Old at Heart

I spent a good part of the day trying to adapt another blog post. (What would I do without this blog, the rough draft of my brain?) But I don't have a very good track record with essays that are at all in an op-ed vein, and that's how this one kept coming out, no matter how personal I tried to make it.

I've published a couple of opinion pieces over the years, but I've written more that either were rejected or never even got that far. It's something about the voice. I start to sound whiny and crotchety, with a dash of forced humor (think eightysomething Andy Rooney of 60 Minutes), or stuffy and crotchety, with no humor at all (for the Washingtonians in the audience, think eightysomething Fred Fiske's commentaries on WAMU's Metro Connection).

Or else I sound as though I'm writing a college-application essay. Okay, it's a little better than my actual college-application essays, in which I wrote about wallpapering the family bathroom. (It's a wonder I got in anywhere.)

So my efforts today will probably not go anywhere. But I actually had a small breakthrough about my writing process, which was a positive thing. It's too complicated to explain at this late hour. Maybe some other time.

By the way, I don't mean to sound ageist with my references to eightysomethings above. Just think of them as forced, Andy Rooney-ish attempts at humor. And Fred Fiske has always been stodgy; my brother and I used to make fun of him thirty-odd years ago when he hosted The Fred Fiske Show on WWDC.

Anyway, my larger point: I'm not in my eighties.