OK… mila is in the other room reading claudia’s book… and I am blogging… half ill from the cheeseburger I stuffed down my throat half an hour ago at some half seedy, half yuppie joint on upper west side… actually there was nothing seedy about it… the place was just dark… and you could clearly tell the yuppiness of the establishment by both the number of regulation finance employee blue shirts worn by the clientele and the wide selection of over-priced and obscure foreign (most likely Belgian) beers….
Anyway… today had my first writing class… actually… now to think of it… really my first writing class… its called something like intermediate fiction… its suppose to help lazy bastards like me complete our life goal of writing a thought out and meaningful and of course commercially successful novel… as a consequence… we will achieve some degree of financial freedom, quit our current miserable jobs and develop a combination of drug/ alcohol/ pain killer habits… we will of course hate outselves more than ever… but it seems like any semi-reasonable life endeavour eventually ends up there… how do I know you ask? This is how my friends – I spent my formative years caddying at a jewish country club… for a bunch of very rich jews… a fair number of whom were self made men… men who were successful in their careers (mostly lawyers and dentists) and achieved if anything a healthy degree of ‘freedom’…. What this freedom seemed to entitle them is to unfathomable degrees of whining and self-pity… a strong sense of your own rights… and an iron will to not over-tip any given member of country club staff (myself included) by a number greater then $5…
Anyway… I forgot where I was going here… the writing class… yes… so I sat in the class… one of 12 devoted pupils – we are like the 12 tribes of Israel… and I choose myself to be Rueven – the cooking tribe… why – I don’t know but it seems the most practical of all of them… let the Levites pray and the Benjamenites rule… or whatever it is… I will stick to cooking bland and unoriginal gastronomical cuisines of Eastern Europe….
The class itself was fine… we had to write spontaneous essays about ourselves and our scars… on both of them I think I wrote the most volume for the least quality… though the one line about me being like a diseased pig seemed to draw a reaction… what was good was that everyone was outside the field of finance… something I assessed immediately, even before the formal introductions… how you might ask? Easy – I was the only one with the sociopathic vulture stare in his eyes… everyone else was calm, seemingly well adjusted and even thoughtful… though there was an older librarian… I respectable looking, older bearded Jewish man who somehow inserted his life story the fact that he has a small p(*&s… but even this managed to come out cultured, in a modern sort of way…
And the class was fine and I spent the good first half of it feeling superior to everyone since I was the asshole from structured finance and no one there knew what a real asshole from structured finance really is like… now to think of it, no one there probably even suspected that such a thing as structured finance even exists… but that’s besides the point… so anyway, there I sat, overlooking everybody, thinking what sheep they are… knowing not a thing of life… for after all, who knows something about life but one who lives in a mad and cannibalistic shop I call my employment… and this feeling of superiority lasted until we started reading our pieces… and I started listening… and it started coming out that everyone here can write… and write pretty originally… and even with a bit of surprising flair… something really surprising to me since the way I see things in this world, no one can have surprising flair but me… but surprised I was… and was… and was… until it was my turn to read… and I looked at my scribbled handwriting... and had a thought in my head that even I cant read my own chicken scratch… and then started talking… or I mean reading… and missing the punctuation marks that I failed to put down in the first place.. and tripped over sentences… and words and nouns and adjectives… and finally over everything… including the diseased pig remark… until it came to me that I was no longer an evil structured finance vulture, by a blush red 31 year old… reading out loud his spontaneous prose for the first time…. And that despite all my personal assurances of self-genius… I was quite average in this room… maybe even below the median… and that if I am to make any headway in this sort of thing… this blushing and stumbling and mumbling and mis-punctuation might have to go… and maybe, just maybe I’ll have to put some honest to god effort into what I do… but again… that requires work and focus and concentration and thought… and where is a scraggly finance finance vulture like me to find these….
