Process Notes: Moments of Being (Sort Of)
From the notebook: the writing grift, ghost signs, DNA, and a quiz.
One of the writing prompts I liked to use with my students is called “Place Us in the Room Where You Are Writing.” Wherever you’re writing—a dorm room, Starbucks, food court—look around and describe it. Take notes. Let people know where you are, and how it relates to what you’re trying to write about. The most famous example I can think of, although there are many, comes from Adrienne Rich’s essay, “Split at the Root: An Essay on Jewish Identity”:
For about 15 minutes I have been sitting chin in hand in front of the typewriter, staring out at the snow. Trying to be honest with myself, trying to figure out why writing this seems to me so dangerous an act, filled with fear and shame, and why it seems so necessary.
Do you want to read more? I ask my students. I know I do!
This writing prompt did so many things at once. It draws readers in. It tells students their everyday lives are worth writing about. It offers a frame for their stories. It helps them make connections between their surroundings and how they’re reacting to their subject matter—be it nostalgia, longing, trauma, or joy. And, my favorite: it lets them talk about notebooks and pens and keyboards if they want to.
I’m sitting here at my desk at home, looking at my random notes for what I want to write about next. Examples:
People still call me professor. I don’t know what to think about that.
My hair is going. It’s time to just buzz the poof off the top of my head.
Why, oh why, is our local ice cream truck called “Mr. Ding-A-Ling”?
There are a lot of items like these—unactionable, at least as far as expanding them into essays. I mean, I can summon up 2,000 words on Mr. Ding-A-Ling, but I am not sure it’d be worth disseminating.
The Technics 1200 plays a “Dear God”-less edition of XTC’s Skylarking.1
It’s raining. Again. Every weekend for the past seven months, we’ve had a weekend without sunshine. Here in Albany—where, as my old student Abby once wrote, “even the sky seems angry”—this does not go unnoticed. People are pissed. It feeds into the narrative that Albany can’t catch a break. And they’re not wrong.
You might even be able to tell what’s going on by the publication dates of these posts. I’m trying to bang this out before the month turns. I promise you, dear readers, that I do have a work ethic—it just kicks in at the end of each month.
“You have to post something before the month ends,” the work ethic whispers. “Some people actually pay for this.”
One note reads “Content Hustle.”
I’ll try to unpack that here, since I think it relates to what I am trying to say sometimes.
During the week, I sit at the desk of my job and sometimes think back to my past life. I stole the “English Department” sign from my office and have it in my cubicle as a joke. I jot down notes for topics to cover, vignettes from two decades teaching at what I used to call the Historically Catholic College in Upstate New York.
I shirk—if that’s the right word—from the idea of talking about my “writing practice,” at least in the way I see it presented on Substack and elsewhere. I know, I know: I should get over myself. But this idea of Making a Living as a Writer, at least in the way it’s sometimes pitched, seems both unreasonable and dishonest.
Can you SEO your addiction tales into low-level riches and a modest book advance? Complain about gentrification in Upstate New York while also gentrifying Upstate New York? Run writing workshops for other gentrifiers who miss the buzz of Brooklyn? Live with your parents well into your thirties and not mention it until your third book? Charge aspiring writers just to tell them to run from MFA programs that you yourself attended?
There are actual business models for all of the above. And it’s exhausting. Maybe what I’m saying is that, at times, I’m leery about cannibalizing my own tales of professional failure for clicks. Nevertheless, I persist.
“Moments of Being.” [in quotes, as in the original notebook entry]
It’s all a bit of an acting job, really. Most days, my life is what Virginia Woolf calls “non-being,” a “fog of routine and surface impressions,” as I move through my shelves of vinyl to play, coffee to make, family to enjoy and savor. Life is life—and to be honest with you, I wish it were always a sequence of non-being.
That’s because those “moments of being,” as Woolf calls them, spring from instances where life leaves an impression. For me, they represent a double-edged sword: moments of being are often painful, but they are also ones I want to remember and write about. Moments of being most worth writing about have some conflict involved. Do they leave the pain/conflict unresolved or let it continue? Sometimes. But those moments—I can’t write about. Only the ones that have cycled through to some kind of end.
