Days

We all have them – the ones when it’s hard to believe we bring much good to the world, when accidentally driving over a bridge might not seem so bad.  It’s not a real desire – any more than the desire to kill off an inconvenient relative or spouse is, though we may have those ideas sometimes too.  And they make you ache the worst when something goes horribly wrong with no intent, no malice.  The thing you say wrong in front of someone who didn’t know crucial information, the moment you step on the cat after a hell of a long day and it just makes you feel like a horrible, horrible person – and the fact he’s so dear and forgiving and purrs up on you almost instantly only makes you feel all the more evil and guilty.

Remorse – I think it’s the most horrible feeling.  Remorse when I broke that vintage bakelite radio that my dad actually got to work when we were kids.  Remorse when the cat himself broke the most beautiful earthenware bowl, given to me by my best friend, a piece which had belonged to her singular, beautiful, beloved mother.  Remorse when someone I love is in pain and there’s nothing in my power that can possibly make it better.

Remorse carries the doom of sitting outside the principal’s office (I never sat outside the principal’s office, of course) with the desolation of helplessness, of powerlessness.  Remorse when you are alone is particularly sere and dessicating.


As you might guess, it’s been a stressful week, and I keep doing idiotic things like losing a knuckle in a cheese grater and getting frustrated at people because of miscommunication – and being mean about it.  I was mean to the cat and the dog both, for which there simply is never an excuse.  I can’t breathe well and keep having problems swallowing and/or choking.  My back’s been killing me for weeks, so I’ve neglected my home – it is a serious pigsty, and I’m running perilously low on socks at this point.  The sink is full both of clean *and* dirty dishes, and the dry leaves that blew in probably DAYS ago, I haven’t picked up nor even looked at twice, in the kitchen.  It’s a neglected house, and it’s the first sanctuary both of my worship, and of my stewardship in life.  It’s the concrete blessing I know I need to take care of, and lately, I just have not.  And, just as I did when I was a child, when I am clumsy and something goes wrong (a constant thing, for someone physically graceless as I), I sometimes, tantrum-like, throw it further and make things worse.  I miss the shoe rack putting away my shoes, I throw them at the back of the closet.  I have a problem taking care of some little task, I QUIT – because who can make me do it all, and who’s it going to hurt but me?

I pray every day, more than once, “may I bring satisfaction and joy.”  To my G-d, to my family and friends, in my work, to those who will someday read my novels, to strangers I just deal with in the routine of life, to X, for whom I have so little to offer really.  It’s not because I’m saintly in the least; rather, it’s because I’m selfish, and the way people make ME feel, who can do this thing for others – I want to make people feel like that.  I want to be the source of the kind of gratification *genuinely* nice people generate in others.  Yeah, morally and spiritually I certainly aspire to it.  But mostly it’s a self-oriented prayer.

And even knowing that, I still blunder into other people and make a mess of more than my stupid shoe rack.  And indulge in remorse, which is only more self-absorption.

Then I find myself driving toward home, cogitating on this post, a beautiful second day of spring, my windows open, Leonard Cohen singing with that inimitable, unhurried cadence – and he says to me, “forget that perfect offering.  There is a crack, a crack in everything – that’s how the light gets in.”

The older I get, the better I am at recovering from remorse’s drama and compulsion and license, to spend attention upon my tender, all-important expectations.  The only way to get past it is gratitude – and nobody can say my life is not abundant with blessings for which to be grateful.  I’m many things, good and bad, but I am humbled at the people who put up with me.  And, at the end of the day – if I don’t get on with things, that house will fall apart around my ears (and even I am not so dramatic as to hope for that).

And, if I don’t get on with things, the estimable folk who take the time to care for me … will find reasons (and they’ll be valid) to be otherwise occupied.

Back Down

My back has been bad again this weekend, and today I've been on the couch with pillows behind me.  Two errands were necessary, but other than that I've been trying to stretch out and rest the muscles.  This immobility has made PBS's streaming channel a particular frustration today, as it just cannot seem to play anything - the natural result of which is that all I really want to watch is Frontline or Sherlock.

The good news is that there's less evening, after Daylight Savings, to worry about these pressing problems.  The bad news is that there appears to be little improvement in my bones and I've got to work tomorrow.

In truth, I've found that the best thing *for* back pain tends to be an office chair (or, at least, it is the "least-worst" thing anyway).  Driving to get to one, unfortunately, somewhat sucks; fortunately, my neck is not too bad, and the pain being in the upper back rather than lower means I'm better able to move in general - the pain bugs, but in different ways when it's higher.

In the meantime, Netflix is working fine and I'm at that stretch of Angel where I object to Cordy not because she went bad but because she's so damned poorly written.  At least Willow's is visiting in the ep I am watching.

My Pets Are So Mean

That little bastard of a cat – he refused for five days straight to make me any hot chocolate, even though I stopped on the way home on the day I got sick, and bought myself milk (I did not touch the cashier …).  He kept whining that he only *weighs* like ten pounds to start with and has these tiny little one-inch thumbless paws.  Mean old cat.  Just because the milk weighs more than he does and he might burn his jellybean peds.  So selfish.

