Tablua Rasa

White, everywhere—large expanses of pure, wet tablua rasa: on my toes, hands, plastic sheeting, and even the 18 boards I was prepping on my sunroom floor for Phase One of a summer porch remodel.  I am a messy painter.  I try to be neat—really I do—but even my best prepping efforts dissolve, midstream, into rivulets of pigment.

The project was never meant to be an indoor operation, but we were not about let plans succumb to a persistent streak of damp conditions.  Fortunately, the sun came out while the boards dried, and I was able to paint the flip side—a robust pumpkin—in the great outdoors, which was good news for our floors and fixtures, but not much help for my hands, which were quickly covered in pumpkin patina.  Nor did the outdoor staging curb my liberal use of various absorbent products on forays throughout the home, during, say, bathroom or drink breaks.  I recall a moment of vague, fleeting concern over trailing some telltale pumpkin on paper products in the kitchen and bath, but frankly, had other priorities.

The beginning of summer, is after all, the time of year my son has dubbed “art season,” as the warm weather months typically find our home strewn with sundry media, including, but certainly not limited to tile, rocks, grout, and various pigments.

So I awoke Tuesday morning to a head full of visions and plans, a bag of unopened materials—and a really disturbing discovery.

It seemed I was bleeding.  It was hard to determine exactly from where, or why, but yep, every time any tissue-like material came in contact with my person, it was sporting small streaks of fresh blood.  I gave myself a thorough self-examination for any visible wounds, and finding nothing but sealed skin, came to the grim conclusion that I was bleeding internally.

I phoned my beloved general practitioner and discovered that he was out for the day.  Then, in horror, I realized the only option left was to turn myself in at my GYN’s office.  I have been vaguely and disturbingly aware for some time that I have been AWOL from the office for—could it be?—a full six years, due to the fact that going has a history of, well, not going really well, and, honestly, nothing has happened in the past 6 years that my faithful family doctor couldn’t handle.

But now?  Now that I was bleeding internally and my regular doctor out for the day?  I remembered that the GYN was really good about saving room each day for “problem appointments,” so I called and was told to show up in an hour.

My stomach was in knots. This happens...Every. Single.Year.  I mean it, every year, the first week of summer is marred by sudden medical mayhem, well documented in just about any late May post on this blog.  How ironic!  How tragic!  And…how statistically improbable for ahypochondriac to have (albeit historically faux) crises befall the exact sameweek every year. How …wait a minute…how oddly fresh the blood on those tissues still looked.

I rummaged through my bathroom drawer and pulled out a safety pin and quickly pricked my thumb, drawing a bright red spot of blood that I dabbed on to a tissue. I immediately noted how, well, orange all the other blood spots now appeared to me by comparison.  In a sudden wave of realization, I absorbed that all of the “blood” I had been finding was the exact color of Phase One of my porch remodel, and I should have cared a little more about pawing all the household tissues with painted fingers.

Now, I realize a sane person would have just called back to cancel the appointment, but, plot considered, this is not a tale of solid thinking.  It occurred to me that I had skirted the system, that I could avoid the month-plus wait for a routine appointment—the stomach-churning wait that, for six years, kept me from picking up the phone.  I could face this thing down, swiftly, here and now, in the same way I might tackle the removal of the band aid I may have used if I actually had been bleeding.

I arrived to an empty office and a new doctor, who was obviously still trying to build a following.  I explained about the tissues, and the paint, and that nothing was really wrong at all, other than I’d been away for a few years.  She took the news in stride, asking me questions along the way to gather my history and cross referencing my answers with my file. 

She expressed surprise that the one actual, Really ScaryThing that happened to me, medically (as opposed to the steady stream of Paint Scares and routine False Alarms) had actually been detected and treated in the manner I described.  She scoured my file to see if the diagnosis I reported having 13 years ago was, indeed, accurate.  “You are fortunate,” she said.  “I just read a paper on about this issue.  Doctors often don’t take it seriously, but they are finding that the abnormality you had, if untreated, really does lead to cancer.”  She continued scanning silently, stopping only to apply an adjective I’ve never heard to an unrelated cyst I had a few years ago, giving me a double eyebrow raise and a nod which seemed to indicate that my survival was a notable marvel. 

Leaving the office, I felt not only the thankfulness one might expect after surviving a faux bleed-out and and a couple of real life maladies, but also a Saving-Private-Ryan style sense of unworthiness and wonder over why/how/if I was deserving of such a gift.  I scoured my memories, hoping to find evidence that I had  done something in the last 13 years that justified my presence here, and then realized that it wasn’t something that could just be found.  I am NOT worthy.  None of us are.  For reasons that may never be known, I am here, now, today.  And I embrace the blank, white slate that is the summer before me.

Season 6

So the past week has found me kicking around my cyber pad,getting the set all up to snuff for Season 6 here at Running With Letters.

‘Wait, blogs have seasons now?’  you might be saying. Based on data collected during my cleaning spree, I’d have to give a definitive yes.  This online “show” has come a long way since the ’05 pilot and subsequent move to the MySpace network for a brief run, before returning here to blogger for our signature 2007 season.   Things took a distinctive morph during ’08 while I was in the thick of Graduate School, Round 1. Then in 2009-10 we took a hard turn into the arts before I tried to go all Big Business and nearly lost my voice in the process. And, no, I didn’t take the time to link to all those eras--it’s all in the archives for the finding.  

