Ah, writing.

Unlike any other art form I can think of, the physical mechanics of my craft are put to good use on a daily, if not hourly basis, by virtually everyone I have any contact with in the course of any even day.

Permission slips, reports to bosses, shopping lists, homework, love notes — all require exactly and precisely the same skill in producing letters and stringing them into words as that possessed by Shakespeare, Steinbeck, and Plath. Once your motor skills are developed enough to clutch a pencil, you’re pretty much assured of being able to write.

And frankly, it produces nothing. This thing I know how to do — the only thing I know how to do — is literally no thing. There’s nothing to hold, nothing to put on a shelf, nothing to clean yourself or feed yourself or warm yourself with. That which is tangible about writing is not, in fact, the writing, but the scroll, paper, screen on which it’s found. The letters themselves do not exist, save for the medium which conveys them. The “writing” of which we speak when we talk about the art or profession of writing is not — really — the formation of letters on a surface (that which anyone can do with a pencil), but rather the arranging of words in the mind.

And yet for me this process is almost as mechanical as the pencil. I think of my process, so to speak, as something close to construction. There’s also music to it, rhythm — an ugly/dissonant brick will be rejected — but it’s building. It’s foundation, layers, mortar, structure. Architectural flourishes are important, as they are in any construction project, but if they get in the way, they have to go.This is especially true when I’m writing to a specific length, as I almost always do: 750 words or (oy) 200 words is precisely that: 750 or 200 words. The house can’t exceed the lot on which it’s being built. If the choice has to be made between a solid foundation or a lovely bay window — the foundation wins. Oh, the many delicate fruits of my artistic mind that have been stripped from their branches and thrown on my compost piles! Oh, the humanity!

I suspect that this is the real reason that I don’t write fiction. It’s often assumed that anyone who self-identifies as a writer has a novel or collection of poems under the mattress, but not me. I long thought — really, really long — that this non-literary writing of mine was a lesser form, something I should aspire to overcome, and I only recently came to understand that I frankly don’t care to overcome it. I don’t want to build new worlds, or find alternative ways to envision the one I’m in. I want to talk about the one I’m in. I want to take one tiny corner of the vast slag heap of human reality and find where the pieces fit together and sort through the bits that were mis-cobbled and mis-labeled and need to be broken apart and put together differently. Even the things that work right, the stuff that’s like clockwork — I want to pry off the back, see the works, and then screw everything back into place.

But because this bears a more than a passing resemblance to what is simultaneously one of the most pedestrian acts of literate human life, and the stuff of fantasy and high literature, I find that (even among writers), there’s often very little understanding of what I do.

Carefully constructed arguments that describe painful realities and prescribe vital solutions on the pages of the nation’s largest newspapers may be, for instance, referred to as “letters.”

“An op/ed,” I want to say, pulling myself up to my fullest 5 feet 4 inches, “is not a letter!”

“As if!” I hunger to add. “I am an essayist, sirrah!”

Whereas on the other hand, when I publicly bemoan the fact that I’ve failed find a way to continue to ply my particular trade — essayists having gone the way of the glittering literary salons of the early 20th century — I’m told that what I do is art, a calling, something mystical that requires only my mind and my willing spirit. Not a job — I must, I am told, simply write.

All of which is hopelessly complicated by the fact that I actually do write, quite a lot, in yeoman-like fashion, stringing words together for other people, expressing their thoughts for them.

But not my own. Not very often, or, indeed, almost never.

What I want, what I worked toward, what I to this day dream of, is a job which allows me to use these no-thing producing skills in order to go through our slag heap and reflect back up to the world what I’ve found. This is my skill-set, it’s one I’ve honed, and I want to use it to pay my bills. I don’t want to simply write — I want a job.

Oh it’s a hard life, I tell you what.

I suspect I’m not the only professional who feels woefully misunderstood both by the larger community and often within her own profession. “I’m not a nurse!” I can imagine some saying. “I’m a nurse practitioner!” “I’m not a mechanic!” others may cry. “I’m a -”  — see, I’m too ignorant to even know what a non-mechanic mechanic might be called.

I further suspect that I’m not the only creative person called on to simply create, with little or no thought to whether or not my creations will ever be seen in the light of day, or if I will ever be compensated for my efforts.

But I am the only one who can figure out what the hell all this means for me, and I haven’t yet. And that, for now, has got to be my job. Whether it pays, gives me joy, or puts my skills to good use, or not.

