Thinking salad

Everyone loves a good stream of consciousness narrative, don’t they. I think it’s funny how often I studied them in school, loathed them on a conceptual level and the day it finally occurred to me that I was a mild SOC writer myself. The horror. Though that bothers me less now. Though I’ve always wondered if I could even stop being that kind of writer. How do you stop writing in the same path as your thoughts. I suppose everyone’s different. I mention all of this because I am enjoying a Greek Salad.

Which leads me to think of my favorite Mediterranean resterant Arugula

Which leads me to compile my top five list for restaurants

This list is:

1. Arugula
2. Tequila Mockingbird (fantastic Mexican not to mention it deserving a place for having such a cheeky name)
3. the Colony (best pizza I have ever had)
4. Cambridge house (find better pub food. I dare you)
5. The Meadow

This leads me to want to add footnotes to the list: mentioning that #1 is always number one. Tequila may always be number 2. Cambridge is fairly new. Meadow is very new and replaces the sushi restaurant in Bloomfield, which had at the time replaced Wasabi. The fact that almost everykind of cuisine is mentioned in this list is not on purpose and is just a matter of conscience. The fact that #1 is a Mediterranean restaurant is not.

This leads me to wonder if I’ve studied so much law that I am now footnoting my own thoughts.

This reminds me of some of the now legal based humor I am routinely subject to

This leads me to wonder if footnoting could have a good place within some of my writing. It would certainly push the form

I get excited about the plans I have for my next creative writing endeavor, which I have come to realize was, on the whole, ignored last year when I worked. At the very least it gives that creative muscle a work out

I fear it may have atrophied

I think of Lackoff and Johnsons work on how many of our conceptual processes are shaped by metaphor. (if you haven’t yet, go read their book and or essays.)

And this more or less gets me to where we started, which the exception of a few detours that came up as I started to type

This salad is good

I’m about to eat the peppers. I hate it when people don’t eat the peppers.

The two best, most constructive things that anyone ever said about my writing where:

1. “there is an underlying humor to everything you write” I love this because there was no way I could control this, but I felt it added life to even the most boring things I chose to write and it meant that regardless of the subject my personality would to some degree always come through in what I wrote
2. “you know your characters and have a great scope which is admirable” I love this because I always feared I did too much or too little with my characters. So much of the meaning of actions of a fictional character are no more my doing then the readers so I loved the thought that each of them existed as a sperate entity from myself. In other words there were not 5 versions of me at any given time in my work. Though an aside it is funny to me that one of my best criticisms used the word admirable, which while suggesting no negative aspects, always seemed like a passive aggressive word to me. Don’t ask me why.

I also want to mention that one of these came from a friend, and one came from my “hot professor”. I wont waste typing space discussing that it just seems meaningfully unrelated.

In closing: take your creative muscles to the gym because this is admirable and only pussy’s don’t eat their peppers.