This is how I tend to spend my time. Now the word, in its entirety, has me staring at the page in almost horror. “UFO!” is what I seem to be screaming, silently, in my head. Only in that the letters p-e-o-p-l-e appear to be (like a UFO) something I have never seen before. It makes me happy never to have seen a UFO. It worries me that I don’t recognize such an oft-used word as something earthly, English and familiar. I can easily spell the word procrastinate without any hesitation. There will never be an apostrophe and it doesn't look foreign to me at all. Probably because I do it so well…
Following my train of thought backwards, trying to remember why I should even care about this plural and possessive nonsense, I recall writing some “things” that caused someone to think I should write a book. I have no explanation for this. Most of the time, if given a choice between being told, “You look nice...” or, “You should write a book...” I would choose the former. In the valley of the shadow of self-esteem it seems like a harder task to accomplish. Of course I can write a book. I can’t always look nice. But for one reason or another, that day, the one when someone said, “You should write a book,” I thought, well, what I thought was, “I should write a book.”
A job that did not require a new wardrobe, a makeover, plastic surgery or lying about your age? How fabulous. (Although I wouldn’t mind a new wardrobe, or some accessories, anyway.) "It can’t just be a collection. The last time that was successful was like a hundred years ago..." was what I remember the voice on the other end of the phone saying. Oh. There went my fantasy, a book of random short pieces, two of them already written. "What an accomplishment!" (I tried to insert a smiley face) instantly becomes "What a complete drag!" (here was where the frowning face would go). I was tempted to argue that I had purchased a collection of Edith Wharton’s short stories sometime in the last two decades but decided that was not going to prove my point very well.
Right then and there I knew that what I needed was to find a way to connect these two “things” that I had written, and a few more (still floating around in my head, except for their titles), in a way that made them my book. The one I was now “in the middle” of writing. So I set out to find the needle that might already be in the haystack of 13,947 written words... the thread that would take that adjective—random—and simply make it disappear... the je ne sais quoi that would make all those other titles without stories still useful and not resemble a collection, which is now a dirty word, I guess. Let me tell you, I am not wasting some excellent titles without a fight.
So, when I looked back over all that I had written and all that I had yet to write (I am very good at imagining), I realized that there was a connection. I didn't really feel like a grown up. Old, maybe... but not grown up. And then it hit me, "How I Spent My Life and Other People's Money".
