Lazy Sunday

The headache, thankfully, has dissipated. I don’t usually get a lot of headaches, but this weekend has been iffy. I think I’ve been staring at pictures and colored paper and smelling glue for too long. Been scrapbooking like a fiend all weekend, and have got 2004 successfully in the book, although I now need to go through and write the captions and anecdotes and usual guide book sort of stuff.

Also in the thank-God-it’s-about-time department, I finally finished Sir Walter Scott’s Waverley last night. It was touch and go for a bit there… if he had referred to Waverley as “our hero” one more time I think I would have gone insane. That and the dialect. Does ANYONE actually like it when authors break into dialect? Scottish brogue = not a pleasant reading experience.

One more book to check off the Great Reading List. The peasants cheered.

I’m into The Hound of the Baskervilles now, and have to say I’m having a fabulous time. The bliss of a good read… of course, after that I have Jack Kerouac, and one guesses that I will find him neither blissful nor fabulous, given my predilection for disliking drugged out, scummy-moralled men. Just a wild guess, you know.

Right. Must start dashing off captions and amusing anecdotes for the scrapingbook. Have to admit, I’m kind of ridiculously fond of my scrapbooks. So much fun to see all the fun I’ve had–get to enjoy things all over again. Here are a couple of random shots (circa 2004):

Dave, exhausted after the holidays:

Easter Egg hunt in Armstrong Wood, 2004

 

In case you’ve ever wondered, THIS is why I don’t move out:

 

 

Fort Wilderness Campground, one of the happiest places on earth

 

 

This is how good days start:

Now you know what I did last night

I always forget how much I dislike bars.  Mostly, of c, it’s just my personality. I sit there, my left knee bouncing up and down, faster and faster, because doggone it, I’m bored.

I guess I just don’t get it. You can’t talk, because it’s ear-shatteringly loud, so that defeats the point of getting together with people I like. (Note: maybe when people I DON’T enjoy want to hang out with me, I should take them to the bar? Then, instead of being forced to make small talk, I can just smile and nod and not be held accountable if I have no earthly what they’ve been talking about for the last ten minutes).

And then there’s the latent sexism. Seriously, you can talk about your glass ceiling all you want, but all you have to do is go to the club or a bar to realize we’re not going anywhere fast. It’s kind of creepy, the women all out on the dance floor (kind of looking like a SATC backdrop, except with the sort of cute, sort of amusing American potbelly most of us have going on), and the men mostly Standing There, watching.

There’s got to be some pretty major getting-attention deficit disorder for women to like that. I mean, we all like to be thought attractive and hot and whatever, but seriously? By scuzzy men in a bar? Yeah, not so much.

So I sit there, smiling absently and watching and taking a sheaf of mental notes for writing purposes, people watching and trying not to think about the fact that I’d rather be writing. Or talking. Or reading. Or asleep.

Well, that and I’m just a straightforward sort of person. If I wanted to go deaf I would pierce my eardrums. If I wanted to make out, I would find a person and take him home. If I want to get anywhere in life, I probably should spend a significant amount of my time in the pursuit of my dreams.

I’m only twenty-five once. And life is so short.

Arguments that, I suppose, could go either way. But, seriously, gyrate my butt or write a novel? I feel like that should not be such a tough call.

and then there was pain

Youch.

Earlier, it was just a little twinge of ouchiness, now my knee is throbbing. Hurts to walk. Hurts to sit still. Gah! I’m trying to decide how I hurt it: could have been at work last night, could have been working out this morning, but you know what, it probably happened while I was sitting, minding my own business, writing this morning.

I don’t know why, but I often sit cross-legged, or otherwise self-entangled, and sometimes I don’t notice when I’ve been putting a lot of pressure on a joint for a long time or something. I’ve always been klutzy. Nothing new.

But, pox on it, this one hurts worse than usual.

My pictures from Snapfish showed up yesterday! All 702 of them. I spent an hour or two trying to get them in some kind of chronological order, mostly relying on the evolution of my hair to judge periods. First there was the long straight, than I hacked it all off in 2004, then I dyed it a plummy black, then let it grow out a bit, then it bronzed in the sun and turned kind of orange… sometimes events were too close to call, and I had to rely on other things. Like when Joel broke his arm. And when Michael and Grace moved out east.

Tomorrow I’m going shopping for a photo album and some more scrapbooking stuff, and then I’ll be all set for six months worth of work. Which reminds me somehow that I have to my taxes tomorrow too. And all on v little sleep, since I’m trying to psych myself up to go to a birthday party when I get out of work tonight at 11:30. I NEVER go to these things, and I always feel badly about that, and there you go.

Although I still have quite a few hours in which to wuss out. And my knee still hurts. And I don’t want to feel like crap tomorrow.

Wow. I think I might be the worst friend ever.

Aww…

Somebody scraped the snow off my car for me. I had my very own Meg Ryan moment in the Pine Rest parking lot with a lot of fluffy snow.

I’m a sucker.

It’s funny how a little thing can make you feel good, like world peace is achievable, and life is beautiful, and even snow in LATE MARCH is kind of pretty.

