Quiet

when the tv is hushed
and the dryer is done
the kitchen clock keeps time in quartz
and,
above the rustle of my hair on my pillow
above the hum of the ceiling fan in the next room
above the drone of the fridge
above my heart, beating in my ears,
there is
an ocean
drumming out of time
onto the sand

A Snail's Pace

Holy mother of pearl, what the what.

Oh, I've been neglecting the blog dreadfully. I've been composing a photo-dump post, in my head, and I even found the cable thingy and attached the camera, and installed Picasa, and, well, that's as far as I got. 

I have about a million zillion projects that I've been trying to finish up--only recently did I manage to finish hemming a pair of pants for the Nick, a pair of pants that he asked me to hem (and got stashed on my sewing desk) before Halloween. This past weekend, I had whatever bug was going around, and was knocked flat on my kiester. For one day, when Grandma was able to hang out with the Monster, I even got to rest for a bit. (After dropping the lovely Monster off at Grandma's house, I stopped by the drugstore to pick up some necessities, and holy mackerel, don't try to go shopping when you are sick. That is one of the worst times for decision-making, and staring at a shelf full of granola bars while a dial tone goes off in your head, well, that's just a terrible idea.) I did rest. I frogged a baby sweater that wasn't ever going to get finished, and frankly, is too small for the recipient, and in between episodes of my favorite British murder and sci-fi shows that I dozed off to, I thought about my creative self. (The sewing desk was right in my eyeline, so that might have helped a bit.) This is what I came up with:

I can be crafty, but I must not expect anything faster than a snail's pace.

WHAT? I'll never get anything done at that pace!

Yes you will; you aren't the knitting Xeno.

You mean the Greek philosopher who stated that one cannot get from point A to point B because first, one must cross half the distance between the two points, and first half that distance, and the first half that distance and so on?

Yes, shut up, we all knew that because we are all educated here.

What do you mean, expect no more than a snail's pace?

I mean that I don't have time to screw off with, and also expect to accomplish anything. My time is now finite, and little. You know that.

Yes, that's true. There's not so much now.

And rather than be disappointed when I don't accomplish the impossible, I should expect the possible.

That's crazy talk!

Shut your face! You're the crazy one, talking to yourself all the time.

Yep, I'm the crazy one. I would roll my eyes at you, but there isn't a mirror handy.

Anyhow, snail's pace. I can accomplish a lot, but only a bit at a time.

So, you're giving yourself permission to pace yourself?

Essentially, yes, that's what I'm doing.

You picked an odd way to deliver that revelation. Seriously, this is pretty anti-climatic.

No it's not, and critiquing a work in the middle of a work isn't meta. It's annoying, and hackneyed, really.

