Ate, Prayed, Loved

My job is putting me through some interesting changes. My awful, incompetent co-worker is leaving and pointedly gave her notice while my boss is 8730 miles (not exaggerating, she's in Vietnam) and three continents away. How nice. My hope is that I will land her $42,000 a year job and some respect and be able to pad my resume enough to get the hell out of dodge before I become the office stress ball.

Selim has been gone almost two weeks. The worst has happened. I barely miss him. I wish I missed him more, I feel abnormal and unmommy like. Perhaps I would if I wasn't sure when he was coming back, or if it was going to be longer than three weeks, but truthfully, I'm not longing for him the way I have been programmed to expect that I should. I think it will really hit me when he gets back and my days and nights are centered around him. I hope he misses me.

I saw Eat Pray Love with two friends from work. I have to say, I related a lot to the character. Don't get me wrong, I'm still angsty and feministing over the fact that this book was launched into stardom by a wealthy, white woman and her way of coping did not in anyway offer hope to the general public. And it's superbly hard to see Julia Roberts as vulnerable the way Liz Gilbert sounded in Eat Pray Love. But I have also not seen a woman so lonely and unforgiving of herself since I last looked in the mirror this morning. I suspect on a few levels, Liz Gilbert and I have quite a bit in common.

Having read a chapter of her next book, Committed, I can tell you Liz has (thankfully) grown up a bit, stopped beating herself with pasta and admitted that Western concepts love basically tanks you before you begin. I tend to agree, but like Liz, see no way out of it now. I am, as they say, hopelessly socialized. If the goal of socialization is to shape people and their eventual futures, I'm good. Stick a fork in me.

I read her piece on writing, and just as I got to the mid-point and started to ask myself, "Jennifer, didn't you always want to be a writer? But you're too old now," her next paragraph began that age shouldn't stop you from trying to publish, trying to write. And while it's true that I don't blog nearly enough anymore, that's not for lack of want. I love to write. I enjoy it immensely, and I know there are at least five people on this earth who love my writing, too.

I don't know exactly what it is about my writing that people like. Perhaps I'm a clear writer, or perhaps you can feel what I'm thinking or hoping or hating through my words. I really don't know. What I do know is, strangely enough, I love to read my own writing. What's a better gift than that?

I fully intend to write something that will be published in the Sun magazine. I have "the right" reasons going for me. The Sun is independent, raw, gritty, emotional. It's me on print. It's not the New York Times or GQ, in both of which any writer would be happy to be published. I'll get to work on it as soon as I'm sure I will not fail my physiology class, which is proving far more difficult than I imagined, which if probably also why it's proving far more difficult than I'd imagined.