The other day a dear friend who I have known for many years and someone with whom I’ve blurred the platonic/romantic friendship lines many times, called me quirky. He used other words, but quirky was what stayed with me. Because he meant it with affection, and he knows me quite well and knows that I’m weird, and that I think I’m weird.
One of the greatest things for me about being a writing student, is meeting other writers. We are different. Each of us our own bizarre collection of idiosyncrasies. Kind of like the table of food at a church pot luck dinner. But I’ve found that some of my weirdness is not uniquely mine, but actually part of a shared fraternity.
I own books. I have a hard time walking out of a bookstore without spending a lot of $. “Ma Belle Mere” keeps lecturing me to use a library card. But I like to own my books. I like to keep them long after I’ve read them, even if I never open them up again and re-read them. I loan them to friends, always asking that they return them to me. My non-writer friends, many of whom are also avid readers, find this unnerving. They are afraid of losing my book, or forgetting to return it to me. They don’t quite understand why I need to keep them.
My fellow writing students, own books, keep them, loan them out but ask for them back.
I edit my thoughts. I have an inner dialogue, sometimes it’s the characters in my stories. I imagine what they would be thinking if they were standing on the L platform with me. Sometimes it’s a replaying of my day and how I would describe it in an email (or a blog). And sometimes it’s my own fragmented prose word play. Just me on the bus trying to describe how the Lake looks to me at night. But even in my own thoughts, I edit. I catch myself using cliché’s or obvious word choices, and I struggle to find new ways, my own way, to say something. No one will hear my thoughts but still I have to write them the best way that I can.
The other night I was on the phone with a writing friend, she was tipsy, smoking cigarettes and talking through a moment of anguish. As she was re-telling the nights events, she used a phrase, one that I can’t remember now, something clichéd like maybe “stars in my eyes”, some phrase that we use in every day speech, and she stopped herself, saying, “Well, if we were in workshop someone would scratch that out.” It made me smile.
I am among other quirky people who are also in constant play with words.