(Sorry – deleted for being overly self-indulgent, and for inadvertently inspiring [with genuine apologies to the commenter in question, whose well-intended comment I’ve deleted along with the post] extraordinarily inaccurate arm-chair psychoanalysis. I’ll be back tomorrow!)

I am so tired, so deeply, dizzyingly, bone tired. And I don’t mean “tired of [fill in the blank],” though I am tired of many things.

I have slept mostly poorly and not enough for months. I’m on such a deficit that when I get a good night’s sleep, I’m more wrecked than usual the following day — it’s my impression that when my body gets good sleep, it remembers how things are supposed to be: “Oh my God! This is what we’re supposed to be doing! More! More of this! Now!”

But what do I then do? Almost invariably, I stay up late, get somewhere between five and six hours of sleep. Sleep which is riddled with anxiety (and thus less than restful) because I go to bed cursing myself for not having gone to bed earlier. Because I have always needed more than six and a half hours every night, my entire life, and now, with this going on, really — shouldn’t I shoot for eight or so?

The quality of my sleep has actually improved lately — fewer nights riven with Restless Leg Syndrome, fewer nights where I can remember every toss and every turn, fewer nights where I just get up and get some cereal and walk around in order to shake my brain loose of whatever is dogging it (stuff I can rarely remember the next day) — thanks mostly to the various supplements offered by Lisa, my naturopath.

(Lisa, who I love, because a couple of years ago she listened to my story of five years of post-surgical woe [surgery? you say. Click here, I offer] and ran a few tests and fiddled with various levels of vitamins and minerals and your whatnot and: Wow. Now the fact that the surgery left me an organ down [I’m now mono-adrenal glanded] no longer means a daily cycle of brain-deadness and exhaustion that is nothing like this sleepless-ness-exhaustion but is more like a kind of shut-down of functionality. I can function right now, I’m just really tired. Before Lisa, I had hours every day when it was sometimes hard to just plain function. Isn’t it amazing, how many different kinds of “tired” there are?)

But I digress. Probably because I’m so tired.

I was saying: The quality of my sleep has improved, but there’s such a deficit, that I just need more of it. Plain and simple. So I promised myself that I would get at least seven hours of sleep every night this week. That lasted three days.

Why do I tell you all of this? Because I sat here for an hour today, trying very hard to write something and all I could do was think about how tired I am.

Too tired to want to grapple with the ugliness out there, all around. Too tired to be able to seek out social truths and pin them down with words. Too tired to do anything but think about how tired I am, and how I wish I had a job that would pay me to do what I know how to do. Thinking too much about that leads to misery, though, a misery I found myself marinating in on Monday. I’m worn out. I’m worn down. I’m worn through. And the truth is that my lack of sleep is only a part of it.

But it is the part that I can do something about. To sleep, perchance to dream…. I don’t even care if I dream. I really just want to sleep.

Today I…

– wrote an op/ed for someone I’ve never met, via a PR firm, at which I have met one person, but not the person I was working with today, who I have never met.

– discovered various Items Of Great Import that the boy (who is actually trying very hard not to do this anymore) had forgotten at home. Prevailed upon the husband to drop them at school on his way to work. Wondered if maybe the ladies in the middle school office now know the husband by name.

– tried, without success, to track down a particular chunk of money that appears to have gone awry. Or amiss. Or possibly agley.

– made reservations at the “boutique hotel” (nicely renovated apartment building) at which we like to stay when we’re in Tel Aviv (cause we’re going in a month).

– tweeted a few tweets. Discovered that James Fallows at The Atlantic is following me. Passed out. Was revived.

– failed again to call my friend Hazel, but remembered that I have an excuse: I can’t find her number. Was reminded that I’m too embarrassed to email her to tell her that. Was then reminded that I could just call her on Skype. Was in turn reminded that Skype is oddly mysterious to me, and I have yet to actually use it. Was reminded that I am lame.

– attempted to throw in the towel on the girl’s Halloween costume, in the wake of this weekend’s heinous discovery that either a) I can’t sew a stretch fabric to save my life or b) my machine is a piece of crap that can’t sew a stretch fabric to save its life. Took cut fabric and pattern to the seamstress at the cleaners — only to have her come up with every excuse in the book not to do it (!). Was reduced to returning to the fabric store to buy the “wrong” fabric, a fabric which might not suit the demands of the Simplicity fabric designers but with which I am at least able to work. Sighed heavily, and repeatedly.

– bought flowers with which to construct a head lei for the girl to wear in our final mother-daughter (parent-child) hula class this evening. Constructed lei.

