sarah eve kelly

If you follow my tweets (if you don’t, you should - I’m a riot), you’ll know that my computer has been giving me a bit of trouble in the past little while. Strange electrical noises, freezes - you know, the things you expect from a laptop that’s less than a year old. The last time it wigged out on me I had a massive Twitter Tantrum, mostly because my husband was at work and I didn’t have a second head to put to the problem (not to mention my own head isn’t so good to begin with).

Mike got home, said ‘Lessee here…’, went click-clack-boom, and the computer was behaving again. As though the problem never was. I should have been happy. Reader, I just about lost my mind.

I don’t venerate childhood or innocence nearly as much as most people, but I do remember a time when I believed that if I were grown-up enough, the learning curve would level out, that I wouldn’t feel like I was constantly scrambling towards achieving the next thing. That things would run smoothly, you know. This hasn’t been the case for a single day of my adult life.

Certain things come easily to certain people. My husband is very intuitive about technology and directions and all those things that you’re not supposed to expect a man to be good at in this enlightened day and age. He solved in five minutes a problem that had had me foaming at the mouth for nine hours. Why can’t things just be easy? I opined. Just for a day. Just for a day. Mike thought he’d done something nice for me, and was naturally bewildered at my nonsensical wailing.

I have a friend who, about a month ago, decided to give up smoking - just for a lark - and did it. No weight gain, no fever, no spots, no nothing. Just gave it up. I have another friend who has an intuitive, simple fashion sense, a beautiful face, and a body that 95% of the female population would kill for and that 95% of the straight male population would follow on hot coals from here to Brighton.

So I’m sitting here smoking with a zit on my nose wearing ever-so-becoming green fleece and wondering exactly how many doors I was slammed behind when the good stuff was being handed out.

But you only notice the stuff you can’t do, right, or the stuff that doesn’t come naturally or easily. Likewise, the natural, easy stuff is all you can see in other people. Who knows what unseen suffering there was in quitting smoking. Who knows how many hours are lost biting one’s lip, staring into the closet. And who knows what people think when they think of me. I’m an optimist, so I’m hoping that the zit on my nose isn’t high on the list.

I can write a decent sentence about just about anything. I have a good sense of rhetoric and a better sense of pitch. I have a huge pile of hair. I have massive green eyes. I have a cup size that would make your eyes go pop. I have really, really strong enamel on my teeth.

It took me two days to come up with that list. A list of things that come to me easily, that I don’t have to think about. Am I grateful for them? Not nearly enough. Some of them I actively resent.

This is my roundabout way of saying that counting one’s blessings isn’t a worthless effort. It’s important to be aware of what you’ve got. Not only to be grateful for it, but to begin to understand what other people struggle against - things that wouldn’t even occur to you. Nobody has everything, but each person has a lot.

And on my brighter days I can say this: what’s so horrible about the learning curve? If you don’t cheat it, you find new mistakes to make every day. The speed with which you pile up your mistakes is often a good gauge of how well you’re living your life. So don’t worry about being an idiot. Tot up those things that make you feel smug. Because my gorgeous friend doesn’t even know she’s gorgeous. Imagine having something that obvious to other people - that envied by other people - and not knowing you have it. Chances are, you’ve got at least one thing like that. Figure out what it is.

This moment brought to you by Hallmark. Any minute now, I’ll slip back down to regular levels of nihilism.

Till next time, &c &c.

If I had lived my life pro forma, I would be twenty-six years old right now. (Four years for a BA, two for an MA, three for a PhD.) That’s four years of my adult life unaccounted for.

Some people get it right out the gate. They know what they want at the age of seventeen and pursue it. I’ve known only one thing for as long as I’ve been sentient: that I want to write stories. I didn’t care how; I didn’t learn how until fairly recently. That was what I wanted, and I believed that university was immaterial to it. I went to university because that’s what people did; it was what my family expected, and I didn’t have any other plans. Looking back on my seventeen-year-old self, I’m gobsmacked that I got the application in, to the one university I solicited, on time and intact.

