If I Ever Won the Lottery

Honest to Shivu, I would travel from hotel to hotel, staying about a week or so in each. I would take train rides just for the hell of it. I would buy a decent laptop, and I would order books through the local bookstore of whatever town I was in and stay long enough for each of them to arrive (usually three days, as far as I've seen). I would pack my Kindle and find podunk laundromats where I would read creepy stories like Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been? by Joyce Carol Oates.

(I thoroughly enjoyed that experience a few summers ago when we had no washer and dryer and one of the last remaining laundromats here was just around the corner from our apartment.)

One of my fears is that I don't have any life to draw from when I'm writing. I looked at one of Tony Doerr's books at the library the other day and I remember him telling us how he used to live in Africa, and also how he worked in Alaska gutting fish for a year, too. He travelled to Rome with his wife and sons. I wanted one of my characters to run away to a big city and the more I thought about it the more I wondered how authentic it would sound. I think I need to go somewhere.

Here's what stops me, and I know it might sound pathetic or childish to some, but it's my psychology. My parents are old. My father is obviously getting sick. Their other children are sucking the life out of them. They've always done everything I've ever needed of them. I don't know what they would do without me.

It's hard to abandon people you know would never abandon you. But I do need to get away. I've never felt more confident or more sexy or more restless than I have since I turned thirty. I feel a little like this is the last youth of my life and I don't want to waste it anymore. I've been telling my mother for the past few days that I'm planning on moving out when March comes because I'll have extra money once all the credit cards are paid off. I'm still going to need a second job. I don't even care right now if that job is at a grocery store.

I just applied at another technical college. I don't think their needs for teaching composition are the same as a liberal arts college, but I'm desperate. I'm waiting on a phone call back from my district manager to tell me if Meijer would be considered a competitor to my current job because they sell clothing. If they aren't considered a competitor, or if she tells me I can work there if I don't work in clothing, shoes, or jewelry, then my brother can probably get me a guaranteed job there.

Maybe I should move to Chicago. Maybe I should apply for a Ph.D. program. (My dissertation would be about the use of memory in literature, focusing on Borges's iconic vs. individual memory, backed by Nabokov's invoked vs. evoked memory, drawing on Abe Akira's woven memories, and Lauren Slater's false memories, and my own false memories, and Dorothy Allison's memories of the dead children who are replaceable because Southern women are baby factories. Or it would be about the separate way we read fiction as opposed to non-fiction. When we read fiction we often think of the events as choices made by the author as opposed to non-fiction, which we think of as a set of circumstances that happened to the "characters." Of course the two occasionally overlap, but not often. Or maybe I can combine the two, and talk about how fiction is iconic as it's often symbolic and non-fiction is individual as it's often recounting a specifically, supposedly true set of experiences.)

Anyway, maybe soon I'll start applying for Alaskan fish-gutting jobs on Careerbuilder.