I had a weekend off but had very little sleep, but that’s not why I’m discouraged.
I got barely any work done on my novels, but that’s not why either.
I have a sink full of dishes that I haven’t the energy to do, but that’s not entirely what’s got me down.
I killed a fruit fly this afternoon by breathing it forcefully (by accident) up my nose and blowing it back out into a kleenex – that was actually the highlight of my day.
I want to go to bed but I have to wait for kids to go to sleep, but that’s not what’s really killing me.
I have so much to do that I don’t know where to start, but that’s not the worst of it.
What really has me discouraged? It’s all of the above combined. Except the fruit fly thing. That’s just funny.
How was your weekend? Please tell me it was better than mine.
Anyone who would like to try it out, feel free to use the “One-Liner Wednesday” title in your post, and if you do, you can ping back here to help your blog get more exposure. To execute a ping back, just copy the URL in the address bar on this post and paste it somewhere in the body of your post. Your link will show up in the comments below. Please ensure that the One-Liner Wednesday you’re pinging back to is this week’s! Otherwise, no one will likely see it but me.
As with Stream of Consciousness Saturday (SoCS), if you see a ping back from someone else in my comment section, click and have a read. It’s bound to be short and sweet.
Unlike SoCS, this is not a prompt so there’s no need to stick to the same “theme.”
The rules that I’ve made for myself (but don’t always follow) for “One-Liner Wednesday” are:
Distemper, datemper… which temper do you want? You know, sometimes you just want to edit. But you can’t. So here we go.
I’ve been sitting here for the past fifteen minutes trying to come up with a word with “temp” in it that doesn’t mean it will soon go away: temporary, CONtemporary (new now, old tomorrow), tempus fugit (time flies), temperature (when does that ever stay consistent?) (okay, if you live in the desert maybe it pretty much does), template. Template! It’s something you use so that you can recreate the same thing over and over – without changing it!
Now what?
I suppose I can still talk about how things change, but that’s so depressing, isn’t it? Unless I’m sad, then I want things to change for the better. Contentment is so rare though, isn’t it? When I am content I try my best to stay in the moment, to remember details, and to enjoy it to the fullest. Contentment scares me though. I have to say I’m pretty happy with the way my life is at the moment. All three of my kids live at home, and they’re all relatively healthy (Alex has a lingering cough, but it’s nothing life-threatening) and they’re all relatively happy as well, and busy with their lives. It all makes me wonder what’s going to happen next. I try not to speculate. Again, stay in the moment. Just stay in the moment, Linda. Enjoy it. Even when I’m being kept awake at 2 am by a coughing kid… Yeah.
Sometimes enjoying my contentment is more of a challenge than others.
I have a hard time staying seated. When I’m writing or editing I have to get up at least every half an hour or so. I sometimes walk into the kitchen, see that there’s really nothing to munch on (because I’ve been smart enough not to buy anything to munch on) and go back to the computer empty-handed. That’s a good thing. I could so easily gain a hundred pounds without even trying if I gave in to all the temptations. Hey, there’s another word that’s not temporary… or is it? I suppose if temptations were constant they’d grind us down so much that they would no longer be temptations but reality instead. So yeah, temporary.
I’m going to temporarily leave reality now… (which means temporary unconsciousness… stream of unconsciousness Saturday… SoUS… French for suck… this really sucks, doesn’t it? Hahahahahahahaha!)
I wonder when the phrase “making light of a situation” began to take on a mostly negative connotation. I try to find the positive in most things. Making light of them induces, in me at least, the idea that all is not always dark. That there is always a light at the end of a tunnel… that nothing is absolute. But then it’s so much easier to see darkness, isn’t it?
Light can blind us. Imagine being so happy that you can’t see any possibility of misery in the future. But then misery hits and things are never darker. Does it mean that we should look for darkness in the light as well as light in the darkness? Perhaps.
But back to my first thought – I have to wonder if the coming of our politically correct society caused the increase in seeing “making light” a bad thing rather than good. Everywhere I go these days, people are getting up in arms about this or that. Finding insult in everything under the sun. I sometimes wish we could just all “be,” without constantly being criticized for what we are and things we do and say. We’ll never please everyone, but what happened to Thumper’s old line, “If you can’t say something nice, don’t say nothing at all”? “Nice” is such a rarity these days, isn’t it? In society in general I mean.
And so it’s become the norm for me to make light of situations only when I’m at home, where the people I know and love know me, and know that I mean no harm. Occasionally I’ll take a chance when I’m commenting on a blog or on other social media, but I’m always nervous that there’s someone out there who will take offense and make me feel like an awful person.
If we can say there’s no rest for the wicked, then at two in the morning when my child gets me out of bed I can safely say something weary this way comes. ~ Quote courtesy of my brain without sleep.
Anyone who would like to try it out, feel free to use the “One-Liner Wednesday” title in your post, and if you do, you can ping back here to help your blog get more exposure. To execute a ping back, just copy the URL in the address bar on this post and paste it somewhere in the body of your post. Your link will show up in the comments below. Please ensure that the One-Liner Wednesday you’re pinging back to is this week’s! Otherwise, no one will likely see it but me.
As with Stream of Consciousness Saturday (SoCS), if you see a ping back from someone else in my comment section, click and have a read. It’s bound to be short and sweet.
Unlike SoCS, this is not a prompt so there’s no need to stick to the same “theme.”
The rules that I’ve made for myself (but don’t always follow) for “One-Liner Wednesday” are:
Anyone who would like to try it out, feel free to use the “One-Liner Wednesday” title in your post, and if you do, you can ping back here to help your blog get more exposure. To execute a ping back, just copy the URL in the address bar on this post and paste it somewhere in the body of your post. Your link will show up in the comments below. Please ensure that the One-Liner Wednesday you’re pinging back to is this week’s! Otherwise, no one will likely see it but me.