My undergrad was not a pristine thing. I didn’t care about school for the first two years, and when I started to care, I had a lot of ground to make up. Those first years still sit like ugly toads on my transcript: they’re there forever.

I don’t mind. In fact, I’m glad.

(My parents might continue to feel differently.)

In my twelve-odd years of adulthood, if not maturity, I have learned this: failure is incredibly important. It might be, in fact, the most important rite there is: real, high-stakes failure. Setting a goal and failing to meet it. It makes self-scrutiny possible, honest critical reflection that has nothing to do with Death and running your fingers through your hair. It brings you closer to understanding yourself, and is the only thing that makes it possible for you to understand others.

In these early stages of the professional writing life, I’ve learned something else that I wasn’t able to properly imbibe when it happened in junior high school: rejection is also important, developing the ability to believe in yourself when others don’t.

Brief History of Me: I grew up in the ‘gifted’ category; I was sent into special programs; I read and wrote early (though walked and talked late); I was sent into kindergarten a year early, just a bit younger than all the others, and my mother believes I’ve been trying to reclaim that year ever since. As I grew older, something started to happen to my ‘gift’ - I distracted more easily, I cared less. I got out of high school with an 87% GPA because I was ‘graded on potential’, a fact that did me no favours in university.

I was six years finishing my BA; it convinced me that School Is Not For Me. Mike and I spent ten months in Europe and I had a plan: we would return to Canada, I would take an admin job, and I would write at night. I loved writing because I wasn’t really doing it; I hadn’t settled into a routine yet. I thought the Muse would be at my shoulder if I only had the time. I spent a year trying this out.

What’s the lamest reason you can think of to enter an MA program? How about ‘My boyfriend’s doing it?’ Well, that’s why I did it. The novel was nowhere, my job was OK but I couldn’t see myself growing old in it; I felt like the teenaged Stephen Fry: My whole life stretched out gloriously behind me. I was twenty-five. Mike wanted an MA, so I got one too.

That degree changed the entire course of my life. I went into it a mouse and came out of it a lion. There was my thesis, bound in red leatherette. I could do anything.

I got a degree; I got married; I left Canada. I finished my novel, got it represented, and came here, to Cambridge. I was twenty-nine when I arrived and I’m thirty now.

I met a woman during my first week here who was just starting the last year of her PhD. I asked her what she planned to do afterwards, and she said she didn’t know - she would only be twenty-six, and didn’t want to commit herself to a lifetime in one job. When I finish my PhD (sacrificial slippers forthcoming to ensure this happens), I will be thirty-two. And here’s what’s not in the offing: children. Home ownership. Lawnmowers.

We don’t even know where we want to be, let alone when, or how.

I wouldn’t cast the four years of my adult life during which I wasn’t in school as a monolith failure for the sake of an analogy; they weren’t. I was on the garden path, not the other one. I did fail, at most everything you can imagine. Whenever I did, it’s because I thought something would be easy, and it never is; the things you love are, by definition, difficult, challenging. When I was up for a challenge, I was ready to experience love properly, not just for people, but for vocation.

I write this now because I am being challenged by what I love (if ‘being kicked in the teeth’ is suitably a ‘challenge’). This is harder than I thought it would be. Thankfully, I know what failure is: not something you struggle against, but something you buckle beneath. As long as I’m still struggling, I haven’t failed. As someone had it, ‘It will be OK in the end. If it’s not OK, it’s not the end.’

I don’t regret not having lived a linear life. If I had, any strong breeze might have felled me. It pays to put a foot wrong every once in a while. (And, of course, that’s why I did it in the first place. All that drinking in undergrad was calculated to make me strong and bind me to glory.)

Till next time, if God wills it, &c &c.

Herewith: the promised post about knitting. It will knock your (knitted) socks off.

