Apparently, I’ve moved to the 1950s

Is it misogynistic if a woman makes a degrading comment to another woman, or only if a man does it? Just curious. I got that yesterday, which those of you who are my Facebook friends saw. For those of you not on Facebook (hi, Margaret!), here’s the scoop: I went to an event for school mothers on the campus where I work. While I enjoyed the lunch and the time spent with monks and the moms I have come to know pretty well, I also photographed the event, then edited the shots and posted them on the school’s Flickr site with a brief description, then sent the HTML code to embed the gallery on the school’s website to my marketing specialist. Just for shits, I’ll let you know that this was a very small fraction of what I accomplished yesterday.

• • •

Scribbling and bibbling

I’ve been writing and writing and writing so much lately, and it’s making me deliriously happy. “Here. It’s all right here in my noodle. The rest is just scribbling. Scribbling and bibbling, bibbling and scribbling.” That’s a quote from the movie Amadeus (one of my all-time favorites).

• • •

Sleep = Happiness

I went back to my doctor the other day, so she could draw blood for some routine tests (I hadn’t known to fast at my first appointment, which was at 4 p.m. so that wouldn’t have worked anyway for I’d have surely eaten my own arm if I had to fast from midnight until 4 p.m.) and to see how the mood elevator she put me on was working.

• • •

A little tune-up

When we bought Zoe’s piano last year, it came with a tuning upon delivery, and one for a month or two later, after it acclimated to our house. Which I think is funny since we had been in the house for eight months and we were still acclimating ourselves.

• • •

Where I confess my drinking problem

I have a problem that I think might be shared with other
writers who spend much of their days at a desk, pecking away at a keyboard. I
tend to accumulate a lot of drinks (non-alcoholic, mind you), or drink-holders (i.e. cups and mugs and bottles and the like), at my desk throughout the
course of a day. Usually by the end of a single day at my desk I have a used
coffee cup, an empty can of sparkling water, and a plastic water bottle. At
minimum, I have at least three different drinks on my desk. Sometimes there is
more.

• • •

What happens when I don’t know what to write

I don’t know what to write.
I don’t know what to write.
I DO NOT FUCKING KNOW WHAT TO WRITE.
And therein lies the problem. I want to write. I want to
write oh so badly. But the words…they aren’t coming. Or rather, the words would
come (they always come) if I just knew what to write about.
I started trying to write about me and my mother, and I got
a lot out, but then I waffled on whether to publish it on the blog and in the
end I was a huge pansy and decided not to. Or in one case, I published it, laid
awake for two hours, then got up in the middle of the night and took it down.
Wimp.
I have about forty women coming to my house this evening.
They are women who served on the retreat team with me, and women who came to
the retreat as guests. It will be a wonderful night. And I will run around
panicked right before they arrive, making sure clean hand towels are in the
downstairs bath, and the blankets neatly stacked on the floor in that bathroom
waiting for the next storm siren are removed. And in those few hours of rushing
around trying to get ready for my guests I will not think continually about writing.
It will hover under the surface, though. Pulsing.
This weekend is Homecoming at the school where I work. The
student council is sponsoring a bunch of fun themes each day this week. Today
is Hawaiian Shirt Day. The faculty and staff are much more interested in this
than the students. Nearly all of us are sporting some sort of Hawaiian shirt. A
relatively small percentage of the student population is participating.
Thursday is Steve Jobs Day, where we are all supposed to wear black turtlenecks
and “dad jeans.” I am curious to see whether this will go over better than
Hawaiian Shirt Day.
I saw a black bug in the women’s restroom yesterday. It was
smaller than a cockroach. Maybe it was a baby cockroach, although I don’t think
so because it didn’t have those disgustingly long antennae that give me the
willies. I almost squashed it, but at the last minute thought, “Meh, he’s not
hurting anyone.” I left him be. Then I realized that he really had no place to
go. He was wandering up and down the tile where the floor meets the wall, which
is the same kind of white, square tile only it’s curved instead of flat. He
kept trying to climb up the corner, then would go back down the wall after
learning he couldn’t go up. I thought about what it must looks like from his
perspective. A sea of white, square tile in every direction. It’s a
surprisingly large bathroom even for a human. Lots of wasted space. For a bug
it’s a universe. I wondered where he came from, and if he’d eventually find his
way back. Later, I had to use the bathroom again and found that someone else
squashed him, right there where the floor meets the wall with the same white,
square tile that is curved instead of flat.

• • •