Watching this video (privacy concerns aside), I thought primarily of what I did in school and what my classmates were doing–we were trying to take lives and turn them into stories. And while I don’t think Facebook is achieving quite that, I think most of us have that urge, to take our experiences and pull narrative from them, to have plot and and arc and reason and momentum. To know and be known. This is what photo albums are about. This is why we treasure letters written in our grandmother’s handwriting. This is why we display family photos on our living room walls.

So, I’m very interested to see how social media changes–or does not change–the way we think about memoir, the way we tell our life stories. We’ll always tell stories about ourselves, in whatever format, and to whatever audience. The possibilities of telling those stories in new ways or to new audiences is rather fascinating. I can’t help but imagine what it would be like to have this kind of information about my own parents or my grandparents.

I am reminded of another video I saw recently, a TED Talk by Adam Ostrow. He talks about the sheer volume of digital records we are creating, and what might happen to those records once we are no longer living the lives we are all so bent on recording and sharing.

8:00 a.m. Eat good breakfast with protein to give me energy for writing. Drink hot green tea, for a little caffeine and antioxidants. Get ready for the day and see Jesse off to work.

9:00 a.m. Use the Barnes & Noble gift card I found this weekend to buy zombie movies, zombie books, and a book of letters from Ginsberg and his father. (Research and inspiration, check.)

9:30 a.m. Answer work-related e-mails to make sure plate is sufficiently clear for writing.

10:00 a.m. Read blogs. (Reading and writing are so connected, you know?)

10:30 a.m. Check work e-mail again.

10:35 a.m. Get an old essay ready to send out. Write cover letters, print things, address envelopes. (Look at me, being productive and sending things out! So totally something a writer would do.)

11:00 a.m. Change Facebook profile picture. (Yeah, I’ve got nothing for this one.)

11:05 a.m. Watch the Google Freddy Mercury video. Admire its creativity.

11:10 a.m. Check work e-mail.

11:15 a.m. Open Microsoft Word and stare at blank screen.

11:20 a.m. Laugh as Gracie jumps into the office chair Oliver was sleeping in and proceeds to sit on him. Oliver is un-phased and proceeds to lick Gracie’s back. Well, how cute is that?

11:21 a.m. Take pictures of the cats.

…

And you get the point. Okay, I am going to write something as soon as I post this. Immediately! With no waiting! I mean, after I post this and put the link on Facebook and Twitter of course…and check my work e-mail one more time…

Oh, here’s some pictures of Oliver and Gracie, in case you were needing a little distraction too:

However, I still haven’t exactly figured out how to answer that question.

Why am I here?

First and foremost, to write. A large chunk of my novel is set here, and I need to smell the smells and see the sights and drink in the air that is San Francisco. Inspiration. Research. Call it what you will.

But I’m vaguely embarrassed at admitting I’m attempting a novel. I mean, who does that? (Okay, fine, a lot of people I know do that. But I’ve got a lot more confidence in them than I do myself.)

And then what do I tell all these people in two years when the novel has failed to find its place in the world and I’m onto yet another probably doomed project? Sigh. Well, I figure I’ll cross that bridge when I get to it. (I love that saying. Probably a little too much.)

There are other reasons why I’m here. Ones that are harder to articulate. After a difficult first half of the year, I needed to be here. Or, I needed to not be there or there. I guess I picked the furthest spot I could from my normal life. Sometimes, I think, a little escapism is exactly what you need. And honestly it’s working. I’ve felt sanity returning from almost the first moment I set foot on the West Coast.

I needed to be away from the heat.

I needed to eat more organic food.

I needed to do yoga multiple times a week.

I needed to be in a place where I had no one to impress. I needed to be in a place where it didn’t matter who I was or how exactly I chose to express that.

I needed beauty. I needed energy. I needed eight hundred thousand people nearby.

I needed to discover Fado, a traditional Portuguese style of music with sad lyrics in a language I don’t know.

I needed space. I needed to think. I needed clarity.

I needed to know who I was out of my normal environment. I needed to know what was me and what was my place and what was other people and their expectations and how to tell the difference.

And I’m sure there are other reasons I haven’t yet discovered. They’ll come at their own time.

So this morning (afternoon back at home), I’ll listen to more Fado and I’ll drink chai tea and I’ll write and I’ll write and I’ll write and maybe the novel will be a failure, but I will say: At least it got me July.

