Tales of a Bohemian Crip

Research. Loads and loads. I have read tons of articles about how television cameras work and why assistant directors scream at everyone so much. I’ve learned a lot but have not hit on anything that would, say, serve as the defining conflict of this thing that I am writing…it is always hard to know what to do with all these new facts. Some of them I probably won’t use at all, but I have to know them anyway because some of these characters do know them and it helps me to think they they do if I know some of their stuff. Still, some of it makes me brain hurt. In some ways, I have not used it as much as I thought since college.

After my last post in here, I second-guessed myself(which I shouldn’t) and totally did the self-deprecating charm thing and got him interested in me. But instead of thinking “Wow, so nice to meet a woman who’s upfront about her weaknesses,” he took it upon himself to armchair-shrink me and decide dating him is, like, the healthy alternative. Being chased was not as cool as it looks from the outside, although I liked it for maybe ten seconds. It is, after all, supposed to be the one thing girls are supposed to want since we are maybe 10 and I had never really had it, so, okay, there was a minor satisfaction in it, a tiny sense that I had left the homely crippled girl who can’t come out on the playground behind a little. But it was sort of crazy how invested he got based on the fact that I laughed at his joke once. Like he was going to make it happen to prove to some woman besides me that he was such a Nice Guy that he would date a cripple. Although initially I thought he understood more about the chair thing, but any time you talk to someone about barriers and limitations and they tell you about their bad back or something, they don’t.
I think I’m off the dating sites for real this time, although they make me feel that something is about to happen in a life that mostly doesn’t feel like that.
Kind of quietly back to fiction writing…sort of feel that I should choose, but I guess I can be obscure in both disciplines.(screenwriting and fiction)
Story’s going fine, but it’s hard to stay really amped without the feeling that a. The World really needs to hear this. or 2. I’m going to make a kajillion dollars. I don’t really have either about this one, so it chugs along, but there aren’t any marathon sessions. It’s very healthy and balanced, but kind of boring without the major flights of fancy/ euphoria followed by torturing myself because I didn’t get it right.

not much passion.
I bounce from thing to thing and almost everything makes me want to opine on Daily Kos…the easiest thing to come from my desk lately is not something that makes me feel like anything but a dilletante, although in my muted way I did enjoy it. Just sort of flinging things on the page without research or much consideration.
Maybe I should have let Divorced Dad buy me dinner. He was nice, even though I can’t say I *felt* him, either. It would have been so great to have something I was really looking for float into my OkCupid box, but failing that, it would be a story, you know? We went out, I had the steak. We had an amazing time, or we didn’t. Because I don’t really feel like a person right now, more like a ghost that types and watches videos. But J. wanted some kind of extra acknowledgement for paying attention to me and he was so NOT over his divorce. But i could get out of my work-at-home uniform, maybe find that melted half-lipstick, practice being captivating. But I’m not where my age and degree tells people I am. I could go out to dinner and chat for the next year and feel fairly satisfied in that, as I’ve been having chronic lust in the back of my brain like traffic noise for years and years…the thought that I might one day be sated would still be a step forward compared to this. But that is not normal for a person in her mid-thirties, not typical, at least. I don’t know how how to handle this. I’ve heard all the pop-culture witticisms about the third date like everyone else, and partly? I’m overdue. Part of me thinks I should find someone halfway decent and like, make up for lost time with them, keep the heart out of it, Piney McPinerson, but is that like admitting that I’m not that lovable? Because I know what the appeal of Manic Pixie Dream Crip in my profile…I sound like someone who does the things that everyone does, with modifications. In some ways, this is true. But not the way I want it to be. But if I explain it too much, it’s like “Wanna date me, even though I’m gross?’ And I want the real thing…private jokes and crap like that. Not just like, Orgasm Thursday.

it was touching, and corny and kind of pissed me off, too. I guess I rented it to rank on it, like those Hallmark things, but it was better than that. Better acted at least.
But it was a confusing viewing experience because it reminded me how much of a foot I’ve got in both camps, you know?I’m both the discouraged reporter and the broken person nobody wants to look at. It confuses me.

