxes and strained vocabularies. The problem is deeper than bad sentences, though. I am constantly pondering these people, but I can’t get a solid handle on them. I don’t know my characters very well. I’ll get a glimpse of a clear view and then they disappear again. It is entirely possible and even probable that this project is beyond my skill level.

You know what’s great about that? It doesn’t matter.

I can stumble over this thing for as long as I want. If I never really get past these two pages that I really like even though they are just scratching the surface of starting to capture Rachel and Lydia’s relationship and if I spend the rest of my life just rereading those two pages and then adding a paragraph to some other part that I’ll probably erase the next day, it doesn’t matter. I’m having an excellent time doing this thing I am mediocre at.

It’s like driving. I love to drive. I like to roll up the windows and listen to The Diane Rehm Show or the Indigo Girls in my own moving bubble. I like the feeling, however false, that I am in control of the vehicle: it moves according to my hands and feet.

But I am not the world’s best driver. It’s not that I’m not a safe driver. You probably won’t die or even feel like you might die in my car. I’ve never been involved in a collision with a moving vehicle. I’ve never gotten a speeding ticket; indeed, I’ve only been pulled over for speeding once. This isn’t because I always drive the speed limit. It’s because I’ve been lucky.

The best or perhaps just freshest in my mind example of my subpar driving abilities is that I can’t back out of my friend Janet’s driveway so I always park on the street whenever I go to her house. I am thirty years old and I just avoid the shit out of that issue. Is it because I am old enough to recognize my limitations or is it that I’ve let myself stagnate? Couldn’t I just practice and learn how to back out of that damn driveway?

I tell myself that I don’t park in Janet’s driveway to avoid being a careless driver. I don’t want to rely on other people’s careful driving like Jordan Baker in The Great Gatsby. Inevitably, when I am trying to back out of this treacherous driveway, I end up driving on the lawn. That, to me, seems like careless driving. I’ve turned my avoidance behavior on its head so that my parking on the street is actually courteous. Instead of taking my time and backing my small car very slowly out of Janet’s precarious driveway, in front of all of her admittedly nosy neighbors, I just park on the street.

And as long as it isn’t in Janet’s driveway, I like to drive.

I worry that this new project is the writing equivalent of Janet’s driveway, and I’m just parking on the street.

So maybe it does matter. Even though they aren’t any time tables or external accountability factors, I’d like to get through this thing. I want to be able to write an emotional minefield like the one I’ve set up here. I can’t yet articulate why I want to be able to do this. Will it lead to something else? I don’t know. Am I going to live the rest of my life teaching six adjunct classes and writing novels no one ever reads? Come on. I just wrote 1100 words about how I can’t back out of Janet’s driveway. Does it seem like I want to talk about the rest of my life?

If you knew me back in the winter of 2001-02, you’ll have already added “again” to the above statement. It has been ten years, but it feels like a pattern or a relapse or something. My doctor assures me that getting pneumonia twice in ten years doesn’t constitute a “pneumonia issue,” but I think he is just talking about the physical. Psychologically, I definitely have a pneumonia issue.

The last time I had it, it blind-sided me. I had a fever for about a hundred years, and it was the sort of fever malaria victims get in the movies. I had hallucinations. I woke up in the middle of the night having sweated through my sheets. My roommate kept telling me to go the health center, but the fever kept me from making rational decisions. I was pretty sure the health center couldn’t help me, anyway. I couldn’t fathom what earthly thing could be wrong with me that would make me sick in this particularly cinematic way. I was probably going to die, and I spent many hours drifting in and out of consciousness in the top bunk in my dorm room, contemplating my demise and watching a Real World: Athens marathon on MTV. (Needless to say, I have some weird feelings about Greece.)

This time around, the fever was different. It wasn’t ripped-from-the-big-screen. It was achy and cruel. Instead of sleeping constantly, I couldn’t sleep at all. There was that same underlying incongruousness, though. I should’ve recognized the signs. I should’ve realized that when I kept thinking “what the hell is this?” because it didn’t seem like any illness known to humankind, that it was pneumonia, that sneaky bastard.

The tricky thing about pneumonia is that since the initial few days of abject fatigue in which I barely left my bed, I pretty much feel fine—as long as I only do one thing a day. If I do more than one thing in a day—like, say, laundry plus cleaning the bathroom or going to work and going shopping—I feel OK for awhile, but the next day, I’m worthless. That stupid pneumonia cough resurfaces and all I can do is lay on the couch and watch Felicity and go to bed at 8:30. Seriously, I went to bed at 8:30 p.m. on Sunday night, even though I got up at 11:45 a.m.