The dog, for her part, refuses flatly to punch me in the back.  It’s like that boyfriend of mine, the guy I was good friends with and very briefly dated, who simply would not hit me, even when I had the most hideous flu and was loaded with chest congestion and needed it knocked loose (don’t laugh; my dad needed this done after bypass surgery and it’s recommended to whack someone in the back).  Sure, sure, your momma taught you not to hit a girl.  But I wasn’t askin’ for a paddlin’ – and, Penelope, my dear, neither would you be, if you’d just ball up your forefeet and give my lungs what-fer.  Really!

Mean old pets.  One won’t burn himself to flinders for me, and the other won’t beat me up, even with a free pass.

Meanwhile, I went in to work today.  I made it, but heck if I could breathe with my mouth closed all day.  Nothing so fun as appearing the slack-jawed yokel, but the only remedy for it is to burn my sinuses out one at a time, painfully, as the congestion shifts left to right all day long.  Slackjawed yokel it is, then.  Of course, the thing about preserving the sinuses from the burn is that the air still has to go in and out – so it just burns your throat a bit less than the nose.  Take that across the space of a good ten hours in air conditioning that makes my home climate control seem wimpy, and incorporate all the coughing fits and half-coughing fits you try to suppress in that many hours – and what you get is a chest that hurts so much it kind of makes you want to beat up on your pets since they won’t beat up on you.  Mean old pets.

To be fair, this rather nasty bronchial infection does actually seem to have done its worst by now.  As much pain as today held, it wasn’t half as miserable as the past three (non-combined …), and for that I am grateful.  Honestly, by the time a pipe burst in my house yesterday (oh yeah – everyone out there jealous of my week yet??), and the plumber stood outside in a rather beautiful soft summer rain, looking up and saying, “It’s just one cloud, right over your house!”, the litany of fresh hell really did become just a comedy routine.  I’m fortunate to have a home, even if bits of it must malfunction; I’m thankful this illness is on the petering-out end rather than its building-up period; I even like those darn pets, but don’t tell ‘em.  And pain, schmain – the truth is, I don’t even notice it compared to the way I felt Saturday through yesterday.  The humidity is fierce stuff – but it’s somewhere I can *breathe* comfortably, even if it does make me sweat.  I may be the one person in this region grateful for muggy air (and it is muggy to the tune of 3-digit heat indices).

Some other people I know?  Facing much harder things than a regimen on antibiotics.  Facing much greater pain.  Me, I’m just a comedy routine.

With stingy, rotten, mean old pets.  WAH!

I have hope tonight I will be able to sleep with my mouth closed.  Simple, comfortable - bliss ...

Home, Sick, Home

So that resolve to stay offline was a poor one, and already abandoned.  Not out of any dilution of my fear/upset about the George Zimmerman verdict - but, for one, people appear not to be responding with great ugliness which cannot be escaped; and, for two, I happen to find myself without a literal voice in the real world right now, and it isn't going to be possible for me to not write/blog/communicate *and* endure the bronchitis (?) which has removed me from human commerce.

The intellectually diverting cold I had starting on Wednesday/Thursday took a turn on Saturday night, and has gone from an "oh, isn't this curious" sort of an illness down a route of extreme pain and difficulty.  My voice, quite literally, is gone now.

Well, or what remains of it is nothing to go around inflicting on anyone, even if it were not excruciatingly painful to do so.  Just breathing is a trial at this point.

And so, I shall blog.  It may still be necessary to keep myself off Twitter (even the slightest excitement causes me to breathe too much; too much of a miserably bad thing, that), but here at least I shall blather for an outlet.

Because:  no human contact since last Wednesday, people.  Except for mom taking me out to dinner on Saturday night, and one trip out to the grocery store, I have been inside my house now for the best part of five days.  Laundry all but killed me (breathing is a requirement for lugging a huge basket up and down stairs), but I have clean socks and pants, which was a worthy outcome.  Housecleaning?  Forget it.  Apart from a trip to the doc and feeding the fur kidlets, I'm not setting any goals today except listening to my ears pop and the congestion slowly bubbling its way around in my head, and POSSIBLY braving the nightmare of an attempt to sleep (you wanna talk about pain ...).  I haven't even trusted my medicine-head to work on my writing, because my brain is a muzzy old mess, has been all weekend.

BLAH.  Whinge.

Summer Cold

It's been a few years since I come down with a cold; and I'm unsure whether I've ever had a summer cold at all.  "They say" summer colds are actually more common, but I've never been sure how anecdotal that is, and how much allergy symptoms inform what we define as a "cold" during warmer months.  Whatever the proportion of science is to wisdom, between the copious rains, swinging shifts in temperatures outside, extreme air conditioning inside - and its just being my turn - I have a summer cold going on.

And, being a writer and overly fascinated by my own experiences, I'm going over all these sensations in my head.

