Posted September 4th, 2003 by Michelle

I am on an email list with about 20 college friends. These friends were not mine in college; they belong to Sean and Ian. I’ve met some of them over the years, but most were relative strangers to me when I was invited to join. I’ve been a part of it now for five years, and just last month finally met the last member. It is a group of thinkers and artists, without necessarily defining themselves as such, and even when I don’t have time to write back, my life is richer and cooler and funnier because of this list.

Some time back, a member decided he was going to quit the list. This man was not the most popular guy around, but I didn’t have any real feelings on the matter because I had never met him. But it was the way he quit that gave credit to the others’ opinion of him. He wrote an email to the list saying that he was off to bigger and better things, that being part of this list was “getting in (his) way” and “slowing (him) down”. As if we were a bunch of drooling losers filling his inbox with forwards of blonde jokes and African bank account scams. So he dropped off, never to return except, once or twice, to plug shows he was doing. I believe I met him some time later but it was during the last fuzzy Los Angeles year and everything looked like solid poop to me. I don’t remember the meeting.

I was thinking about this today as I was reading some of Ian’s old blogs. There is no doubt that he is the better writer, and really, the better thinker. He also has the benefit of not just five years, but also of education and more practical experience in writing than I. When he was writing Wednesday’s Child in the Daily Tar Heel, I was wearing sequins and dancing and singing bad Bette Midler songs onstage somewhere in California. I was writing all the time, and I had a terrific editor in my mom, but I didn’t focus on it nearly as much as I could have.

I was also thinking about my blog versus the novel I’m working on. How will keeping this blog affect my commitment to my book? Which brings me back to the issue of quitting my job. One of my managers, who I can now say can be a real toad, told me he didn’t understand why my job at USC kept me from writing. Apart from time spent both at work, and exhausted from work, I tried to explain something to him: The main reason I’m leaving my job is that if I don’t, I will not succeed at anything else. I am reasonably challenged, very successful, and make enough money (almost) to keep a roof over my head. I have tried and tried to work out a schedule that allows me to work on the other passions in my life and it hasn’t worked. It hasn’t worked for three years. So I am going to find a job that I will not take home with me, and one that requires as little time as possible to make ends meet. And one that I don’t love so I will be inspired to do my other things.

Which brings me back to my blog. It is a very selfish thing, something entirely for myself, in a way, as it has mostly replaced my journal writing. In this forum, I can be good or brilliant or average or bad and it doesn’t change my life one way or another. I am not proud of anything I do that is average, but this allows me to write every day, to put words together on a page. I can be scattered or irrelevant but at least I’m writing. And so, back to my original thought, I was wondering if this blog, where I’m neither successful nor unsucessful, where I can let my mind go in any direction, where I can vent my anger or expose my broken heart or talk about my butt (or my cervix!), will this affect my other writing. Will it “get in my way” or “slow me down”.

But I’ve realized what that friend on my email list obviously did not. That list makes us think, exercises our brains, challenges our views, and lets us make plans with twenty people at the click of a button. This blog will not tell me where to get drinks tomorrow night, but it is writing, and writers write. I will continue to be varying in my brilliance and mundanity (ha HA! And make up words on the way!) and every day, put more words together, work that muscle harder.

I’ve quit my job, the opening of my new job has just been postponed to the third week of this month, my heart is still a mess, I can’t afford yoga, I can’t inspire myself to get on my bike in the morning, I don’t have enough money to pay the rent, and I have to have a colposcopy and biopsy on my cervix this Tuesday because my most recent PAP was worse than the one just a month ago. There ya have it. That’s my life. What can I do? Sit down and do this, once a day. Write.