It is an ironically imprecise, indefinite word. After all, if the word is to connote some concrete action, such as placing both hands on the ground and lifting your torso and legs into as straight of a gravity-defying line as possible, then why does it have surprisingly little action of its own?
If you try to just do–I mean do-singular, do-standing-in-the-corner-bobbing-its-head-to-the-song-sipping-highly-colorized-punch–you will be hopelessly confused. Even doing nothing requires another word to make it clear.
Yet we insist on asking people this cliche phrase with this hopeless verb in it. For example, maybe you are taking a hunched-shoulder puff of fresh carbon-monoxide with a dash of bitter tar next to a fellow smoker and you tip your cigarette ash and make brief eye-contact: “So. What do you do?”
I find that this has become an increasingly difficult question the longer I live and the longer I pursue things that are among the outliers of human experience. Especially writing. Writing is that strange “do” that isn’t quite a “do” at all. You sit down. You string words together, and sometimes they fit together quite nicely and you give yourself a smug little smile and sip on a lukewarm can of flat Dr. Pepper. Other times, you are, in fact, playing a game on your computer or flipping through a novel you’ve already read before and didn’t particularly enjoy and pretending to write. But over time, you write something, and then, maybe you have a lucky break and all that “do” that was previously nothing suddenly materializes into something.
Applying to MFA sucks, because not only does your “do” feel even more useless and un”do” than ever, now you are waiting for somebody to confirm or deny that your “do” is, in fact, a piece of nothing pretending to be something.
The craziest part? You have a sneaking suspicion that even if everybody tells you what a piece of shit your writing is (or rather, it isn’t a piece of shit at all, but can you blame us if we can’t accept everybody because of limited space and money?), you are still going to sit there and continue to do nothing because you are one of the accursed group of people who is destined to be a writer.
It’s a small comfort, at least, that you are not alone:
“When I was older, I decided that getting a rejection slip was like being told your child was ugly. You got mad and didn’t believe a word of it. Besides, look at all the really ugly literary children out there in the world being published and doing fine!” –Octavia Butler
Dare I say it? I apologize Mr. William Gibson, but I daresay I believe she’s talking about your ugly children.
nerdy note: for my stats class, we have to program our analysis on “do” files with the file extension “.do”