You think it's about something but it's really about something else

I'm terrible at outlines. I had one professor in college that demanded we submit outlines for essays to him something like a week before the due date, and looking back, I truly think that was the most agonizing part of my university experience (and I had to take college math!!!!!!!!!! Which I've clearly blocked/blacked out).

I'm not drawn to movies or books driven by plot because, I think, my pleasure of being in this world has mostly been drifting along with experience after experience, unfolding before me (with my help). I didn't go to college knowing what I wanted to major in, and only submitted to a major (English Lit) and minor (French language) mostly by default, because those were the classes I enjoyed taking the most, not because I was pitching myself towards something. I just liked being here (Earth), looking around, laughing at things.

I worked 7 jobs in my year after college just so I could enjoy living another year in a hot city with my hot boyfriend and our hot dog-shaped dog before making a bigger decision about my life. I moved to Los Angeles because of a terrifically, insanely, absolutely bonkers-crazy run-in at a sushi restaurant which I will tell you in person someday if I haven't already, not because I had a job waiting for me here, or a certitude that my future lay here. I wanted the experience of arid days that could stretch onto infinity and an audition at a life that I knew I wanted from the beginning of my small, crooked-toothed childhood days, a life trying on the thoughts and lives of others, maybe ones that had more of a specific trajectory than mine. I've even left my family into the hands of the wind. Will we get to keep Zoe? There's no outline here (genetic liability), but I'm trusting in the winds of fate and the good of the world, that she'll be ours. I wouldn't be so bold as to set my life in stone, though.

I paid a babysitter so that I could come to a quiet, barely air-conditioned library, and I'm struck most of all by such tender moments around me, that I wish that's the screenplay I could write. A screenplay of tender moments. I would certainly watch one, but I'm not sure I could sell one. The way the man I'm sharing a table with jumped out of his seat and quietly exclaimed "Sorry!!" first in Chinese, then in English to me, when his phone rang -- a window into the language of his mind. The drug-addict looking middle-aged couple that wandered by me, and the woman softly touched her partner's arm and said "Oh look, non-fiction. Now that's nice."

I started writing this screenplay because a wonderful mother in my mom group encouraged me to write this specific story, said she would help me with it, and so I am, because that's just as much of a push I needed in this tender time of life I'm in, caught between a maybe-career and two little people who I love and want more than anything, who all but consume my daily moves and breaths and rhythms, my last thoughts before sleep, who wake me from my slumber softly calling "Mommy, mommy, mommy," and I hear it almost before they say it, I hear the crib creak from the other room and know what is coming, the soft little wail before calling to me, and then the soft little hands around my neck when I give the 2am hug, and whisper "It's sleepytime," when I lay them back down, though all I want to do is crawl in there and talk all night. I truly cannot wait until one morning they will have the wherewithal to tell me about their dreams, considering it's the biggest pet peeve I had with my mother growing up (boring my dad and I with seemingly endless tales of her dreams). All she wanted was someone to listen to the wild inner life she had, and I rolled my eyes and its irrelevance. And now, here I am, lying in wait for someone else's somnolescent imagination. I'm sorry, mom.

I sit here, struggling with an outline for this story, for a drive, to make it unlike any other story that's ever been told, just putting the pressure on myself to not just write my first full-length screenplay but to write the most quixotic production, a script so sui generis all of Hollywood will come clamoring...well, this ridiculous burden is one of the handful of reasons why I haven't written anything full-length yet.

I've had an idea for an essay noodling around in my brain for a year now, but it's felt too private to share, too intimate to put to paper, and now I realize, the thing thing that's been nagging at me for months and months is the drive behind this story. Rowan is currently obsessed with trucks, tractors, and diggers, and all over town we drive around and he yells out "DIGGER!" if he sees any large truck-looking car (problematic to the extreme were his elocution not so stellar, believe me, I know), and there's just another way into this story. Exhuming the beasts of one's mind can crystallize a basic story. I can place tenderness in structure. Hopefully, I can even transform a basic idea from Save the Cat! to Whoa, What Kind of Animal Is This, There's Not Even Fur? We'll see, but as always, you dear subscribers are my sounding board and my silent accountability.

Thank you. Back to my outline. *Whimpers less vehemently than before.*