June182009
6/17/09 - Almond Rum Biscotti.
Last year around this time, I was miserable.
I had set aside the summer to be a writer, only to discover that my creativity shied away from attention. I would wake up at 5AM every day and waste hours, crumbling pages filled with sentences that led to nowhere.
Day after day, I starved for inspiration, until finally I snapped. One morning, I was so peeved with my writer’s block that I hurled it into the oven. An hour and a half later, I had a batch of biscottis. As a sort of mockery, I uploaded a photo of my difficulties transformed, and entitled the resulting blog, When Words Fail. Ironic now; perfectly descriptive at the time.
So much has changed since.
For one, this blog has grown beyond my expectations. I haven’t always taken my work here seriously. These days I spend hours taking notes, drafting, editing and re-editing, reading every line aloud to perfect the rhythm. But there was a period when I thought of the space as nothing more than a dump for miscellaneous material.
It wasn’t until last September that I realized this blog can be more.
Emotionally drained at the time, I wanted to ease myself out of introspection. I was tired of sharing feelings so I casually posted a photo with some banal description.
That very night, SJ came over to our apartment to hang out. The first she said when she saw me was, What’s up with your latest entry?
What do you mean? I was confused.
The tone was really out of place.
Immediately, I grew defensive.
What tone? It’s just a blog. It’s supposed to be spontaneous. I write whatever I want.
But you have a style that you’ve been establishing, she insisted.
I didn’t say much more after that, but she had set my thoughts in motion. I went back to re-read some of the entries I liked and saw her point. This could be the writing project I had been waiting for, if I would just put my heart into it.
Gradually, the blog turned into a forum for my experiments with words - blurring boundaries between poetry and prose, breaking linguistic rules, reshuffling narratives, drawing wild (but relevant) associations, representing real life with fiction techniques.
While the anchor point is still always food, the stories I tell are really about what revolves around it: the people I cook with and eat with, the connections between what we eat and how we live.
Since I started distilling my life experiences in this virtual space, I have found a new freedom. People, objects, memories, thoughts and feelings… there are no constants but the constant of change. What I need to remember from the past year is here, preserved as is, raw and contradicting at times, but always truthful. I need not carry anything.
