summer blockbusters

And I don’t mean the Transformers sequel kind.

You and I will bust through my writer’s block this July. We will do this together! All you need to do is give me a prompt, and I will use it to write at least 100 words each day of July.

Send your prompts via comments here or via Twitter.

If you are similarly blocked and want to play along, you are cordially invited to do so.

Let’s have some fun!

bridge from sunday

I dream of being late for work, drenched in sweat, catching a cab to my home and not having enough time to shower.

I wake up before my alarm goes off. The tick of a cat’s tail is at my chin. The heavy curtains gap near the top, a knowing wink of light: not yet, but soon. Without my glasses, the bedpost is a smudge and not a sphere. Cat’s tail ticks. To call the weekend “brief” would do a disservice to all we packed in: our house show, our gardening, our quiet talks and unquiet laughter.

Monday mornings are difficult for me in the most cliched way: I struggle to stay motivated in my job, because one half of it requires me to be the heavy, the other half requires me to be the martyr, and both halves require me to take all of it with unflagging good humor. Some days I feel guilty for how much it frustrates me, for how little I care to interact with the rest of the world as a result. Some days I wonder if I belong in this profession; this is followed immediately by musing on whatever else I would be possibly qualified to do if not this.

The bridge from Sunday to Monday is usually paved with panicked dreams involving exaggerated absent-mindedness, lack of planning on a gross scale, appointments missed, obligations shattered, dependents horrified. I wake up before my alarm goes off; the dreams crumble like mildewed paper. Here are a few solid moments of my own before I push forward and out in an unremarkable birth.

Sometimes when I wake up we are holding hands.

fifteen in fifteen

This sort of meme makes me both crazy and happy. The instructions are as follows: “Don’t take too long to think about it. Fifteen books you’ve read that will always stick with you. First fifteen you can recall in no more than 15 minutes. Tag 15 friends, including me because I’m interested in seeing what books my friends choose.” The list is in order of how I thought of it, not how I read it. Reply in a comment if you so desire. (Thanks for the tag, Jen!)

1. 1984 by George Orwell
2. Brave New World by Aldous Huxley
3. The Bridge by Iain Banks
4. Justine by Lawrence Durrell
5. Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury
6. Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll
7. Demian by Hermann Hesse
8. Of Human Bondage by W. Somerset Maugham
9. Watchmen by Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons
10. Snow Crash by Neal Stephenson
11. Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison
12. The Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood
13. White Apples by Jonathan Carroll
14. Black Wine by Candas Jane Dorsey
15. The Time Traveler’s Wife by Audrey Niffenegger

the sprouts of despair

Angsomnia: when, due to angst, one cannot sleep.

I should have had a perfectly lovely evening. Before that, I should have had a perfectly lovely day. All of my problems were no more than minor irritations in actuality, logistical tangles to untie quickly and cleanly.

Why, then, do I only fumble them?

The dish I promised to make for tonight’s pot-luck supper has a time-intensive component: shredding 2 pounds of brussels sprouts by hand because we don’t yet own a food processor. I decided to buy all of the ingredients Thursday night so I could easily make the recipe Friday night, then send it to work with FunkyPlaid on Saturday morning so I didn’t have to carry it on the bus.

By the time Friday night cooking time rolled around, I wasn’t in the mood to cook. Cooking even straightforward recipes like this one is still a challenge for me, and my week had already been an 8 out of 10 on the “challenging” scale. (Note to self: do not plan on cooking to relax until cooking is relaxing.)

Long story medium: the brussels sprouts were wormy and unable to be salvaged, thus turning my Saturday into a car-less quest for brussels sprouts, which — as I realize I should have already known — aren’t in season anyway, so I have no business making the dish. (This last is difficult for me to internalize because I love the dish and it’s something I can do consistently well. Still, second note to self: cook seasonally.)

My Saturdays are strange creatures. I look forward to them throughout the week as if they are gold-plated unicorns of sheer delight. They are all mine, because FunkyPlaid is at work, so I have complete autonomy over them. That is in theory only, because when they roll around, I mull over completing any number of a hundred different things I think I should be doing with my time off, and I end up getting nothing done and feeling guilty for it.

A few times I have hit that lovely “I can do what I want and I want to do nothing” stride, but on most Saturdays my to-do list and I get into a stare-eyes contest and, despite it not actually having eyes, the list always wins.

Anyway, this Saturday I spent entirely on the brussels sprouts, up until the moment I hopped in the shower to get ready for the two-hour public transit adventure that is getting to the middle of Marin County. By the time I arrived, the brussels sprouts had taken on legendary status for me; I was merely a support system for the brussels sprouts, the imperfect vessel by which their greatness would be conveyed.

Okay, not really, but you get the idea. I had obsessed so much over how I considered this stupid side-dish to be inconveniencing me that I missed the entire point of cooking, or at least what I consider to be its point: to savor and share good food with good people.

Because I am me, I did not have a “silly me” moment. I had a full-on self-loathing “stupid, stupid me” moment. More like a collection of moments, organized into hours. It is hours later and I am still upset with myself. And then I say, “Why am I still upset with myself? That’s so stupid.”

… and we begin again.

This is the point at which a normal person says, “Hey! Snap out of it!” and I hear, “Hey! Stop being stupid!” I have no idea how to stop being stupid so I just sit there, wings flapping uselessly. Flap flap flap they go, and people wander off because watching sad little wingflaps is pointless and kind of pathetic and there is nothing more for them to do anyway.

So, third and final note to self: learn how to snap out of it. There are probably whole self-help books devoted entirely to learning how to snap out of it. I would be surprised if Oprah herself did not have a treatise on the snapping out. If only I knew of a place filled with books that I could browse for free!

Yes, I see my wings are still flapping. At least everyone ate all the brussels sprouts.