My Writer’s Notebook: a Summer Brennan Essay Camp Write-Along School for Ants
idk I just wanted a ridiculous subtitle for this week of real rough draft essays, if essays is what you’d call them
Summer Brennan is a writer I enjoy reading and she hosts an online writing workshop called Essay Camp over on her Substack, A Writer’s Notebook.
Inspired by that and, for some reason, Zoolander, here is My Writer’s Notebook: a Summer Brennan Essay Camp Write-Along School for Ants
DAY 1
7:50 am Central European Time — you should already have some questions here, firstly, why on Earth is Spain in the Central European Time zone along with Poland and Hungary? You’ll never guess. Nazi Germany! Googling this now to provide a link as proof turns up a bunch of articles about this nonsense that suggest the Spanish government is seriously considering changing to the geographically sensical Greenwich Mean Time. The article linked, because you probably didn’t click, is from 2013. Never going to happen.
7:51 am Central European Time — oh, the Essay Camp Day 1 post isn’t up yet, and I had hoped to use the reading and writing as my brain warm up for the day. Maybe she’s scheduled it to post at 8:00 am our time! Yes our time, like sharing a time zone makes us pals, because she seems to live in Paris WHICH as we’ve established is in the same time zone as Barcelona. God, this is going to be one of those days, with these little obsessions, isn’t it?
8:00 am Central European Time — yeah I could just write CET now, or leave it off all together because we have established twice the time zone in which I live.
8:01 am Central European Time — nope! It is going to be one of those days, and it looks like this will be the whole gimmick of this day’s writing.
8:05 am Central European Time — I’ve lived in Spain for a year now and I know that I will never vibe with the rhythm of life here. I’m talking the literal sleep/awake cycle. I’ve tried to find patterns in my neighbours lights and curtains, figuring that on or off and open or closed are decent indicators of awake and sleeping. One year and I’ve got nothing. Last night around 2:00 am (Central European Time) the wind was making my bedroom windows bump the frame and when I got up to close them I saw two of my neighbours had both their kitchen and living room lights on full blast!! I am not nosey. I am observant. And these women are both awake, according to curtains, whenever the sun comes up. When. Do. They. Sleep? Not only do I need seven-and-a-half to eight hours a night, I seem to need them exclusively from 10:00/30 pm (Central European Time) to 6:30 am (Central European Time). Do native Spanish people ever end up with my kind of sleep schedule? Or is something like this baked into your nervous system when you’re a baby? I know a study of two apartments’ lights and curtains is not a scientifically sound basis on which to build claims of broader culture, but I’m working with what I’ve got.
8:20ish am Central European Time — got a not great email, was a grump at my husband about it, wandered over to Twitter: Elon’s Version to see if Ms. Brennan had posted something on there about today’s stuff, got even angrier at the world because I exposed myself to Twitter: Elon’s Version, abandoned my desk for Yoga with Kassandra who has become the only online yoga teacher I watch
21:00 Central European Time — I found myself finally in the right head and body space to continue or somehow conclude this day’s entry and I scrolled down to the reading list that Summer provides each day. Of course she included a Joan Didion and of course it’s an essay from Slouching Towards Bethlehem. Of course I wanted to get off my bed and get the book from the shelf because I am pretentious yes, but also I read much better when I have something physical. But the cat was on the heating pad that I’d placed on my lap to trap him there. For fun, I clicked the piece she listed from Cheryl Strayed that turned out to be a question/answer from Cheryl’s advice column Dear Sugar. The question was what she would say to her 20-year-old self. Tears stung the corners of my eyes as I read the first sentences of her response: “Stop worrying about whether you’re fat. You’re not fat.” And I cried the whole way through.
No, that’s not strictly true. I had to put down my phone after a few more paragraphs of general and deeply personal advice because I was feeling entirely too many feelings.
21:10 Central European Time — I finished the essay and indeed started both reading and crying right where I left off. When I finished I spent a few minutes thinking about what had happened. It was just luck that my cat prevented my intellectual snob brain from re-reading some cerebral Joan Didion, but this gooey, feely, sentimental and personal essay was one I needed to read today.
Maybe I can’t find any patterns in my neighbours curtains and lights — yes I know the more I talk about this the weirder I sound — but maybe I should see if there is a pattern to be found here.
On days like today, when inaccuracies or similar nonsense seem stuck in my head, like a rock in the tread of your shoe, maybe that’s a clue that I need to remember I have a body, not just a brain, and that I can’t shove all the emotional processing down into my body. I have to deal with it in my brain too.
21:47 Central European Time Zone — to be completely honest if you look at a map of the US time zones and look at north Idaho, where I’m from, you’ll think to yourself, “why on Earth is north Idaho in a different time zone than the south? Trust me. Just look. It is silly. But it does mean that when drunk boys try to mansplain to me that “acccsshtually Idaho IS in the middle!” I can say back, “dude I grew up in the same time zone as L.A. I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
21:49 — time to post this and go to bed!