When I write, I feel like an armless, legless man with a crayon in his mouth.

Kurt Vonnegut wrote that. That's how I feel all the time. Except my crayon is a nub and I need to remove the paper. Frustrating. I know that I've been paid to write and I keep getting assignments, but I feel more like a fraud than I ever have. As I get closer and closer to my goals, I feel as if I am still so far away. Each success begs to be duplicated and brings its own very different fears. I am overwhelmed. I want to quit everything, just stop it, but the thought of doing that is so gut wrenching, and when I actually sit down to put word to page (or type to screen), I am at home. I don't know why this has to be such a combative process, but then, as Will Smith playing Chris Gardner says, it is the pursuit of happiness. I don't want to work this hard, yet when I do it, I love it. Ah well, let me take this crayon and pretend that my work is not a giant cerulean scribble on the screen of life.

A Different Light

I have been thinking on the subject of friendship a lot lately. I called a person who was once a really good friend and we struggled through our less than 10 minute conversation as if we were strangers. While I still have friends from college and when I moved back home many years ago, the friendships I thought would be the longest lasting have all but dissipated. My husband still has his friends from high school. While they've struggled with continuing to find time for each other in the mess of life, they still do, they still enjoy each others company. With the exception of one friend here, my other good friends live in Atlanta and Miami. While Atlanta is not that far away, in many ways it is a lifetime away. With hectic lives on both sides, making arrangements to hang out doesn't happen as often as we'd like.

So what happens to make relationships disintegrate? How can you be each other's best friends and confidantes one day and the next not even really know the person? I'm prone to think it's a woman thing, because my husband and my guy friends are my only friends. My husbands friends are slowly warming up to me and me to them, but every female friend I have ever claimed as a "best" friend, barring my friend in Miami, has left me in the dust. I am not bitter about this fact, just incredulous, wondering what I do to cause it, if it is my fault, if I am just a poor chooser of friends. I would like to put the blame on myself in some cases. I am the common denominator. But in other cases, even as I claimed friend status, I watched her make and discard friends like tissue paper, and one day, my turn was up. It is hard for me to turn off the "caring for a friend" mode that I've gotten into when friends leave me, but I could stand to see this in a different light.

In other news, babies are being born and are about to be born. Expect presents sometimes before they turn 2.