When I was a kid, my dad used to say, “If you want to slow down time, sit in temple.” As a thirteen year old, I thought this was kind of brilliant. Then I discovered addiction. Well, not quite discovered, but understood? If you want to slow down time, try recovery, or quitting something, anything that you are physically and emotionally tethered to with a big fat braided rope. Try drugs or prison, or something safer, like breaking up.

I never thought much about other people’s time, the time that is counted, slogged through, a burden to pass, the time that heals. A friend, going through a rough period, would call me once a week, or once a day. But during the other moments, when not on the phone or hanging out, I would go about my business, work, reading, writing, conversing with friends. I never thought about the rest of my friend’s time. The other phone calls she’d make, the activities she’d force herself to do, the hours she’d sit alone, willing the time to forward.

I never thought about other people’s time, until I had to do my own time, and the basics of each day–brushing my teeth, doing my laundry, sitting quietly with my computer, cooking my own food, going to the gym–became huge triumphs, victories of existence.

Living with simple goals, like making it through a day, or making it through a meal, reduces life to simple pleasures, bite sized nuggets of joy for which I am thankful. They distract me from the clock. When time is overwhelming, stretched out to infinity, it feels easier, naturally so, to “live in the present.” I notice the waves that make up the ocean, the breath that flows with my movements, the rhythm of my bicycle pedals, the lullaby of consoling words.

But just when I feel a sense of peace, I notice a clock. An hour has passed. It’s Tuesday. Morning. And only one thought comes to mind:  Are we almost fucking there yet?

It should not have been so daunting. I go to a café and write all time. I had a venue in mind and an idea in my head. I wanted to tell you about the mellow flow yoga class I went to on Friday night. Happy hour, the instructor called it. Over 120 of us gathered in an enormous room, six inches between our mats, which were lined up row after row after row. The clamor of a beer hall crowd and the clank of our water steins faded into a collective steady chant. In the far corner of the room, the DJ started up the ambient music. Yes, you heard me right, a DJ, in yoga class, at happy hour on Friday. Welcome to San Francisco. I still haven’t told anyone about the class and kept a straight face, but the truth is, for an hour or so, I felt connected to a room of sweaty dripping strangers, and I felt a sense of much needed peace.

When I approached the café the next day to write about the class, there were construction workers jackhammering near the street corner. Despite the noise, I went inside. Choosing another locale was beyond my current abilities, so I went all the way to the back room. I stood in the center and hearing only the faintest sounds from outside, I decided to stay. My squash soup lacked any flavor, but the bread was perfectly toasted, warm, doughy and covered with a crusty outer shell. I dipped it in the soup, filling my belly, feeling like a prisoner shoveling gruel, desperate for the calories, ignoring the taste.

Everyone at the surrounding tables worked quietly, except for one pair. All I could hear was their conversation. I couldn’t decipher their relationship, but one held the power and the other listened intently. If the one giving the advice was a teacher or a counselor, she was a bad one. I put on my headphones to listen to music, the wrong music, the kind that brought back memories. I stopped it immediately, hearing only the distant rat-a-tat-tat of the jackhammer. Then I started to cry. Lately, I am a loose cannon, packed with tears.

In MFA writing school, I learned that being sentimental almost always makes for bad writing. My teachers discouraged me from being “confessional.” It reminds me of an older essay in the New York Times Book Review section, “Misery Loves a Memoir,” decrying the modern day memoir. In Benjamin Kunkel’s opinion, we are infatuated with the struggle of a victim, overcoming adversity, “hurt and healing.” He praises Thoreau’s Walden as an early example of memoir outside the everyday triumph stories like Augusten Burrough’s Running with Scissors. (I’ve read the article several times and still don’t fully comprehend it, so feel free to comment).

I often think of that essay when I’m trying not to overexpose myself, use pain and struggle as story. But that is what I do, expose myself, work through my battles and epiphanic moments. I find that the line between therapy and art, honesty and confession, showing the heart but not spilling the heart, me the person and me the character is always unclear, especially in the beginning.

This weekend a much older relative of mine was asking my cousins and me what’s up with all of the social networking sites, all of the blogging. “Why do you put all of your personal business out there?” she asked, not fully understanding that we don’t put our phone numbers and addresses on the Internet.

The question that I’m circling around, is how much to share or not to share with you? Why do I feel the need to reach out into the black hole of cyberspace with my personal struggles? Is it okay for writing to be entirely self-serving if put out into the world, hoping to be read?