Emotion recollected in tranquility and all that jazz, as William Wordsworth liked to say.
I loved Wordsworth’s definition of poetry for years, probably because I took it as an excuse not to write until tranquility set in. When would that happen, exactly? When I retire to the Berkshires? Win the lottery with a scratch-off? Attend some writing-themed canoe weekend?
MTHFKR
As a sidebar, I will say to you, dear reader, and by way of some reassurance that I am attending to self-care, that I am looking for a new therapist. Back in my teaching days, I had a good thing going. I could walk up the street to see Dr. P, who would listen to me go on about my failures and sadness and daddy issues, and I’d walk back to campus. I remember when I worked as a freelance proofreader in midtown for this crazy lady, and she would be put out that I had to take a break from copy editing cell phone ads to see my therapist. She was in love with her first cousin, so I didn’t really take her seriously.2
Working regular business hours nowadays means going the telehealth route. I will try that eventually, but hold out for seeing someone in-person.
I did start seeing a therapist for face-to-face appointments, and we’ve had a couple at night. They’re an MD and all we talk about is vitamins and blood work. I’m not feeling it so far. Maybe after a couple appointments—after we determine if I have a variant in the MTHFR gene and whether I should go with folic acid or methylfolate—we’ll finally fucking talk about my dead mom or my loss of professional and personal identity after two decades. Stay tuned!
Lipstick Day
I remember when I had an op-ed published in The New York Times—ten, maybe twelve years ago. Sunday opinion section. A humorous piece, but still maybe my highest-profile byline. I thought it would erase the sting of the terrible review they gave my last book—the one that sent me to therapy.
I shared the link with the college’s offices, hoping they’d celebrate it. A professor published in the Old Gray Lady! But instead, the publicity team posted about National Lipstick Day across all platforms, complete with a red lips image and a caption: “What’s your favorite lipstick? Leave it in the comments!”
Ghost Signers in The Sky
I’m looking at the notes at home, and this one was a head scratcher. What the hell did this doodle mean? Then it hit me.
It references a Times Union story on how highway signs still point to the campus of my now-shuttered Historically Catholic College. The angle was obviously click-baity: local governments can't even get it together to take down a few signs, right?
My reaction was personal, since one of these signs—each and every time—triggers me. I almost muscle-memory my steering wheel to whichever off-ramp it points to.
Honestly, it wasn’t always with joy that I drove to my old job. Lately, in classic former professor fashion, I’ve been giving myself pop quizzes in my head. Here’s one.
Which one of the statements below best describes my current mood:
A. I really liked my job.
B. I was riding it out.
C. I trapped there, afraid of what would come next, unsure if I could work outside academia?
D. The “golden handcuffs” of tenure turned me into someone both underappreciated and complicit in the exploitation of adjuncts and students?
E. I just I loved teaching and was willing to suffer through everything to be able to do it.
Answer key: Trick question! The answer is F. All of the above.
I flip Skylarking over, “Dear God” still missing from side 2.
Thanks for subscribing, and for reading.
I have another post in the back, so look out for that one sooner rather than later.
I apologize in advance for any typos. They drive me crazy when I spot them after I send this out.
Or, you know, maybe just buy me a coffee. I love coffee.
“Dear God,” arguably the band’s most famous song, was added to the album only after radio stations started playing it. It was initially a B-side to “Grass,” the first single. That “Grass” was a single, in retrospect is insane, in this Substacker’s opinion, considering they had “Earn Enough for Us” in their back pocket.
Seriously, this person was in fact in love with their first cousin. It took several months to put all the pieces together, and when I did, it wasn’t long after I left the job. The vibes were off.
I mean, ding-a-ling is where my mind goes right away. Your instincts are true. Come for the onomatopoeia; stay for the Chuck Berry and “ding-a-ling hat”/“ding-a-ling wagon” variants.
All of the reasons for being in your old job. That part.