Photo by Just Add Light.

My youngest nephew, Will, is on the cusp of two years old—that adorably maddening tipping point between babydom and full-functioning Big Boy.  Sometimes he struggles to communicate his needs, at which point he defaults to a full-throated, full-fake cry; sometimes, he’s clearly and efficiently out-sentencing most reality show contestants.

And sometimes he switches from one to the other within no interval between the two.  Recently he was struggling to open a toy, and, seeing a facsimile of an Official Adult nearby in me, he wailed aloud.  I bent down to unfasten the latches for him. I might not be willing to endure labor, breastfeeding, and adolescence, but I can unlock the plastic stops on a Fisher-Price barn. Most of the time.

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Photo by Kekka.

“I want you to feel like you’re going to die.”

That’s what the woman on my TV tells me every single day. Then again, I’m the one who’s putting her there.

It’s my workout DVD, and the scary yelly woman puts her hands on her hips and hollers at me to jump and kick and push and crunch and I cannot believe I paid eleven dollars for this.

As a freelance writer, this is often the beginning and the end of my physical movement for the day. Sometimes there is trudging up and down the stairs for water or gum or alcohol or other major sources of sustenance; sometimes I actually exit the house. But mostly, it’s me and Yelly.

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Photo by tarotastic.

“This is about structure,” the therapist said.

I’m sitting across from her because my husband found me sobbing into the carpet of my home office, again, some more. She’s sitting there because I’ve reached the point, now, where I need to pay people to listen to me.

“I thought this was about huge, huge amounts of anti-depressants.”

“No. For the first time in your life, you don’t have outside structure dictating your every move. And it is affecting your writing, and you are very angry.”

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Photo by silvia di natale'S.

Folding a regular Internet broadcast into my media empire—which, at the moment, consists of a laptop and two pens which actually work—has increased my visibility as a freelancer. Everything that comes with being a freelance writer is there: the flexibility, the endless reach to bump up against another human soul through art, the second-glass-of-wine buzz of speaking with admired guests. And you know who else came over to play? Rejection and self-consciousness. Hello, old friends.

The show that was rushed into production (after one of the entrants in the Kentucky Derby was euthanized right on the track) was fielding its first guest. Even after such an auspicious beginning, I was terrified, for this was Talking To People, which is horrifying on any level and even worse while still finding my footing as a radio hostess. It would be like recording my very worst cocktail party small talk, then broadcasting it over the World Wide Web.

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Photo by helmet13.

The tree in our tiny backyard is a glorified twig.

“I think I nuked it,” says my husband of eight months, surveying what remains of the poison ivy at its base. An impressive array of weeds tentacle over our socks and shoes and very selves. The dogs in the neighbors’ yard have churned their grass into mud, with the occasional decorative addition of puppy poop. “We’ll wait through the summer, and if it stays dead, I’ll chop it down.”

He goes to work, where we have been expecting him to test into a raise since October. It is now April. The national news has been working against us. Continue Reading

Photo by Arwen Abendstern.

After placing the last plate in the dishwasher yesterday, I poured in the detergent, set the dial, and burst in to tears. It was not the chemicals or the hormones. Okay, probably a little bit of the hormones. Okay, probably mostly the hormones. But it was also because it’s been almost a full year since I made the freelance switch, and I was ready to admit to the kitchen sink that I am, in fact, lonely.

Look, I don’t get lonely. I clutch jealously at control of my life and my time like the One Ring. Days and days will go by and I’ll happily not leave my office except to go to Mass, at which point I’ll pile my purse and jacket in the pew next to me and daaaaare you with my eyes to sit on the other side. And if you do plop yourself there, you keep your sticky paw to yourself. I will genially wish you peace from my five-foot bubble of personal space, my brother. And also with you.

Nonetheless, yesterday I realized that I cannot remember the last time I have been shopping with another woman, and surfaced in tears because of it.

“But,” said my husband as I wept on him over this, “you don’t like to shop. We couldn’t afford to shop even if you did.”

“I knoooooow.” I covered my face with my arm.