The worst part about this pneumonia business is that I am forced to confront once again that I am pretty good at being sick, especially this kind of sick. I was pretty much made for this lifestyle. Doing one thing a day does not bother me. I am not afflicted by a feeling of uselessness. Last week, my mom asked me if I was getting bored just being at home. Heck no! I’ve been reading, watching Felicity, writing, and catching up on all the laundry I neglected during finals week and then the following week, which shall be known as Pneumonia Week, but mostly, I am too tired to be bored. I’ll read for twenty minutes before I fall asleep. Felicity maxes out my energy supply.

It has been two weeks since I discovered that pneumonia was the reason I felt worse than dead. I am definitely better. Today I deep-cleaned the bedroom, cleaned out the refrigerator, and went to Target. Three things, none of which were Felicity. We’ll see how I feel tomorrow. If I feel fine, if I’ve finally made it over the hump, then most of me will be glad. But I’m too anti-social, too perfectly suited for the kind of life that includes lots of cat-snuggling and little measurable productivity not to miss it a little. Maybe I have some kind of variation of Stockholm Syndrome. The pneumonia held me captive for so long that now I think I like it.

Sometimes I’m kind of screwed up.

The first step was taking our upstairs TV out of the bedroom. Now I read instead of watch HGTV before I go to sleep. Not only do I have more time for reading, but I also think I sleep better. Most of the time. When the cat isn’t yelling and the weather isn’t making my sinuses beg for mercy and my mind isn’t racing. Lesson: life is not 100% controllable.

When I started this push for more reading of this kind, which can be called “for pleasure” or “for myself” but really means “novels,” I had to figure out what kind of texts I wanted to be reading. It was novels. It has always been novels and it will likely always be novels for me.

In my Gender, Sexuality, and Popular Culture class this semester, we read Orlando and then watched the film adaptation that Sally Potter made in 1992. The students didn’t like the book, but they hated the movie. Something about the movie made them protective of the book, and while they were going through their lists of complaints, I smiled to myself and thought, “These are my people.” The movie couldn’t do the book justice because movies can’t do the things that books do. Of course, there are some examples of great books being made into good movies. The Great Gatsby is one of my favorites. You can try to talk to me about Harry Potter or Lord of the Rings, but I haven’t read those books or seen those movies so I’ll have to take your word for it.

Filmmakers don’t seem to be interested in the books I read. There is a film version of one Joan Didion novel, Play It As It Lays, and it is a perfect adaptation, meaning that it is stark, uncomfortable, quiet, and weird in precisely the same ways the novel is. It is clearly made for Didion readers and just ignores the possibility that someone who hasn’t read the book might watch the movie. This post isn’t meant to be a discussion of whether books should be made into movies. This is about novels, and anyway, I’m not in the habit of making proclamations about how creative folks should use and apply their creativity.

What my class’s discussion crystallized for me is that in my world, novels will always be the highest form of art. Other forms of art—especially music, television, film, and visual art—are important to me, and I get a lot of creative inspiration (for lack of a better word, since I hate this one) from these. Nothing comes close to a novel, though. For as long as I can remember, writing the ultimate novel has been my most persistent fantasy. Just one, singular novel. My very own Beloved. I know it’s a pipe dream at best, but it keeps me going.

The first novel I read this year was Love Medicine by Louise Erdrich. I had been meaning to read this book for a long time. I bought it at a used book store several years ago because a creative writing professor I admire likes Erdrich. (I also bought Tracks but I haven’t read it yet.) Love Medicine was as good as I hoped it would be. It weaves in and out of several stories that are connected in tight and loose ways with such an easy continuity, creating the sort of illusion of linearity, that I found myself getting caught up in Erdrich’s technique and forgetting to follow the story.

Then I read The Marriage Plot by Jeffrey Eugenides because it won the Pulitzer and because I just heard one too many positive reviews on NPR. In a grand marital experiment, Andy and I read it at the same time. Well, we started it at the same time. He plunges into books in a way that I admire. I dawdle. I’m not a slow reader but it takes me a long time to read a book. I want to say I linger, but the truth is that I dawdle. As in many other things, I dawdle when I’m reading a book, especially a book I’m not that into.

Such was the case with The Marriage Plot. I really wanted to like it. I mean, NPR liked it so much, and it sounded very much like the sort of thing I’d like. It was supposed to be about a undergrad at Brown University in the early 1980s, but really only a small portion of the plot happens at Brown. The main character and her boyfriend graduate from Brown in the first fifty pages or so and the rest of the novel is about their halting transition into “real life.” This, too, sounds like something I could dig. The problem is that the protagonist, Madeleine, is not likable. I don’t need my characters to be good people; I just need to be able to connect with them. The only time I felt connected to Madeleine was near the end of the novel when she is drinking bourbon and observes “the bourbon was so sweet it tasted like an alcoholic form of Coke.” That is exactly why I love bourbon. Alas, this moment of connection came too late for Madeleine and me.