Those following at home will know that I’m Living the Dream. Those who know me better will know that writing and Cambridge have been in daydreams and sightlines since I was about seven years old. I have also documented with some assiduity my compulsion to react badly to good fortune; I’ve spent most of my adult life trying to figure out why. I know now, and the reason is too pathetic and selfish to impart even to such a self-indulgent medium as this.

The upsides of Living the Dream are too many to count. I’m so lucky that I occasionally nauseate myself. Not only did I get to Cambridge: my husband got here too. You can’t imagine the logistical sets-of-three-train-connections shit that would have resulted if he weren’t a student here. We’re here; we’re together; we’re off in the same direction.

I also get to make my own schedule - provided said schedule gets everything done. Everything that requires doing, of course, can be done from this chair. Yes, I’m behind. Yes, I’m lost. Yes, I’m terrified. But I’m a lucky girl.

Also: really good fudge just down the road.

I have professional backing for a novel that I thought I knew would never see the light of day. It may never, still, but it has a fighting chance now. I love the world my clumsy hands have brought to life. I love the shaft-of-light moments that startle me into making it better. This I can also accomplish from this lovely, squashy blue chair.

There are so many other things, but stop me: I’m losing my point and I’m about to make myself vomit a little.

The problem with Living the Dream is that you’re living it out loud; you’re living it on deadline. The things that I used to do on the sly - character sketches, reading Eric Ives, wondering wondering wondering after the awesome power of getting to where I wanted to be - are (apart from the wondering) now done in the open, with expectations from people outside my own brain. I’m part of a club, but it’s not without its dues.

So when I sit down in my lovely chair for eleven hours a day of what I’ve wanted to do all my life, I often flex my fingers with a bad grace and a high heart rate. This has to be good; this has to be original; this has to be scholarly; this has to be riveting. Sometimes - just sometimes - this makes it feel like work.

And so, last term, being Michaelmas Term, I had a Long Dark Teatime. I clutched my towel. I didn’t know what came next; I only knew that I was doing it all wrong. I wasn’t all that good at admin work, either, but I was buffeted by a wonderful confidence that I didn’t have to be good at it: it wasn’t what I do. Well, this is what I do, and it’s being tested, now, day after day.

The upshot is that I’ve spent my entire life - from the age of six onwards - doing things on the sly. Deciding the main performance of the day just wouldn’t cut it. Now I’m here, doing this, and it’s not possible to make that excuse; and besides, if I were to do something on the sly, what would I do? All the fun stuff is already taken.

Enter knitting.

Two years ago, half a bot of sippy-cup gin into an evening, my dear friend Vanessa undertook to teach me to knit. Vanessa is an amazing, just-for-fun, on-demand, flashing-needles knitter. I swear to my heathen gods that half the reason I want children is because I want them to have a blanket by Vanessa. That night we drank and drank, and knitting took on a vitality, an importance: my stubby hands were making needles work.

Seriously: I suck at knitting. I really suck. It’s like chess: I sort of know the moves, but I get my ass kicked every single time. This is not Vanessa’s fault. I shall have to go back to Edmonton and get just as drunk to learn how to purl.

Still, I love it. Three weeks ago, Lent term threatened. Novel revisions are due; research writeups are due; so many things are due. So much fun. I’d have hidden under my bed if it weren’t one of these weird English beds that sorta goes all the way to the bottom. But instead of retreating to the corner I have specifically reserved for the fetal position, I dug through my closet and found two skeins of wool and a set of knitting needles.

To this point I have only ever managed lumpy trivets. But they are trivets!

In the fullness of time I want to be better at knitting - I’d like to make the hat, for example, that my agent asked for. But I don’t want to go overboard, and here’s why: there are two things that I’m good at. They are writing, research, and research writing. (No, that isn’t three. Shut up.) And I’m not nearly good enough at them to sit at the big kids’ table yet, but I’m getting there. Perseverance, discipline, love and love and love, a stiff drink. They all help. I’ll be what I want to be.

