Once upon a time…

You’d think I’d come up with a better opening line than that, but I’m not really a writer. Or maybe, I just like to play around with conventions: what are your expectations now that I’ve said that? Will there be a “happily ever after” somewhere, or just a curse that spans decades? Or maybe it’s just that my writing tends to be academic. Yeah, I’ve published a book, but not a literary kinda book, and all the novels I’ve started take place in South Carolina and end up going nowhere.

South Carolina holds a special place in my imagination, and I’m not entirely sure I could explain why without finishing one of those novels (or, more seriously, writing a different one entirely). Once upon a time, I was accepted into graduate school and got my own apartment, and started thinking about what I wanted to do with my life, in little ways and big ways. After a week of spaghetti and hamburgers, I wondered what kind of food I wanted to cook, and decided on Indian food (I’m not sure why that seemed like a good idea, having little experience with Indian food, but here I am still cooking lentils and rice most days). I really liked riding my bike: Columbia turned out to be a good place to do that, even though I never noticed many other bicyclists. I watched a lot of television, until I got tired of it (solely attributable to Sarah Gilbert's speech on why everyone should be a vegetarian, at least for the talk shows. I still watched a lot of afternoon cartoons).

I remember reading Hegel in German up in the graduate student office, for about a half hour, the same two pages over and over again, until I realized that I wasn’t reading the translation. I remember watching H.R. Pufnstuf and the Monkey’s movie, Head, with some friends (well, one friend and some guy I never did like). I remember painting in oils, the one and only time. I started painting more in acrylics, though, and was irritated that what I thought was a pretty good portrait of Amanda was mistaken as a poor portrait of Erin (Amanda having lent me the oil paints). And I remember watching the beginning of what was- to-be the First Gulf War, and being appalled at the people running through the streets waving the American flag, as if attacking Iraq was some great thing.

When I arrived, I hadn’t had anything to drink in over a year, and didn’t drink anything during that first year. That was probably a good decision on various levels: I made Dean’s List my senior year of college after a dismal freshman year, which I attribute to finally buckling down and concentrating on my work rather than socializing (and even as I write that I wonder, did I drink to be social or to avoid having to socialize?). Not drinking was probably a good idea when I was first living by myself in a strange city where I didn’t know many people. By the second year there I felt more comfortable with the people I’d already met, and also started meeting new people. In October of that second year, if I remember correctly (and I probably don’t remember that correctly, for obvious reasons) I started drinking again for complex (and in retrospect admittedly bad – if subconscious) reasons.  And I can say confidently that it was social (at least until it turned anti-social a few years later).

That’s where I’m at right now (and by “now” I mean the past couple weeks) – and I don’t think I’m going to write much more about it. But watch for the painting!