Don’t you love it when people are just genuinely and for no reason nice? And isn’t it odd how extremely rarely I think of doing things like that for other people?

Hmm. I should change that. I should, but honestly I think going to bed is the more realistic option for me at this particular moment.

I can become an all-american sweetheart tomorrow.

It could happen.

Maybe.

Happy Birthday, Robert Frost!

How does it feel to be one hundred and thirty-four? Ok, and dead? I guess ultimately I’m more interested in that second question.

While out in Connecticut with my uber-fabulous sister-in-law Carleen (see the south-southeast link), we hit on a new program for self-improvement: celebrating famous author birthdays. Thus, Robert Frost. Thus Flannery O’Connor yesterday. And thus Tennessee Williams tomorrow.

Brilliant fun, although, as Carlie mused a couple of days ago, “why is it that every idea for celebration has to do with food?” We were trying to decide how to celebrate the birth of Flannery O’C without invoking the aid of fried chicken and cornbread… we didn’t succeed, by the way.

But Robert Frost is much easier. The man only has two billion of his best-loved poems online. Check out this site for a few of his greatest hits. Won’t take more than a minute, and won’t you feel oo-la-literate? Five minute ego boosts. I’m all about them.

My life seems to be lived from one self-improvement jag to another. My latest five  are:

1. Exercising every day. I seemed to have been on Miracle-Gro whilst on vacay. I think I gained seven pounds. It’s slowly coming off. Slowly would be the key word

2. Celebrating authorial birthdays and trying to read up more on the old folks

3. Studying eastern religions

4. Cleaning the bathroom on a sort of regular schedule

5. Trying new recipes

Am easy on myself, no?

And Joel is telling me my tea water is boiling. And my characters are still languishing in chapter forty-six, so must be off.

The Jonas Brothers creep me out

… just saying.

I think it’s that fact that their combined age is what—seventeen? And they have this bizarre mixture of barely-teen male vocal ranges with all this scratchy, sexy-voiced crap about looking people in the eye and tasting heaven yadda yadda. I sort of imagine if I were to find myself looking one of them in the eye I would probably say something more along the lines of “now would be a good time to get your GED and work on some personal hygiene issues” rather than, you know, “I love you.”

I’m just saying.

Miley Cyrus, though, different story. She actually kind of has it going on. At fifteen or eight or whatever she is. I feel in a scary (read: insecure) sort of way that her heavy-lidded, scarlet-mouthed sexuality is about twice as visible as mine will ever be. Not a bad thing, when you consider that at thirty-five I won’t have changed and she’ll have done rehab twice, but disconcerting nonetheless.

… and now I’ve completely forgotten why I stopped by here in the first place. Stupid radio station. I think I actually had something to say. Was going to jot down something about self-improvement. Some new scheme.

Egh.

It’s gone.

Must be too late at night.

An uneasy state of bliss

I took the day off.

Which is weird for me. Not because I don’t clock in my share of hours lolling about, but because even when I’m surfing the net or trying on shoes or chatting with a friend, part of me is ALWAYS thinking about how many words I could write if I got in a couple hours later, or what the next chapter will be about. I guess I just feel guilty when I’m not working.

Making me one of the world’s laziest workaholics, I suppose.

Sometime I should actually figure out how many hours a week I work. I put in 20 at the hospital, and then it’s anybody’s guess with the writing. It’s hard to calculate, because I’ll get up from my desk and make a cup of tea and wander around the house and bounce ideas off of Joel and check my email. It’s sort of an eternal muddy state of work. The nice part is that I never have to GO to work. The bad part is that I can never leave.

And I would be lying if I said that even now I’m totally relaxed and at peace with my day-off-state. I might even be twitching a little bit, but that could be the coffee too. Never know. I took myself out for coffee this am, dragging along a fresh copy of InStyle and my crossword puzzles, and cozied down at Panera for a little bit, followed by a jaunt to Target and the mall.

I even bought myself a bona fide madeleine pan from France. Shall do Proust proud one of these days (always a noble goal, yes?).

No, okay, I’m definitely twitching and watching the clock. It’s like withdrawal. I keep bouncing my knee and trying to sweet-talk myself off with thoughts like: you could color-coordinate your closet! You could play stylist and put together summer outfits and take pictures and file the pictures for future reference (and then read your daily chapter of Coping with Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder for Dummies)! You could clean the bathroom! You could bake madeleines! You could read a book! You could catch up on newsy emails!

I suck!

This day will not feel good until I write a couple of pages.

Shall go fix that.

Little Crush on Geoffrey

Okay, I think this is probably not supposed to happen, but I’m having a little authorial crush on this cameo character I just made up. Drowsy, slow afternoon of writing, just trying to make my goal, feeling that the fictional world was a bit grim and dull and full of reheated arguments and voila—

Somebody went into the next room and FOUND A PERSON. A brand new person named Geoffrey. He’s a short, dapper little editor of the society page for a now-defunct newspaper in London circa 1850, who fishes for gossip by conducting an insane number of correspondences with rich women who have little crushes on him.

He reminds me of my younger brother’s Wodehouse counterpart. And the only sad thing is that he doesn’t seem to have a whole lot to do in the story, and, in fact, doesn’t fit the mood of the thing at all.

