Preface: Going Crazy

Where to begin. 


It seems like yesterday that I watched a neon guitar get stuck halfway down its trajectory at midnight, but it's February already.  Mitt Romney won the Florida primary last night, my apartment was robbed last week, and the only movie I've seen that is nominated for an Academy Award this year is The Help -- mainly because I'm from Mississippi.  I was born in Natchez in the spring of 1986, my family moved to Birmingham, Alabama, in the fall of 1990, and I now find myself in Nashville, Tennessee.  I'm 25 years old, I have a Master's degree, and I'm doing administrative work at a prestigious private university in Music City.  I play piano and guitar, but I've picked up neither in at least a year.


That's a lot of listing in one paragraph to tell you this: I'm going crazy.


No one told me about being an adult -- maybe because my parents started so early that they didn't even notice the transition.  They were high school sweethearts in Sedalia, Missouri.  Neither went to college -- instead they got married at 20, moved to Natchez to be nearer to my dad's family, and started a family of their own.  My only sibling, an older sister, was born in 1979, when my parents were 22 and ate mostly macaroni and cheese with cut-up hot dogs for dinner.


Both of my parents worked hard to give us more than what they had, and my dad eventually charmed his way up to a vice presidency at a large, private, international company headquartered in Birmingham.  My mother was able to retire at 50, and she now plays video games, overfeeds the cat, and monitors Facebook all day in the mini suburban mansion he built for her.

My parents sent me to a small liberal arts college on the outskirts of the city, and I thrived there.  My new friends were intellectual, witty, and utterly nerdy.  They're lovely, and to this day I couldn't adore them more.  Our college nurtured us into believing we could do anything -- change the world -- and some of them are out there now, doing that.

A year after college, I defaulted to grad school because I found I hated working in the real world.  I had taken an internship at my father's large, private, international company, and I promptly discovered that I was miserable.  By day I sat in a cubicle trying to look busy while g-chatting with my friends, who were also sitting in cubicles out in the real world; by night those friends and I drank.  Oh, how we drank.  And drank.

In grad school I found myself surrounded by more intellectuals, but of a different breed than my college friends.  These girls were snobby and competitive -- looking down their noses over their hipster glasses asking things like, "You did READ Stanley Fish, didn't you?"  I sat around conference tables for two years growing resentful, feeling like this version of academia was much different from undergrad.  The professors were nice for the most part, but they also seemed to expect me to know how to act like a doctoral candidate.  I never felt my contributions were worthwhile or deep enough, and I convinced myself that maybe I wasn't cut out to be a professor after all. 

I now have a Master's degree and I'm stuck in a cubicle again.  Going crazy.  Wanting to make a meaningful life for myself, wanting to find fulfillment in my work, wanting to do what my college professors always told me I could and would do.  I don't know what that is, but I do know it isn't writing thank-you notes to kiss the asses of the rich alumni of this university.  Many of the donations they drop are bigger than my salary for an entire year of kissing their asses.  Many are more than two, three, four times that.

So here I am.  Have I mentioned that I'm going crazy?  Perhaps what's crazier, though, is what I've decided to do to magically make all of this better.  I'm going to write a novel.  HA!  Even looking at that sentence in this little text box gives me a tingly feeling in my chest and I start laughing at myself.  I've always loved writing, but for some reason the stories stopped coming out of me around the time I hit high school.  I have a theory on that, but it can wait.  I also have an idea for an epic poem that's an allegory of that theory -- HA HA!  The tingles intensify.

Seriously, though, I'm doing this -- just so I can say that I did.  Also, I'm told, if I want to get serious about being a writer I need to actually, um, write every day. 

Don't get too excited now, imaginary reader.  This blog isn't going to actually include the novel.  As I fully expect it to be a steaming pile of crap, that novel will probably never be known to human eyes other than my own.  This blog, instead, is going to be comprised of my writing about writing a novel.  It's meant to be a bit like the Julie/Julia concept, except instead of cooking my way through Julia Child's book, I'm going to be laboring my way through the writing of my own.  Here I'll share what I'm thinking, how the process is going, whether I'm getting saner or crazier. 

If nothing else, I'm hoping to get out there what it's like to be 25 years old in 2012 -- a young, educated person who has no idea what to do with her life to make it match her expectations.  So here I go.