I think I could get off government aid tomorrow if I could get paid every time an American male tried to equate my disability with his bad back or old football injury. And they’re so proud, too, like they’re three years old and about to put their comparison on my fridge. Unless you’ve had people stare at you or not want to befriend you because you have it, then, no, you don’t know what it’s like.
If the discomfort never lasts past the point you get special “sick person” treatment, then you don’t know what it’s like.
And the whole limitation thing: are they really so privileged that they think it’s a serious thing that they will never see a six-foot jockey or gymnast? I mean, maybe a guy who wanted to be either of those things and suddenly shot up could understand, but…

didn’t happen. I mean, technically, I suppose I could just stay here all night typing whatever and claim I’d written a sixty-page pilot script, but I’m probably not going to really do that seeing as I’m here and not staying up till midnight typing anymore. Just typing pages of crap takes me longer than most people anyway. I’m not sure I’d be done by midnight tonight even if it devolved into writing my feelingsabout peanut butter or whatever, even using my own source material.
Getting a Celtx page to come out right is still hard and hard to forget about. You can’t get swept up in a story and worry about whether the end of the page is going to look right. I can’t, sitting here at the end of page 13.
I got a count yesterday and felt myself sort of deflate, as what felt like a ton of writing took up a page and a half.
I never did it for the group hugs before and I won’t now, I guess, but I thought this would be easier than it turned out to be.
Had some non-fiction stuff to write so I did that first, since only one was on spec this time. Good feeling but it doesn’t really take away my my doubts about myself as a writer exactly.
Sometimes I don’t know what I’m doing anymore. I mean, not really in a fugue state or loss of memory kind of way, but more like, at the end of the day,I feel like “I must have done something, but how can I account for this day?” I mean, yesterday all that I’m certain of is that I started a kerfuffle and watched one of the worst chick flicks I’ve ever seen and I feel worse that the movie was so bad. But there are so many insignificant articles to read and comments to get pissed off over.(And I suppose it’s true that even two years ago having even one of my virtual friends tell me they were offended by something I said would have sent me into a frenzy of backpedaling apology so I guess this is better, but it’s not thrilling. Because I don’t love myself now, it’s not a blinding flash of light, or anything like that, but I did look at the words “You’re wrong,” written several different ways, but I’m not bitter, without really thinking that I should go in and abase myself *right now* to get my Nice Crippled Girl reputation back.)
But that was totally time not spent on the script.
I know, right? I’m supposed to sit in an almost dark room with no internet and not get up, so to speak, till I have 500 words, young lady. And if Harvey Weinstein was banging on my door to read this thing that is what I would do. But maybe the one advantage to being nobody special is that I don’t have to write like I’m in detention.
But this isn’t the Script Frenzy post I thought I would write.

Finally getting into a rhythm…like what I’m doing okay, but not loving it. Would love to just dive into something and hate to be torn away from it again, although I suppose I’ve kinda lost that looking for equinamity.
However, I miss loving stuff. I’m not sad like I used to be but that doesn’t mean that I am ever truly happy either. Word counts are decent and the work that comes out is decent, too. But I don’t want to grab people on the street and thrust copies of my imagined-brilliant words into what I pretended were their eager hands. Sometimes I still wish I knew little enough to imagine I could still be all that.

Not knowing Celtx is messing with my flow…the feeling is like an old-school typewriter, where you have to do something different at the end of every line…being without word wrap is like an eighties flashback, like, wow, totally. Gag me with a spoon, man. Very conscious of every word on the page and kind of creeped out by that. I wish more people that wrote detective drama put their scripts out to be read for free on line, but there is one more link I got from Mr. Hack Notes that might have something that will help. I don’t know the form really well, but a super-extended flashback seems like a mistake. Have only written about half a page as of today. It’s slow. But it looks pretty good as it was formatted by Someone Other Than Myself and therefore has been typed by an adult. But it’s hard to feel that I’ll ever cut loose on Celtx. I also keep thinking of Christopher on the Sopranos who “bought a screenwriting program cause I thought it would help me do more of it”
But this one is freeware. Which is good, because being a wannabe could really cost money. Books(mostly seeming to contradict the other book you just read) buying scripts, maybe seminars or tapes…argh. There seems to be recession resistant appeal in people hoping they have talent.