So now we’re here. Here is good. There are new characters. New possibilities.  A new look.  Join me here for Season 6, set to air in real time immediately following The Grading of Finals.  In the meantime, let me know what you think of the remodel!

It's Been A Year

It's been almost a year since I've been here. A lot can happen in a year, and, for me, much has happened, indeed.  But that story isn't today's focus.   Of immediate concern is the state things around here--what on earth?  I stopped by to, you know, check out the old digs and I couldn't believe the entropy: crumbling entryway in the form of missing design graphics (my virtual landscaper apparently quit), trash manifested in junk comments from automated bots, dead links like so many tangled vines. I mean, I know I refer to this as my "place," but I meant it in a metaphoric sense, with no literal link to the Laws of Thermodynamics implied.  But alas, it seems no dwelling is immune to decay, and if I am to move back in, even as a summer getaway, I need to do some pruning and painting to make this place inhabitable for us again. 
We'll be in various stages of construction for a few days.  If you're new and want to get a feel for how we roll around here on a good day, then stop by to read about my actual habitat, messes with tresses, or some random difficulty we had with an onion. I don't recommend poking around too much in the posts immediately preceding my hasty departure.  The days before a departure are typically so messy and uncertain, and those represented therein are no exception.
Not, of course, that I'm expecting immediate company.  After all, how logical is it for me to look for folks sitting here among the weeds and webs just waiting for me to waltz on back after letting the place go to pot for four full seasons? But just in case? Be careful around here: it's officially a construction site.

Missing Monday

When I was a little girl, listening to my favorite tunes involved a clean needle applied to a grooved vinyl circle. Nothing was a more unwelcome impediment to this process than a nick, scratch, or scuff that would stop the needle in its tracks, sending the music into a perpetual hiccup.

Monday morning I awoke to sunny skies and equally radiant spirits. I went for a run, hoping to give myself a healthy energy surge before I tackled an impressive list of engaging tasks. I was looking at the perfect window of time to complete these meaty projects before my upcoming departure on an even more exciting train trip.

But alas, my forward motion was sent off track as jarringly as an 80s power ballad derailed by a dinged disk. After a recent stint of anxiety-fueled unproductivity, all that vim and vigor was apparently more than my re-emerged psyche could handle. In an epic Man v. Himself worthy in itself of some haunting Phil Collins or George Michael treatment, I skipped back into, well, anxiety-fueled unproductivity.

It is beyond me how someone could do, literally, nothing all day, but nothing is the single track on my Monday discography. The blaring notes of Tuesday’s rude wake up call powered me over the bump in my path and by today I was mentally echoing Monday morning’s sweet refrain, but physically scrambling to make up for Monday’s, um, lapse.

I miss Monday. I wish I had it to do again. I wish I’d stood up and smacked down those scream-o voices that told me I somehow wasn’t ready to whistle a new tune. But now that I’m beyond the scrape in this week’s soundtrack, I’m not going to spend too much time looking back. Monday’s work laid a track over Thursday’s tune, so tomorrow’s pumping a high-energy techno beat and I need to be ready to dance.

On Assignment

Ok, so I know I said I was coming back, and it’s probably starting to look like I lied.  But I actually am still excited about posting here again, it’s just that I spent most of last week trying to determine if I regarded meeting back-to-back newspaper deadlines falling in the midst of a lot of school and home activity as glamorous as I apparently did in 2005.

In this early blog post, I giddily reported that I had been assigned a series of human interest stories in the middle of a heavily scheduled week.  The glamor factor rested in the fact that this was my inaugural foray into paid feature writing, and I was reveling in my new found ability to bandy around the phrase “I’m on assignment.”

Well, seven years later, I am still on assignment, albeit writing for a lesser publication than I started at in 2005, and, flush with yearning and angst after a heavy dose of Kerouac novels, I have to ask myself if the situation is satisfactory; if, indeed, I still get that rush from finding the narrative in the local news beat.

I have to admit that my first thought was a probable no, considering that I haven’t broken into the premium markets and I’m still trying to find captivating angles through which to twist topics like salad and dentistry into meaty, journalistic pieces—and for a paycheck that has shrunk in proportion to publication prestige. 

But after looking back a bit to my circumstances at the time of the 2005 post, I realized just how very different things actually are.  Back then, the grades I was being pressed to calculate were evaluating the renderings of elementary art students with no more than a stale BA in Psychology on my educational resume.  Today, I am awarding or denying college credit to 45 students as I grade my freshman comp papers.  Seven years ago, I had never had a regular writing gig.  Today, I have around 100 feature stories under my by-line with two respected, albeit local, publications. And with my amassed clips and dose of that Kerouac-inspired passion I can still pitch those big publications.

It became clear that there’s still a story arc here.  I’m still in the game, and having fun.  My story is still in progress—and, yes, I have some chapters waiting to be logged here.  It will happen.  But now—I have 15 more papers waiting to be graded, and an interview to schedule for my next story.  After all, I’m on assignment.

Preview Trailer: How I Got Off Track and Found My Way Back

I have been missing this space for a lot of good reasons. Like the cinematic Stella who Lost Her Groove, I have been a bit short of mojo myself for reasons I just couldn’t bring myself to put into print. With those things now safely framed in my rear view mirror, I can not only write about them with perspective, I find that I must. What I hope unfolds here over the coming weeks and months is a story of a girl on a wilderness adventure gone wrong and the joy of finding her way back home. See you soon.