From Overworked to Underwhelmed

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From Overworked to Underwhelmed
by Erik Jay

I was telling you last week how I intended to handle movie reviews, and gave you a glimpse into my cranium through which those opinions, reactions, and judgments would be filtered. I must say, I got some interesting responses to the column, including one from some self-congratulatory proofreader who espied a typo (horrors) and took issue with my statement that I hoped readers would "weigh" my words with some "gravity and respect"; this particular pedant apparently found this ungrammatical. I replied in a short e-mail that had he been proofing an article by Tom Wolfe, Norman Mailer or Hunter S. Thompson, he would have expended two or three blue pencils on the same sort of bookish, pedantic, and unimaginative "corrections" that he sought to make on my piece.

But why am I telling you all this?

Several reasons actually. As happens so often, life got in the way of my plans, and I thought TAP's curious and querulous readers would find the details at least modestly entertaining. I am hoping so, at any rate. Anyway, there I was, cruising through another week of prose and music, writing and arranging, typing and recording. At around midnight my sister called to tell me my 78-year-old mother had broken her hip. There went my perfect plans.

The new plans meant scheduling family and friends to stay with my parents and help out; my mother has been helping my declining dad get up, get dressed, get fed, and all the rest for several years now. So it's not my mother with a hip on the mend who needs help; in fact, she is healing and recovering at about twice the usual pace, given her athleticism and strong will. But since her movement is somewhat limited, we have to provide the assistance for dad that she cannot. As I write, it's Tuesday, July 11th, and I'm four days into a two-week stay at my folks' place in Boulder, Colorado. If any subject at all is apropos of my column title it's the feeling a SoCal Christian libertarian gets visiting this Marxist-Leninist enclave of smug Starbucks-slurping elitist know-it-alls.

The hip replacement surgery was about mid-June, I think. At about the same time several other things occurred that caused me to seriously reconsider those carved-in-stone plans of mine.

For one thing, I was spreading myself too thin. In addition to this column, I was writing three other regular weekly pieces, totaling some 10,000 words a week. That's fewer by far than many writers, whether novelists or essayists or newspaper folks or even corporate PR pros. Add that to running a small webzine, writing music, reading 30 hours a week, working with my wife, walking the dogs...Well, you get the point: I'm busy.

I had to set some priorities. Putting family at Number One is a no-brainer; then I had to admit to myself that, music edges out prose; and then I also had to tell myself that some outlets for my writing are better than others. It was a toughie, but I let go of all my other regular columns except this one. I will write from time to time for a few of the other spots but the only weekly deadline I will adhere to outside of my own enterprises is the one for The American Partisan. I like this place!

I may be boring you, but I still believe that the more you know about a writer the better you can read him. Anyway, I was trying to do too much and and lowering my standards, so I cut down on the extraneous junk and focused on the priorities I believe God has ordained for me -- service (to family first, then friends, then the world at large), and my art (music first, then writing and design).

Late last week, after the dust started to settle, I started breathing much more easily. A weight came off. I took a nap. And now I feel focused.

The horror of it all. See you next week. Remember, God has richly blessed us, so let's go out there and do some good.