Faking dialogues

On the road tomorrow, I will be attempting to find an idea, or a tentative research question, for a paper that I should finish writing in about ten days. How will I find a few valuable ideas for the mini-essay and, even more importantly, creatively add meat to it (that is, editing), since writing is like giving birth to a skeleton, is another kettle of fish. (Hmm, fish, skeleton, and meat—again, my undergrad English teacher would say that I lapsed into literary sin with this mixed metaphor.)

 

Longing for some peace for writing these days, whirls of social merry-go-around, I tend to regard some acquaintances as time reavers— so numerous and imaginative, so it seems, in taking away bits of time. Your time is a minuscule gear in a ruthless mechanism in which you are forced to fit, a small toothed wheel precisely cut by a grinning, godly Swiss clockmaker. How often, and to what extent, can you negotiate that time for yourself, to own it, without appearing selfish? This is especially awkward when people love to tell you their stories, going into details that are only relevant to them, with their assumptions that you know what they are talking about, but you hardly do.

 

You feel that every word you utter in a sentence, presuming you have the chance to arrive at its end, triggers a memory in your interlocutor’s mind, who is rushing to narrate it, and you suddenly realize that your sentence, though the initial netting on which they weave their little stories, becomes meaningless to you–its meaning has been appropriated. Do we read texts by appropriation? Not quite, but I will write about that some other time.