Jesse wakes up at his normal time, and I try desperately to stay in bed as long as I possibly can. Eventually, I get up and we have breakfast. (This is usually right after Gracie has thrown up hers. Sigh. Not the most pleasant sound to wake up to…but I’ll take it over an alarm set for 5:30.)

After Jesse leaves for work, I water my herb garden out back and silently urge it not to die, even though I planted it about a month later than I should have and this early summer has been just as ridiculously hot as last year’s early summer was. (Funny, all my friends who posted jokes about global warming this winter as it snowed have not said word one this summer…)

Some days, I babysit mornings and early afternoons, which means I read stacks and stacks of Berenstain Bears books (love those books) and dole out snacks and supervise the blowing of large quantities of bubbles. Also, potty training. I feel I’m getting quite the education for when I have my own children.

Also on the daily agendas: continued work on the book–writing out ideas, notes, paragraphs, character sketches, fleshing out the outline. And plenty of reading. Right now, I’m plowing through a 622-page book on emerging diseases–and I’m loving it. Except that I was already paranoid about germs, so every now and then I’ll be reading about Ebola and I’ll feel a little hot and my brain will first think, “Oh no! A fever! Ebola! When will the hemorrhaging start?” before I’m able to correct the thinking and remind myself that it’s in the mid-90s outside and I’m trying to save money by keeping the thermostat as high as I can stand it. (In my defense, every single time someone is about to violently die of a vicious disease, that person will first have very normal and explainable symptoms. A headache, perhaps. It always starts like that.)

Now that I’m home most of the time, I’ve been cooking. Nothing special, but I’m finally (after almost a month) getting back into the swing of preparing weeknight dinners. Buying a giant bag of broccoli from Costco has helped. Now, when planning dinner, I just need to ask myself: What other broccoli recipes do I know of?

That’s about it. I’m trying not to think about San Francisco much, because every time I do I get panicky–hot, itchy, heart racing, tummy aching. So I will, as my mother always said, just cross that bridge when I come to it.

I hope your summer is off to a good start!

I did this during the day, too, particularly on long car trips. When I got my first Walkman, the stories suddenly had soundtracks.

I’m still in the planning stages of this book, and I realized today that writing (fiction, at least) is for me an extension of what I was doing as a child. I am functioning on one level as a normal person: I drive, I go to the bank, I buy groceries. But often I’m also imagining a story, inventing characters, listening as they speak to one another.

For the most part, this doesn’t impact “real life” that much. I’m still careful in the car. I watch where I’m going. But yesterday at the bank I made at least three mistakes while trying to complete a simple transaction. I hadn’t even been in “story mode,” but I’d been thinking about it in the car, and apparently I hadn’t fully returned to earth.

The teller laughed; I laughed. I told her my head must be in the clouds, or already in weekend mode. She asked if there was anything particular I was looking forward to about the weekend, and I paused for a moment, considered telling the truth, and then lied and said something about the beach, keeping my secret to myself.

As I left the bank, I smiled. And continued the story…

I’ll let you in on a little secret:

I might–might–be doing something crazy this summer. A couple weeks ago, I switched a setting in the novel I’m writing to San Francisco and immediately had a crazy idea: What if I spent a month this summer in San Francisco, researching for the book, writing, soaking up the city, pondering life, recovering from a rough semester?

Before I could think about it too much, I decided to do it and launched into a rigorous “Find a Place to Stay” search.

Now I’m knee-deep in vacation rentals–most of which are too expensive or not available when I want to go–and I’m starting to wonder what the heck I was thinking in the first place.

I can’t go to San Francisco! By myself! And spend that much money!

Jesse emailed me a quote for inspiration: “If you don’t take a chance, you won’t get one.” (He’s pretty sure if I spend all this money to go to California, I’ll let him buy a keytar. He’s probably right.)

I told him that being a scaredy cat and a tightwad at the same time can be bad for taking chances.

Sigh. So, that’s where I’m at this morning. Trying to find the point at which I throw in the towel, say that was a fun idea while it lasted, and give up. How much money am I willing to spend, and how much is too much? How much time away from home am I willing to spend, and how much is too much? Am I doing this just to prove I can? Is there anything wrong with that?

If you have any words of wisdom (or money) you’d like to send my way, please do.

I can’t remember those particular neighbors’ names, but I have watched their little boy go from baby to toddler to child. His mother is pregnant again. Their yard always looks nice.

