The Reading List

"By prevailing over all obstacles and distractions, one may unfailingly arrive at his chosen goal or destination."-- Christopher Columbus

Roughly eight short chapters into congratulating myself for having more sense than Elizabeth Gilbert, I saw the most gigantic epically proportioned beetle of my life. It landed upside-down on the ledge of the short wall enclosing the pool area in which I was sunbathing to the audio book of Eat,Pray,Love. And, as fate would have it, just when I was thinking “Elizabeth Gilbert is a complete idiot,” the beetle righted itself and flew directly at my head. Not at my hair, not at my body, but as if my nose was its landing strip.

So, with a shriek and many undignified squeals, I leapt up (thank God I hadn’t reached the point in my sunbathing of undoing the back of my bikini top to avoid tan lines) and made frantic swatting motions in the bug’s direction. I didn’t want to touch the thing, just make it think twice about landing on me. Boy, did I feel stupid.

No, I hadn’t buggered my marriage and shacked up with an actor like Ms. Gilbert, but still – I was humbled.

Why am I reading the book of someone I suspect to be fundamentally daft and self-absorbed you may ask? I’ve given myself a reading list of books by and about women who take on the challenge of defining themselves. Women who actively create the lives they want and become the heroines of their own stories – and then write those stories down with great success.

The two books with which I am beginning my education are bestsellers in the genre of Women Creating Themselves and Writing About It:
Eat, Pray, Love by Elizabeth Gilbert
Bridget Jones’s Diary by Helen Fielding

From them I hope to gain wisdom, a game plan, and an outline for this project. So far, the wisdom I have received is along the lines of what not to do.

Lesson 1: Don’t write as if you have all the answers. It’s annoying, and you don’t. That’s one of the problems I’m having with the first few chapters of Elizabeth Gilbert’s book: this tendency towards omniscience. I am taking this lesson to heart because I have the same problem. A lot of smart, writerly 20-somethings do in fact. So omniscience is out. I do not have all the answers now, nor will I after this year is over. What I hope to have, what this year is about, is creating my life. And like all of my projects, this begins with a To Do List.

1. Lose 10 pounds.
2. Get and maintain a tan.
3. Travel around the world to England, India and Japan.
4. Get published in a magazine under my own byline (ghostwriting doesn’t count).
5. Become a journalist.

In my first post I declared that my mission was to create my own life. To that end, I have to become the person I want to be: a woman with direction, a plan, a size 10 wardrobe, and a tan. Oh, and a job. In writing.

My three least favorite words in the English language are “I’m going to.”

“I’m going to write a novel. I’m going to learn Latin. I’m going to memorize the dictionary.”

That was my “To Do List” when I was nine. I think I got ninety pages into writing a book about flying unicorns, and I memorized the first five entries in the dictionary, all of which I have since forgotten. “I’m going to” is not interesting, it’s depressing, a harbinger of failures to come.

Here is what I have done so far –

I have the beginnings of a very nice tan. Being pale, and contentedly so for many years, I didn’t think it was possible. But it turns out that if you quit your job and commit to spending thirty minutes to an hour reading journalism books by the pool every day, tans are possible even for pale people like me.

I have bought my plane tickets to Heathrow, New Delhi and Narita; booked a tour of North India; and made arrangements with my friends in Oxford and Tokyo to stay with them while I’m there. I will be gone for one solid month from October 7th to November 7th.

So that’s two down.

But my big accomplishment is quitting my job three weeks ago. Without going into too much detail, I had a job for two years with great pay, benefits and security. I met some truly good people there, but unfortunately my boss was not one of them. In short, the man wouldn't let me write, even though the position I had initially accepted was very writing-intensive. But, while I was there, I paid off my student loan, saved enough money to be unemployed for a while and travel, and wrote food and travel articles during every break, evening and weekend. I also took a few journalism classes at night and online, and taught myself photoshop and a news publishing program. Then my boss found out about all of my extra-curricular activities and didn't like what he saw as a conflict of interest. There was no conflict - I wasn't interested in his job at all. So I quit.