But I love him.

Beatific Visions and Such

When Jon lived stateside, we used to talk about three times a day. Usually short conversations about stupid things like this guy on a bike who was totally drunk or this quote in a book that made me laugh or I would totally rather be talking to you than doing my homework.

Now that he’s in England, it’s harder to talk on the phone, but we’ve started scheduling times to skype online, which is like a video phone and v nice. Anyway, we chatted today about how to ditch the moldiness that passed for Christianese and talk about the concepts in language that makes sense without all that ghastly baggage. A modern reinterpretation of the medieval beatific vision was, I think, Jon’s phrase.

Was trying to explain this to M at lunch when she asked how Jon was doing, and it rapidly turned into a Your Generation conversation. We have those a lot. Doesn’t especially bother me, because I think we both walk away feeling equally justified, but it’s strange.

My mother says “your generation” when I think what she really means is “you at your potential worst.” You know what I mean: the drug generation, the video game generation, the grubby-jeaned little punks who don’t believe in absolute truth.

I tend to think of her generation as cold, duty-oriented little modernist with their how-to guides and their crispy social norms and American Dream. I readily admit I would rather be perusing my field guide of eastern religions, doing yoga, and practicing centering Christian meditation.

Why it took me this long to realize, I don’t know, but I noticed today that we have rapidly become a kind of ludicrous cartoon strip.

Creedal vs. experiential. Organized vs. independent. Two sides, one coin. We still believe all the same things. I guess it’s just amusing to me (probably to both of us), how generationally-bound we really are.

Although, okay, confession: it causes slight narrowing of the eyes when one’s entire generation is accused of not believing in any kind of absolute truth. Tired argument, anyway. Of c we believe in truth, I think there’s just been a legitimate cynicism about who’s truth is being touted as absolute and what the agenda behind that might be.

Somewhere along the line we got off on church attendance as a generational thing.

It’s a little hard, I said (have just finished listening to Love Among the Chickens by Wodehouse, and yes, I hear that phrase in a particular kind of Ukridge voice), to be faced with the responsibility of a whole generation’s lukewarm interest in “church” and have that disinterest be blamed merely on a style of music or length of sermons. I’ll tell you frankly enough that church as a Sunday morning institution is probably the least visibly, spiritually useful part of my week. I don’t think it has anything to do with music style. I don’t think it has much to do with length of sermon or order of the service or even whether or not women are allowed to speak.

I think it’s funny that those things are what we spend our time arguing about, as though there is some magical combination that will revitalized the spiritual community. I think it’s funny that we assume the young generation has an inordinate need to be entertained instead of assuming that maybe the church itself is what’s unhealthy.

Maybe our drugged and medicated generation is still young enough to be sensitive to the fact that our churches are pretty materialistic and American dreamy and spiritually reserved. Maybe we know when we’re being babysat with Sunday school classes that a wide-awake toddler could ace.

Dunno. Something I find myself contemplating as I crunch my way through a packet of Easter Peeps. It’s also a good way to avoid writing. Have done a thousand words so far today, but should do at least two or three. We’ll see. The day’s still young.

Entry the first

Always something auspicious about starting a new journal. I suppose it’s the pleasant illusion that one will have turned a corner and be suddenly brilliant and profound and generally NOT the disorganized, snipey, sun-lazing, fantasy-prone shopaholic one has been for the past twenty-five years.

One can always pretend. And, in fact, One usually does.

Just got home from a week-long jaunt out to the east coast to visit brothers #1 and #2 and their respective wives and bairns and am frantically trying to piece Normal Life back together before heading to work at three this aft.

Okay, “frantic” might be a bit much, since I am snuggled up in my office chair chewing bubble gum in a quiet house, but you know what I mean.

Got my thank-yous written, emails read (Instyle informs me that I ought to be using BROWN mascara for a “fresher, younger look.” Thank you, Molly Sims, my life is now complete), answered a couple of outstanding emails harking back to the dark ages of mid-February (oops), changed the cat litter, refilled the bird feeder, watered plants, unpacked my bags, mailed a package out, sorted mail, gathered library materials to return…

Been a busy morning.

And I wish I could find some way to recount the best bits of my trip, but I hardly know how to come at it… Carlie, Joel, and I found a website with instructions for analyzing handwriting for personality traits and spent an afternoon amusing ourselves with puzzling over the fact that my lowercase “m” is rounded and my lines generally slant upward (although the words themselves have a backslant, indicative of being an independent soul)… At Michael and Grace’s we spent an evening playing murder mystery—dividing into teams, the first of which comes up the a mystery plot and sets up the house with a number of clues, while the second team has to solve the mystery. Hard to describe, but great fun to play.

Got to see the Liberty Bell and take the tour of Independence Hall, wander around the Philly art museum and eat cheese steaks at Gino’s.

A great trip.

… yes. I think this blog will be exactly like every other journal I have ever kept: a hurried splash of events and impressions with flashes of genius and, you know, proof-reading eternally pushed off onto tomorrow’s plate.

But I have to get ready for work now. And I want a cookie. And the side of my face appears to be bleeding for no reason.