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Beating writer’s block

April 21, 2011 By Jessica Safran 10 Comments

As a writer, it’s natural to have writer’s block at one time or another.

Now is one of those times.

After starting this piece about five different times with five completely different topic ideas, I decided to go with the only thing that I could write about: not writing.

It’s not that I don’t have anything to write about. I have  much to write about. What I don’t have is a good writing practice — a committed discipline — and without that, my writing is subject to my moods and the unscheduled time slots in my calendar (between the hours of 12am and 6am). I need to cultivate the practice of placing butt in chair to write whether I feel like it or not — rain or shine, inspired or stymied, happy or cranky.

My most developed writing ritual is procrastination. I tend to find ways to procrastinate until the pressure I put myself under gets really unpleasant. I do a lot of web “research.” I think about the logistics of my writing rather than the content. I fret about the fact that I didn’t schedule writing time in my calendar, or if I did, I used the time for something else. I go grocery shopping. I do laundry. I even pay bills — another activity I procrastinate religiously, unless of course I end up doing it as a way to procrastinate the writing.

How long can I write about not writing? Isn’t that an act of procrastination?

I could write about how I brought my laptop with me to the couch with the intention of sitting comfortably and writing but fell asleep instead. This is what happens when you start a writing session after midnight, after a fabulous dinner with friends that included a couple of bottles of wine. I could write about how much bill-paying I completed, or how many new photos of my baby nephew I added to my growing digital collection. I could write about how I learned that actor Ed Norton dated singer Courtney Love from 1996 to 1999. Finally, I could write about how I viewed the online galleries of all the photographers I used to work for in the 1980’s after compulsively Googling them for the first time ever… when I was supposed to be writing. I guess I thought I might write about them. I guess I just did, so in retrospect it was web research.

Did you know that “ok” first showed up in 1839 as an abbreviation for a deliberate misspelling, “oll korrect?” It was the vestige of a slang fad in New York and Boston. Should you care to question the source of this random piece of information, according to the Chicago Manual Style (CMS), the proper way to cite it is:

o. k.. Dictionary.com. Online Etymology Dictionary. Douglas Harper, Historian. http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/o. k. (accessed: April 18, 2011)

I think I just have to accept that this piece will not be what I had originally intended. It will end without me writing about anything substantive that I experienced before this bout of writer’s block. It will be disjointed and self-indulgent. It will end without much logic or warning.

Filed Under: Humor, MISC, Opinion Tagged With: , ,

Baby’s first oral surgery

April 8, 2011 By Jessica Safran 9 Comments

One Friday not long ago, I noticed that my six-year-old daughter’s adult tooth was erupting before one of her bottom front baby teeth had fallen out. The baby tooth was loose but not going anywhere. I thought of a shark’s mouth, with rows of multiple sets of teeth. I called my daughter’s pediatric dentist, Dr. Ray, who’d given me explicit instructions to call her the moment I noticed a big tooth growing in too early.

“You need to come in Monday,” she instructed. “That tooth has to go. And very important: your daughter must go to school after.”

I fretted about Monday morning’s impending violence and decided not to tell Monkey what would happen, or else I would never get her to go. I said instead that Dr. Ray needed to check her loose tooth. Until now, she’d only had favorable checkups that included cleanings and x-rays. The child hadn’t even gotten a cavity yet. She would never forgive me for subjecting her to this. She’d see it as a betrayal. In twenty years, she’d discuss it in therapy.

When we got there, Dr. Ray said plaintively after examining Monkey’s mouth, “Oh, how I wish that she wouldn’t do this! Why must she make me prove myself?”

“Who?” I asked.

“Mother Nature! She wants me to prove that I know what I’m doing.”

“What are you doing?” Monkey asked Dr. Ray.

“I am helping Mother Nature by making some room for your tooth to grow in.” She swabbed the lower gum to numb it. Then she expertly hid from view the comically large syringe full of Novocain.

The dentist’s assistant pulled back Monkey’s lower lip, and Dr. Ray stuck the needle into the gum and slowly pressed the plunger. Monkey was crying with her eyes shut tightly, tears streaming. I sighed with misery.

“I’m going to do both, since I don’t want you back here in a week,” Dr. Ray explained.

“I understand,” I said with resignation.

Monkey felt around for her numb lower lip and chin. She unsuccessfully tried to purse her lips together and drooled. She cried. I held her hand, caressing it.

This time, Dr. Ray hid from Monkey’s view a set of shiny silver pliers. On one side, the dentist’s assistant held down her lip. I stood over her looking into her face, her eyes squeezed shut, and held down her arms. From the other side, Dr. Ray quickly pulled out Monkey’s right bottom front baby tooth and then the left bottom front baby tooth in a continuous graceful motion. The blood was efficiently suctioned away through a tube held to the site of the wounds by the assistant. Monkey was instructed to bite on a wad of rolled up gauze that was stuffed into the gap where her two teeth used to be.