But knitting is the thing I’ve found to do on the sly. Nobody wants me knitting (trust me). But I take feverish joy in making lumpy scarves and squares and tearing them apart when they don’t work; I love to sit in front of some good television of an evening and plough away at these pieces of shit, knowing that they will never be evaluated. Knitting, if it has done anything, has made me love all the more what I now have to work really hard for. Before, it was OK to be a shitty writer; nobody ever saw. Now people see. But nobody - except Mike, whose love is, as yet, unconditional - has seen my knitting.

Knitting, and a couple of pub nights a week. That’s all I need to keep loving what I do. Both make me look forward to conquering a new day. Living the Dream is a burden of its own: you have to find ways to cope with it. It sounds ridiculous; it is ridiculous, but it’s true. There have to be failsafes, coping mechanisms to ensure that you continue loving what you’ve thoughtlessly loved your entire life. Knitting shows me that I’m horrid at something; it reminds me of what I’m good at, what I’m working towards.

Knitting is a life-affirmer. Ridiculous or not, it’s getting me through the Dream.

Maybe I’ll try basketball next.

A few notes: my next post will be on Living the Linear Life. My dear friend Amy Bai has begun ‘Confession Fridays’, and I’m thinking of doing something similar, just because she’s so faboo - any ideas for Theme Days on the blog? I’m eager for suggestions.

Till next time, &c &c.

You know, I’m turning 30 in six days. I really did think that by now I’d be able to wake up at seven, be working by nine, take a civilized lunch break at noon, and then get back to it. Nothin’ doin’. It’s twenty past four in the morning (make all the jokes you want), and it is ever at about 2:30, just when I’m poised for sleep, that I decide I can change the world by updating my calendar, making enormous lists that I have no intention of consulting again, and then posting publicly about it.

I had high hopes for my thirties, I really did. Although it might be that the Special Powers trademarked by that particular decade don’t actually take effect until one is properly thirty. I hadn’t thought of that.

I blame it on the US election (although that really doesn’t account for the past month). Being five hours ahead of the action means you have to stay up late, and it’s not just about the numbers: it’s the punditry, the reviews from everywhere. I’ve had an awful lot of fun reading the curmudgeons over at National Review Online’s The Corner, I read an apocalyptic piece about Obama’s first security briefing on CNN, and listened with interest to the total silence issuing from the mouth of Sarah Palin in the past 24 hours.

(Does anyone else think she’s going to spend the next four years in finishing school? Hiring private tutors, taking courses in rhetoric? Learning to walk across a room with a book on her head? Doin’s are transpirin’ in that mind of hers, I’m telling you. Something tells me she stays very quiet in Alaska for the next couple of years and re-emerges as Sarah Palin 2.0 in time for the Republican primaries.)

Anyway, the prospect of staying up till five in the morning last night really didn’t bother me; it rarely does. I feel more adult when I get my work done during the day, but I’m putting in the same ten-odd hours regardless, and, as Stephen King would say, it’s darker than a carload of assholes out there these days, so it doesn’t really matter when I’m working. The bonus is that I detest natural light: my previous works will attest to my attempt to foster perpetual twilight.

Still, though. There’s something a bit deviant about being awake at this hour. I thought being back in a student population would put me back into an anything-goes atmosphere, but these cats genuinely seem to work by day, attend choral rehearsal by evening, eat their pulses and get their Five A Day, and tuck themselves into bed by ten-oh-oh. I can’t be the first disorganized Cambridge student, can I? But perhaps I’m the last.

I take a multivitamin, anyway. Sometimes two, when I’m feeling the need for extra virtue. Or toxicity.

Between reading The Compleat Midwifes Practice and working on novel revisions, about 85% of my life’s work has me more or less confined to this chair (there are worse chairs, certainly). At this time of night it’s always tempting to consider the All-Nighter, to just go until I drop, and then drop. But then I remember the birds. Thanks to Daylight Savings Time (a professor at a readings seminar recently told me in a very smug voice that DST is a “social construction”; I returned that time itself is a “social construction” - maybe this whole thing is just an attitude problem), the birds will be out in full force in about an hour.