I think one of the hardest things about having a disability is having to go through it with every new person I meet. Of course, most of the time, something else icky beats it out, like having to entrust any part of your life to some bureaucratic moron that you absolutely don’t respect.
Or the unpleasant physical facts of not being able to tend to yourself, which can be really…too much for people not on a parenting blog.
But sometimes I feel that I could live with it all if I wasn’t always, you know, scouting for that surprised flicker of vision in meatspace(Because nobody really expects “Us” to be anywhere but a doctor or a wheelchair-repair clinic. Everywhere else it is so fucking remarkable that the able-bodied person expects me to share in their awe that I have ventured out again and can occasionally hold other thoughts in my head besides “Not walking today, either.” After thirty years, and being told I was part of like, a civil-rights revolution, I’m sick of this game. Accept me or not; this is what there is. I have to.
And yet, I’m not supposed to make a big deal out of it either.When I meet new people, I have to absolutely be the Doris Day of Oppression, making people comfortable with stuff that, well, sometimes, *i’m* not okay with. I can live with it because I’m not Drew Barrymore in that movie, where she has to be reminded every day that she is not going to her teaching job…it’s not new news but that doesn’t mean I’m ever more than putting one foot in front of the other regarding it.
Online life is a better fit, but I still had a big reveal with an OkCupid friend last night, because you tell an able-bodied person a thing like that, and sometimes they become an amateur neurologist, wanting to know everything about my functional limitations but what they are really saying is “please never be a pain in my ass.” Which I would love to say yes to. Really. Because I would love a chunk of my life that’s light, and fun and never makes me think of writing my Congressman> But I think this little messaging thing is all you get that is like this. Or all I get. Otherwise, I wouldn’t be thirty-six and still sad that I never did anything stupid on Spring Break. But I think I can’t assure someone that. And maybe he’s a jerk anyway; I hate white guys who, when you talk about prejudice, expect you to have this one, clearly defined incident that they can relate to and catalog, and of course, assure themselves they are So Not Like That. And, of course, sometimes there are those, but sometimes it’s more subtle. And I don’t know why he is so fascinated by the thought that, years ago, I left my gimptitude off a dating site profile that no longer exists. Actually, I thought that would be a relatively funny story, not proof that I at one point was a horrible liar who is now trying to redeem herself. I needed a look at who I could be without all the baggage.She’s okay, you know, that person, who’s also me. She got chased, for a couple weeks.Which had never happened to either of us.
Yeah, okay, those guys were like my science experiment, to an extent, but I just flirted with them online. I’m fairly sure they are not scarred and I never asked them for so much as a nickel. No, I would not do it again, but maybe the Honesty Police could chill a little? I imagine, if I had not just befriended other dorks in early high school(and there had been more internets) I might have done something similar then. It’s no secret I’m behind for my age. And ahead. And behind again.

the thing that has helped my writing find an audience the most isn’t my musty old journalism degree or all the American lit I studied but the html I learned to go spend time on a fangirl website. I had no intention of, you know,Learning a Marketable Skill when I did that, and the tutorial itself lasted about a week, but it is one of the smartest things I’ve done since I decided that I wasn’t *quite* lonely enough for Dianetics
I guess if there is a larger point to this story, it is “Don’t discount your hobbies,” not that I’m enough of a success that anyone who reads this is looking for tips. But it’s interesting, because I used to take it as a big sign I was deep how much I sweat stuff, right? That I worried so much about being accurate, well-read, and appearing as if this wheelchair were some giant fashion accessory, and something I fell backwards into, not literally, of course, would turn out to be my greatest advantage…I wasn’t even thinking “advantages” when I started, which is a good thing as my first recap took about four hours and still ended up a hot mess.If I had been thinking like I had done previously, I would have probably given it up after a few weeks as I was not instantly good at it and sometimes it made my technophobia(which,make no mistake, I still have) flare up something terrible.But I had a lot more unfilled time, and was far enough away from being graded that I could learn without thinking about being the quickest study to ever master baby html in the history of ever, and there was no instructor to make into bad mommy or good daddy or try to seduce intellectually. Or whatever all that teacher-pleasing crap is…I’ve never quite been able to figure it out.
So, now, I’m a blogger, although my latest assignment is more like blog *coverage*…blurbs about depictions of women in the media. I had hoped to be more of an essayist, I suppose, Molly Ivins 2.0, but the truth is, I don’t know as much and I am nowhere near as funny. Nothing is stopping me, I suppose from holding forth on whatever topic catches my fancy, but sometimes this stops me too. Everyone has seen a blog entry or twelve that you wish the creator hadn’t spent the time on…don’t want to add to the glut.