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My drug of choice is writing––writing, art, reading, inspiration, books, creativity, process, craft, blogging, grammar, linguistics, and did I mention writing?

Monday, October 28, 2013

SSDW

I almost feel like this weeks update could be a link back to last week without missing a beat. Normally establishing a routine that measured would be a good thing, but in this week's case (unfortunately) it's more a case of "The Same Shit That Sucked Last Week Still Sucks."

  • I still don't have my laptop back.  The Apple Store SciGuy should probably realize that fixing it for free is awesome, but if they he tells me 3-5 days at the most, and I still haven't heard from them him in over a week (including one brush off call I made to the Emeryville store down to the R&D department) I'm still going to end up a customer with a bad taste in my mouth.
  • My writing is still affected by the absence of Vera. I didn't realize how often we danced in the cracks between chunks of my life. A paragraph or two on BART...  A few sentences on the bus... A polish pass in the few minutes before I teach a class... It adds up faster than I thought. ("Pave paradise and put up a parking lot....") I am still able to sit down at my desktop and write (some fiction and this blog) but it takes blocked time and is very inconvenient.
  • I'm still very excited, but a little anxious about our coming bundle of psychic crime fighting joy. I'm already squeezing my leisure time into the moments between the ticks. I sometimes do 12 and 16 hour days among my three jobs. Some days I even have trouble finding time to read--which is one of my bellwethers for "I am way way way too busy." And the little bugger isn't even here yet.  
  • Whenever that feeling comes up in my life, I feel like something has to give. There is this power struggle between my will to write and the forces that don't feel writing is legitimate or real.  I don't mean I have to write a nasty blog post stamping my foot and saying that writing is real work or e-mail a couple of people. I mean I have to make some incredibly hard decisions about what I'm able and what I'm willing to get rid of because life has reached the point where it has demanded too much of my writing to continue. So that's got me pretty anxious--these breaking points are rarely pretty.
  • The Brain is now allocating upwards of 80% of her CPU power to nesting, which means she wants everything uber-clean. I told her housework was not actually my superpower, but I ended up spending hours and hours doing it anyway at her behest. What can I say, she controls the wireless wifi and the ice maker.
However, I suppose there are some developments.
  • The laptop thing actually affected me in another, more-different way this weekend. A whole new layer of suck frosting was added to the fucking bullshit cake. Last week I just didn't have it to write on. But this weekend I was SUPPOSED to have it, but I didn't. I kind of planned on that extra productivity.  I can usually do some writing, but the amount of time I can be home and sitting in front of my desktop severely limits my productivity.  I had some articles planned for both NaNo and an Ender's Game  that I have half written and earmarked for Ace of Geeks (that is a tad more political than I like to get here).  Both really need to be done by Nov 1st if they're to be topical but time is running out, and I may have to jettison something. I really hate that feeling of having marbles rolling around in my head that can't come out.
  • My knees hurt from scrubbing floors on my hands and knees. I'm not sure when this body stopped being 20something but I wish it would stop trying to improvise on a good thing.
  • Playing Supernatural on my iPad when I'm cleaning the house continues to be a good choice. It is seriously one of the only shows interesting enough to stand but vapid enough to be able to NOT WATCH and still follow without trouble. If I leave the room, I just assume I missed Dean saying "Sam. You're my brother, and I'm going to look out for you," and then dying horribly. 
  • I'm usually pretty zen about my choices. I know I can't be a writer and not write, so my priorities usually mean I have very little social life and very little non-reading leisure time. Usually that's no problem--just the cost of doing business. But every once in a while I get a bee in my bonnet about someone around me having the time to just sit and talk with a friend or pursue a new romantic relationship when what I have to do is another load of dishes and a few more hours of writing before bed. I'm sure this has absolutely nothing to do with the ramp up of the time I spend on chores and such. Nope. Totally unrelated.
  • I've been trying to lose weight and I've hit my second weight goal.  (Yay.)
Most of the time "same as last week" is a pretty good update for a writer. It means routine, and routine is good for both creativity and productivity. But in this case, if this last fortnight or so had a face, I would punch it...in the face.

5 comments:

  1. Wow. The details are all different, but I'm in that OMG OMG OMG TOO MUCH TOO MUCH space, too. Despite what my employer thinks, writing it what I NEED TO DO. That and singing. It's therapy, because there are just a couple of really sucky things about life that I can (a) forget about when I sing or (b) kill the people responsible for the suck when I write. Ha! And I don't have to pay anyone to listen to me either. In fact, people PAY THE CHORUS for the privilege of listening to us. It's so weird.

    I offer my condolences on Vera's condition. While I know as much about Macs as I know about nuclear physics (Macs are a thing! Nuclear physics is a thing!), I have been in that place, and it was dreadful. I miss Danu. Maeve doesn't really have a useful keyboard (tablet thingy, and all). My coworkers who've slammed the Google Kool-ade keep telling me to get a Chromebook. I want to collect all their friends and family members and have an intervention. In the meantime, I have a case of spiral notebooks and a gross of my favorite type of pen.

    You, however, have lost weight! That is totally celebration-worthy!

    (Babies are pretty awesome. Especially when they're superhero babies. Oh, that reminds me... time to go write!)

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    1. This made me laugh really hard.

      Thank you.

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    2. As long as it didn't cause liquids to spurt out of your nose... my job here done.

      For now. ;)

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  2. Playing Supernatural on my iPad when I'm cleaning the house continues to be a good choice. It is seriously one of the only shows interesting enough to stand but vapid enough to be able to NOT WATCH and still follow without trouble.

    That's what Law & Order is for me. But I probably mentioned that last time you mentioned Supernatural.

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    1. I think you're right. This feels awfully familiar.

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