I finished reading Anne Lamott's bird by bird this morning, and she spends most of the book telling you to face it, buddy, you're probably never going to be published, and then she goes on to say things like writing is its own reward, and we write because we love God or want to impress girls or want to think about things or distill things or reach out and etc., and it made me wonder, not so much why I write, because yes, those are the reasons I write, mostly, but who I write for.

And yes, of course I write for you, but there's the whole public face, the me I choose to show you, and am I really anything like this in person, and would you even be here if you weren't heavily into hot man on man action? and so on that gets me to say this: I write everything, everything, first, for me me me, even if I'm writing something specifically requested, or as a gift. I'm writing it to see if I can, I'm writing it to see how it turns out, I'm writing it to see if I like it when it's done.

Then I usually rewrite it with a certain friend of mine in mind, and I always hope she, above all others, will like it, will laugh in the right places, will prize it because it's good, and not because it's something I wrote.

And then I write it hoping you kids out there will stop by and read it and maybe nod or even say You know, I particularly liked that thing he said about dry cleaning in the third paragraph. and then I will be incandescent with delight, naturally, but the only truly important thing to me about any story that I write is that there is something in it that I like about it.

But the secret is this: I write it for me, yes, but I write it hoping you'll remember it. That in three years you'll think of just one line in hundreds of stories, the thousands of stories you've read and you'll think, man, that? was a really good damned line.

This is hard to admit to, and probably foolish to hope for, because I myself only very rarely remember the specific lines to stories I loved and read and read again, and most often, that one shining sentence only works because it's the last one in a series of beautiful sentences that tap on the inside of your skull until that perfect sentence breaks the shell and lets the light in.


As long as I'm being arrogant and self-involved, why not tell you about my blind spot.

When I was in college, I lived with this woman who may, and I emphasize may, have been in love with me. Eventually she moved out of our shared apartment and stopped going to movies with me or returning my calls, and at first I was confused and then I was angry and finally, hurt. She refused to tell me what it was I'd done to earn her apparently eternal enmity, but I think now, looking back on it, that she was (maybe) very much in love with me, and that I was completely oblivious, and that she got tired of waiting for me to notice and gave it up as a bad job. Her love probably turned from chafing exasperation to utter black resentment by degrees, or maybe she was just tired of seeing me, with my dorky face and my complete inability to notice love.

It goes without saying that I loved her, that I still miss her sometimes like there's a clenched fist in my throat. She was my closest friend and I had always done everything in my power to be the best friend I could be, and it could be said that she was not necessarily an easy person to love. She was haughty and arrogant and bossy and always chock full of withering things to say (although generally about people other than me). Still, she made me laugh and I knew that she prized my company and I accepted her short temper and her changeable moods and the way she had of abruptly tiring of your company and tossing you out on your ear in the middle of a game of Russian Bank or an episode of the X-Files.

So, there I was, happily adoring her, and all of a sudden she would no longer speak to me. And really, it could have been anything: maybe she had secretly hated me all along, maybe it was because I whistled in the kitchen or sang in the shower, maybe it was because I was always fretting about money. The part that was hardest about this was that I didn't know what I'd done, and therefore couldn't even try to make it up to her. (Which I don't doubt would have been worse for all involved-- debasing on my part and cringe-inducing on hers.)

The reason I mention this is because I spend a fair amount of time thinking that I'm a fairly observant person, and then something like this happens and I am faced with the naked truth: I really almost never have any idea what other people truly think of me. I meet people and I feel reasonably witty and pleasant in their company, but who knows, perhaps they merely gritted their teeth to smile at my jokes, or spent the entire meal wishing for my brain to get scooped out into a blender set on zortify.

I'm the empress of meaning well and doing harm in any number of ways, but I'm generally blissfully unaware of all the ways I kick people in their emotional shins from day to day, and I have to say that I'm glad about it, or I'd never speak to anyone again.

And so I take this opportunity to fashion a sort of blanket apology and say, if ever any offhand comment was unwittingly cutting, if I forgot your name, if you felt I was patronizing, if I missed the point of your story entirely, or laughed in the wrong place, or said nothing at all, if I was careless or lazy or snide, please let me say that I probably only noticed after the fact, if I noticed at all, and that I'm uselessly sorry and routinely oblivious, that I take it back, that I'll do it again.