– re-wrote op/ed.

– called synagogue to make reservations for the various events surrounding our new rabbi’s installation. Commented to self that this makes the new rabbi sound like an art project, or pipes.

– attended said hula class. Put lei on own head at the girl’s request when the girl declared it “too heavy” for her wee head. Danced a little hula.

– practiced the haftorah that I will be chanting in shul on Shabbat. Discovered a verse with more bizarre trope (cantillation) in it than I have ever before seen in a single verse. Struggled mightily with said verse; may have prevailed. Judge is still out on this.

– threw soup, rolls, and fruit on the table, calling this supper.

– failed to place the Peapod order.

– at various and random moments of the day found myself aghast, enraged, horrified, and/or mortified by the news out of Israel, the news out of America’s mid-term elections, the news out of Washington. Wished very, very, very hard that I might never have to think about any of these things ever again.

– read two Mad Men recaps. Dude – Don proposed to Megan?!

– wondered why it was that my brain couldn’t gather itself sufficiently to write the post I had planned about God and how maybe He’s not omnipresent, omniscient, omnipotent, or omni-anything.

– sighed heavily, and repeatedly. Some more.

So. Got my first bifocals the other day – or, oops, my bad: My first progessives. Which, aside from sounding much nicer than “bifocals” (and, if I’m not mistaken, being, in fact, a better descriptor of the current lens technology) rather suits my politics. So there’s that!

I think I’m supposed to be depressed by this turn of events, or mortified, or summat, but honestly, the more I adjust to them, the happier I am. It’s just so much easier to fucking see now! For a long time, my eyes were bad enough to be really annoying, but not bad enough to warrant a whole new approach to corrective eye-wear — so, like a kid waiting for her next birthday so that she could finally get her ears pierced, I spent a good year anxiously awaiting my further decrepitude, so that I could get old lady glasses. Wheee! I can seeee!

And so it has struck me that, in fact, there are a good handful of things to look forward to as the years take their toll. I’m not loving the drying of my formerly lustrous locks, for instance, but on the other hand, not having to shower so much? Awesome!

Let’s see, what else awaits….

1. No babysitters – In four or five years’ time, I will no long have to pay double just to go out of an evening. “Double?” you say, “what’s this?” — yes, double: Once for the event, once for the warm body who keeps the children alive. Remember the notion of “sponge-worthy”? Well, I’m now at the stage in my life where I have to consider whether something is “babysitter-worthy.” Entire events have been jettisoned because the very notion of spending anywhere from $20-$50 just to leave the house made the entire event entirely unappealing.
2. Less acne – Note: I do not say “an end to acne.” Given that my pimple situation actually got (and remained) worse after my 25th birthday, I have begun to sense that it’s not really ever going to leave me alone. Indeed, just the other day my dermatologist, in the process of giving me my annual no-those-moles-don’t-look-cancerous once-over, was reduced to saying to me (a 46-year-old grown-ass woman) “No picking!” as his eyes took in the left corner of my chin. So.
3. My old lady accoutrement will no longer be mockable – There’s stuff that I’ve begun to use that, at my age, is the stuff of mockery: Wrap-around sunglasses, for instance, that go on top of my regular glasses. Socks that I wear to bed. A heating pad tucked into the back of my pants on cold winter days. Go ahead, mock me now — you’ll be in good company — but I rest easy in the knowledge that a) you’re using some of this shit too, you’re just hiding it and b) as the years advance, all this stuff will just be “accoutrement.” Because I’ll be an old lady. (Though I’d like the record to show that I’ve finally found clip-ons and hardly use my wrap-arounds at all).
4. Grandchildren – You heard me! I miss my own babies, and I’ve always found the age of 2-5 to be the most magical of childhood. I can’t wait for my kids to (get old enough to take on the responsibilities incumbent upon anyone who has begun to) start bringing home my grandbabies! I may have to go work as a preschool assistant at some point, because if memory serves, grandchildren tend to grow up, too.
5. Gravy time – My dad died when he was 35. Thirty-five. When I was growing up, I had no idea how young that was. Now I do. Every birthday I’ve achieved past 35 has felt like victory, every year I’ve lived past 35 has felt like gravy — extra time, bonus years, stuff that my poor dad never got to see, and for which I am thus that much more grateful. And honestly, it’s nice to know that when my back creaks and my steps are slow, I’ll be able to appreciate the privilege. Perspective (also a gift of the years) is a good thing.