Structure

Last night I was at the 30th Birthday party of my brilliant and beautiful writing friend. She said that she liked my writing but it needs structure. I value her opinion, but it creates a dilemma. I hate structure. Whenever I’ve tried to put structure to anything or I have had structure thrusted upon me, I get paralyzed by it.

I remember back in high school when we learned about the structure of a paragraph. Topic sentence, three supporting sentences, and a conclusion. I got so consumed with getting this structure down that I couldn’t write anything good anymore. When I told structure to go take it in the pooper, I started getting A’s on my papers. Ironic, isn’t it?

See, I went to a Hippy school. We learned how to write by just writing all the time. We didn’t learn grammar. We just wrote a shitload and went from there. I mean what the fuck is a predicate nominative anyway, and what does it have to do with the price of tea in China? Maybe that and 50 cents will get me a cup of Coffee. Although these days it’s more like that and 5 bucks, but that’s another story for another day.

But it isn’t just in my writing that structure screws me up. At work, we have this “project plan”, which is basically a way for people who know nothing about programming to crawl up the programmers’ asses. It also makes other people look a lot more important than they are. I just want to code damnit. I want to create some cool shit that will actually help the users. But now I have some jackass who doesn’t know what he is talking about structuring the way that I work. It’s like trying to make love to a virgin who is giving you sex advice. Fuck me here! Fuck me there! Harder! Softer! Faster! Slower! Don’t cum yet! If you can manage to keep it up, all you would want to do is just bust and leave. Meanwhile, if she would have shut up, you might have stayed and spooned.

Here lies another problem. It takes me a while to get into things, but once I get into them, it’s all or nothing. No half ass. When I was a kid, we had these wide steps with no banister. I was scared to walk down them, so I used to just slide down them on my ass, one step at a time. Shit, I didn’t even get my license until I was 25. Now I run downstairs and drive wherever my heart pleases me.

So I just need to write and code and let the chips fall where they may. In the immortal words of Mary Schmich, “Dance, even if you have nowhere to do it but your living room.”