this post is a parking space

Okay, so, all I want to do is move to California and make movies. No one's ever wanted to do that before, right? At least I will be some sort of pioneer. With the novel being sent out and coming out and whatnot, I realize I am only really interested in an overwrought and distraught juvenalia. Like a dirty poor Sofia Coppola. Except I cannot make movies - not yet - I have two months to write some sort of heartbreaking staggering  work, or if not heartbreaking and staggering, at least semi-sane and standing upright. Funny how my due date coincides with my sister's. I think I need to at some point examine the birth metaphor for women writers. My incubation is metastatic, ecstatic. In Copenhagen I bought a pair of 4-inch platform heels I've been wearing with skinny jeans, which makes me look like a bloated once-starlet. I feel they are my shoes of nerves. You know how Eileen Myles recently wrote that thing about how whenever she writes she tells herself she is loved? I really liked that. My ritual in the past few months has been different. I stand in front of my floorlength mirror in the bedroom - sometimes while scooping up chocolate almond milk ice cream - and stare at myself, and say to myself, out loud: "You're a fucking genius." I say it in a tone that's almost hostile. I know I'm - what's the word - psyching myself up. I don't actually think of myself as a genius, because I don't believe in geniuses, and if I did believe in writers who were geniuses, I would think of those who had a singular obsession and an all-encompassing gift - not those who spend as much time thinking about shoes as they do about the book they are now dangerously on deadline for. But anyway. That's what I do. I say it in a Bette Davis intonation. You're a fucking genius. I keep on repeating it until I feel some confidence seep in through my bones. And then I sit down and try to write something. Since I've been back I've gotten dressed every day in skinny jeans and platform heels and full-make-up - and I intone that in front of the mirror. You're a fucking genius. No writing has come yet but hopefully the nerves. Because for this project on nervous women the ancestors and the contemporary girls a different sort of nerves is needed.

If I am a good girl I will not write in this space for two months. We'll see about this. I think I checked Facebook today about 60 times. Facebook is my new cigarette.