First Comes the Excuses

Starting this blog just under a year ago, my plan was to update much more frequently than, well, what turned into never during my time in Spain. The first entry was not only my first, but also last on Spanish soil.

I thought the blog would be the most obvious way to keep up with my writing, the talent in which I had just invested a private college Bachelor of Creative Writing into. The blog would be my medium and Spain would be my muse, because who can’t be inspired in the south of Spain? I went there to learn Spanish and teach English, but I believe I was also chasing a sort of artistic muse.

As to why I didn’t update my blog over the past year. . . Since I’m one that thoroughly believes in the joys of excuses, although I don’t have a definitive answer, I’ll stab at a few possibilities. . .

I just passed my month back from Spain marker about a week ago. Around that time, I went to a ribs festival in Chicago, the ultimate Americana experience. I was talking with a friend who graduated a year before me. The year after she graduated, she was one of the first people to receive a Fulbright for creative writing. She spent the year in Russia.

As we clutched our plastic cups of beer with the sounds of Sister Hazel as our background and smell of BBQ ribs wafting, we discussed our times abroad, or, at least as well as you can at a ribs and music festival. She advised that I write down my experiences as soon as possible, warning me that the more I become removed from Spain, the more I’ll probably forget, and the harder it will be to do any sort of nonfiction, which is in fact what I hoped to do with my material.

“At least get the notes down,” she said. We discussed how there are benefits to both approaches: writing in-the-moment because after-the-fact you often forget those split-second inspirations, but then how writing after-the-fact gives you more perspective and makes you realize the abnormalities of things you found commonplace at the time.

Considering she is the equivalent of a recent-graduate-in-Creative-Writing superstar, having received a Fulbright and already enrolled in a MFA program--all within a year of graduation, I took her advice very seriously.

Then, this past Saturday night I received sage advice from Brad, one of my boyfriend’s best friends, as the three of us hung out playing videogames together. The late hour mixed with angst about unemployment mixed with my fear of failure and living with my parents forever brought out lamenting for not having written in Spain.

“Well, it sounds like you do remember a lot,” Brad said “You just spent the past hour telling me about Spain and showing me pictures. Just start writing now while you have time. One day when you’re an old, wrinkled woman you’re going to appreciate having those stories to tell your children. You did a lot, but you told me you feel like you didn’t even do everything. So, if you wrote while there, you would have done even less. You were only there ten months and it takes a long time to get use to a new place.”

That’s true. I’m not an old, wrinkled woman yet. But that old wrinkled woman will one day enjoy hearing about these adventures. And I do remember them now.

Also, writing, for me, is a very introspective process. Spain, on the other hand, is the opposite of introspective. If a country could be described as an extroverted entity, that would be Spain. It is a place where people will easily take two, if not three, hours for a meal in the middle of the day. Where coffee/socializing breaks are a requirement for the workspace. Where the old woman in line before you at the market will talk to you for thirty minutes about her son who at one point might have dated an American, but wait, actually she was British. And the grocer will give you a ten minute bonus Spanish lesson on how to order meat. This is the place where I had my first post-college-making-it-work-on-my-own experience; the first place where I truly learned a second language. During my short ten months there, I wanted to dive into the experience and live it out to the fullest in whatever way I could and truly make a home in this space rather than retreating into my mind. When you live on the beach in the south of Spain, it is hard to stay locked up in your thoughts with your computer all day. Not to mention, I very much took to the Spanish siesta.

My idea now is to go back and write what I wasn’t writing over the past nine months. I don’t know what form these essays will take or if it is indeed true that being set apart from the experience will give me perspective, but I certainly hope so. The plan is to try to get as much written as possible about my experience while I’m still on the job hunt and actually have time. Why am I writing these stories? Well, I don’t really know, other than providing future memories and providing a window into my experiences. It would be amazing to one day be a travel writer and at the very least, these essays could provide much needed practice.

So, for real this time, I’m going to try to write at least a little each day in my Microsoft document, and I will try and post at least every other day, if not every day. An article a day and a job application a day. That is the plan. Hopefully I will come to some conclusion soon.