When I started my blog, I purposefully avoided choosing a subject. For the most part, I even avoided a large point of blogging, which is to comment on something in the world, moderate and engage an audience in conversation. There is another point to blogging, but that is better called live journaling or an online diary, things I’d prefer not to cop to. But which this is, sometimes, as much as I hate to admit it.

All the discussion and critiques of self-disclosure and confession are nice to keep in mind, especially in a literary context, when the final product is the most important outcome. But ask someone who has a stack of unpublished manuscripts in her drawer and she may tell you the important part was the process. Ask me, someone who often writes out of loneliness, to connect with others in a shared sense of humanity, and I will say that I do it for the process, to feel my arms extending from my body, reaching out for an embrace.

After a week of being unable to write anything other than “Dear Diary, woe is me…” in my actual journal, and “Please enter the name as it appears on your credit card,” for my job, I think I finally have a blog post here. Instead of trying to tell you more about the mellow flow yoga class, a post I just couldn’t write, and instead of coming up with another subject, a distraction or preoccupation from my sadness, I ended up writing about my problems. Sort of. Sometimes it seems like the best thing to write about is the one that makes sitting in front of the computer possible. Sometimes writing is nothing more than an attempt to make the jackhammer stop pounding.

Lately, I’ve been turning to the author’s note in nonfiction books for guidance about writing. I think this has something to do with my MFA program. There were only two kinds of classes, one where we offered feedback to each other on our shitty first drafts and another where we read literary masterpieces. How to get from a shitty first draft to a masterpiece was never covered. The how is in the writing process, of course, but in nonfiction I always get hung up on the extra element, the translation of “truth” into story. Or more specifically, I get hung up on truth.

The following is the opening of an author’s note from Jennifer Finney Boylan’s memoir, She’s Not There: A Life in Two Genders.

“This is a true story. In order to make its rendition tolerable, certain moments in it have been gently altered–by compressing or inverting the time line, making various people taller or shorter, blithely skipping over unpleasantness, inventing dialogue, as necessary.”

Some of this I consider to be standard for memoir writing and completely acceptable. “Blithely skipping over unpleasantness” is what I consider omitting. It’s the scalpel that cuts the arc of the story, and without it, we’d be reading play-by-plays of people’s lives. The rendition would not be tolerable. This line also tells me that for the most part, Boylan chose to shape her story around the positive aspects of her experience. We all have that right.

“Compressing and inverting the time line.” Fine, I’ll take it. For the sake of tension and Freitag’s pyramid, and for a compelling page-turner of a book. I feel like “gently altered” borders on being an oxymoron, but it’s not. It’s probably a great example of what my teachers meant about the importance of making perfect word choices.

“Making various people taller or shorter” is changing physical attributes of characters. Not a big deal. But the line is kinda offhanded, like she’s sitting in a wicker rocking chair, smoking a Virgina Slims, tossing a hand over her shoulder as she says, “Tall, short, fat, thin, old, young, no matter.”

Here’s where I get stuck: “Inventing dialogue.” It’s like she’s giving up any pretense of truth. Invent means to create, or to concoct and fabricate. To me, “inventing dialogue” implies that no effort was spent trying to remember the dialogue, as if that would be too much for a reader to expect. Boylan uses dialogue for pacing, and in one scene, I think she put words in a doctor’s mouth, for the purpose of lending them authority.

What are we left with after tossing Boylan a bone for not using composite characters? Well, she altered, gently, the plot, characters, and dialouge, which means the setting is super accurate. The fiction writers I know also often aim for truth in setting.

Perhaps the point then is one that I hear often. Fiction and nonfiction aren’t very different. Fiction has to be believable, and nonfiction has to be salable, I mean constructed, and both have to employ similar techniques in order to be stories. And that’s what Boylan’s book is, a story, and I understand that in the meaningful ways, the ones that are emotionally resonant, her story is 100% true.

To easily categorize this book, it is a transsexual memoir. Somewhere in the back of my mind, even though I know the answer, I wonder why it couldn’t exist as a novel, why the curiosity factor wouldn’t hold up if it were simply a story. Would I feel any better if nonfiction books said, “Based on a true story,” like the movies?

Maybe it would have no impact. I don’t feel duped as a reader, but as a writer. I feel duped into trying to be truthful. That’s not entirely true. My philosophy is don’t get caught. I embellish for humor’s sake. I constantly remind myself that if a tree falls in the forest and no one is around to hear it, it makes whatever sound I want it to make. I invent my thoughts with the abandon of someone who knows that scientists have not developed a mind-reader to verify them.

But as I learn from continually reading author’s notes, there is a better philosophy than “don’t get caught.” It’s own up to whatever you did, descriptive white lies and made-up conversations, then explain it at the end of the book, where nobody will see it.

