September 15, 2006 - 10:01 a.m.
The theme for this week, and especially for today, is daring to eat a peach.
Did you know that many aerial artists (tightrope walkers, trapeze artists, and so on) are afraid of heights? But they just keep flinging themselves out into the open air. And in exchange for facing down their fears, they get to fly.
This semester I am a junior in my college's intense creative writing program. I'm in an intermediate fiction workshop run by a teacher who will tear me a new one if I don't strive for my potential, and he will be able to tell. For the first time in my life, I'm really focusing on my writing with conviction and committment. And I'm terrified.
I've been thinking about the things I write a lot lately. So many of the things I come up with feel so safe. They're all about dancers or English majors, girls a lot like me who want what I want. And I think I can do better than that. So I'm going to throw myself out into the air with my writing and see what happens.
And also I have a boy's phone number. And I'm going to use it.
Douglas Adams wrote in one of his books (Life, the Universe, and Everything, I believe) that the secret to flying is to fling yourself at the ground and forget to land.
Wish me luck.