I don’t want The Marriage Plot’s issue to be gender, because I really do believe that men can write women and women can write men, but I am not sure Eugenides can write women, or at least this woman. The novel’s third main character is another male, a religious studies student named Mitchell. I think I am supposed to like him, but I couldn’t. I can’t quite put my finger on why, but Mitchell grated on my nerves. His tendency toward self-examination was as useful as Madeleine’s, meaning not at all, because for neither of these characters, whom readers are perhaps supposed to regard as star-crossed lovers, does this endless self-analysis manifest in a healthy self-awareness. Mitchell’s failed attempts to break free of it, though ringing true, still felt flat.

Where Eugenides really shines is in the character of Madeleine’s manic depressive boyfriend Leonard. The Marriage Plot might be better served with Leonard as the protagonist. His struggle to accept and manage his illness is the novel’s most compelling aspect. I had never read about manic depression from the point of view of the sufferer, and Leonard’s struggle feels authentic, mostly in its futility. He has upswings and downswings, and the illness makes sustaining his career all but impossible. At the conclusion of the novel, Leonard runs away—from everything: Madeleine (who is by then his wife), the East Coast (he is originally from Portland), and his career (he is a biologist). Madeleine, after a year of taking care of Leonard and not making any decisions about her life, goes to graduate school. If the novel’s central message is about life after college, the moral of the story is that there is no life. Luckily, I don’t read novels for the morals.

Most recently, I read The Brief, Wonderous Life of Oscar Wao. I bought the book as soon as it came out because I loved Junot Diaz’s first book, a short story collection called Drown, so much, and because I once heard Emily Saliers say that she liked it. I’m happy to report that Diaz’s novel has Drown‘s same voice. It’s a gritty, conversational voice, like talking to a charming thug. The title reminded me of a tragic cat named Oscar that I knew last year, and that comparison lent the whole experience a kind of melancholy tone.

I nevertheless enjoyed the book, but Oscar is the least interesting character in it. Diaz’s style has compelled me ever since I read Drown in a creative writing class in what must have been 2001. He is utterly removed from the conventions of grammar and mechanics that so frame my approach to writing. The reaction I had to Erdrich’s writing is impossible with Diaz. I couldn’t even begin to be distracted by his technique because I can’t parse it out. I can’t see how it works. It confounds me. It might as well be Spanish, and sometimes it is.

Right now, I’m reading Drift by Rachel Maddow. It isn’t a novel and it definitely affects me in decidedly non-fiction ways. (What I did there isn’t what I meant to do there, but it works anyway.) This summer (which for all intents and purposes started today), I’m planning to finish up the Toni Morrison catalog, which has been a goal for too long. I have three novels left before I can say I’ve read all of her novels. I’m positively giddy with anticipation.

2. Fifty Shades of Grey started out as Twilight fan fiction. Sometimes, I just give up. You know? I just give the eff up.

That’s how I feel most days.

For a long time, I have daydreamed about having a podcast about General Hospital. This notion must remain a daydream since such a task is not practical for my lifestyle (i.e. laziness) or my talents (i.e. not talking through my thoughts). Surely you all remember the last time I had a podcast? It was messy, to say the least. Because I have the sort of arrogance that comes from a deadly combination of using a computer proficiently, listening to well-produced audio, and having no idea what audio editing even looks like, I feel like I could sufficiently edit a mediocre podcast given enough time and patience. I labor under the misapprehension that patience is the most important thing in audio and video editing.

Even if I were some kind of editing savant, I know I am not a hosting savant. When I open my mouth and try to explain something—anything, but especially my thoughts and reactions to politics and popular culture—a faltering mess comes out. Just ask my students. I am much more comfortable writing out my thoughts, and I think they are better-received that way. I am aware, though, that there is value in podcasts and for whatever reason, I still daydream about having a GH podcast.

This daydream was re-energized last week when General Hospital tweeted (yes, I follow the show on Twitter) this:

And all I could think was, “I have a lot of feelings.”

I mean, this is a terrible idea, right? But its terribleness is multi-faceted. Hence, the “a lot” part of “I have a lot of feelings.”

Most of my feelings are about history.

On the one hand, I appreciate the push to reinvigorate the cast with faces of yore. I have heard that both Frisco and Felicia are returning, and this turn in the Anna-getting-over-Robin’s-death storyline would keep Luke and Anna on screen. That aspect I support.

