Inland, Dreaming of Waves

In for the long haul

This week I passed a couple of milestones.

First, I finished my first-ever newspaper article and sent it off to the Rocky Mountain News. In a way it was like revisiting my past. Long, long ago, in the dark ages of the 1980s, I was briefly a reporter for a newsletter called Space Business News, which sold for about $400 per year. I worked there for about 8 months. They even sent me to Sweden to an aerospace conference, and I saw the king of Sweden from afar. And then I quit about a week before the space shuttle exploded. From a reporter's perspective it was a bad time to quit, I guess--right before a story like that. From my perspective, it was the perfect time to quit, since I had decided I didn't want to be a journalist, or at least not the kind of journalist that works for an aerospace newsletter.

I'd planned to be a writer at least since high school, but it didn't really occur to me that I could plan to be a fiction writer. I didn't know you could actually go to school for that when I was in my teens. So I figured I'd go and get a degree in something like government and report on it, maybe even be a foreign correspondent. I'd learn the craft of writing, and someday I would be ready to write fiction.

At the time it all seemed so practical. And then after a few months of journalism, I wanted out. Badly. I even had a heart-to-heart talk about my doubts with the VP at the newsletter, and he said to me, "If you really want to do this, you'll find a way to." That was excellent advice. I concluded I didn't want to report on ramjet engines and manufacturing in microgravity anymore, so I left.

But at least I got a novel out of it, and I published it in 1998.

After I quit, I worked as a secretary for a while. I moved back to Kansas City and lived with my parents--take my advice: once you leave, don't go back--and worked in a communications office at a dental school. And then I went to graduate school and studied fiction writing. It's been a much more circuitous road than the one I imagined in high school and college, but when I see Christiane Amanpour on TV, I'm fine with the fact that I'm not living that life, that instead I've been writing what I want to write for the past twenty years.

So back to the article for the Rocky Mountain News. It's on rock gardens, but I did have to do some reporting for it. I interviewed two different men who were, in their own ways, passionate about plants, though one was far more articulate than the other. One talked about the romance of mountains and how you could bring that into your yard with a rock garden, and the other one referred to plants as "things." After I met the inarticulate one, I thought it wouldn't be bad to have a job at a nursery spending your time growing plants. And the other person I interviews gets to travel the world trekking up and down mountains looking for plants that grow well in Colorado. That's not a bad job either.

It seems that the older I get, the more jobs seem appealing to me. When I was younger, I had such tunnel vision. And, of course, now, I have much less time to try out new careers.

The other milestone I reached this week was the Krav Maga level 1 test. I took it Friday night with 9 other people, and all of us passed except one guy who twisted his ankle.

It was the longest workout of my life. We reviewed skills for 2 1/2 hours, and then we tested for 1 1/2 hours. It was pretty constant work: punching, kicking, escaping chokes. I felt proud of the way I got out of the headlocks. That was the skill I worked on in my very first class, and six months ago it was so hard to put my hand on someone's face--thumb underneath the chin, index finger below the nose--and push them over backward. I was afraid I was going to hurt the woman I was training with, who was quite a bit smaller than I am.

The only problem I had occurred on the very last skill, when I was kneeling, holding the pad for Kim and she was kicking it from the ground. My quads could not take it anymore, and I almost fell over on top of her. I hope it didn't hurt her score, but I really couldn't help it.

posted by Price of Silence @ 4:41 PM