“Aren’t I your friend?”

“You don’t understand about shoes.” Continue Reading

Or... not!
Photo by Angela7dreams.

Last month, I spoke at my alma mater about freelance writing. The request letter from the high school was helpful and precise: I was to inform the students about a “typical day.”

So I gathered several digi-photos of me at a book signing, me wrapped in a tipsy embrace with my Random House publicist, me propping my computer up against a thatch-shaded picnic table on the sugar shores of Cocoa Beach. And then I digi-ditched them. I had half an hour to address fifteen-year-old me, and she was going to hear the truth of it all.

What is my day? This is my day. Continue Reading

Image by thp365.

Was this you once?

Is this you now?

When I was working as a technical and marketing writer in the corporate universe, I endured quarterly “team luncheons,” which consisted of long sandwiches featuring very sad lettuce and a conference room in which we were told what a great company we were and the many ways in which we, those of us who comprised the company, sucked at our jobs.

These to-dos weren’t technically mandatory, of course, but when the send-all email hit the inboxes with a closing sentence consisting of, “The CEO looks forward to seeing all of you there”, it was clear that it wasn’t the brightest idea to be found at one’s desk during the Team Hour, scrolling through vintage Atari cartridges on eBay.

My strategy was to nip in at the very last second, which usually meant that all the uncomfortable folding chairs were taken and I was left—oh, gosh darn it!—to stand in the hallway next to the folding table with the lettuce, which frankly had a more winning personality than many of the office people. I braced myself up against the wall, faced the ice bucket, and was free to not feign raptures over PowerPoint clip art. Continue Reading

Like so many sudden deaths, it came under perfectly normal circumstances: I submitted a humor column to a website I’ve been publishing with for years. It went live in short order. And within forty eight hours, my prior understanding of how we interact online was dead, dead, dead.

Just as psychiatrist Elisabeth Kubler Ross suggested it might, the violent death marched me through five stages of grief. Some lasted longer than others. Some required more drinking than others. But at some point, most freelancers who publish online for the general public troop through them. May you have loved ones and plenty of ice cream around you. Continue Reading

One of my many day jobs — among them were bodyguarding, selling roses in bars, and sports reporting for the American Thoroughbred industry — was teaching writing at the college level. Faced with a roomful of pilots at an aeronautical university who really, really did not wish to be bothered with comma splices, I threw out the textbook the English department gave me with its carefully chosen, PC-balanced literary selections and ordered Laura Hillenbrand’s Seabiscuit instead. If these captains-in-training were going to learn how to love words, they were going to do it with a horse story written by a girl.

They soon realized that the book was really about a man clinging to an outside power to free him — just as they felt every time they climbed into a cockpit. Hillenbrand describes Seabiscuit’s jockey, the constantly injured Red Pollard, as a “caged bird.” The pilots and I talked about that phrase a great deal, and although they eyed me as their own jailer when I handed out essay assignments, I never told them about my own corporate cage. Continue Reading

My husband is a pilot. His workspace is fairly defined. It has huge fiberglass wings and crazy sharp propellers that will chop you to little tiny bits if you don’t knock properly on the office door.

I wish I had propellers.

Instead I have a laptop, which, sadly, isn’t quite so lethal, and my non-pointy office also functions as a DVD player, a bullhorn for Star Wars-related whines, a sports wire, a news station, a photo album, a gift shop, and a jukebox. So when he sees me staring at the screen with my head in my hands, I could be trying to figure out why people continue to care about Paris Hilton… I could be contemplating the fact that my nephew’s new haircut makes him look like a forty-five year old in a Piglet sleeper… I could be one syllable away from a Pulitzer… he never knows.

What he does know, for his own health, is to assume the Pulitzer thing, even if it’s five in the morning and the theme from The A-Team is pouring tinnily from the speakers as I sob face-down on the keyboard, bitter freelancing tears raining down upon my caps lock key. But that wasn’t knowledge he simply absorbed from basking in my per-job presence: He had to be carefully taught. And so did I.
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