work

Wednesday

Today did not go exactly as planned. I didn’t even do my morning pages until two o’clock in the afternoon.

I hurt my back late yesterday, pulled something as I was leaning over the couch to plug in a surge protector. Because I lead just that kind of rugged and/or glamorous lifestyle. I took it easy the rest of the night, but the rest of that night involved taking a dog out at both three and six am, and around that second time I decided to e-mail in sick. My back was starting to feel better, but I really didn’t want to rush into it and make things worse. (It’s amazing what leaning over the wrong way can do when you already have a herniated disc and are in arguably the worst shape of your adult life.)

So I again did the whole laying about the house watching TV thing. Which, admittedly, isn’t the way towards getting into better shape, but it does seem like it’s helped my back. I also read some comics — Jack Kirby’s “Fourth World” stuff, fitting since today’s the anniversary of the day he died. (I didn’t know that, but Tumblr keeps me well informed.) I also discovered an interesting show called The Booth at the End on Hulu, which beat watching many hours of Star Trek Voyager while endlessly checking my work e-mail. (It definitely beats ABC’s new “the Nazis had evil clocks or something” Zero Hour. That was awful.)

I’m definitely going back to the office tomorrow. I need a break from television. I’d actually like to get back to reading and maybe even writing again. What was supposed to be a couple days off has turned into five. And while I enjoy them, I am not very productive on days off.

Friday

I knew I wasn’t going to finish the short story tonight, so I gave myself permission to take the night off from it completely. I’d rather return to it again in a day or two with fresh eyes, eager to finish, then struggle for hours and still not be anywhere near the end. There’s an end in sight, I think, but I didn’t want to rush to get just a little bit closer but still not there.

So I watched an episode of Bunheads instead.

I did finish a couple of reports on political psychology today and do my morning pages, so there’s that.

Thursday has Friday-envy

I tried to sleep a little late this morning, a decision I actually came to a little late this morning — however much I try to fit the impulse to hit the proverbial snooze alarm — but it didn’t quite work out as planned. I thought I’d get the 8:15 train, which gets me to the office a little later than I like, but which means another hour of sleep. But I wound up on the 7:37, which is just slightly later, but also kind of annoying. It doesn’t go to Hunterspoint, but to Penn Station, where the subway’s less fun, and this morning it crawled along a snail’s (or Long Island Railroad’s) pace. Plus I had to stand.

Tomorrow, I think I’m going to either be on the 7:20 again or oversleep properly.

Meanwhile, still writing. Tonight, the single page of short story was a lot harder to produce, but I finally managed to pull something together. And it’s something that actually moves the story forward in a good way, so there’s that. I’m going to give myself permission to not finish the story tomorrow, since I don’t think that’s possible, or even advisable. I don’t know if that will extend as far as not working on it at all tomorrow evening. But it’s pretty clear this isn’t going to be done for a February 1 deadline.

Speaking of which, how in heck did it get to be February already?

Tuesday

Believe me, I’m not going to spend every day for the rest of my life (or the rest of this blog) talking about how I did or did not do morning pages. It’s just that the exercise itself is still so very new, and in conjunction I’ve been struggling to meet a deadline on a short story that morning pages really seems to be helping me with. So it’s been on my mind a whole lot.

I’m a little less optimistic about meeting that deadline, since it’s this Friday — and I just realized, with some shock, it’s not this Saturday — but I’m still going to plug away at it. I can always try to do something else with it if I miss The First Line‘s cut-off.

But for now, let me just say this: yesterday and today both, I did my requisite three pages in the morning, and I pulled together a page of short story each evening. Which, as I think I’ve said, is very good for me. I’ve had productive flashes before, but I am usually a painfully slow writer. The 17,000 words I wrote over a long weekend for 2011’s 3 Day Novel contest were a sleep-deprived, Canadian Rockies-influenced anomaly. (Also, while incredibly fun, probably not my best writing. Though I keep thinking I should do something with it.)

Beyond the writing, there isn’t much to report. I worked from home today. I think my brain may explode from trying to figure out political psychology. It rained a lot this evening. I’ve recently discovered Bunheads, which is filling that Gilmore Girls-sized hole I didn’t even realize I had in my life. (I still haven’t watched that show’s last season.) And that’s about it, really.

The rest is silence

I was well into my morning before I remembered to do my morning pages, having already had breakfast and decided to watch an episode of Quantum Leap. (On Netflix, where there are a lot of odd gaps in the episodes available.)

But I did them, and then a page of short story this evening, which has so far been the pattern, even if that single page does still feel awfully hard-earned at times.

In between, I’m sure I did some things. Watched an episode of The Muppet Show, helped my father change a light bulb on the stairs, went for a long walk. On which I listened to a pair of Studio 360 podcasts. I was particularly moved by Meehan Crist’s story about the fragility and unreliability of memory. (Which I’d actually listened to last night on the train home.) There’s something both wonderful and frightening about the idea of memory as this continuous game of telephone, in which we don’t remember things so much as the memory of the memory of the memory.

This evening, I watched A Dangerous Method, which is an odd (if often very good) almost non-movie. It’s about the early days of psychoanalysis and the rift between Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung, and the performances are great. Unsurprisingly, given the topic, it’s mostly just a lot of talking. The film is many things, but exciting is not close to being one of them. When it first came out, and I was still part of the behavioral sciences group at work, we joked about going to see it as a group. I’m kind of glad we didn’t, and not just for all the talk of sex and the occasional nudity. It would have been a weird movie to watch with my boss and co-workers. It was a weird enough movie to watch on my own.

Anyway, that was pretty much my day.