On Sunday I missed writing a post for Monday. There were many things to accomplish over the weekend and not many hours to do them in.
The point is progress, not perfection.
It’s also honoring the constraints of the day.
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My plan, bit by bit, is to make a garden inspired by the lyrics of Waking the Witch by Kate Bush. I started with the pinks and posies because they’re less expensive garden plants, and several years back now, I received the red, red roses as a birthday gift that would keep blooming in my garden.
This year they decided to bloom pink.
For reference, this is the same rose bush as the pink roses above.
Maybe it’s the unseasonably hot weather we’ve had this spring that has confused them. Maybe they’ll go back to blooming red. Maybe they’ll never be quite the same again.
I’m not going to complain about roses. They’re still beautiful, just not exactly what was planned.
If I were a member of the Addams Family, I’d be Inertia Addams. *sigh*
Me, Facebook, 6/1/2022 (since deleted)
I’d like to be able to say that I lost my creative identity during the pandemic, but it’s not as simple as that. As a person with multiple ongoing health issues, keeping the energy up to continue as a high performer at my day job, which is both necessary and important, and at the same time dry and dull, often takes priority over priming the pump and other self-care.
For a long time, I’ve been able to keep up things up by shoveling tomorrow’s energy into today. But there’s been a cost. It’s been this way for a long enough time that I’ve whittled away whatever energy reserves I may have once had, and my creativity, put on hold for everything else, feels like it’s circling a black hole.
There are all these stories inside me. I can feel them dying. I just haven’t been able to find enough energy to overcome my creative inertia.
Self-care and priming the pump cannot be my last priority any longer.
Giving myself time to exercise, time to do physical therapy, time to get out into nature, to bike, to knit and crochet, to read things that are purely for enjoyment? These things are not just fuel for my writing: they’re the fuel for everything.
So, this month, I’m burning down Inertia Addams and rebuilding myself from the ashes, one little blog post at a time.
I sat down to make a plan for kicking this creative outlet back into gear, but Ms. Poppy decided it would be better if I just petted her instead.
Then she farted. An unapologetic tuna bomber stank wafted from her bum. My eyes started watering.
I guess it’s good she can relax, but I need to buy a gas mask if she’s going to love me this much.
What I’d like to say: Sock knitting. Van modding. Writing.
What’s actually been happening: very little.
So today starts a quest. Okay, understanding of a need for a quest started about two weeks ago, but I set the official kickoff to June so I could have some time to plan and prime the pump, so to speak.
I could whine about the pandemic. About losing friends. About regrets. About menopause. About a culture where it’s all but assumed that I’m Gen X and over.
But I’m not here for that. I’m here for action out of the mire I’ve let my life become since 2020.
I’m not sure about the details of the plan, but my goal is to write something here every day for the month of June. It can be about anything. Maybe I’ll write about my crafting or the van we’re turning into a camper.
Maybe I’ll post my responses to exercises from my writing prompts book.
It could be anything. It will be something.
It came up in Book Club that it would be nice to have notes about what people enjoyed or didn’t enjoy on our book club reads. So here’s the nutshell information about what we read and how we felt about it.
Book club: Cedar Rapids SciFi/Fantasy Book Club
Venue: Cedar Rapids B & N
Book: A Memory Called Empire by Arkady Martine
Overall impression: Liked by people who finished, but it was a small meeting.
Warnings: Colonialism, Long, unfamiliar words (assuming you’re a typical Midwesterner.)
My personal take: I was ill on book club day. That said, I can’t say enough good things about this story. I bought the sequel. Don’t be put off by the long words. The story is worth it.
It came up in Book Club that it would be nice to have notes about what people enjoyed or didn’t enjoy on our book club reads. So here’s the nutshell information about what we read and how we felt about it.
Book club: Cedar Rapids SciFi/Fantasy Book Club
Venue: Cedar Rapids B & N
Book: Spinning Silver by Naomi Novik
Overall impression: Split. One of the themes of the book is how tied into antisemitism the monster myths of the Western world are, and some found it an uncomfortable read. Some people liked the story.
Warnings: Antisemitism. First-person narration. Multiplicities of first-person narrators. My notes say 6 different first-person narrators.
My personal take: I skipped this month. I have a bias against first-person narration, especially when there are more than three first-person narrators in a book. Who is speaking again?
It came up in Book Club that it would be nice to have notes about what people enjoyed or didn’t enjoy on our book club reads. So here’s the nutshell information about what we read and how we felt about it.
Book club: Cedar Rapids SciFi/Fantasy Book Club
Venue: Cedar Rapids B & N
Book: Radicalized by Cory Doctorow
Overall impression: Positive. 6 liked. 2 abstained.
Warnings: Politics. Police violence.
My personal take: Four short stories? What’s not to like? It was easy bedtime reading.
I enjoyed all the stories, but Model Minority was my favorite story. I see what you did there, Cory Doctorow.
This is Poppy’s box now.
What is missing from the world is a Quenton Tarintino movie adaptation of the book Trilby, by George du Maurier. It would be one dark film and it would cater to all the things Tarintino is good at: dark themes, a controlling manager (the trope namer for The Svengali) trying to own Trilby’s mind and soul, and Trilby’s a foot model – so it’s got plenty of reasons to film the feet of the actor who plays Trilby.
I mean, seriously. This book was practically written with Tarintino in mind, despite being a Victorian-era novel.