Resolution 2007

My new year’s resolution is to be more true to my relationships with people. How this plays out exactly, I won’t know, but it came to me slowly while I was visiting my parents for the holidays in Houston, Texas. Dad has very serious colon cancer, even though he no longer has any cancer cells in his colon. Apparently, where the cancer originates determines how you refer to it. They say Asians are good at dealing with death—we commemorate the day a person died to celebrate his entire life and not the day he was born, when, as my mother points out, “You haven’t done anything.” But we aren’t necessarily any better at dealing with illness. As you’ll see. This blog will provide the updates as Dad moves along and what I might be thinking about as the bottom of the oceans turns over.

But I wanted to start a blog, even though no one takes them seriously, because I thought writing a bit on a regular basis would help me to complete my novel. I’ve been working on it since 1932 and at 37, it feels late to debut. I recommend to all writers that the first novel be done briskly and without torture. You will write more the rest of your life, some of it will be uneven, one or two works might be great, and they might be personal essays, and therefore, you don’t need to try
everything on the first go. And baking a cake or growing a garden, while creative no doubt, is not a substitute for writing a novel when you have a story to tell.

My bed broke—don’t ask—and rather than buy a new one (I’m not handy to fix it either) I decided to stack large books in order to prop it up. The one on top turned out to be a dictionary. This was by accident and I thought that my novel would have to be completed with only the words I know, which aren’t that many. I’m constantly having to look up words I think I already know: agitprop, smarmy, absolutist, schandenfraude (Never use a foreign word when a plain English word will do—George Orwell) and so on because everyone around me is always using them in ways I don’t understand. And if I were pretentious, I would cook up some magic realism about how the dictionary will become my novel but I don’t want my novel to be big or long. I just want it to exist. I’m mostly concerned that when my boyfriend asks me for the definition of a word—he’s a Mexican-born Spaniard and he reads mostly nonfiction—I won’t be able to tell him and I won’t be able to look the word up. For some reason, I don’t like looking up the definitions of words online. A friend exclaimed when he visited my new apartment—I used to live on 7th Street and First Avenue in a 300 square-foot studio but moved to a 500 square-foot 1-bedroom on 7th Street and Second Avenue—“Where’s your writing area?”

What do you mean? I said.
Where are you writing? he asked.
It’s there—I pointed to a file folder—and there—I pointed underneath the bed.
You have an obvious aversion, he said.

I do. Maybe all writers do. There are so many other, arguably more interesting things to do. Let’s see how this year goes.