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Month: June 2021

Staycation, Gotta Get -Away- Get It Done

Hullo, friends. it is Tuesday! The day that we blog. Yes. I totally remembered that all day long! I remember which day it is on a regular basis! Confession–I actually didn’t remember today was Tuesday. Because I’m on vacation. It’s so easy to forget, it seems–we’re two actual days into the workweek I’m not working, and I forgot what day it was! Which is even harder to believe I managed, because–well, let me show you. Going into the summer, I had no intention of taking a week off. I had the hours, but I didn’t have any money to go anywhere, and we’re still being careful anyway. Might as well just save the time off till I had something useful to do with it, right? Well, but my admin team was taking a week off. I would still have plenty to do–there is ALWAYS more to do–but I’d be going to work every day, and they wouldn’t. I’d probably end up not doing much but answering the phones and being mad at myself for not having taken the week off. So I took it. At least, I thought, I can get some things done. Ah, yes. That age-old goal of adults everywhere, to Get Some Things Done. I made a list. I collected notes from here there and everywhere, and I brainstormed, and I wrote a lot of things down, and then I put some of them on post-its. And then I put them on my whiteboard. And still I…

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Writing Again!

So a few days ago, I started writing again for the first time in SIX MONTHS. Yes, my friends, six months. It’s the longest time I ever went without writing since 2003, I estimate, because that’s when I started writing every day. I’ve had pockets of time where I stopped, or had to stop, like when I finished the revision of Fey Touched in 2012 and was brain dead for two months, or when the trigeminal neuralgia flared for the first time in my left eye and I quit the computer for three months, thinking it was my heavy computer usage (spoiler alert: it wasn’t). But never, ever have I went six months without a word of fiction. I have written poems here and there, so words were written — just not fiction words. Why on earth would I do such a thing, you ask? Why put myself through such torture? And yes, it was absolute torture. I don’t recommend it at all. There were a few things going on. One, I simply didn’t have the time. Sounds lame, because who doesn’t have time to write, but it’s absolutely true. With my health being sucky and my energy being low, and every minute I felt okay devoted to work, there just wasn’t any leftover spoons for writing — except poetry. I was battling a sleep disorder and head pain as well, so those things just made it worse. I was still stressed from the pandemic. Things are getting better overall,…

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Coffee Shop Exploration

You know what I miss most since we’ve locked down? Coffee shops. Specifically, sitting in coffee shops, sipping my drink, drawing or writing or reading, people watching, and generally absorbing the atmosphere. Before, I used to go at least once a week, and sometimes I would see a coffee shop I’d never been to before and make it a priority to hit it up when I had the chance, or I’d specifically look for one in a town or part of the city I didn’t usually frequent, so I could absorb a new and different atmosphere. One of my favorite things, when I go some place new, is scoping out the coffee shops. Coffee shops are almost liminal places, you know? They’re not quite local to their environment, since they tend to host a mix of locals and people just passing through, and there’s something universal about them, whether you’re at your shop around the corner, three states over, across the country, or even in some foreign locales. Vacations with the whole family can get a little overwhelming over time, so what I used to do, when we went road tripping or whatever, was get up early, before I’d be needed for anything or by anybody, and walk to a nearby coffee shop. What I did there varied—normally I would write, since I logically understand that vacations and writing don’t always mix but that doesn’t seem to always fix the need to write, but sometimes I would draw, or read,…

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Clothes Make the Woman…Maybe

Style is a way to say who you are without having to speak. —Rachel Zoe Clothing has been one of the banes of my existence. As a teen and young adult, I had no sense of fashion and didn’t know how to acquire one. It doesn’t help that this was the ’90s, or that I didn’t have the money to do a lot of experimenting (or the inclination for thrifting). So I spent a lot of time feeling awkward and out of the loop. Not just because of my clothes, of course; I just had the general sense that I’d missed an instruction manual somewhere. Despite all that, I managed to start a professional career in a real office (after being chastised by my temp agency for taking a backpack to an interview…and here we pause to acknowledge that white-collar dress codes are deliberately classist, racist, and exclusionary). I realized I had to learn how to “look the part,” so I bought style magazines and signed up for an online style guide subscription, which helped a lot in demystifying the world of personal style and how to put an outfit together. I went through a phase of trying to wear blazers, dress pants, and pencil skirts, and trying to figure out how to find office-appropriate shoes that would stay on and also not kill my feet. (I finally settled on flat mary janes.) (Insert rant about women’s shoes, office-appropriate women’s bags, women’s fashion in general, pockets, and so on.) As…

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Timelines

by Siri Paulson I am increasingly convinced that we are living in the wrong timeline the one the time traveler is supposed to come back and fix she was supposed to win he was meant to live we should have learned our lesson from the pandemic that almost was from that time we all messed up, or the other time, or the other one but she has taken a wrong turn in the multiverse he is fighting the pterodactyls stuck in the far future with the giant crabs intubated in some locked-down ward the portal dark and idle the time machine hidden and locked up tight waiting for the one with the knowledge who will never come to release it from its long and lonely wait or maybe they know not to come here maybe these are the years they always skip in their tours through the past maybe this is how things have to be if we want the shiny future we were promised long ago maybe we’re waiting for a rescue that will never come there’s no-one but us to mend the timeline to put things right one butterfly at a time we are all time travelers one second per second, one way only one day we’ll live in the future how it looks is up to us

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