A teleology of the writing life

I’m writing in search of an edge, an angle, a certain keenness and acerbic wit. It’s what I might have called “my literary voice” if it was 1985 and I wore draping black dresses with shoulder pads and scribbled brooding poetry in diners that borrowed their décor from the Q train. I never thought I’d blog, but I suppose, like writing in general, it’s just something I resisted until it became undeniably clear—it may just be the thing. If I wanted to do something out of character and be really optimistic, I could think of myself as some kind of writing superhero, born with a pen in my hand and fated to save humanity one snarky (but incredibly poignant) article at a time. It goes like this:

My earliest memory of writing is of the time I procrastinated on a book report in first grade. Actually, that’s when I learned the word procrastinate and it’s a tenet I’ve ascribed to ever since. Evidently, by the following year I was a dedicated short story writer. I have no recollection of this at all—I only found out several years later when I bumped into my second grade teacher, Mrs. Burns, who asked if I was still writing (I wasn’t, I wanted to be biologist and cure cancer). Fast forward to junior year of high school, when I took AP Chem and AP English and worked after school in a solitary beige vascular lab pulverizing aneurisms and growing arterial cells in flasks. I really enjoyed English; I felt psychically connected to Kafka, not to mention real fuckin’ cool for memorizing passages from Shakespeare. And I hated acids and bases and counting moles. More than that, I couldn’t stand all those overachievers with their veins full of liquid nitrogen. I usually spent chem class hyperventilating in the first row.
And still, I didn’t put it together. There I was, sixteen, angsty, romantic and trite (ah, my salad days!), worshipping the Beats and Maureen Dowd, sure that I’d become an MD/PhD. Eventually I realized that any science that didn’t appear in the Times on Tuesday was dullsville, so I decided to study anthropology in college. I really liked it for long time, but, again, I came to hate the idea of locking myself in an ivory tower and throwing away the key. The turning point came when I studied in Tel Aviv about a year ago and, inspired by all the male beauty running around on the beach in its underwear—er, natural beauty of the Holy Land—I started writing again. Still, it’s slow going and torturous, like bleeding onto the page—in a good way, of course.

So I’m blogging to make up for a life of denial and misplaced ambition. Maybe it’s a sort of penance, but I’m hoping it won’t be as much of a drag as all that. I’m hoping it’ll make me a little sharper, get the juices flowing. Mostly, I hope it’ll be a good read, maybe even good enough to distract five or ten people procrastinating at work.

- shoshi