I have half a dozen pretty good writing ideas on the new, actually useful (though a tad crooked) dry erase calendar in my office and was planning to use one today, in the name of Developing A Schedule like a real professional-type writer person. However, I was originally planning to substitute at my old school today but the teachers are on strike so now I’m in a productivity limbo; I started the day strong by getting up at 5:32, stretching while my cat Zelda tried biting my legs, feeding Zelda half her morning food so she wouldn’t eat fast and barf, meditating, adding items to my To Do list, writing & drinking tea on the late summer-cool porch and then…stagnation. Somehow I went from a concrete, invigorating plan to complete some household chores then start a decluttering/reorganizing project to: writing book reviews on my StoryGraph page, reading a random assortment of Substack posts, searching for a Banksy triptych that I saw in Austin but wasn’t allowed to photograph, looking up directions for using a Clinique sample I found in a drawer, leaving birthday greetings on friends’ Facebook pages, starting laundry, discovering the dryer isn’t working/texting husband/trying to reset the breaker/having husband come home to fix it/ignoring laundry for an hour, lying on the bed in the sun with Zelda, ordering groceries from Target, considering purchase of a new carry on suitcase/added to my online cart/reconsidered/removed it…
The point here is not that I should have been more productive or focused all day - I’m in a lifelong fight with the word ‘should’ because it is usually judgy & elitist and most times when I’m told I should do a thing*, I don’t, on principle. The point is simply that this is one of those days when I thought I would be engaged in a particular thing for which I knew how to prepare + dress and when that fell through, I thought I could pivot to a thing I was equally interested in doing, but somehow I could not (maybe because I didn’t get dressed? I honestly don’t understand how my brain operates a lot of the time). And, as with meditation when I struggle to not interpret what is going through my head and just notice & accept it all, I ended up feeling a little failurey** even though I fully know that is not true; even if I had crawled back into bed and played Wordscapes all day, I’ve survived, I still have value, and tomorrow is another day.
*I hope it’s clear to everyone that I’m not the kind of monster who would purposefully not help others because someone used the word ‘should’ in directing me. I’m only the kind of monster who points out spelling & grammar errors when they’re related to willful ignorance rather than class or culture. And the kind who will pluck a fly from her cherry Pepsi and continue drinking…story for another day.
**Made-up words are technically not spelling or grammar errors.
You accomplished more today than me! I didn't even go meet up with my brewery buddies ("Brewing Community") because some news -- which only affects me a tiny bit in proportion to its main person -- threw me for a loop. Getting dressed does help me accomplish things, but I didn't do that until 7pm. Almost time for pajamas now!