Feeling Teenaged

I really know how to make myself miserable. Although, I never go IN to make myself feel like a moldy piece of dog poo. It just happens sometimes. Like when I go online and scour the World Wide Interweb for literary journals where I want to submit my work.

But I only have two officially finished pieces and so I feel like I need to choose really, really, really wisely so I don't waste a good piece on a bad journal. And then I read some of the published pieces from these journals and they are that really subtle kind of writing where the whole story involves someone walking down an inner-city block wearing Converse All-Stars, and you are left feeling lonely, confused and hollow at the end. Because that's how real art makes you feel?

I read a letter that someone wrote to one journal that said something like, "OMG! I've been submitting to you guys for ten years! And now I finally got in! OMFG!" And I had to read it three times to see if I got the "ten years" part right. And then I wondered if she was saying OMFG about the ten years or about the getting in. Hard to say.

And then I read some other writing, but it's either way more far out than I am (i.e. the intricacies of punk rock as it relates to the intricacies of being a gay man in New York) or just really terrible.

Makes you feel a little teenaged in the 'Where do I belong?' sense of things.

Because I really don't know. Where I fit. I write funny stuff. But not funny in a Chewbacca-mud-wrestling-with-Captain-Kirk pop-culture blahblah hipster way. Not funny in a Fart Joke Of The Day way. Not funny in a bitchy, snarky celebrity gossip columnist way. I mean, I'm sure I'm not the most uniquely funny person in the world, but when you're trying to submit your shit to snobby high-brow lit mags to whom "funny" is a version of the plague it sure feels like it.

Which is when I give my head a shake and say, "Mel? Quit bitching about literary magazines and get effing writing." I wouldn't feel so freaked out if I had ten finished pieces and a finished manuscript, would I? Prolly not.