Anyway… today had my first writing class… actually… now to think of it… really my first writing class… its called something like intermediate fiction… its suppose to help lazy bastards like me complete our life goal of writing a thought out and meaningful and of course commercially successful novel… as a consequence… we will achieve some degree of financial freedom, quit our current miserable jobs and develop a combination of drug/ alcohol/ pain killer habits… we will of course hate outselves more than ever… but it seems like any semi-reasonable life endeavour eventually ends up there… how do I know you ask? This is how my friends – I spent my formative years caddying at a jewish country club… for a bunch of very rich jews… a fair number of whom were self made men… men who were successful in their careers (mostly lawyers and dentists) and achieved if anything a healthy degree of ‘freedom’…. What this freedom seemed to entitle them is to unfathomable degrees of whining and self-pity… a strong sense of your own rights… and an iron will to not over-tip any given member of country club staff (myself included) by a number greater then $5…
Anyway… I forgot where I was going here… the writing class… yes… so I sat in the class… one of 12 devoted pupils – we are like the 12 tribes of Israel… and I choose myself to be Rueven – the cooking tribe… why – I don’t know but it seems the most practical of all of them… let the Levites pray and the Benjamenites rule… or whatever it is… I will stick to cooking bland and unoriginal gastronomical cuisines of Eastern Europe….
The class itself was fine… we had to write spontaneous essays about ourselves and our scars… on both of them I think I wrote the most volume for the least quality… though the one line about me being like a diseased pig seemed to draw a reaction… what was good was that everyone was outside the field of finance… something I assessed immediately, even before the formal introductions… how you might ask? Easy – I was the only one with the sociopathic vulture stare in his eyes… everyone else was calm, seemingly well adjusted and even thoughtful… though there was an older librarian… I respectable looking, older bearded Jewish man who somehow inserted his life story the fact that he has a small p(*&s… but even this managed to come out cultured, in a modern sort of way…And the class was fine and I spent the good first half of it feeling superior to everyone since I was the asshole from structured finance and no one there knew what a real asshole from structured finance really is like… now to think of it, no one there probably even suspected that such a thing as structured finance even exists… but that’s besides the point… so anyway, there I sat, overlooking everybody, thinking what sheep they are… knowing not a thing of life… for after all, who knows something about life but one who lives in a mad and cannibalistic shop I call my employment… and this feeling of superiority lasted until we started reading our pieces… and I started listening… and it started coming out that everyone here can write… and write pretty originally… and even with a bit of surprising flair… something really surprising to me since the way I see things in this world, no one can have surprising flair but me… but surprised I was… and was… and was… until it was my turn to read… and I looked at my scribbled handwriting... and had a thought in my head that even I cant read my own chicken scratch… and then started talking… or I mean reading… and missing the punctuation marks that I failed to put down in the first place.. and tripped over sentences… and words and nouns and adjectives… and finally over everything… including the diseased pig remark… until it came to me that I was no longer an evil structured finance vulture, by a blush red 31 year old… reading out loud his spontaneous prose for the first time…. And that despite all my personal assurances of self-genius… I was quite average in this room… maybe even below the median… and that if I am to make any headway in this sort of thing… this blushing and stumbling and mumbling and mis-punctuation might have to go… and maybe, just maybe I’ll have to put some honest to god effort into what I do… but again… that requires work and focus and concentration and thought… and where is a scraggly finance finance vulture like me to find these….
4 comments:
Sounds great... would love to take a writing class. The only one I have taken came during my freshman year in college... I had a fascist of an English composition teacher, an ex-military English PhD who hadn't handed out an A in his class in three years when I took the bloody thing... and it cost me blood and sweat and tears and stubbornness and dangling modifiers and shoots and leaves but I couldn't afford losing my scholarship, and I was walking away with an A in that class, if it was the death of both of us... and I won. Looking back it was one of the best things I learned in college - good for you that you're pursuing it.
And in the spirit of Dr. what's his militant anal retentive ass, your punctuation could use some work.
So... is this what you learn in writing class?
"and maybe, just maybe I’ll have to put some honest to god effort into what I do…"
Hello???
Last chance to express yourself this year...
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