Your face is hackneyed.

~~~

So. I can travel at a snail's pace, and it's okay. I'll get to where I need to go, and in the time that I have. I will work on my ADOS (Attention Deficit--ooh, shiny! as my sister jokes) and document my ideas when I get them. The thing is, I get excited about a thing, and want to do the thing OMG right then and drop everything else. So, I'll endeavor to document my ideas as I get them, and hopefully be able to organize them, and be able to come back to them when both the idea and myself are ready,

Foul, non sequitur*

So, I guess I wasn't quite back on the horse. This post will be a bit disjointed.

So sorry, Gentle Readers, to leave you hanging with no new writings. I've had some things to process, and then a holiday happened, and then another holiday happened, and well, I am a master procrastinator. But I'll tell you about that later.

 ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~

There's an amazing amount of depressive procrastination that can set in when a project ends. It is rather amazing. It's almost like a post-partum of sorts (I have lady bits and manufactured a human with them, so I can say that). I devote so much of my time, energy, sanity and whole self to one thing for a certain amount of time, that when that thing is done or over, I almost don't know what to do with myself after that. I guess that it's a good thing that I can immerse myself into a project, and do it to the very best of my ability, but it gets exhausting. And then I need to work a full day, and care for the aforementioned small human. Who is bright and completely awesome, but still exhausting all on her own. Maybe I should start getting weekly lottery tickets.

 ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~

One of the things that I am paying the piper for now is that I never really had a career path, not a 'practical' career path. I went to a vocational theater school, and then took accounting adult ed classes after getting laid off from a retail job, and cobbled together a bookkeeping background by working for my husband's family in their various ventures. Now I have all these ideas for things to do that I am passionate about, but I don't have any time at all to do them in, so I just have to hope that I want to work on them when the time is available. Inspiration doesn't have a long shelf life. I don't know that this creative frustration is a product of not having a piece of paper, or just a product of being a functioning adult who is contributing to society. Either way, creatively frustrated, and blaming it on lack of time to devote to all the ideas that are cropping up.

 ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~

Gah. Am writing this in a coffee shop--typical, I know, shut up--and my table is facing a table where there are couple of young kids studying. I've been staring over the top of my laptop screen while thinking, but it looks like I'm staring at them, and now I'm pretty sure that they think I'm a creeper. And I can't approach them and say 'hey, I totally wasn't staring at you, I'm just staring into space, and you happen to be right above my laptop screen, and I'm really not a creeper. Am I concerned because there is someone in this room who might not like me? Does it matter if a complete stranger, who I may never cross paths with again, has a less than stellar opinion of me, a complete stranger? This sounds like normal human stuff. I'll chalk it up to normal human stuff.

Also, IT'S FREEZING IN HERE. FREEZING. So, with that, until next time, Gentle Readers.

*If you didn't get this reference, please find Rosencrantz & Guildenstern Are Dead, the play by Tom Stoppard in either written or film form. As of this post publishing, the 1990 film is on Netflix. Seriously, go watch it.

Ack ack ack ack ack

I wrote a thing. And the thing wouldn't tell me what its name was, so I picked a so-so name.
AND THEN I CLICKED SUBMIT.

600 word story for a contest on NPR, and it's all submitted, and I should really be in bed, but ya'll were making me feel guilty for not posting here.

So, here's a little band-aid post. MORE TO COME.

Now, bed time for this lady.

À bientôt, mes amis.

A list of things

1. The Russians are over taking the stats! Not that there is anything wrong with Russia, or the fine people that make up that country, I merely find it highly suspect that my relatively new blog could be so enticing to more people in Russia than in the US, where this blog is authored. Are a Russian reader, or a reader from somewhere outside the US? Leave a comment. You'll get a prize. For real-real, not for play-play.

2. I wrote a thing that seemed to take a lot out of me last time. It was good to write, but I let it be an excuse to not come back to the blog. So sorry. Done with that excuse for now.

3. National Novel Writing Month is coming up, and quickly too. I should really spend some time thinking about what I want to write 50,000 words about. Maybe catfish. Or wingnuts. Or maybe I spend some time.

4. I have been putting off chopping kindling and making fire starters. I really should get on that and get a good stock pile going while we still have our late summer. October will be chilly, and will be here before we know it.

5. Fall is coming! The pears will be ripe soon, then the apples, then the pumpkins! I have a lot of canning in my future. Hopefully.

Alright, that will do for now. I'm now back up on the horse.

Beaux reves.

Grab-Bag Quickie

At work. I need a little break from writing, so I thought I would write on my blog.

Yo dawg, I say you like writing.

I like the idea of some shorter, structured posts. I have Future Fridays (awesomely alliterated!), which have potential to be a blast. How about a Grab Bag Quickie? I'll take a topic (and please suggest topics, gentle readers) and search on Google with the I'm Feeling Lucky button, or if a topic doesn't strike me, I'll go to a random article on Wikipedia. And I'll try not to cheat. Also, I'll choose how to use a topic.

Today, I'll write on the Grab-Bag Quickie for 10 minutes--that's what I have left on my break.

Alright. This is a challenge. Timer is going.

Today's Grab-Bag Quickie Topic Seed: Karl Leister, German clarinetist.

Hmm. German clarinetist. Okay, let's see where this goes.

My mom plays the clarinet. Or, she did, in high school. She would pull it out when my sisters and I were little, and us girls would play with it, or really, make it go HONK after much effort, then my mom would wow us with her scales. We were kind of a musical family, sort of half-heartedly so. We had a keyboard growing up--no space for a piano, really. I took lessons, and my younger sister did as well, from the same teacher. I hated that teacher, (how cliche, I know, I know) and the minute she tried to cajole me into practicing by saying 'well, your sister is getting ahead of you in the work book,' I said see ya, lady. I don't know if my mother was ever disappointed that piano lessons never really took; she never really let on either way.