I was given a tiny pink plastic treasure test. Inside it were her two baby teeth.

When she came home that day from school, she said, “How come I had to have my teeth out?” She’d figured it out once the Novocaine wore off. It was a good thing that it was a status symbol in school to have your teeth fall out.

“Because the big teeth needed room to grow in straight.”

I showed her the treasure chest and she marveled at the two perfect baby teeth.

That night I stuck the tiny plastic treasure chest under her pillow.  “For the tooth fairy,” I explained.

“The tooth fairy isn’t real. You’re the tooth fairy!”

“You think so?  Should we just skip it then?”

“No! Leave it there… just in case.”

Filed Under: Humor, Parenting

Mind Over Matter

March 22, 2011 By Jessica Safran 9 Comments

In January 1990, my friend Nate and I were enthralled by an intriguing New Zealand tourist attraction: bungee jumping off a 160-foot crane perched over Auckland Harbor. We hung around watching people jump off the crane and bounce around over the water, whooping and hollering with resonant joy.

We liked that sound.

We decided to jump the following day. The entire night and morning of the next day we buzzed with a happy restlessness, anticipating our jumps with nervous excitement.

Nate dove off head first and screamed with abandon, his T-shirt gathered around his neck from the force of the bounce, exposing his pale chest. Five minutes later he was standing next to me, beaming.

“How was it?” I asked.

Although it was overcast that day, his eyes were a dazzling and fiery green with brown flecks ringing his dilated pupils. I looked at him, eyebrows raised.

“Go for it, Jess,” said Nate with the voice of someone speaking to me from the other side of a rite of passage. Who was I to turn down a challenge?

I paid seventy-five New Zealand dollars, and was ushered to the staging area below the crane. Sitting on the floor of a white metal cage, I was outfitted with a harness around my feet that would be attached to a thick latex bungee cord. “My lifeline,” I giggled nervously to the blond, tanned JumpMaster who was tending to me. He winked. As a final check, he expertly locked the bungee cord to my harness and tugged, and then unlocked it for the ride up. I stood. It was time. The JumpMaster entered the cage with me, and it rose slowly into the air. The pounding in my ears was so loud I couldn’t hear the JumpMaster speak to me. Uncomprehending, I watched his lips move.

Suddenly, everything stopped. There was only the insistent beating of my heart.  Animal survival instinct had alarms going off all over my body and was doing everything it could to make me reconsider, including hosting a hemispheric butterfly migration in my stomach, and giving me a severe case of dry mouth.

“I’m attaching the bungee cord to your feet,” said the JumpMaster.

“Ok.”

“I’m going to count down ‘Three-two-one-Bungee’, and when I say ‘Bungee’, that’s your cue to jump.”

“Do I have to jump a certain way?” I asked, my stomach in my throat.

“No, just lean out and jump forward.”

“Ok,” I lied.

“Ready?”

I nodded and gulped. He slid up the door of the cage.

“Three… two… one… BUNGEEEE!”

I took a deep breath, as if I were going to plunge underwater. Fully intending to jump out of the cage and propel myself forward, I sort of stepped off—in a manner closer to falling off.

I was in free fall as the nature around me burned into my retinas and the air automatically exited my lungs in the form of a loud scream. I felt like I was remembering one of the flying or falling dreams I had every so often—only it wasn’t a memory, and it wasn’t a dream. I watched as the surface of Auckland Harbor rushed up to meet me and passionately hoped I wouldn’t break it.

My bungee cord was at that time-stopping standstill point between being stretched to capacity and snapping back. In that moment I faced the water in silent wonder, praying Hello as one tiny drop of awareness should to an expansive water totem. I rebounded into the air, flying. A few minutes later I was back on land, rubber-kneed and giggling, hugging Nate as my flattened viscera slowly decompressed from the top of my thoracic cavity.

I realized I’d subjected myself to something very dangerous—and pointless. Though maybe not so pointless: I’d imposed my will over my animal instinct. The adrenaline high lasted for days.

Filed Under: Humor, MISC, Nostalgia Tagged With: , , , , , , ,

My writing debut

March 9, 2011 By Jessica Safran 14 Comments

I’m a journalist. That is, I am someone who keeps a journal. My compulsive writing habit started in 1973 when I was seven years old. It was an important writing activity called the Thought Notebook in my Brooklyn public elementary school classroom. Every day we would write a couple of sentences about our thoughts. We could tell a story about something that happened at home or at school, or write about what we were feeling. We could write a message to our teacher who would often write a response on the same page.

On a recent morning, my newly rediscovered Thought Notebook was on my desk where my curious six-year-old daughter noticed it and began to leaf through it, reading it aloud to herself. I was thrilled, since a few weeks before she had started reading to herself without any adult in the vicinity. When I heard her read the pages written by my seven-year-old self, I was dumbstruck.