As with Stream of Consciousness Saturday (SoCS), if you see a ping back from someone else in my comment section, click and have a read. It’s bound to be short and sweet.
Unlike SoCS, this is not a prompt so there’s no need to stick to the same “theme.”
The rules that I’ve made for myself (but don’t always follow) for “One-Liner Wednesday” are:
Because I just know everyone out there in WordPressLand is interested in my to-do list for the next week, I’m posting it publicly. You see, I have a partial week off. Which means the kids are with their dad for a week, but I still have to drive my mother here and there, and I still have my basement troll (aka my eldest son) and his cats dwelling in my dungeon. During this time I hope to accomplish the following:
Finish editing my novel.
Write the remainder of my Second Seat series for my fiction blog – only 21 days left to go and I’ll have published one entry every day for an entire year!
Annihilate all of the fruit flies in my house, if not the world.
Pitch an article to at least three different publications for my Interview with a Magician. (Yes, I italicized it to make it look as awesome as it’s gonna be.)
Write some fiction, poetry, and articles to sell, to raise money for my upcoming trip to Tokyo!! (Yes, I’m going again in November. The tickets are booked because I won the lottery to get the concert tickets I wanted!!!!!)
(And this may be the hardest of all,) get away from the computer and get some exercise.
(And this may be the hardest thing to avoid, but I have to be realistic,) procrastinate.
Remind everyone that there’s a contest going on for which we have one (fantastic) entry so far. It’s for the new SoCS badge in case you missed the memo. Don’t make me break out the pom-poms. And for pity’s sake don’t make me enter it myself. You’ll rue the day you have to look at any more of my mad paint skillz.
So there you have it, WordPressLand. Can I do it? I think I can. Wish me luck.
I can’t be the only one this happens to: I’ll have something–an event–to look forward to and I’m so enthusiastic about it that I can’t wait. I look forward to this one thing so much that I’ll begin to imagine what it’ll be like. How much fun it will be. And then the day comes when it’s actually going to happen…
And I don’t feel like going.
I’ve been thinking about what this phenomenon must be caused by, and the only thing I can come up with is that I’m afraid whatever it is won’t measure up to my expectations. That I’ve built the event up so much in my mind that nothing can possibly match it. And the longer I wait for it, the more I don’t want to do it, because I’ve had so long to envision what it’s going to be like that I’ve basically already done it in my head.
Enthusiasm is such a fickle thing, isn’t it? It’s like when I get an idea for a story in my head that I just HAVE to get down on paper. It’s gonna be great! But if I don’t get to writing it almost immediately, it becomes, ehh, whatever.
There should be an opposite for enthusiasm. You’re either enthused or unenthused… but unenthusiastic isn’t quite the right word, in my mind. Disenthusiastic, on the other hand, comes closer. Un-, to me, means I never was. Dis-, to me, means I was and then I wasn’t.
Do you ever write a word so many times that it stops making sense anymore? Or just doesn’t look right. I’m getting that now…
It all started last night – two fruit flies sat on the edge of a ledge in my kitchen. Side by side. So close that I could kill them both with one slap. I wound up for the hit (they were big fruit flies, okay?) and I… missed. The fruit flies that is. What I hit was the fruit fly trap (that’s not working). It fell off the shelf knocking a wine glass into the sink where it broke. Damnit! I thought. I smashed a wine glass for nothing.
But that’s not where it ended.
This morning I was getting Alex ready for camp. He followed me into the kitchen and started complaining that his foot hurt. I didn’t get a chance to look at it; someone knocked at the door. While I dealt with that, Alex began to scream. He didn’t come out of the kitchen and the man at the door (the postman) is Deaf, so I ignored Alex and finished up with the postman. When I got back into the kitchen there was blood everywhere. It took me a while to figure out where it was coming from – turns out there was a cut–a hole actually–on the bottom of his foot. Yes, the fruit flies strike again.
So while I was discussing with Alex whether or not he would go to camp, Chris, my Autistic son came downstairs and began to insist I take Alex out of the house. He had plans to spend time in the living room (rather than the computer room where he locks himself whenever his little brother is home). When Chris has plans, they’re not easily changed. He ranted. He yelled. He swore. He threatened. He banged doors and hit walls. And then he went for a walk. Luckily by the time he came back he’d calmed himself – he even apologised and gave me a hug. I still couldn’t help imagine what might have happened if he’d been hit by a car or something while he was out. It’s the writer in me… and I’ve always had a bit of a morbid imagination. Anyway, I could just see it.
Officer: What happened, Ma’am?
Me: Well you see, it all began with an attempted murder… of two fruit flies.
The morals of the story? Karma’s truly a bitch. And never underestimate the significance of a fruit fly.
Anyone who would like to try it out, feel free to use the “One-Liner Wednesday” title in your post, and if you do, you can ping back here to help your blog get more exposure. To execute a ping back, just copy the URL in the address bar on this post and paste it somewhere in the body of your post. Your link will show up in the comments below. Please ensure that the One-Liner Wednesday you’re pinging back to is this week’s! Otherwise, no one will likely see it but me.
As with Stream of Consciousness Saturday (SoCS), if you see a ping back from someone else in my comment section, click and have a read. It’s bound to be short and sweet.
Unlike SoCS, this is not a prompt so there’s no need to stick to the same “theme.”
The rules that I’ve made for myself (but don’t always follow) for “One-Liner Wednesday” are:
lindaghill.com 