Since they moved in across the street, I wonder, what have they noticed of us?

They have not watched children go from crawling to walking. They may have seen our cats in the window. They do not know that Oliver is perpetually hungry and always looking for food to steal. They might laugh if they saw us hiding bread in the microwave. Or, they might think we were nuts.

They have likely noticed I work irregular hours. They do not know what I feel when I hear my students have lost loved ones, when I know they are ill, when I know they are struggling, when I see they feel unloved. Nor, I imagine, do my students.

My neighbors do not know this year has been one of my hardest, that I have questioned everything. Everything. That while driving I sometimes imagine not taking my exit—perhaps this time I’ll just keep driving, just keep going, until I hit the Pacific ocean.

But because I am no longer twenty-five, or twenty-six, or twenty-seven, dreaming becomes harder to maintain, and escape routes seem perpetually blocked. There is a mortgage. There are utility bills. There is a savings account that must be maintained.

And, so, I take the exit, every time.

I go to school. I teach my classes. I take the summer off to write. I am beginning to have my doubts.

I am shelving the book. If it will find a place in the world, it will be as a second or third book, when I’ve got some distance and perhaps some outside input.

This summer, I am starting a new one, something very different—I suppose in the hopes I will write something more marketable—and I cannot help but fear I’m wasting my time, wasting my life, chasing a dream that will never materialize.

Still, I keep chasing, because I don’t know what else to do. I do not have a hundred interests, a dozen possible paths, a range of possible career interests. I have writing, and I have teaching, and that’s it.

My neighbors, however, know none of this. What they must see is this: a young couple who are always behind on yard work, who drive aging sporty cars never washed often enough, who keep a big white upright piano in their garage that they will probably never restore. They see us coming and going, they see friends and guests coming and going. Perhaps from time to time they hear clips of music—Jesse on the piano, or strumming a guitar, or the sad songs I play while I’m writing, or something with a beat while I’m cleaning.

There is a bush in our backyard that we forgot to keep trimmed. It is now above the fence. I keep looking at it in dismay, but the solution does not seem readily apparent; because we have let it go so long, we’d need different tools than we currently own in order to be rid of it. And it’s a cycle—the longer I wait, the harder it becomes to cut down the bush. Surely, our neighbors have noticed that.

Sometimes, I become very afraid that we are exactly how we seem.

But now the sun is almost behind our house, and we are nearly blocking the light from hitting that tree. I am tired, but with summer comes hope—of change, of restoration. The doors that have been inching shut this past year have not closed completely, and maybe, just maybe, I will slip through one.

I may not have gotten everything done, but I’m not unhappy with what I did over this break.

First and foremost, I prioritized my writing. I finished an essay I’ve been working on for two years. I sent it out. I also sent out a batch of query letters to agents regarding my book.

I don’t talk about my writing here very often, as least not the business side of things—the attempts at publishing. I don’t like to talk about it, because an attempt like this carries with it an almost guaranteed level of failure and rejection, two topics I’d prefer not to talk about online (or at all).

It’s one thing to share success, but it’s much harder to admit defeat.

Last Friday, Jesse and I listened to a podcast about success and failure and futility and life, and I realized yet again how results-oriented I am. I often miss the process, the journey, wanting to skip ahead to outcomes. I’m quick to deem something a failure, and I’m not good at seeing the gray areas here. Something either succeeds or it fails, and success is always good, and failure is always bad.

End of story.

Well, I’m trying to grow up a bit, and out of that way of thinking. I’m sending out this essay and this book, and it’s all too possible they’ll come straight back to me, rejected. Failed.

Will that make me a failure? Well, yes, in this regard anyway.

But that needs to be okay. Failure is an option.

And the sun will keep on rising, and the seasons will keep on changing, and I’ll keep waking up and putting one foot in front of the other.

Here goes nothing.

There was a sheet pulled over the windows, with the band’s name on it. It was held up with duct tape, and its shabbiness fit somehow. During the show, the sheet slowly slipped down, one strip of duct tape at a time, until one of the band members ripped the whole thing down, exposing the large half-moon-shaped window. The night outside was dark, a perfect contrast to the bright lights hitting the stage, and from the window I could see a few lit windows of a nearby tall building. I imagined myself outside, looking in. I wondered if people from those windows could see us, a little dot of light in a dark, cold night, and I thought, yes, everyone should see this, everyone should see us, as the drummer grinned and we sang, loving life.