I fell in love with public library system sometime after the card catalog gave way to the searchable electronic database. Like most people, I was drawn to the library because of its boundless supply of books and because it’s free, but my feelings for the library grew after I discovered the joy of ordering books online.

Not included the main library, there are 27 branches in San Francisco. If you live near a small, understocked branch, you can borrow books from any other location. No surprise. But did you know that you can have books delivered to the branch of your choice? So, let’s say you’re interested in Knitting lingerie style; more than 30 basic and lingerie-inspired designs. You go to sfpl.org, do a search, find the book, enter your library card and PIN number, and then hit the “request” button.

Ordering books is like using Netflix, except it’s free. Sure, there are some downsides, like the five blocks or so you will need to walk to the closest library to pick up the book. But gone are the days of perusing the aisles, wondering whether it’s 303.457ab B303.475a. You just walk directly up to the counter, give your name, and you’ll have your books before the smell of homeless shelter gets on your clothes.

For a steady stream of reading material, I recommend developing a queue of requested books. Memorize your library card number; it’s way cheaper than memorizing your credit card number. Every time a friend mentions a “must read” book, or you stumble upon a good book review, put in a request. Even if the book is a best seller with “97 holds on the first 47 returned copies,” one day when you’re least expecting it, you’ll get a notice in your email inbox. Lo and behold, your best seller is close by, waiting for you.

The library isn’t perfect and if hardcover books are dealbreakers, then you may not find the true love I speak of. I write this post having just come from the Eureka Valley Bookmobile, a bus that sits outside my local branch for a few hours a week, providing limited services while the library undergoes extensive renovations. I can’t say visiting a bus provides the same experience as a brick and mortar library, but it really didn’t matter when I grabbed my bundle of reserved books. My only hope is that someday the bookmobile will deliver.

There is a post today on the New York Times’ book blog, Paper Cuts, that combines March Madness and creative writing graduate programs, two of my favorite subjects. The goal of the post was to find Cinderella writing schools, the lowly ranked MFA programs that produce a surprising number of graduates on best seller lists. The results are inconclusive (i.e. nonexistent) and the post serves only to prompt MFA bashing and MFA justifying in the comments section.

Scanning the blog post, I hoped that my program at the University of San Francisco (USF) would be like the NCAA basketball tournament’s Davidson, an underdog to watch out for. Unfortunately, USF is ranked #83 in the U.S. News and World Report rankings, and if the NCAA graduate writing tournament is anything like the basketball tournament, there’s only room for 64 teams in the bracket. Hello, NIT.

But really, #83? There are three writing programs in our backyard — San Francisco State (#46), Saint Mary’s (#50) and Mills (#62) — that are ranked higher. There are schools in Hawaii and Alaska that beat us. Two schools in the top ten, Michigan and Arizona, are even basketball powerhouses, too.

None of this was news to me. When I tell people about my writing program and they respond positively, I usually point out that they are thinking about SF State not my USF. Also, when I initially looked into programs, I discovered the highly ranked schools focus on fiction and poetry and many lack nonfiction tracks entirely. Since I write nonfiction, the list is useless. As is my graduate degree, which not only says, “The Society of Jesus” on it (damn, Jesuits), but comes from a lowly #83 school.

In my family, personal worth is directly correlated with the ranking of the person’s undergraduate school. Every year my mom pored over the U.S. News and World Report with the rankings. To this day, when I’m at a magazine rack and see the famous annual issue, I check for my undergraduate university, hoping that some useless category like alumna giving will keep it in the Top 5, just behind Harvard, Yale, Princeton, and Stanford (three of which rejected me).

I fell for all of the crap when I was younger–the competition, the grades, the importance of going to a top ranked school. I like to think I’m past all that ranking stuff now, but the truth is, I’m not. Going to the Iowa Writers’ Workshop might not have made me a better writer than going to USF, but getting into Iowa would’ve proven that I’m a good writer from the start. And the people who say all it takes to be good at anything is hard work are fools; it takes talent, too. A lot of it. A basic grasp of language and grammar helps, and even with my degree, I’m still figuring out how to use basic punctuation.

But I do want to say that the University of San Francisco has a terrific MFA degree program, and at least some of the instructors went to top ranked writing programs. They are shellshocked. What I learned from them is this: The better the program the more horror stories you will have, and your book advance won’t cover the cost of lifelong therapy.

Next year, perhaps US News will rank the MFA programs by tuition, and perhaps the NY Times book blog will tell us how much money the author of a non best-selling book can expect to make. Then all of us writers will have some truly useful information.