Writing


I can get really pissed off with myself at the end of writing a column. I sometimes have the feeling I have failed miserably in getting my message across. Especially when I want to say something specific, but can't find the right words. Or the words just won't get in line, the right way, the way I want them to. And no matter what I do, how I rearrange them, or replace them, they just won't convey my thoughts.
You would think that that would get better over the years. Nice try, but no cigar.
To be honest, I had no idea that I've been writing for years, already. But when opening a box, after our second move (it hadn't been opened since I moved out of my parents' house), I found a few columns I had written before we got a computer. That was 16 years ago.
I never knew that I have been writing for so long, but when I seriously wrecked my brain about it, I realised that I have never not written or fantasized.
My mom and I, for example, would make up entire stories during doing the dishes. Or completely rewrite existing fairy tales. Remember the fairy tale of the wolf and the seven young kids? Well, mommy-goat left the house every morning to go to her work as a housekeeper in town, because it was a heck of a job to keep seven young goats in clothes and shoes, when you only had a widower's pension. Her husband was dead, had to be, because he was never mentioned in the story. Or maybe he just "went out for a pack of cigarettes" some day
See what I mean? Completely nuts.
I have always had a knack for the absurd, by the way. I remember one time our car wouldn't start. It was the dead of winter, cold, and we had an appointment, and no matter what my husband did, the blasted thing wouldn't start. So at one point I said to the car: "If you don't start right now, I'll rip your shock breakers out!" And it started.

This is something else I can really get pissed off about. Sometimes I just can't keep to the subject. I start writing the way I speak, jumping from topic to topic.
Don't even try to get it, 'cause usually I don't even know how I got from one topic to the next. What I've written here is still reasonably easy to follow, but sometimes I'm talking to my husband, and I will jump from one topic to another, and he'll get annoyed, because he has no idea what I am on about. I get edgy, because to me, at that moment, my thouht process is very clear, and before you know it, we're biting eachother's head off. And that's something else that gets me pissed off.
There aren't many more things I get pissed off about. There isn't very much more I am this passionate about, except reading. I'll read anything, as long as it contains words, I'll read it. And that kinda comforts me, when rereading a piece like this. That there will always be people like me, that will read anything, no matter what the contents, or lack thereof, just because there are words in it.


© 2002 Bertine Centen-Nieuwenkamp