'til Tuesday

[I'm a day late in commenting on what proved to be a busy Tuesday, but that doesn't mean I won't comment.]

[Oscars: I echo Max's annoyance at Gong Li's omission from the noms, and I'm pleased that Amy Adams in Junebug was remembered. It's a long way from Drop Dead Gorgeous. I didn't study other groups' film awards (although I've made two posts in a row here about the movies, and like everyone, I've written a little about Brokeback Mountain elsewhere, I don't think about movies in general all that much), but I've had the impression that she was being left out because Junebug was released earlier in the year.]

[Enough of that! I'm beginning to feel like the fatuous matron Eric Idle plays near the end of The Meaning of Life, prattling on about Burt Bacharach and Carole Bayer Sager. Tuesday was full of stuff, some surprising, some not...]

[The Goleta Postal Massacre greeted me as I listened to NPR while having the usual debate about getting out of bed. You don't hear the town mentioned in the national news too often - Goleta has to be one of the most populated areas in California that most Californians have never heard of. I hadn't until I was accepted by UCSB, and I pored over maps when I was a kid. I lived in its zip code for all but a year and a half of my nine years down there.]

[Goleta has long held Santa Barbara County's central postal processing center; it fits with the image of Goleta being the back lot where all of the dirty work gets done while Santa Barbara concentrates on being really pretty. I've been appalled on my several visits back by what's been done to Goleta since I left. When I arrived in 1987, lack of money and any authority besides the County and amusing but powerful enclaves like the Water Board had made the whole place look like a rotting 60s-vintage shopping center that had been jerry-built in the first place. I came to love it, and although I moved into S.B. when I finally had a choice of where to live, I understood in some way those "Goleta Pride" banners that hung ever-hopeful along Hollister Avenue and Calle Real.]

[Anyway, some money came to Goleta after I left, and most of the empty land that separated randomly spaced, decaying housing tracts has been filled in with New Retail. I knew those vernal pool arguments would never stand up to Wal-Mart, Home Depot, and Chili's in the long run. In one of those fields, the one which had separated the apartment complex I lived in for almost four years post-dorms and the inevitable adjacent shopping center, this new postal node was built around the turn of the Y2K Millennium, and that's where the killings happened. I'd thought at first it had been at the old central facility near downtown Goleta where we'd often drop off our taxes just before 8PM on April 15th, but no. Even psychotically bigoted mass murderers can't let me have one damned memory of my youth!]

[Also Tuesday, Coretta Scott King died, Bush said nothing surprising or of note during the State of the Union, and I made my final appearance for at least a month at the writer's studio I've attended fairly faithfully for three and a half years. My friend Violet founded the studio and is its sole paid employee. I work there around the edges both to help her and to pay my own way. I wouldn't have written my law review article without the discipline it offers, but since I finished that in the spring of '03, the reason for my going hasn't always been clear.]

[The studio's mission is to help writers finish their projects by forcing them to sit down and write without distractions. Aside from a brief check-in at the beginning, we don't do anything but write. Implied here is that these frustrated writers have projects they care about, and that, unlike the "War" on "Terror," there's a projected end. I've been having trouble finding a project to care about enough to finish it. For a while it was a memoir; then what probably would have been a series of slightly fictionalized stories about the Friendly Neighborhood Cabaret Around The Corner; then a novel with autobiographical details and broad plot arcs cleverly disguised; then a joke screenplay. Right now I'm back to memoir-ing, and in a way I like better than my previous dead recording of events.]

[But there's little there that feels like the kind of writing that gives me joy, or which used to do so. Being a writer was the first ambition I ever expressed (with a black Magic Marker on a wooden railing at age three, I think), and it's really the only one that will feel like the fulfillment of any sort of the "dream" that people keep telling me I'm supposed to have regarding a career.]

[I remember walking into the Brentano's in Santa Barbara, looking with Jessica at the new hardcovers, and declaring that my name would be up there some day. Am I a writer already? I've been published but never been paid for my writing. Nowadays, the writing that makes me happiest I do here and in clever little email messages.]

[I get frustrated with the way Violet runs the writers studio, and I've started to resent the trek every Tuesday to a somewhat dysfunctional place where I no longer have much reason to be. (Ignore that sentence if I tempted you a couple of paragraphs ago to try the studio. Many people have finished their projects there; it works.) I'm taking a break, and while I've said it's only for February, I have a feeling it might take longer than that.]

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