Nancy Springer's Blog: Last Seen Wandering Vaguely - Posts Tagged "writers"

I shouldn’t speak for writers in general, even though I have a gut feeling that many others are as uncool as I am. But it’s only fair that I should speak just for myself.

That said, how uncool can I be?

Well, I don’t care about fashion or home decorating or entertaining. Or not in the same way many other people do. So when they’re talking about the upcoming holidays, party ideas for Thanksgiving or Christmas, maybe an Ugly Sweater fest, recipes to try, maybe a Polynesian style tree, I’m likely to say something like, “This year I really want to do a Fishmas tree, you know, with those red-and white plastic bobbers instead of balls, and bass lures for ornaments. They’re very colorful, and you can just hang them up by the hooks that are already on them, or string them into chains. But I wonder what I should put on top?”

Blank silence. No helpful suggestions. Maybe this thought should have been saved for a book, but I can’t tell, because being a writer isn’t just what I do; it’s who I am = uncool. Lately I’ve been studying one of those circle diagrams (I love circles! I collect circular objects like bottle caps, Slinkies, Hoberman balls – oops, sorry, I’ll shut up now.) Ahem. I’ve been studying one of those overlapping circle diagrams representing set theory, the Venn Nerd diagram, to try to figure out whether I am more of a dork, a dweeb, or a geek, Nerd being the given. I think I have more social ineptitude and intelligence than obsession, indicating that I qualify as a dweeb, but I personally have always felt more like some kind of cognitive alien tending to hide under sofas with antennae prodruding, not a cockroach but perhaps a dwerk? I think I will stick with that. Dwerk.

And what I do as a writer = dwerk is become interested in the wrong, uncool things, or at least in things that are inimical to a normal conversation or social eptitude in any form. Right now I’m fascinated by chickens, every aspect of them from their freakishy strong horny scaly feet to their fluffy backsides to their soft, fleshy combs and wattles just begging for lipstick – I mean wattlestick, because chickens don’t have lips. I marvel at how accurately full-grown hens can look, and sound, and indeed sing, like Victorian ladies in the era of massive bustles. I listen with fascination to the full-bosomed paean that announces the daily egg. I have recently learn that chickens poop their eggs, so I muse about old-fashioned values including regularity. I ponder what can possibly be the purpose of double-yolkers, those stretch limos of eggdom? I see a hen jump straight up in the air two chickens high to snag an insect on the wing. I realize that hens can do amazing things. They can run really fast on their yellow scaly legs. They are related to reptiles. They poop eggs; did I mention that? That’s one of my favorite words, “egg,’’ ovoid and compact and very old English. . .okay, I’ll stop babbling.

How does being a writer make me uncool; let me count the ways. I explore tree trunks for cicada husks, even in the city, where I also mine the gutters for circular treasure and gawk up at buildings with gargoyles or carvings of naked persons. Social gatherings wear me out, so I have been known to hide under tables and nap on the floor. When awake, I will abruptly cease talking to you in order to jot something on my hand if I don’t have paper, some important thought such as, “Who names colors? Why ‘mauve’?”

Also, what I am wearing to the social gathering will be what people euphemistically call “comfortable.” I’m still wearing some of my daughter’s hand-me-down clothes from her high school days. (She’s in her thirties now.) Aside from mom jeans and a twenty-year-old top, I’m likely to be wearing sensible shoes along with socks depicting horsies or kitties or duckies. If ducks, they will have colorful umbrellas.

I know there are plenty of women besides me who don’t give a rat’s sphincter about fashion trends, so how does this apply to my being a writer? Well, it’s part of the larger pattern, which is that, in order to be effective=original as a writer, I have to think differently than most other people. So if being cool is being “with it,” meaning in step with popular culture, I so am not. Most news events are not events to me. My kind of event is, “Hey, I saw four lizards in the kitchen window this morning!”

Blank silence.

“Hey, have you ever heard of Fibonacci numbers? Look, you gotta do this on graph paper. See, it’s a square plus a rectangle makes another rectangle plus a square makes another rectangle and it just keeps growing and if you graph it the whole thing makes a perfect expanding spiral like a nautilus shell or a hurricane or a galaxy and I can’t believe I never realized before but it’s the same thing as the Golden Ratio over and over like in a hall of mirrors or in one of those paintings like Steven Colbert has, you know?”

How cool is it to be uncool?

Very.