Mental Notes
Posted: February 23rd, 2006 | Author: aly hawkins | Filed under: life, writing workshop | Tags: life, writing workshop | 5 Comments »Sometimes it’s nice to have your hair on fire.
Not literally (I imagine), but in the way of running around with so many thoughts and ideas and inspirations that there just isn’t time enough in a 24-hour day to jot them all down in one central place where I might remember them later, once I have a chance to sit down and sift through the detritus, panning for gold. So instead I start taking mental notes, knowing deep down this is akin to keeping the tax code on Post-Its tacked to a small beer fridge, tucked under the snapshot of a slightly tipsy Ash doing the spanking dance at a friend’s wedding and the overdue electric bill.
I got one of those fancy-schmancy moleskin notebooks for on-the-fly note-taking, but I keep forgetting it’s in my purse. When I run across it while rummaging for my keys or ringing cell phone, I make a mental note that it’s there and I should use it. But that Post-It gets tacked up under the Chinese take-out menu and I’m right back where I started.
My cell has a voice recorder, but I feel excruciatingly silly speaking into the damn thing when I know very well nobody is on the other end, even though there is absolutely no one (if they cared enough to listen) who could know that. I feel like a Ray-Ban sporting Secret Service agent, muttering phrases like “The fox is in the henhouse” into my lapel. Pride is dumb, and I am making a mental note right now to get over myself.
I’ve begun to seriously consider the efficacy of tattooing Big Ideas onto my body, like the Guy Pierce character in Memento. I might not be able to remember what “semi hauling bales of post-consumer cardboard” means, but at least it would be at hand if and when I needed it. (This was a note I managed to actually write down last week. I have no idea why I thought it was worth remembering.) I’m not ruling it out, but the time and pain factors have kept me from buying in completely.
Usually my lack of discipline in the area of writing down important ideas doesn’t bother me too much. But when all the stars have aligned and all two creative cylinders are firing, my brain starts to feel like one of those Tokyo high-rises where all the thoughts are crammed into sleeping modules the size of breadboxes, and I become terrified there will be a neural tsunami and they will all perish in one devastating wave of amnesia. Or early-onset Alzheimer’s. Or paranoid schizophrenia, when I start to sculpt tin-foil hats to limit the aliens’ access to my gamma wave-particle energies, which are at their most potent when I’m feeling inspired.
I’m enjoying having my hair ablaze, but I wish I had a good system for tracking the fire’s progress. Maybe GPS technology could be involved somehow. Mental note: GPS is cool.
Writing
GPS
Moleskin
Humor
Organization
Technology
Tokyo
Memory
You are very, very funny.
brilliant
I laughed so much reading this. “The fox is in the henhouse”. Um, have you ever considered writing a collection of funny and/or pithy essays for a book à la Anne Lamott? Sure you have.
I also have a cute spiral notebook in my purse – I actually do use it (when I remember). It contains a recipe for fideo, a recipe for some obscure Brazilian drink (the names of the obscure Brazilian liquors are all phonetically sounded out), the notes I gathered from classmates to read at Luke’s funeral if I got a chance, and a note to Ramon telling him that the loud little girl reading Ursula Le Guin aloud to her mother on the ferry was starting to annoy me. And sundry other things…I’m very emotionally attached to that notebook. I open it up to write feeling the same way I do when uncorking a bottle of wine, incidentally. It’s a better diary than my diary, as long as I don’t fuss at the idea that there may be lapses of many months before I contribute to it again.
Cerise
After I published this last night, I remembered that when I wrote down “semi hauling bales of post-consumer cardboard,” we were driving by one such semi and I thought the image was fraught with metaphor. Something about the discarded beer cartons and cereal boxes of our lives, but that’s the problem with momentary inspiration: 95% of the time, it later makes about as much sense as a bag of hammers.
[...] To celebrate International Women’s Day, several bloggers got together to do a “grid blog,” a concept with which I was not previously familiar, being all non-geek and whatnot. The idea is that a bunch of bloggers post about the same topic on the same day (in this case, women…specifically, women in ministry) in hopes that awareness of said topic will be raised. I am heartbroken that I was not on the ball enough to participate (Mental Note: Remember for next year.), but it gives me great pleasure to direct your attention to this important discussion. This is a topic that is near and dear to my heart, and any chance I can get to mix it up in our ol’ white european male Addison Road is good enough for me. [...]