Thursday, September 07, 2006

When Reality Gets To Be Too Much

[posted by dinah]
There is life beyond the blog.
There is life beyond the blog.
There is life beyond the blog.

Last month, I wrote about how The Blog was ruining my life. It was distracting me from writing, diverting my angst and motivation and I found myself reading other people's blogs, following Fat Doctor's life as if it were my own. A summer thing, I told myself, with the hope that with the end of summer I might enroll in a grad school course, might let Shrink Rap take its rightful place in my life as just a blog, not an obsession.

Tonight, I had my first class-- a grad school course on Fiction Techniques. It's been a long time since I took a college course. Back then, we didn't register by fax. We didn't email the professor before class began. We didn't print out the parking map from a pdf file (--oh, I didn't have a car, never mind a computer). And the professors never began class by commanding the students to Turn Off Your Cell Phones. Other than that, it was pretty much the same.

I don't think I was the oldest person in the class, but I might have been the second oldest. There were a few people who looked a little older than the rest of the crew, and I'm not very good at guessing ages. Many of the students were in their twenties, and there were some very interesting hair chemicals involved.

I have homework.

I need to go buy my text books--Amazon is definately an improvement from those days of old. And I have to write a 2 to 4 page paper where a fictional character discusses a difficult event in his/her life. My character is going to be a 54 year old. His difficult event is going to be slipping on the snowy steps and injuring his back-- a devestating injury resulting in chronic pain. He becomes disabled, angry, depressed, and addicted to pain medications. You may be asking Why? Isn't that like going to work, rather than writing fiction?

Maybe I'll change my mind when I go to actually write it.

2 comments:

Steve & Barb said...

He sounds like one of my typical patients I see on the medical floor. Let me know if your character needs a consult. He'll either wind up on Cymbalta, Effexor, or Remeron. If Neurology sees him, then maybe add some Neurontin or, lately, Lyrica. Add some PT and exercise for good measure.

Dinah said...

JW: my life isn't that hard.

FooFoo5:
Um. No, I didn't mention the blog. It is now, however, on my CV which is a hodgepodge of chaos anyway, so "...Along with ClinkShrink and Roy" fits right in.
I wore a white sweater, jeans, black sandals. I think it was okay, but if you'd like to be my wardrobe consultant.... The stain came out of the white T shirt and according to teeny-bopper child any pants where your butt doesn't stick fully out when you sit down is "up to your ribs".

No one called me "madame." Ever. You can be the first? In Baltimore it's ma'am and I've been called that (rather unnervingly) since the day I moved here from NYC.

Supplies: thought we had spiral notebooks and at the 11th hour I couldn't find one--ended up grabbing the one a kid used for Drivers Ed (only 2 lines of writing). I now have a lot of loose papers and have to decide Folder or Looseleaf Notebook, but even I'm not geeky enough to bring a hole puncher to class.

Admiration via cyberspace: it's transference (to the blog). Still, Thank You.

Your tone: you're enjoying exacting revenge for all the ribbing I've done about your diaper bag purchase.