bang on the drum all day

Back to work today. Since I left in the early afternoon on Thursday and was off Fri and Mon, it was a super-long weekend. Every time this happens I remember that I like being at home more than I like doing just about anything else.

Last night we watched Wanted. It was goddamn awful, Rotten Tomatoes be damned.

My mood is not altogether stable or peaceful. I feel acutely the days counting down until the 31st, and I am not nearly as hopeful about the -tunity part of this whole matter as I was a week ago. I tried to talk to BF about how I feel about this last night and made sort of a mess of it so I think I’ll just hang on to those thoughts for now.

I had this friend in high school. Let’s call him Albert. He was thoroughly brilliant. Smart beyond the norm of we mortals. He used to spend his time making up rules for a symbolic language he invented, with a separate alphabet and different rules of grammar. This was how challenging the school curriculum was to him, that he had spare time to do this. His appearance was also extremely nerdy to the point of caricature – he sniffed and pushed up his glasses and spoke with a thin, reedy voice, a lot like the thin guy of the trio of nerds that Homer goes to Springfield University with.

I befriended Albert, and I tried my best to help him be social, to help him do normal high school things and relax his nerdiness a little. From this distance I have no idea if I affected him, or even if this intervention of mine was necessary, but at the time I thought I was making a difference in his life. He’s currently in a Ph.D. program at MIT, and the stuff that he’s done in between high school and now is so advanced that I won’t even ask him about it.  Something to do with string theory, I think. Fractals.

So anyway, he was one of the people I emailed about this teacher training thing. He wrote me back to chat more about our lives, and in there he said that he’s done a great deal of creative writing himself. Short stories, beginnings of novels, etc. He even forwarded me a story he wrote in the second round of emails.

This information made me incredibly depressed. For a while now I’ve considered myself a talented person; I am interested in many things and when I put my hand to something, I like to think I’m capable of doing it well. I’ve tried a lot of new things in the last five years and I’ve succeeded at a lot of them. But there are things that I do that I think I’m good enough at that they make me special, and one of those things is fiction writing.

To find that Albert is also good at writing fiction makes me feel as if, I don’t know, Michael Jordan decided he’d try his hand at yoga. Albert already can do things with math and science at the drop of a hat that I couldn’t do if you waterboarded me. Why does he have to butt in on this thing that I’m good at, one of the few things that makes me special? Does he want to make me feel thoroughly useless?

Of course I know this is absurd and petty. Albert writing fiction has no bearing on my talent (such as it is), and he certainly didn’t begin writing just to hurt my feelings. Also, Albert is a one-in-a-million kind of mind, and it’s ridiculous to compare myself to him. His obscene specialness doesn’t make my own light shine any less brightly.

But I still feel a whole lot more ordinary this morning than I’ve felt in a while. I value Albert’s friendship and it’s not his fault he’s a genius polymath, but it’s not easy to hear that he’s picked up yet another hobby that he’ll be better at than anyone…and which he won’t even need to make him stand out in a crowd, like I do.

If your advice is for me to read his story before I say all this, I agree that I should – but I’ll bet you good money that his story will be proficient, exact, with character depth and perfect pacing. I have no idea if he’ll have the kind of messy touches that make writing interesting, but nevertheless, I think it’ll be the kind of stuff that could give him a more profitable writing career than I will ever have. Not that he needs it; he’ll doubtless be in a lab in Cambridge for the rest of his life, doing intellectual work beyond the reach of mortals.

And good for him. I just want him to stay the hell away from creative writing.