Woody Cavenaugh

What am I? And before it has time to enter your mind, let me go ahead and tell you that this isn't some sort of identity crisis. This is simply a question of identity. Not only how I choose to identify myself but how others identify me. Over two years ago when I got laid off from my tech job I was feeling obviously a little down. When people asked me in social situations what I did, I told them I was unemployed. I was feeling down and maybe just a touch sorry for myself so when I described what I was I used the title that had a mountain of negative meaning behind it. "Unemployed" is a word that packs a whole grocery list of questions and statements behind it that lead the asker to the conclusion that I had somehow failed. Questions like, "What did this guy do to end up unemployed?" And statements like, "If this guy is unemployed and his peers are still employeed then it logically means that he is the worst of his peers." "You wouldn't lose your job for being good, or even mediocre." "What's wrong with this person?" When I got my feet under me a little bit and I had a handle on my situation I answered the question honestly once again. I told them I was a fencing coach. It was true then and it is true now. When I go to class three nights a week I am a "coach", they call me Woody, or if they are formal they will call me "Coach Woody". Fortunately I don't have that many formal relationships left in the club. I like "Woody" better than "Coach Woody". I like all of my fencers and when they call me "Woody" to my face, I can tell myself that they like me right back. But being a fencing coach doesn't put food on the table. As a volunteer the only compensation I get is the occasional meal from a parent, or the monthly bag of coffee from my coach whom I call "Doc" behind her back, and "Dr. Robinson" to others in more formal situations. To her face, I try my best not to say "Dr. Robinson" and will opt when I can to call her nothing at all. We met as I was a student and she was the Doctor teaching the class, our relationship started formal and remained that way for years, I can't exactly just start calling her "Sally". It feels weird in my mouth. But not only do I degress, I tangent.

So back to my identity. I was unemployed two years ago, but have been a temp ever since. I teach fencing three nights a week. I work in a university project management office, but I do not have a PMI, nor have I ever managed a project. I helped to create a project management office complete with custom methodology and database for tracking work and reporting. At work I am a temp-Project Management Analysist. My boss would like for me to stop using the term "Temp", but since I am not permenant I have to be "temporary". The difference is retirement, insurance, and other bennifits. These are very important differences that I am not about to forget about. So I was unemployed and a fencing coach, but now I am a temporarily employeed for two years so far project management analyst who teaches fencing. Its a mouth full. So as the mood hits me I am a "temp", a "fencing coach" or a "project management analyst". But that's not what I am telling myself I am. I tell the people who ask that, and I put that in this blog but when I look at myself in my mind's eye I am writer. I feel guilty for doing it and embarassed at doing it. When I take surveys where they ask you to check the box, "Mr., Ms, Miss, Dr., or Esq" I will often pick "Esq". I am not at lawyer but I love the sound of the word as a title and since it is a blind survey it doesn't really matter that much how I title myself. If "Esq" isn't an option I am just as likely to use "Miss" as "Mr". This makes since in this situation, its blind they can't check for hardware to asertain wether I am a Mr, Ms, or Esq. But I couldn't title myself a writer in public just like I couldn't title myself MS or Esq.

Yet it is ok for myself to refer to myself as a fencing coach. Among my friends a large number of them are writers. My wife and another friend are both graduating this year with a masters degree in screenplay writing. I have upwards of four friends who are all working in some level of secrecy on their Great American Novel one of those has written a couple of feature length scripts. The number of friends I have who blog is large and growing. So among my frinds I have screenwriters, novelist, bloggers. But I can't call myself a writer no more than I can call myself a Ms or Esq. I can't use Ms because I have a penis an can't use Esq because I don't have a law degree. I suppose I could say that I can't call myself a writer because I don't have nor have never had a best selling book or an article in a newspaper or magazine. If you were to ask someone who has a spot on the NY times best seller list reserved for them like Dean Koontz, Michael Crichton, or Steven King they would laugh and tell you "Of course he's not a writer". If you were to ask people like Fred Chapel or Michael Parker who to my knowledge haven't graced the top of the NY times list and teach writing at a university they would also tell you I am not a writer. So one would be lead to believe very logically that to be a writer, one must make money by writing. If that were true I couldn't call myself a fencing coach either because I don't make money doing it. There are project managers out there who have little or no certification at all, only a small percentage of Project Managers are PMIs, yet all of them call themselves project managers and work for a living managing projects. That's like a boy scout getting his Red Cross certification and calling himself a doctor. Project managers call themselves that because of the simple fact that they lead projects. Fencers call themselves that because they fence. No one in America makes money by winning fencing matches. So if you use the "Writer" definition then America has no fencers in it. I have a club full of kids who go out every week and bring back medels for winning competitions who would disagree at sword point with that. (I trained them well in the art of tact and diplomacy at sword point.)

