Booooring...

Boring: That's me. At least lately.

This has been my view for the last few days. We've spent a couple recent Friday and Saturday nights in: my laptop and I. My continuous whirlwind exploration of New York has come to a grinding, squealing, 3-train-braking-ouch-my-ears halt—for a brief moment. Blame it on the end of the semester: final stories and papers to write, procrastination that has come to bite me in the ass, a little bit of burnout. (I've come to discover that while all writing can be hard work, fiction ALWAYS seems to be hard work, and often I don't think I'm necessarily getting any better at it. Yet I flounder away. Thanks, deadlines!) I have to admit, I love the feeling of saying "the end of the semester." It's been so long since I've been in school. And it's so great to be a student. Don't even ask the last time I actually existed in the world of terms and breaks—I'm, like, one of the old fogies in my class. I just have to say that it's good to be here.

Back to fiction being hard work. I had to turn in a story for my workshop yesterday. What started as a little sketch of a drunk couple leaving a party turned into a short saga about cheating, stillbirth, car accidents, icy roads, hopelessness, resignation, escape, and acceptance. Or something like that (it hung together in my head, anyway). It's so weird where ideas come from, or when they come. You look at the screen or the page and tell yourself, OK, start writing. And from nowhere these characters present themselves. Then you make them do things that don't always make sense. Then you have to figure out a point to the whole thing. That's if it's a good day.

On a not-so-good day, you get coffee or do yoga or make soup or see a movie or go to a museum or clean the house or not, or run or read or sleep or eat, then eat again, then repeat, anything to avoid the way the screen stares at you, indicting you for your incompetence and lack of inspiration. Writing: It does wonders for your self-esteem!

But the semester (let me savor the word again) is coming to a close. That means drinking wine at professors' houses, putting books back on shelves (and giving this laptop a break), going to Friday night at the Met (it's open until 9 pm), seeing Don Giovanni at the other Met (my mom told me that Erwin Schrott, who sings the lead, is apparently the man), attending my final training for the Community Word Project, catching Milk with Veronica (if only to see my classmate, J.F., on the big screen), and busing it to Boston to see my bro—and pick up all my ski stuff! I'm hatching a couple plans to get out West to the mountains. Museums and operas are great and all, but I could use a little powder in my life soon....

Back to my stare-down with the blank page.