sandra the spy.

Writers don't care what they eat. They just care what other people think of them.

-Louise Fitzhugh, Harriet the Spy

Harriet is an observer. She calls herself a spy, because that's much more glamourous. I read the book about Harriet the Spy a long time ago when I was still occupying the age group for which the novel was intended. I liked it a lot and secretly filed it away in the ranks of classic young adult novels, where the greats like Judy Blume and Roald Dahl (the ultimate) live.

1.23.07
The worst job in the world must surely be the bus driver of the terminal shuttle at Reagon National Airport. As far as I can tell, his job is to drive a small bus back and forth across an asphalt slab half the length of a football field. I suppose if he's good, he's promoted to...I'm not even sure what.

Harriet carries around a notebook all the time, and in it, she writes her thoughts as well as the daily comings and goings of her neighbors. She writes who has a big nose and who has a disgusting pimple and who has the most ridiculous red hair she has ever seen.

11.18.04
Tracy, a chatty Wal-Mart employee, is having problems with her knee. Also, her car broke down this morning. She hurt her knee in the bathroom, she loudly complains, loud enough for a girl with glasses and a small notebook to hear her from the table across the way. Then she leans in to tell an old woman quietly some secret woman thing that she was doing when she hurt her knee. Across the way, a girl with glasses and a small notebook wishes she had been able to overhear the secret woman thing.

Harriet takes notes constantly. She scribbles over breakfast, during math class, before she goes to bed at night. She is taking notes as if life were a class, the events of which she will be tested on later. Some of them are just to remember the things she has seen. Some are things that she wants to remember to think about later. These she notes with a brief note followed by the words "THINK ABOUT IT."

10.10.06
The guy keeps looking at me, and I can't decide if it's because I look like his dead sister or because I look better than his blind date.

Harriet wants to be a writer, or is it a spy? Or maybe some sort of combination, which I suppose adds to either a tabloid writer or a really terrible spy. Someone told her once that to be a writer, you have to write, write, write all the time. People have told me that, too, and so I try, though I suspect it's just another joke, like that one about how to get to Carnegie Hall.

9.8.06
I have started to get comfortable with the natural ebb and flow of writing. For the past two weeks, nothing has come to me. Nothing in my life has changed, it wasn't as if everything got boring all of a sudden. I knew the little nuggets of inspiration that allow me to turn an everyday event into three pages are still all around me, but it's like I couldn't see them. And that feeling is not nearly as upsetting as it has been in the past - I had a bunch of old stuff saved up so I could keep up the blog. I worried a little, because one can never tell how long a dry spell will last, but at least this time, I seemed to realize that it definitely would end.

But Harriet isn't so much trying to get to Carnegie Hall anymore. The notebook has become a part of her, a kidney or lung, and she is unable to let it go. It interferes with her life. Even when she can focus on whatever is going on around her, she is composing it all in her head, her hands aching for the time when she can record it all in her notebook.

7.15.05
Things found in my car:
3 umbrellas
1 deck of cards
1 sewing machine instruction book, copyright 1970
9 burned CDs, 8 labelled
31 cents
2 pens (blue)
a box of hangers
1 diabetic test strip
1 hospital volunteer badge

And so I found Harriet the Spy for a quarter at the Salvation Army and immediately brought it home to snuggle it next to the Roald Dahls. I read it in one night on my couch, all two-hundred ninety-seven pages of it. I'm grown up enough to realize immediately why Harriet appeals to me so much, and I only wonder if I realized it then.