Day 35 – I Know Why Disney Princesses Get Married So Fast

On August 28th, my wife lost her job. 24 hours later, I lost mine. This blog is a continuation of the day-by-day chronicling of our emotional journey back to employment. This is bound to be upsetting, hilarious and hopeful.

Thursday – October 2, 2014

Let’s be honest with each other: some days, unemployment is pretty boring. Erin and I probably spend more time waiting for things to happen than actually do. This has been a huge boon to my writing and this blog, but it does mean there are days, like today, where there simply isn’t much to report. I spent most of the day at Panera Bread writing. You don’t care about that.

Whatever the reason you come to this blog, I’m pretty sure it’s not “to hear about Brock’s boring day.” Of course, it wasn’t boring for me at all. Writing is a high and the time I spend doing it is thrilling, exciting work. It’s hard work, sometimes it’s even absolutely painful work, but it’s never boring.

There is one thing I wrote today I think I can share with you. It’s a nice, standalone little paragraph that comes very near the end of my almost, almost, ALMOST completed memoir that I’ve mentioned once or seven times, Worlds Apart, in which I explain one of the great mysteries of fiction–why Disney Princesses get married so fast:

The Disney fantasy of a Prince and his Princess meeting and then marrying the very next day after only the briefest of courtships (which was mostly spent fighting a dragon anyway) could only have been concocted by a man who, having gone through the engagement process and all its discussions of the color of the wedding flowers and whether the cake cutting knife should have a pearl handle or a glass one (this may or not be an actual thing, I honestly don’t know or care), decided to indoctrinate the rising generation of young girls with an attractive, quick alternative to the traditional engagement for the sake of his, I’m sure, sons. This plan went terribly awry of course, and instead Disney ended up on the wrong side of feminism for years. But they did try.

Basically, engagements are hell.

Sometimes, you write something and you think, “Yeah, that was good.” That was this passage for me today. I wrote more than this, but when I got the above just write I did a little internal cheer.

Of course, it often happens that the passages I’m excited about in the moment I write them turn out to be all that great when I go back and read them later. So, the above may be complete garbage. I can never tell these things until at least a week has passed.

* * *

Before I forget, a bit of good news today: Erin got a lead on another opportunity here in Fresno. The salary looke potentially like just what we would need to sustain ourselves. Erin keeps getting these out of the blue leads and I gotta think one them is gonna take. I hope so. We’ll make work what we need to make work, but at the same time we’re also willing to reject what we need to reject (like the idea that we might have anything further to do with this guy). That’s always our prayer anyway: to do what we need to do and to go where we are wanted to go.

And it really is a prayer. I say it every night.