Miscelanea - The Perfect Response to, "De Qué Escribes?" Photo by Sarah

It’s always the same conversation –

“Oh, sweetie, are you studying here?” said in meticulous Spanish as if I were a lost blonde four year old.

“No,” I try to say with as much restraint as possible, “I live here.”

“What do you do?” is the next surprised question, sizing me up, trying to find another box to neatly place me in.

“I’m a writer,” I say, which still sounds funny to me. It’s definitely not satisfactory for the vast majority of people. Is that an occupation? Do you have hours? Did you study to do this thing? It’s like putting some bizarre fruit in front of people and they don’t know how to peel and eat it. So for some reason, the next question is always –

“De qué escribes?” What do you write about?

Initially I always tried to respond in earnest to this since I was so caught up in the justification of writing as a valid “career” decision, until it occurred to me that the question in and of itself is ludicrous. Would it satisfy them if I said, “I write about turtles. Sea turtles.” Then would they say, “Ah, yes,” relieved, as if that was real, definite, concrete somehow, and they could envision me going to work everyday at nine a.m., taking a short break for a torta around three, plugging in a few more hours about egg-laying habits or migration, and then coming home to watch some T.V and chill. Right. Sea turtles. Gotcha. Go on your merry way.

But the second I say, drawing it out as I do now to let them wallow in the ambiguity, “I don’t know, travel, dogs, earthquakes, words, cultural relativism, baking, photography, trees…coffee…parking lots…”

They always wait for me to finish, their smile drooping a bit, thinking, “I hope this girl goes away soon.”

Unless, of course, they happen to be a Oaxacan artist, in which case they nod sagely and agree that whatever I’m writing about is probably complicated and profound and will result in —take a deep breath – arte.

So now I have this question on the brain: de qué escribes? As if I should be writing about something, not just anything. It’s fueled a few more furious morning lists in the accumulating notebook of lists that at the end of the day or week feel more like something I’ve found on the side of the road then something I wrote in utter seriousness.

These lists consist of things like –

Dogs/personality
Artists/exercise
Running? Haruki Murakami?
Dog training!!
Sencillo video or pelon pelo rico anecdotes
Precision – watermelon, cheese, tasajo

All of these are things that occur to me.   They could be random nuggets of ideas which don’t go much further than a forced paragraph, or they could be seeds that spawn a whole essay. Or, most likely, they could be alien concepts I find on a discarded list sometime next year.

So I suppose when it comes down to it, I write whatever worms its way down into a deeper layer of curiosity. Grover Cleveland did that, and so did Mexican reality T.V. Which doesn’t really resolve any of the ambiguity problems for anyone – writing is still this mass I don’t really know what to do with, something that’s absorbed me but that I can’t quite see or define clearly. Maybe that’s why it’s so stimulating. And for everyone else, it’s as if I slip in and out of ghost worlds, disappearing into something vague for hours during the day and then coming out for beers, with this slight damp sense of something a bit too ambiguous to talk about.