Surprise, I'm a writer:

At work today, my boss was showing me a website of an artist she knows and navigating the artwork until she got distracted by a phone call. With her attentions otherwise absorbed, I began clicking on some of the site, focusing on "press" and then finding myself intrigued by the first listed link titled, "Fall Gallery Walk 06." As I began to read the piece, it felt vaguely familiar, as if I had read it before. And then I realized it was familiar because I was the one who'd written the piece.

It's odd because I have been thinking about that thing I used to do, where I would go to events in the "art" world and write about them for a blog. No one really ever read it (except my delightful father, I suspect was our only avid fan/reader), and it was the sort of thing I did just for fun and because my friend Natalia liked to go to art galleries and wanted to do a blog about them and wanted a writing partner.

It surprised me the way it might surprise someone to casually bump into a family member you haven't seen in a while. Enough time has passed so that they seem slightly different, maybe they have grown a beard or put on weight, but with a good scrutinizing glance, you recognize the face from long ago. In other words, my writing, my babies, my work is out there in the world being put to good use and it was heartwarming to see it fulfilling some function. At the time I wrote that piece, I didn't know the artist and had no idea that my boss knew the artist. I simply loved her work from seeing it at a gallery.

It also made me aware that I used to lend a lot more of my time to intellectual and cultural pursuits, opting to skip a night in front of the tv on the couch getting high with Eric and his roommates. Of course, I was still in school and bone crushingly busy so was just part of the rigor I subscribed to without thinking very hard about it and sometimes when you are busy you are more productive than when you have all the time in the world to do anything.

The other thing that surprised me about the piece is before I knew it was mine, I was impressed by the writing. Generally I scoff at most online reviews, finding them dull and meandering or too full of excitable language (written by a marketing major, most likely). Of course, looking at it now, with three years distance, I can see obvious mistakes and edits I'd make. Yet, it just reminded me that writing isn't about thinking about it, wanting to do it, conceptualizing, it is about doing it and having something to show for myself. And though I have quite a lot of words behind me, there are a lot things I don't give credence to, for whatever reasons (those screenplays, that piece on oprah.com, the stuff I do here--hehe--because largely they are not exactly what make me thrilled as a writer) but they are still a part of me.