As much as I enjoy writing these entries, occasionally I’ll suffer from what is commonly referred to as writer’s block. Or as it’s known among my friends, “Jenny hasn’t been robbed in over two weeks.”
During those trying times, I often look to my friends for help, comfort, and advice. Most of them just give me the vaguely supportive suggestions like:
Change your environment!
Try mood altering medication!
Move your computer into the dining room!
Hold a brainstorming session!
Plagiarize!
But not Vivian. No, Vivian’s advice is much more concrete. In fact, she often comes to me with lists of things I should write about. Sometimes, they’re not even things that happened to me: “So this one friend of mine is really allergic to cats, and he started dating this girl with a bunch of cats, but he was too embarrassed to tell her he was allergic, so he rifled through her medicine cabinets looking for Benadryl because his throat was closing, and she caught him, and thought he was creepy, so they broke up!”
“But Viv – I don’t know either of those people, and none of that happened to me. I can’t write about that!”
“Oh, well, I admire your integrity. Good luck coming up with an entry.”
The last time I saw her, we were in a coffee shop getting some lattés, and I casually mentioned that I didn’t have anything in mind for the upcoming week’s entries. After she got done paying for her coffee, she handed me a tattered dollar bill that had one of those web addresses on it that lets you track who has had that dollar before you. You know the one – where’s george dot com?
Without even looking up from her wallet, she just shoved the bill at me and said, “Here. That should be good for at least an entry or two.”
A dollar bill? I’m seriously going to write an entire blog entry – or two – about some ratty dollar bill that she handed me? Yeah, that’s riveting stuff. Maybe I can do a whole series on Things I Dug out of Vivian’s Pockets:
Monday: Blue and White Lint
Tuesday: Cough Drop
Wednesday: Crumpled Kleenex
Thursday: Two Nickels and a Dime
Friday: Old MetroCard
Boy, that will make for quite the literary event – I might want to save it for sweeps week, though, to drive the ratings up. The interesting thing is that Vivian is a writer, herself. A poet, to be exact. Since inspiration apparently comes in such mundane forms, the next time I see Vivian, I’m going to see if this same theory works for her as well:
“Oh hey, Vivian. Look! Here’s a stick. Why don’t you quick write a poem about it?”
Or

”Hey – that’s neat! Here’s a bottle cap that’s been run over by some cars. I’m sure this will inspire you to craft a few sonnets, right?”
Or even
“What do you know? I found a ring from the milk carton on my kitchen floor. Then my cat knocked it into the dining room. Viv – you could do an epic poem about that, in the tradition of Homer’s, The Odyssey, don’t you think?”
Brother. Some people have a lot of gall. Like it’s just that easy to write a blog. “Write about this dollar bill,” she says. How on earth does she think I’d be able to write an entire entry about a silly dollar bill?
Ridiculous.
Absolutely ridiculous.

Filed under: General on February 7th, 2005