What happens when I don't know what to write

I don’t know what to write.

I don’t know what to write.

I DO NOT FUCKING KNOW WHAT TO WRITE.

And therein lies the problem. I want to write. I want to write oh so badly. But the words…they aren’t coming. Or rather, the words would come (they always come) if I just knew what to write about.

I started trying to write about me and my mother, and I got a lot out, but then I waffled on whether to publish it on the blog and in the end I was a huge pansy and decided not to. Or in one case, I published it, laid awake for two hours, then got up in the middle of the night and took it down. Wimp.

I have about forty women coming to my house this evening. They are women who served on the retreat team with me, and women who came to the retreat as guests. It will be a wonderful night. And I will run around panicked right before they arrive, making sure clean hand towels are in the downstairs bath, and the blankets neatly stacked on the floor in that bathroom waiting for the next storm siren are removed. And in those few hours of rushing around trying to get ready for my guests I will not think continually about writing. It will hover under the surface, though. Pulsing.

This weekend is Homecoming at the school where I work. The student council is sponsoring a bunch of fun themes each day this week. Today is Hawaiian Shirt Day. The faculty and staff are much more interested in this than the students. Nearly all of us are sporting some sort of Hawaiian shirt. A relatively small percentage of the student population is participating. Thursday is Steve Jobs Day, where we are all supposed to wear black turtlenecks and “dad jeans.” I am curious to see whether this will go over better than Hawaiian Shirt Day.

I saw a black bug in the women’s restroom yesterday. It was smaller than a cockroach. Maybe it was a baby cockroach, although I don’t think so because it didn’t have those disgustingly long antennae that give me the willies. I almost squashed it, but at the last minute thought, “Meh, he’s not hurting anyone.” I left him be. Then I realized that he really had no place to go. He was wandering up and down the tile where the floor meets the wall, which is the same kind of white, square tile only it’s curved instead of flat. He kept trying to climb up the corner, then would go back down the wall after learning he couldn’t go up. I thought about what it must looks like from his perspective. A sea of white, square tile in every direction. It’s a surprisingly large bathroom even for a human. Lots of wasted space. For a bug it’s a universe. I wondered where he came from, and if he’d eventually find his way back. Later, I had to use the bathroom again and found that someone else squashed him, right there where the floor meets the wall with the same white, square tile that is curved instead of flat.

I learned a new word today: schismatic. As an adjective, it is “of, characterized, or favoring schism.” As a noun it is “(especially in the Christian Church) a person who promotes schism; an adherent of a schismatic group.” In layman’s terms, a schismatic is a shit disturber. Cool. An intellectual way of calling someone a rabble rouser.