Sixteen and a half long months since the day I began, I finished writing the first draft of my novel this evening.
I’m celebrating by going to bed.
Category Archives: Life
Milestones
Life’s milestones come in so many shapes and sizes. While many are like gigantic boulders others can seem like pebbles at first. But even a pebble can create a ripple.
Today my firstborn, my baby, who has somehow so quickly reached a height of almost six feet and eighteen years of age, moved out. A huge milestone for him and what I thought would be a smaller one for me.
But now I find myself thinking about how empty my house feels, even though my other two children are asleep in their beds. There’s no one to call down the laundry chute to say good-night to before I go to bed. I’ll turn off all the lights without worrying if he’ll trip over anything should he get up in the dark. The ripples have spread, just as my son has spread his wings and proverbially flown the coop. Just like that.
March Break Blues
It’s snowing. And I’m thinking to myself, why the hell is it snowing when it’s almost the middle of March? And then I remember, oh yeah, I live in Canada.
I’m also right smack dab in the middle of March break. Kids are home and the youngest one is looking for something to do, as usual. I know what I want to do, but sitting around while I write, for some reason doesn’t seem all that fun to him. He wants my attention. Constantly. OR he wants my laptop, which is not very conducive to getting any writing done either.
So I pawned him off.
No, I didn’t sell him, though sometimes I’d like to. I gave him to a friend. Somehow I think he may be returned however.
March 11
When I visited Japan in 2005 I was struck by the beauty of the land with its mountains and valleys, towns nestled in between as though they had grown up from the ground and the way the Japanese make their culture known, from the most magnificent temples to the tiniest of window boxes.
But what most deeply affected me was the people themselves. Their capacity to give of themselves to a complete stranger without asking anything in return was astounding. I found that all I had to do was stop on a sidewalk and look at a map and someone would invariably come up to me and ask me if I needed help to find where I was going. I had people walk far out of their way to escort me to places I wanted to go. In fact, in Kyoto I did my best to get lost, just in order to have a reason to talk to people. But it wasn’t just the fact that they were helpful, it was the eagerness and the grace with which they offered.
I promised myself when I got on the plane to come back to Canada that if ever I had the opportunity to help a Japanese person I would go as far out of my way as so many of them did for me. Unfortunately that opportunity came in the form of disaster. Two years ago today I grieved when I learned so many of these wonderful, generous people were lost, and all I could do at the time was send money. I hope that I will be able to go back, next time to help with the restoration of a beautiful land laid to waste.
It’s odd, I suppose, that a born and bred Canadian should think of a country almost half way around the world as home. But that, I do. I love Japan and its people.
Itsuka Nihon ni kaerimasu.
Blogging is better than food
Of this, I am now certain. Please bear with me.
In an email to my mate earlier today I wrote the following:
So I’m procrastinating right now. I should be delivering papers but instead I’m reading. What, you ask? Blogs. Anything that’s short enough that I don’t feel as though I’m actually getting into something. Because that would be serious procrastinating rather than the ‘I can stop doing this at any given moment because it’s short’ procrastinating. Hey, that sounds like a blog entry, doesn’t it? I may just copy and paste later.
And now that I have another million and one other things to do, what am I doing instead? You get the idea.
While I was walking around the block delivering my papers (yes, I did finally do them) I thought more about blogging and the effect it has had on me since I started a little over a month ago. It’s addictive! It keeps me up at night and better yet, gives me something to think about when I’m delivering papers! Hey, it’s sapping my energy! And for energy, I need… food! But do I? Not as much as you might think. I’m just a teensy bit overweight.
So then why is blogging better than food? (I had to get around to it sooner or later.) Before I discovered this wonderful way to avoid the things I should be doing, I would graze. Procrastination meant weight gain.
Therefore I triumph in the logical conclusion that blogging is indeed better than food.
At the very least, that’s my excuse and I’m sticking to it.
My Poetic Paper Route
It’s cold and damp outside. The snow is melting in all the wrong places turning the earth that was churned up beside the sidewalks by the sidewalk plows into mud. Said mud is running in dirty puddles down every conceivably available square inch of concrete, and where the sun doesn’t touch the mud is an icy sheet. Every day before noon I walk these muddy sidewalks delivering the local newspaper. I don’t do it for the money, I do it for the exercise – at least that’s what I keep telling myself. Most of the time I think I just do it because I’m masochistic, especially on days like today.
However, as I was trudging up the hill on my street today, an inch deep in dark black mud, I realised I am living my dream. I write in the hopes of one day distributing my words to hundreds of thousands of people. What am I doing now? Admittedly, I only deliver 16 daily papers (and 124 flyers on Thursdays).
One day, when I’m a bestselling author perhaps I’ll be able to look back to my life now and say, ‘There I was, doing what I’ve always wanted to do. I spread the written word’.
Poetic, isn’t it?
Ch-ch-ch-changes
It’s funny the way sometimes changes in my life come all at once. It’s like the moon, or some other force out there in the universe has shifted and made everything seem different, even though it all looks the same. Although I am just a speck in the grand scheme of things, I am affected.
I strongly believe in the concept that everything is connected. Everyone is connected simply because they exist. It’s a bit of a frightening thought that I might be causing someone harm at any given moment. But then, if I live my life right, surely the majority of the time I must be spreading happiness, or at the very least causing someone to think more deeply about how not to make the same mistakes I did.
Anyway, back to the changes. In the past twenty-four hours my son has gone from hospitalized to sitting in at the computer at home, watching The Price is Right on Youtube and screaming as though he just won a car. A good friend of mine lost his job. True, neither of these changes are about me per se, but both affect me. However the biggest change of all: I found regret. Not just the regret I feel when I discover I should have bought that bag of milk yesterday because today it’s not on sale anymore, but life-changing regret. The kind that I can’t go back and change. Not with all the forces in the universe.
In the grand scheme of things I’m a speck. A shifter of the universe.
Sad but True
Ever have one of those days when you haven’t had any sleep the night before, and you’re just about to finally fall into bed at 9:30pm and you get a phone call from a customer you deliver the newspaper to (for a stunning compensation of 11 cents per day) to let you know that your eldest son didn’t deliver their paper today (and neither did you because you spent the day in the hospital with your youngest son) and all you want to do is cry?
I wish I could say me neither.
Life does that sometimes
I realise that in posting a serial story I have created for myself a certain responsibility to my readers to keep it up. Unfortunately, life. You probably understand. It doesn’t always revolve around the internet.
So, I’m writing now to say I haven’t forgotten about my story (Boy Series – One through…) and neither is it finished. Nine is not the dot dot dot.
Not that I’m assuming anyone cares.
Are they crickets I hear?
Forty-something and still growing up
What is it about my life that at what should be my bed time I start acting like a teenager? I know damned well that I’m tired, and yet I refuse to do the sensible thing and go to bed.
I think that maybe it’s the quiet which lures me into wakefulness. When it’s quiet I can concentrate on writing. At night I don’t have to worry about the phone ringing to tell me someone has been misbehaving at school and can I please come and pick him up. During the day I’m so worried that my creativity will be interrupted that I would rather procrastinate by playing Bejewelled than run the risk of starting and having to stop. Then there’s the fact that at night I can act like an adult: having a child who refuses to play silently by himself (and by that I mean if I don’t play with him he screams at me until I do – long story) is hardly conducive to sitting down to a peaceful cup of java and a pleasant read. Oh, and wine of course. THAT I can enjoy a glass of after the kiddies are safely tucked away in bed.
After all, isn’t being a teenager all about wanting to grow up? Yeah, I’ll bitch about how tired I am in the morning…
Maybe I’m not really grown up after all.