On the other hand, this twist would kind of trample on history. Robert and Anna were a super couple, and Robert and Luke’s friendship is legendary. That kind of history can’t be tread upon lightly. Even on soap operas, certain things are untouchable.

Aside from the history, I just don’t feel Luke and Anna as a couple. I like their friendship chemistry, and we all know how I like to champion friendship on the soaps. After all this time, don’t you think Luke and Anna would have already done it if they wanted to? I mean, despite my reverence for their respective relationships with Robert, neither of these characters has a reputation for not doing what they want in order to spare anyone’s feelings. I hope the tweet was intended just to rile up the Twitterverse. I don’t exactly feel riled, but I am definitely on alert.

I remember this stuff.

Click here to view the embedded video.

The lack of sound in that video just adds to the creepiness, doesn’t it?

I can’t believe it has been ten years. I feel old, but I’ve aged more gradually than Kristina. Am I right?

Over the weekend, I made the claim that I don’t have The Rage. I thought I was exempt until I remembered the sudden and irrational flurry of an emotion disproportionate in scope to the event that precipitated it that I felt when I found out that Franco is Jason’s twin brother. That can only be described as The Rage. Ten years ago, when Alexis slept with Sonny, I had The Rage. I had it so bad, guys. I’m pleased to report that these YouTube clips of the offending event no longer evoke The Rage or anything close to it. Watching her make this terrible decision doesn’t bring me joy, but The Rage is all gone. Such is The Rage’s way, I guess.

Happy Monday.

I think I may have aged out of the target audience. I mean, I can easily see how 19-year-old me could’ve loved this show and found it really valuable. Incidentally, I was 19 when it originally aired so what was I doing?

In addition to making me feel like I missed the boat, Felicity‘s introspective style reminds me of a My So-Called Life sequel, like My So-Called Life: The College Years. So when Devon Gummersall showed up in the fourth episode, it felt totally natural.

Even though I don’t exactly feel like the show is for me at this (advanced) point in my life, I’ll likely finish up the series during the summer. So stay tuned for more “insights.”

Guys! General Hospital will be on for at least another year. I have said more than once that all I wanted was for GH to reach its fiftieth birthday, which is April 3, 2013. I was afraid to hope for more than that, and I still am. So I’ll take this victory and I’ll grin about it. It looks like the universe paid attention to the totally arbitrary connection I drew between Mad Men and bad luck. Mad Men is back, and my luck does appear to be turning around.

Think of how cute the ABC daytime schedule will look, with a show called Katie leading into or following GH.

That’s how I feel about Jennifer Baumgardner.

You all know that she used to date Amy Ray, right? Hence, the weird feelings. It isn’t as if I actually believe myself to be Amy Ray’s lover, current or otherwise. It’s just that my brow can’t help but furrow when I think that Jennifer was lucky enough to be in a relationship with Amy. It distracts me from absorbing what I imagine is the meaningful work that Jennifer does. I did read her book, Look Both Ways: Bisexual Politics, some years ago, and that’s when all this really began. It is a kind of sexual identity memoir so naturally it is filled with references to Amy and stories about how terrific Amy is—as if I needed someone to tell me these things. It was while I was reading this book that I began to superimpose my own overwhelming feelings of affection for Amy Ray on to Jennifer’s feelings for her. Of course I have no idea how Jennifer feels about Amy, but during the course of reading her book and ever since I read it, I have sort of just channeled my feelings about Amy through Jennifer as a sort of proxy lover. (All right, I can see that this is getting weird, but I don’t know how to stop the crazy train once it leaves the station.) So you see, I assume Jennifer feels the same way I would feel if I were her, but in no way do I think I am her. Because I, too, as myself, love Amy, I can’t help but be a little jealous that Jennifer loved/loves Amy and that she actually knew/knows her, too.

I don’t know why it didn’t work out with Jennifer and Amy. Amy is kind of a wandering soul—one of those easy-to-love, hard-to-keep types—so she probably has a lot of ex-girlfriends pining away all over the place. According to my worldview, it’s a given that Jennifer is still pining for Amy. If she isn’t, there must be something wrong with her. I mean, how does one get over Amy Ray?

Well, I may get a chance to find out. Jennifer Baumgardner (and Amy Richards) are coming to IPFW on Thursday. Do you all know what Thursday is? It’s Amy Ray’s birthday. It seems like a perfect opportunity for me to air out my weird feelings about Jennifer and maybe get some closure. Maybe Jennifer and I can get a drink and talk through our feelings and then I can concentrate on the merits of her work.

Or, maybe I’ll just go to the lecture, shake her hand and thank her for coming, and then go home with my weird feelings still intact.