Maybe it's because I'm worried about money. I had to cash out some mutual funds last week to make my house payment. The woman at the brokerage house didn't make me feel any better about the difficult decision to sell. "This isn't a really good time to do this, you know," she said to me, as though I might not already know that. We had a talk about losses and did some evaluating of where the hit would be the least painful. I opted for the lowest losses because, while there have been years in the past when a write off could have been helpful, this year has been one of rather limited income and a loss write off is about the last thing I need. I was hoping to get by on my income from a job I did in October, but in spite of promises that the check had been mailed, it still has not been received. Before I came to the final decision to sell my funds, I checked in with a friend who's a financial journalist and a good place to turn when I'm seeking common sense advice about money matters. "Seems like a rainy day to me," he said. "You were saving for a rainy day, right?"

 

The writer's speed bump (it's not big enough to be a block) could also be caused by my preparations to leave the country. I've been cleaning out the cabinets and the closets, getting the forwarding orders filed on the mail, sending the house plants off to camp, making sure the neighbors know about the friend that's in my apartment for the winter, and doing annual maintenance on my body. The doctor. The dentist. Dang it, there's no time for the optician. The eyeballs will have to wait. All systems are go everywhere else, maybe I can extrapolate and assume that the eyeballs are okay. I've started gathering the bits and pieces that I need to take with me, buying dental floss and cumin, stocking up on prescription drugs, and hitting up all my pals to clean off their bookshelves for me so I can take their hand me down reading material with me to the Old Country.

 

There's all that reading I have to get done before I go, too. The New Yorker is really starting to pile up about the place and those books I borrowed have to get read and returned. I finished the Satanic Verses, but I gave up on Founding Brothers and Stupid White Men for exact opposite reasons. I felt like Founding Brothers wanted me to have all this knowledge that I just didn't have (honestly, who remembers what Federalism was all about?). Conversely, Stupid White Men was telling me all this stuff I already knew and I felt a little bit like I was being preached to about views I already had. To my horror, I found I had a copy of A River Runs Through It in my bedside bookshelf and today, underneath yet another stack of New Yorkers, I found something called Breaking Clean. I returned Bel Canto (whew!) and a crabby little book about food along with that Peter Gabriel CD and the neighbor's video of Young Frankenstein. Don't even get me started on all the movies I need to see that are sure to cut well in to writing time.

 

For about two weeks I've been aggressively working out instead of writing. Swimming, using the treadmill, riding the bike, making a circuit through the park on the sunny days, up and down the stairs in the water tower and then around the reservoir before coming back through the neighborhood. I had to load and reload my MP3 player and ever since I installed Windows XP the laptop hates me, so loading and reloading the MP3 player takes time. But it's important because, hell, your workout is going to suck if you have to have the same music over and over and over again, every day. Doing all that working out takes a lot of time, you know.(I've been wondering if I can't some how offer a service of doing other people's workouts for them, at a very affordable rate. I go on a 30 minute power walk, report back with time, route, calories burned. My overworked client, who had to go to last minute meetings, gets the satisfaction of knowing that a workout has been completed in their name.) The time it takes to walk to the gym, get suited up for the pool, do the swimming, stretch out in the sauna, get showered and dressed, and walk back to the house really cuts in to the not writing time. On top of that time loss, I overdid it three days back and my knees still hurt. Moping about how my knees hurt is really interfering with my writing.

 

Not writing could be indicative of some further problem. Maybe I'm not really a writer. The writer's discussion list that I'm on is on the verge of a tizzy about an article posted in Swan's about a little event called NANOWRIMO - National Novel Writing Month. The goal was to crank out 50,000 words in the month of November, eschewing quality for quantity. "Write like the wind, Bullseye!" The article suggests that the participants are less than writers, that the event bestows a false sense of credibility upon its participants, and that those wannabe scribblers that participate are damaging the good name of real writers everywhere. Now, I didn't participate in the event, not being interested in the form or the quantity based goal. Plus, at opening day, I was busy - um - writing. I'm not so busy with that any more, it seems. I could use a foolish deadline to motivate me.

 

While I'm grappling with the identity issues tied up in being a writer, I'm doing a lot of research about people who I should be writing for but at this time am not. This means a great deal of web surfing for submission guidelines and a lot of oddball searches for publications that are interested in the personal essay as a valid literary form. I'm looking for the travel publications that ought to be paying me to write for them too. And I'm trying to make some choices about what to submit to them when I find them. The whole business of writing, and by that I do mean the business, the marketing, the research, the preparation, takes a lot of time that should be spent writing. The more I read about what an agent wants, the more I wonder why, if I knew all the stuff an agent wants me to know before I even sit down to write to them, I would need an agent at all. It's mystifying, but there you go. The business of writing, as I was saying, is a lot of business and if I keep it up, I may need someone to do my workout for me because I will not have time for it.

 

In the midst of all the not writing, I've been sending a lot of letters off to government officials. I wrote to Gary Locke about the transportation summit and I sent my regular missive off to the big three, Jim McDermott, Patty Murray, and Maria Cantwell, about the issue of the week. This week it was President Bush's new forest plan. Last week, it was probably the war in Iraq. I write to them a lot about Iraq. I am curious if they are going to be taking out a restraining order on me, I think if I wrote to any one civilian as much as I write to those three, they'd think I was hitting on them. In addition mail to the pols, I write to the technical team I'm working with right now, the people I used to carpool with, and a few old friends from art school. I had some job leads to follow up on, which required careful attention and some social planning via email.

 

Maybe it would be okay for me to give myself a break this week. It's pretty clear I have lots to do and lots to think about. It seems like if I had time between all the reading and the running around and the corresponding and the worrying and the planning and the researching and the keeping up on world events to put together something as insignificant as a 1529 word essay about, oh, why I'm not writing, for example, well, it seems like if I had time to do that, well, I would.