Everybody knows what it’s like to hear the birds of a morning when you haven’t slept. It’s a warning that reality is setting back in: the day is beginning; the robins are opening up shop and soon everyone else will be too. One’s stolen season is stolen back when one is uniquely ill-equipped to deal with it: tired, cold in the extremities, reading the same line over and over, but of course there’s no getting to sleep now because of the fucking birds. The world has woken up and it’s only just occurred to you that you have no idea how you’re going to get through the day.

So yes, I’m trying to be civilized, I’m trying to be grown up. I’m failing parlously. The whole reason my husband and I came to love each other so was these habits, but now he’s a Morning Rower so he gets his carbs and is in bed by midnight. I need a new night owl. Katrina the teddy bear is great, but she’s not big on talk. She just sorta sits there, judging me. (She started judging me when the felt started leaving her face a little bit - she’s a case study in Velveteen-Rabbititis - now she’s got this sort of wry half-smile on her).

Katrina is telling me to go to bed, and the fact my stolid, wise bear has become animate tells me that she’s probably right all round.

Till next time, if God wills it, &c &c.

Looking for more? See Sarah’s recent weblog entries here.

I’m going to get back to work in just a minute here.

What is it about Sunday nights that brings a person up against the edge of Destiny? I used to think it was about the week starting again, and I’m sure there’s an element of that to it, but now I’m working every day, and things don’t change much from day to day, and still here I am, standing on my balcony and muttering to myself - and occasionally to Mike - about Destiny.

My mother says this often and I ought to listen to her: “you may,” she says, “remember this as the greatest time in your life.” But Sunday nights still manage to penetrate. A friend told me, I’m sick of being on my way to something - I want to be there. I’m terrified of being there. I’m terrified, if we’re honest, about getting anything I want, because what if it wasn’t what I wanted? But I just made a very full-throated speech to Mike about learning to be shameless in the pursuit of what I wanted - I can’t back down from that. Can I?

Muttering about Destiny never gets a person very far. Usually, in fact, the act is in aid of putting something else off. The good advice is Complete What’s In Front of You. Forget about your Five Year Plans and oh-god-what-will-houses-cost. Complete what’s in front of you (which is precisely what I am, on this very chilly balcony, now I think about it, failing to do).

I worry constantly about the future. What’s a woman in her right mind doing getting a PhD in the humanities at this particular point in history, anyway? I haven’t heard a single person tell me that it will be easy or even possible to find a job at the end of this $120,000 road. So I worry. I worry about that, and becoming a mother, and not being talented enough, about losing the friends that I have and missing opportunities to make more while I’m muttering about Destiny. That worrying isn’t confined to Sunday nights, but at those times it takes on an apocalyptic colour: one wants - or thinks one wants - the future nailed down, certain, visible. One wants a home that one doesn’t have to think about moving out of in nine months’ time. One wants to be where one is going, to have a pee break and stretch out and have a goddamned nap and know that the landscape won’t have changed entirely when one wakes up.

But I’m always throwing myself into these situations, these changeable and unreliable situations - it’s a famiily legacy. I say I want security but I work with glory in mind.

A few weeks ago I might have abated this Sunday night bullshit by going over to Naomi’s for a glass of wine and a few fags out the bathroom window. We would have stared down Farquhar Road together and pissed and moaned about the coming week and missed out entirely on this weird depression that descends on the twilight of the Lord’s Day. Now Naomi is two hours away, not two minutes, and I’m convinced that everyone in Cambridge is perfectly prepared for, and even enthused about the coming week.

Well, let’s face it, I’m excited too. Not about slogging into town for groceries, mind, or checking my pigeonhole, or any of that day-to-day crap, but for the reason I’m here: the work. I suppose that’s more than a lot of people have. I love my work, when I’m not terrified of it - when I think I can do it. And now that I’ve committed this piece of offal to the air supply, I’m less sure than ever. But back to it.

Till next time, &c &c.