She read the entry from Sept 10, 1973. “School is nice. I like it.”

There were many similar entries following the winning formula I like X because X is nice. Luckily, my vocabulary eventually got bigger.

Then my daughter came across the excellent entry about my second grade teacher, Mrs. Allen. “I like Mrs. Allen!” I declared, to which Mrs. Allen responded in bright blue felt tip letters: “I like Jessica! And I would like Jessica to write a lot more! Right now!”

So I did.

Little did Mrs. Allen know that I would go on to fill up fifty journals between the ages of eight and forty. Which might actually sound somewhat impressive, if they were all brilliantly written as well as legible (pick one).

I made my daughter an offer. “Would you like me to read you my journal tonight before you go to bed instead of a chapter book?”

“Yes!” she said, the look of joy on her face one of those indescribable parental pay-offs.

I read the entire journal to her as we lay next to each other in her bed. We both agreed we would’ve been friends had she been in my class.

Then we came across this entry from March 11, 1974: “I want to help the animals who are in danger to survive.” Mrs. Allen wrote in response, this time in red ballpoint pen, “That’s very nice, Jessica. We will talk more about what we can do to help them.”

I turned to my daughter. “My entries are getting better, I think.” She nodded in agreement.

It took a while to get her to bed that night. She was so excited to the point of restlessness, having met Mommy as a seven-year-old by reading my first journal. The outcome of this is that she now wants to start her own Thought Notebook. She will write down her thoughts, and I will write my responses to them. It will be our first written collaboration, and I imagine in thirty-five years we will reach the reader who is our target audience: some first or second grader who will somehow be related to us.

Filed Under: Nostalgia, Parenting

Monkey philosophy

February 17, 2011 By Jessica Safran 9 Comments

My six-year-old daughter has a bit of the philosopher in her. She asks a lot of questions. Often it’s the same question multiple times, as if asking it will make her desired outcome happen faster.

On a fifteen-minute walk to a friend’s house for a play date, five minutes into the journey she asked, “Mommy, are we there yet?”

“No … you know where we are.”

A minute of quiet walking, then: “Mommy, are we there yet?”

“Monkey, you just asked me that a minute ago. Do you see where we are?”

“Yes.”

“Are we there yet?”

“No.”

Ninety seconds go by.

Monkey, whining: “MOMMEEE, are we there yet? My feet hurt.”

Me, trying a new approach: “Yep. We’re there.”

Silence.

Monkey, smiling: “No, we’re not!”

Me: “We’re not? You’re kidding! Uh oh! Where are we then?”

Sometimes the questions are about bigger topics, like the one I got yesterday after we chatted about her six-week-old cousin: “Mommy, how does the mommy get the baby out?”

“Well, the mommy goes into labor. Labor means ‘work.’ Getting the baby out is hard work. Here, put on your socks, we have to go.”

The questions these days are more about the physical world, but two years ago when she was four, I was already getting the metaphysical questions. One night she asked me what God looked like while I was flossing her teeth. “That’s a very good question, Monkey. It’s hard to say exactly what God looks like because you might say God is everywhere.” She looked uncertain, either because of my vague explanation, or her anticipation of her least favorite part of the nightly flossing routine. I went for those two tricky back teeth in the upper right of her mouth. “Although some people imagine God as a man with a flowing white robe and long white hair and a beard,” I offered, pulling out the floss with a pop, as Monkey winced. She smacked her lips, happy to be done.

“A man with a white robe and long hair and a beard?” she giggled, not sure if I was kidding.

Later that night, I gave Monkey a big, squeezy hug as I tucked her in bed. “No matter how old you are, you’ll always be my baby!”

“Even when I’m old?”
 she asked.

“Even when you’re old.”

“Even when I’m fifty?”

“Even then, when I’m eighty-eight.” 

I thought of my own mother, whose age remains highly classified and who has always had the ability to reduce me emotionally to a cranky fifteen-year-old no matter how old I am.

“Eighty-eight? That’s SUPER old!” Monkey gazed at me lovingly, stroking my cheek with her hand. Her face then grew somber, and she innocently ambushed me.

“Mommy, what if you die? How am I going to find food by myself? How will I know what to do?”

My heart skipped a beat in my rib cage. “Oh Monkey … you will know how to take care of yourself long before I die. I promise.”

“I hope we die together—I want to be right next to you. Will we be together when we die?”

The nightlight blurred.

Suddenly, I squeezed her again, even tighter. I forced myself to breathe deeply in order to respond with a steady voice. “Monkey, no matter what happens, we will be together, always.”

“That makes me happy, Mommy.”

I released my hold on her and stroked her hair. “Me too, Monkey.”

*
We’re now two blocks from the play date.

“Mommy … are we there yet?

“Almost!” I declare, triumphant.

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Filed Under: Humor, Nostalgia, Parenting, Spirituality