Yesterday was my mother's birthday, and after we had dinner and cake, the year book came out. Oh, there were some wonderful pictures in there, and some hairdos that I just died over. That got me thinking, about where my mom is in her life, and where I am in mine. Her mother, my grandmother, died three years before I was born. My mother never got to call her mother, at three am, with a screaming baby, seeking advice, comfort or just her mom's voice. Now that I have a Darling Monster of my own, I don't know that I ever called my mom at three am, but I definitely called her frantically when Baby Monster had a fever, or when I couldn't remember a recipe that I swore I wrote down last time, or for whatever reason. It hadn't ever struck me what it must have been like for my mom, to be 2,000 miles away from her childhood home, with a small baby, and then two and then three small children, and essentially going it by herself.

So, Mom, if you are reading this, thank you. It must have been difficult, but it didn't really show.


Ha.
There goes the timer.
Toodles, peeps.

not-so-quick of a post

It's after 11 and I want to go to bed, but here I am keeping a promise (of sorts) to myself.

I was on my way to the library, after picking up my darling little monster from daycare, after I had put in a full day of work. We were in the car stopped at a red light, and I noticed a younger woman, probably my youngest sister's age, walking toward the crosswalk. There were a couple of men, one about her age, and one much closer to twice her age walking behind her, and my radar went off. I hadn't been noticing the world outside of my itinerary much, but I saw her, saw the men, and in an instant I was intently watching. I was watching her, to make sure that she wasn't acting like she felt she was in any danger, and I was watching the men, watching their postures, how they looked at their surroundings.

Why?

Usually, whenever I see a woman who is in my age group, I am instantly comparing myself to her. Is she taller, shorter, thinner, fatter, prettier, uglier than me? Do I defer because I think I am less than her by comparison? Do I puff up, act bigger and badder? Is this woman an ally or an enemy, because she is taller/shorter/thinner/fatter/prettier/uglier than me? All of these questions are asked and answered in an instant. I can't help it; that's what happens. I try to help it, I try to pretend to not care, and hope that will lead to a 'fake it 'til you make it' sort of outcome, but that is rarely successful. But, when I see a woman in a potentially dangerous situation, that turns off. My radar goes off. I watch her, watch her body language, watch the men, look at their expressions. Are their eyes angry? Are their fists balled up? My hand usually reaches for my phone, in case I need to make a call to 911.

The first time I really remember doing this, dropping all concerns about the superficial and instead being concerned about the person herself was the summer between junior and senior year of high school. I was seventeen and on a trip to France with my French class. Two of my very good friends went on that trip, so I'll have to ask if they remember this incident. We were on a city bus, late, in on larger city. It might have been Paris, but I don't remember. There were only a couple of other people on the bus, a young woman who was a few years older than me and my friends, and a young man. I remember he had on a giant puffy jacket and a baseball cap. He was talking to the woman, and my French wasn't good enough to keep up with what they were saying, but to me, it was clear that they weren't besties, and that she wasn't very amused with what he had to say. I think I mentioned something to my travel companions, but if I did, they weren't too concerned. At the next stop, she was off the bus in a heartbeat, and he got off after. I remember watching through the tinted bus windows that made the streetlamps an even darker amber. I had lost sight of her, but I had watched the young man turn a corner, and the bus was on its way, and we went back to the hostel.

Every now and then I find myself thinking about that night. I'll never know what happened, or what their actual relationship was. I don't know if I was imagining some sort of potential threat, just for the universal human thrill of being able to say 'I know that something was up, I knew before everyone else.'

Today, the woman crossed the street, head high, and with a little smile and wave to me. The men went on their different ways. Truth be told, I was thinking about what to write tonight when I pulled up to that intersection. And there it was.

Having thought about this all afternoon and evening, these are my thoughts: It's saddening that I instantly compare myself to someone that I've never met, and some sort of self worth is measured by that comparison. That part is getting better and better as I get older, and frankly, care less. It is also a slight comfort to think that there might be others, women and men, like me, who watch out for each other when we think that there is a potentially dangerous situation. I do take off the rose-colored glasses and hope that I'll never have to rely on a stranger being concerned for my or a loved one's well-being, but I would like to think that there are others out there, their hands on their phones, watching their surroundings.

Hm. That's a darker note.

Cupcakes, ponies, sunshine, rainbows and smiles.
That helps a bit.

a bientôt, mes petits choux

changing things up a bit

I've let my blogs go fallow for too long, so here I come with the roto-tiller.

I've wanted a lot of different things in my life and I haven't been able to successfully achieve them for some reason or another, but mostly because I haven't done anything about it. Here I am doing something. What I want this time (or really, have wanted for a long time, but haven't done much toward) is to be a writer. How do you get to be a writer? You write.

That's the thing about writing. You don't need a whole lot to become a writer, but there is one thing that you must do, and that is actually write. Put pen to paper, or fingers to keyboard, and write. Not think about it, or talk about it, but actually do.

The doing is the hardest part for me.

I am a terrible (or wonderful) procrastinator. I could list my excuses and give them more validation, but I won't do that. I am going to make this pledge here, on my public but not viewed space, to endeavor to write. To endeavor to write every day. To do something productive, instead of getting lost in cat pictures and 'liking' facebook posts.

Here's my talk. We'll see what the walk entails tomorrow.

Until then, bon nuit, mes petits choux.