Submitting Again
by Tiffany Vakilian
I keep worrying if my underwear can be seen through my pants here at work. I keep glancing at my fingernails and getting lost. I keep wondering where this Boulder Dam bursting headache came from and when it will go back there. But this has nothing to do with my submission today.
Plot – A girl (me) wants to write a story.
Conflict – She’s 37, at work, busy, and tired (with a funky landfill of a headache).
So I sit here, collecting words, and put my purple pen to notepad, mindful of the fourth wall and my being on the wrong side of it. I like it here, somewhat. It’s a tad lonesome and kinda sexy too. I imagine titillating brushstrokes of calligraphy ink to paper, and then think of my husband – perhaps the reason for my headache. That could be taken in a good or bad way.
Man, if I get caught writing this at work that last paragraph alone may get me sent home. I feel like such a rebel. Can freedom be like this? Confined, but present?
I run free within the secret garden of surreptitious fences and aromatic phrases, despite the pain of weeding and the excitement of possible discovery as I push my own fruit through, as if I were travailing with a story.
These words, are they stolen, or secret? A moment here; a moment there; a misused semicolon because the Chicago Book of Style is still unordered. Adding words, dynamic commas and periods forming from a moment here and there, as I said before, oops.
I should be spanked for redundancy – redundantly!
Well, it comes to light. These words are stolen times. I should be typing or designing, or, well, doing something for the office. But the work-life balance is a gray area, and California Labor Laws say I get to take breaks, so let’s call it a wash. Pen touches paper in fleeting crashes, a love affair within the bondage of work; breaking the contract by breaking free, orgasmically artistic.
Aah!
It is finished, I am spent, and my husband is waiting.
I am submitting again.
art@timobe.com / 619-292-8772 / https://awordwithyoupress.com/author/tiffany/
Now HERE is someone bored at work and pushing their own fruit through. Not quite what Tiffany meant, but proving to all that graduation from the seventh grade still eludes the editor-in-chief!
“Submitting Again” is how an archetype of what the employed in an otherwise job, but in reality is a writer/artist thinks along their tedious day of mundane duties to win a paycheck as opposed to a writing/artistic contest or writing/artist based career.
I recommend Tiffany’s story forward to writers and all other artists of other passions, because her story of daily frustratations is also a community’s shared story about aspirations in the work environment of banality.
You know Par… you got that nail right on the head.
Hegemony vs. Artistic Neuroses – one feeds you, and one *feeds* you.
BTW, the headache’s back.
Had me smiling all the way through the story. Think many can relate to days they would rather be attending to something else than the work at hand. Well done.
Thank you. I thought this would be one of the ‘stupid’ entries. Your comments are making me think I told the truth on myself. It means a lot.
you should be bored at work more often. great story! ps. a glass of wine and a back rub should cure the headache…that could be taken in a good or bad way…
That may be why the headache is back this morning… but the back is feeling real nice.
Ahhh, the stuff of revolution.
What a clever entry! Writing about the painful process of writing, especially on deadline…but also the deliciousness of creativity, the urge to merge. These creative urges titillate us at work, and it feels scandalous to think our own thoughts there. All power to you…hope you can find a job that allows you time to write! And hope your bosses don’t check this site 😉
Addendum: legally you are allowed 20 minute break every 4 hours, plus a lunch hour, so that allows 1:40 for guilt free writing daily, which is more than most of us write in a week. So now we’re waiting for your novel…
Addendum: legally you are allowed 20 minute break every 4 hours, plus a lunch hour, so that allows 1:40 for guilt free writing daily, which is more than most of us write in a week. So now we’re waiting for your novel.
Laura, Thorn has basically put me on blast to take my 17-year novella and make it a finished product. Had it not been for this site, and the people I met at the Anti-Social Writers and Creative Misfits meetup, I would have emailed people my occasional tales and let it go. Thorn and Morgan have made me work really hard on my writing, but more than that, they’ve made me really want to. Between them and Transformative Language Arts, I think I should have the world changed by Friday. I am humbled by the inspiration and the GREAT writing that I get to engage on this site EVERY time I come on it. I can’t wait for the next level, knowing what hard work it will take to get there/remain there/pass through there.
Please keep inspiring us to write Tiffany. It should be whole-heartedly noted that if I was as talented as you are as a vocalist you would also be an inspiration to that career as well, but I can hold a pen far more gracefully than a key.
O, and thanks goes to our editor in chief for the photo of Bra-zillan Barbie for this truly gives us a new definition of the phrase “double entendre” in the work it, work it baby work place.