Happy American Thanksgiving, and stuff(ing)

So my leg hasn't fallen off yet but I am continuing my hiatus of exercise, wallowing in every ounce of fat I consume, just to insure that gangrene doesn't set in. That's totally a joke, since my pain originates neither from a gunshot wound nor from a stabbing, but from some wacky joint thing. Anyway.

You know how I'm doing the NaNoWriMo thing? It's going both well and poorly; well because I'm at 35,000 words plus some (the goal is 50,000 by Nov. 30), poorly because I've realized that my so-called novel is a) just insanely boring, and b) not the work of staggering genius I had envisioned. These sorts of realizations tend to depress me, I don't know why. I've tried to give myself the it-doesn't-matter-that-you-write-like-crap-and-will-never-be-published-and-
your-goals-in-life-are-LAUGHABLE pep talk, but I still get a little down when I have one of those flashes of insight where I suddenly see that I will never be rich and famous and no one will ever give me a Pulitzer Prize and I will never marry Colin Firth and live in a mansion in a sunny climate. Because I don't know about you, but when I was younger (like, say, 22) I used to have these fantasies that one day very soon my sparkling talent was going to be discovered, and I was going to be the toast of the talk show circuit, a media darling, a millionaire, a great and respected intellectual, and also somehow a ballerina and one of the 50 Sexiest People Alive.

And then real life kept squashing my dreams. To date, I've never had anything published, nor have I ever really finished a single story, let alone written the Great American Novel. Until last year I've been living under the poverty line and could still probably qualify for food stamps if I really put my back into it, which pretty much nullifies the mansion and the millionaire dream. And I don't know if you've noticed, but that Sexiest People thing? Ain't gonna happen. I guess it's one of those growing-up moments, where you suddenly see that yes, you are going to be just as boring as your parents and sadly, no, you aren't going to have oddles and oodles of money and a career you totally love; you will do the same things everyone else does and live a quiet life filled with vast stretches of doing nothing but getting up and going to work and in the meantime be saddled with crushing debt from those bygone years when you thought, "Hey, it's OK, I'll be rich someday."

And you just have to realize that accomplishing little goals, like writing a 50,000 word novel (which, who are we kidding, is really just a novella), is OK and is good enough and better than sitting on your ass watching Lost because Lost is just not as interesting as it used to be. And that being creative even in very tiny small ways is more than most people can do, when you get right down to it, so you shouldn't fling your hands in the air, even though it feels like poo to know that the part of yourself you always hoped would make you special turns out to be only marginally more talented than the average Joe who voted for Bush and watches Fox News and Nancy Grace on a daily basis.

(And by 'you' I mean me.)

But lest this become a downer post, I want to point everyone's attention to someone who actually can write: The Oh Really. The coolest thing about this blog? Every month she puts out a new list, one item for every day of the month. It's ingenius. Why didn't I think of this? Oh yeah, because I'm an idiot. Anyway, enjoy.

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