Saturday

I had the pleasure of going to a party where a bunch of people said really nice things about one of my recent social media status updates. It might be the work I'm most proud of this year so far.


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Life is Like a Game of Wack-a-Mole

Lives average out, right? If you're a mousy office drone who works endless hours at small, thankless tasks laden with nearly pointless detail, you're much more likely to unleash your caged Mongol warrior on the weekends (there's that bit in Hitchhiker's Guide where the town councilman's genes cry out to him), or if you're a serial entrepreneur with a family to feed who nevertheless starts up more and more outlandish enterprises that have no chance of succeeding, defying the odds, spitting in the face of potential starvation and irrelevance, you're also a germophobe who can't use a public restroom.

At the post office, when I worked there one summer, lots of the guys were veterans, and they liked to calm one another down, or pretend to calm one another down, with the military advice to "maintain an even strain." (I'm pretty sure this has its roots in Army training films on lifting heavy objects -- I had lots of training on lifting heavy objects that summer.) They'd say it like "maintaaaain an even strain." That sounds right, right? You do each thing with the right level of intensity, you make sure your bravery is just foolhardy enough and you make sure your fears are grounded in reality. You inject creativity into your boring office job and you go dancing on the weekend instead of riding a bison down main street and smashing into the sushi place.

That kind of balance is unsustainable, of course (and, let's face it, boring), which is why those post office guys used to have to keep saying it to each other all day. Your energy level shifts, you're wired to do certain things a certain way at certain times. Not enough oatmeal one week, you're going to flush all your Ideas files down the can; too much and you start singing really loud in the TSA line.

So, knowing that there are going to be highs and lows, I recommend trying to average out individual days. Just spend half of every minute screaming and the other half laughing. Average!


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"Have a seat," they said. I sat.

Although I'm happy to say that this phone's exterior now matches its bitter mechanical heart.

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Why NaBloPoMoWriMo?

I am blogging an average of once per day this month because I'm supposed to be finishing (for the third time) the novel I started during NaNoWriMo in 2009 and this seemed like the best way to procrastinate.

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Update: Nothing Has Changed

Fiveish years ago I wrote about a couple of developments underway in the woodlands surrounding my town. Neither has been built yet; one is still under way and the other is held up in various zoning wrangles. Thankfully. It takes sixty years to grow the woods, and just a month to cut them down—so it's probably worth an extra year or two to be sure you want to do that, before you do that.

In any case, someone stopped by where I was sitting today and asked if I had an opinion on that one, the tied up one, and I said oh sure, and I said, actually, here.


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Three Millimeters is Enough

Took me four hours and forty minutes to get home last night. Three millimeters of ice had coated the roads, and the bottom of every hill held a drift of cars that reminded me of the boats from the marina after Hurricane Sandy, all piled up together. I should have been using my phone to blog while parked on Route 9 in the hills up behind Cold Spring, wind whipping the trees and light sleet falling, but instead I listened to the radio, wondered about the identity of the people in the cars ahead of me and behind me, texted the friends who had picked up the kids, reflected on how every moment of the past had led up to that dark night and the high-pitched zzzzzip of someone's tires looking for purchase, the ticking of the sleet on the windshield.


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With Daylight Savings Like This

I guess I'm sort of okay with the early dark if it means leaving work to scenes like this. Which it probably doesn't, generally.

















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