So why do I have to call myself a writer in a whisper in my own head at night behind locked doors with the blinds drawn under the covers with the flashlight turned off? My fifth grade teacher told my mother and father at a parent teacher conference that it didn't matter what I went out to do, what I wanted to do, or what I actually did, I was a writer and no one could take that away from me. Well someone is taking it away from me, or I could at least have the flashlight switched on when under the covers in the house at night with the doors locked and the curtains drawn and I whisper in my own head that I am writer. I mean I write right? I'd better be writing or for these past several long meandering paragraphs you have all shared a hallucination with me. Creepy huh? We could all be crazy right now and no one knows it but Koontz, Crichton, King, Parker, Chapel, and the editor of the NY times book list.

I am not a novelist. I admit it, I am working in secret on a Great American Novel like everyone else, but that's not my muse exactly. I, as has been already made clear by a group of book snobs, am not literate. They defined literate as reading more than six books a month or something equally horid that I am trying to block from my mind. I am guessing this group must be bankrolled by the publishing industry. Its like Wal-Mart publishing that you aren't a consumer if you don't spend "X" dollars a month at Wal-Mart. Or worse yet, like I see on the occasional bumper sticker, you are not American if you didn't vote for Bush. I am ok with not being a novelist and I have read very few novels compared to my friends. They read Tolken, Gaiman, King, Koontz, Chrichton and Stephenson. Ok, I have read two Neal Stephenson books. I read Snow Crash (loved it), and I just this morning finished "In The Beginning...Was The Command Line". This 151 page essay took me about two months to read and was worth the time. He writes in Emacs, I write in Notepad, appart from the OS choise I almost feel like a kindred spirit. Although I was never a programmer, I didn't ever learn emacs, and he wouldn't call me a writer either. Some kindred spirit he turned out to be. My literary heros are Oscar Wilde, Mark Twain, Lewis Grizzard, Dave Barry, Douglas Adams, and Brad Rich. Ok, some of you could argue that Douglas Adams doesn't fit in the list. He wrote sci-fi novels sure, but in them he wrote things like "...ape like descendants who are so amazingly primitive that they still think digital watches are pretty neat idea." No truer social comentary has ever been written. If it wasn't true than why are there so many people out there who carry cell phones, pagers, PDA's, laptops, and when asked the time look at the digital watch on their wrist. Adams hid great social comentary cleverly within the folds of a sci-fi novel. I have never read any Tolken, Gaiman, King, Koontz or Chrichton. I suspect most of my friends just marked my name off of their christmas card list for admitting that. Its not that I don't think I would like Tolken, Gaiman, King, Koontz, or Chrichton, I probably would, but the environment necessary for me to read text on paper is pretty specific, way too specific to allow me to be married, work, teach, write, and well do anything else really. Being dyslexic means that for me to read, I must be comfortable and have good light but otherwise be in a sensory depreviation chamber so I can focus on the translation and comprehension. I think that is what draws me to the essay. Short works of social comentary that start with a bang and end the same way. Poetry is actually harder because the pattern has to be learned of the poem at the same time that the translation is occuring. Essay speaks simply in a language I already understand and doesn't waste valuable mental CPU time describing the ceiling of a hardware store. Thus in the set of all people who call themselves writers I would like to place myself in the subset of those who describe themselves as essayest. Not that I can call myself an essayest or a writer or anything.

I think the only reason I am even having this long winded one sided conversation with myself and you is because recently people, who are friends of mine in spite of me saying things simply for a laugh that should have earned me a punch in the face, have complimented me on my writing. (You know you have friends when you insult them for a laugh and they don't punch you in the face and they still invite you to stuff.) I am struggling with why or should I even call myself a writer because people like my writing. Woah. It took all those paragraphs for me to figure that out. You've heard of the theorpy where the shrink just sits in a chair with a notebook and says nothing. The style uses the discomfort of silence to force you to deal with your own problems. Well, my monitor is my theorpist. And I just had a breakthrough. Next session perhaps I will try to figure out what this new understanding actually means.