yo soy el arbol

[dragonlady7]

I need to secede from society. Really I do.

Things are going well. My life is going well. There is progress, although slow, on the house. My abode is not a garbage dump; things are organized. I am mostly caught up on most of the pressing aspects of my life. Chita has not peed on the bed in weeks and weeks, but grows only cuter as she grows larger. (And mouthier.) Work has been going well, if annoyingly. Z is behaving himself in a largely un-annoying, sympathetic and amusing way. Even roller derby is going well. We drafted new team members and the veterans on my team are now outnumbered by the fresh recruits.

But I am wound up as tight as a tight thing and I am miserable to boot. I have not written anything in weeks. I have not even had a chance to write goddamned blog entries, of late; I lie in bed and think wistfully of the Barbarians_Novel, of the one with the vikings, even the one with the space pirates I did in NaNo '02. I had a great little inkling today for a novel I wanted to do.

I also have more than one photoessay I want to do. I drift off into thinking of how I would compose the shots.
I am so starved for creative expression I've even been daydreaming about drawing things.

But I don't have time. If I want to do roller derby, hold down a job, and keep my house not looking like a garbage dump, I don't have time to write. I have to pick three things. I can do three things. Writing is, at the moment, the fourth. If I give up the cleaning, I'm miserable; I can endure living in filth but it wears me down. If I give up the roller derby, I'm miserable. If I give up the job, well, then I'm broke, so I guess it's not an option either, but I want to so bad.

I haven't even had time to write a long email of late. It's like, it's like not being able to take a crap, only slightly more distracting.

I wanted to declare tonight a Night For Just Sitting Around And Writing, but guess what? My eyes are bothering me and I can't endure the computer monitor. It gets worse all day long until I have to drive home with one eye at a time shut, and I"m typing this with my eyes in unfocus and coming back once in a while to comb for typos. I can't compose like that.
It's an ongoing problem at work, and now my eyes are growing worse so I can no longer make out distant objects with my glasses on.
Guess what I don't have? Insurance that will cover eyeglasses.
Guess what I don't have, come to think of it? You guessed it: Univera never sent me the insurance card after my hour-on-hold-with-them saga. I have a feeling they've simply eaten my $400 and still don't have me in their database. Fuck them.

Fuck everything. This sucks. I hate it. I hate it so much. I hate everything.

Comments

[kkatowll.livejournal.com]

what is arbol?
I even looked it up on babelfish, which translated it as "arbol." So helpful.

Dunno what to tell you about writing. Except that maybe for now you should handwrite?

[dragonlady7.livejournal.com]

Arbol is Spanish for tree, or so I had thought; it was a line in a song I was listening to when I opened the window to compose the entry. I could be wrong; I couldn't understand the rest of the line. My Spanish is dribs and drabs by now.


Handwriting is never worth the time for me. If I don't have time, I don't have time; I keep finding myself with a spare fifteen minutes here, a half-hour there, and I know that in the right frame of mind and state of health I could write 500 words in 15 minutes, but I just don't have the time to get myself into that frame of mind.
I shall be frustrated for a while. I did just spend an agreeable hour not looking at the computer and playing with the cat, so I can stand to look at it now. Maybe I can do something now.
It's just so frustrating.

[kkatowll.livejournal.com]

I understand. Lots of really good authors have that problem. I have been well-trained by journalism deadlines to not let bad writing stop me; thus I happily write all sorts of crap in whatever bits of time are available to me.

But since your writing is far, far superior, I hope you get a good bit of free time very soon. Because you could actually write a book that I could see myself reading. And that would be cool.

[dragonlady7.livejournal.com]

It's not that it takes more time to write *well*, it's that it takes me time to focus enough to write. During times when I've regularly, recently had time to devote to focus, I can write in little dribs and drabs all through stolen bits of time in a day. But when, like now, I've had no significant time within the past month to just sit and think about writing, and write, then I can't really get words out. It's like I lose the habit.

[forodwaith.livejournal.com]

{{hugs}} Same here lately -- it sucks.

[alex-beecroft.livejournal.com]

Can you just clean *less* and desensitize yourself to the mess? A little clutter and dust is worth the extra time, surely?

[dragonlady7.livejournal.com]

No, my whole family are coming for Thanksgiving and I am not only cleaning but doing home improvements. We still haven't finished painting. So I am aware that at the moment I am spending rather more time than usual on housework, but it doesn't change the fact that it's still a long-term project, and once I've finished the big one-time stuff, there's the recurring stuff waiting for me. I'm replacing electrical outlets and light switches and their faceplates, one at a time as I have time to get to them (and the old screws on the outlets are very, very stubborn, often painted in place more than once in the sixty or seventy years they've been there), and Z's bedroom is still a pile of his shit that once he's moved, I have to get in there and clean intensively because he'll say he did but it won't be clean. We aren't even going to try to paint it yet. But the clothing still has to be put away in the reorganized bedroom. I have a house full of new, empty shelves and drawers, with piles of junk sitting on top of or next to the new furniture, and all my clothes hidden away in the uninsulated attic meaning I have to go into a space that is literally freezing if I want to get dressed.

There's just too much to do. And I know it's not quite the normal state of things... but it's a long-term situation. I won't be done with all this until after the holidays.

[alex-beecroft.livejournal.com]

Oh right. Yes, well that's a bit different from just normal housework. I'm not sure what to say there except hang in there and it will get sorted out eventually :) But yes, decorating and having people round means you can't ignore the house in favor of writing. Maybe just jot down your ideas at the moment so that they don't disappear before you have time to work on them?

[dragonlady7.livejournal.com]

I only really have ideas when I have time to sit down. THe rest are just inklings, not enough to really write words down, just vague notions and feelings but nothing defined. I've tried writing those down and they usually just frustrate me later.

I can't really do anything in the scraps of time I have currently. I will not be one of those people who writes books in her spare time, because I can't do that.