Monk Quixote

It’s not often I make F snort yogurt out of her nose and con­vulse with laugh­ter — well, except when I am attempt­ing to explain the cre­ative process or why I can’t fin­ish the novel this week because I’m (a) wash­ing my hair; (b) admir­ing the onion mon­ster in the gar­den; © think­ing up ways in which think­ing about writ­ing is like hav­ing your own Judaean People’s Front Com­mit­tee meet­ings going on in your head, con­stantly; or (d) ooh look, an ickle kit­ten — but I man­aged it this week.  And all because I said, in all seri­ous­ness, ‘I am a duck, I swim.’ You see, what I meant was when placed into an unfa­mil­iar envi­ron­ment (well, office, I don’t think this applies to Peck­ham, Mons Aus­tralis or Port Eynon) I have a ten­dency to cope with things, and worry about it after.  But I wanted to con­vey some sense of effort­less­ness, or per­haps nat­ural apti­tude.  There­fore ‘I am a duck, I swim’.  All right?  Stop sniggering.

More accu­rately, I should have said, ‘if I am a duck, I will swim.  And quack, and quite prob­a­bly be best friends with a goose that lays golden friends.’  It comes from a life­time of self-consciously not fit­ting in.  And pre­cisely because I am self-conscious, I end up in some kind of exis­ten­tial night­mare where I take on the tropes and mores of what­ever sit­u­a­tion I’m in.  Hence my bill, feath­ers, sticky-out tummy and strange quack­ing noise when I wad­dle to and from the bis­cuit cup­board.  Or to put it another way, the rea­son I don’t speak to peo­ple at par­ties (ha! as if I go to par­ties) is because I start speak­ing like oth­ers, talk­ing like oth­ers, and in cer­tain May­fair par­ties, quack­ing like others.

Which explains why my con­tin­ued atten­dance at copy-editing classes is turn­ing me into an idiot-pedant.  And, while my writ­ing is gen­er­ally becom­ing more clear and bet­ter punc­tu­ated, hav­ing not yet reached the prof­read­ing sec­tion of the course, I am still bak­ing masic mis­takes.  Which is my (e)th excuse for Really Not Get­ting On With Things — RNGOWT for snappy Python-esque dis­course — I don’t trust myself yet not to call Paulo Paolo and Giulio, erm, well, he’s always called Giulio.  Except when it’s Gio.

But you know what?  I’m a duck, I swim.  And I don’t care who knows it.  (And with one less excuse not to fin­ish the novel,  from now on I will try and pay more atten­tion to the excel­lent advice in this Cory Doc­torow article).

This entry was posted on Thursday, June 18th, 2009 at 3:24 pm, is filed under flimflam and tagged as: cory, displacement, ducks, JPF, quack, quackalicious, quackerjack, quackers, quacktastic, RNGOWT.. You can leave a comment, or trackback from your own site.

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