Sore throats SUCK.  How I could stand all the years of bronchitis I endured during The Ohio Period of my life, I look back and cannot fathom.  (Except that I was a horrid little drama person back then, and almost certainly stood nothing of the kind, likely whinging for attention all the way along.  It did get me some attention; I still remember Beloved Ex coming over to take care of me, and watching the extremely brief comedy routine of Diane On Codeine of an evening before I passed out completely.)  The memories of the pain are what come back to me at the moment.  My esophagus suffered the arid cold up there in agonies still clear to me more than twenty years later.  The scraping-by-glass-shards pain, the coughing up of copious amounts of blood.

I haven't missed bronchitis, nor any manifestation of respiratory disease.  So, having my first fairly bad sore throat in several years, it's easy to recognize it as very much less distressing than those I had in my youth.  This hurts, but I feel like I keep bracing for it to become as bad as it used to get.  Say what you will about summer colds being "the worst" - with heat and humidity the like of which we're having down here, there is simply no chance my entire mucousal support system will evaporate in the dry and cold, leaving me sucking up steam in the bath which almost hurts the wounded interior of my breathing apparatus.

Even so, my initial assessment, yesterday morning, that I was not "sick enough" to stay home, did endure a revision.  I stayed at the office for about two hours, and shortly after my nose decided it was time to run I called it a day.

Sick sneezes are worse than allergy sneezes.  My brain is currently too medicine-muddled to quantify this eloquently, but the short of it is that ordinary sneezes don't *hurt* thanks to swollen-up everything-inside-the-headbone.  Elegantly phrased, yes, I know.  Hey, we're just observing (and I can hardly discern the letters on the screen), so give good writing a break.

Swallowing is its own worst reward.  And you can NOT not do it.  Ugh.

Talking really does hurt.  Enjoyed doing the crossword over the phone with mom (we haven't done that in a while, and I love it), but chatting was perhaps an error.

The older I get, the more of a petulant, icked-out child I am about swallowing cold syrup.  Gross.

Three naps and I still went to bed by ten.  Which is odd, given that, actually, sleep is the WORST thing for breathing, when you have a cold.  All the raw and sore things exacerbate badly in sleep.  Bleah.

Eating seems to help.  Fantastic, given that I am not exercising and had JUST managed to lose about ten of the forty pounds I put on in the space of the last year.  Just great.  Drinking water seems a neutral stimulus.  Drinking hot chocolate, I know, would feel very good indeed; I have not yet actually made any hot chocolate, though I did stop at the store just to buy milk when I left work yesterday morning.  Genius.

My next-door neighbor, as I have noted in the past, remains The Best neighbor in the history of ever, and I've had some good ones.  She is a great blessing of a human being.

The headache I could live without.  But then ... yeah, all of it, I guess.  Duh.

Oh how I want to take a nap ...

Irritating Query Research

I'm going to paraphrase a quote from an agent bio found tonight as I was trying to work on queries.

She wants stories told with an honesty that can only come from the heart of the storyteller. 

Apart from being a bit purply-prosaic, this agent's blurb is maddeningly non-specific as to genres she represents.  It does, however, wax not-at-all-helpful with the encouragement to excite her with the following undefined requirements:  "artful" storytelling, a "unique" voice, and "a new perspective" ...

How is an author supposed to know what this agent finds "new", "unique", or "artful" (something I'd prefer to stay away from, as "artful" is to me a term limited to the coy romantic stylings of young Victorian heroines I find repellant)?  My voice as expressed through Clovis is without question unique - but I get the sense from the schmoop here it would hardly appeal to an agent hunting through her submittors' hearts.

I've said it before and I'll say it again:  we as writers owe a great deal of work and research to our submissions, and gratitude to agents, along with a modicum of respect for submission guidelines.  But agents and agencies owe us the courtesy of *clarity* in those guidelines.

Sheesh.

Ado Annie

Look it up, kids – she’s singing my song.

The one way in which I align with the expectations of people who think that being “just a secretary” is an ambitionless state without honor is that, through much of my life and career, I have not been what anyone would call an overachiever. My job, as much as I love it, is at the end of the day a means to an end. It isn’t who I am. I didn’t dream of becoming a secretary when I was a kid – but then, I didn’t dream of becoming an astronaut, artist, politician, nor corporate go-getter either. I was interested in *life*, not the means by which to pay for it.

Certainly, being a professorial family, we were not over-endowed with the means to pay for a lot of things when I was growing up. We didn’t suffer penury, but we were not wealthy – and didn’t especially aspire to be, either. Okay, maybe mom. But she took care of herself. She was the investor, of my parents, the one driven by certain financial motivators – and she took care of that. But my expectations were not set on wealth … and so, for a long time, my expectations of myself in a job weren’t exactly exalted either. You work, you do okay, you get paid, fine.

It took me until I was thirty to realize how much I *cared* about my work. Strange to think how many years ago that was, too – it doesn’t feel like a decade and a half – but then, what does a decade and a half feel like? (It looks like hell, but that’s another post/kvetch …)

Age thirty was about the time I had spent three or four years worming my way into the entire works of the agency I worked for at that time. I took on a lot there. Learned over a dozen software packages. Became the entire company’s go-to for tech issues when our Tech guy was unavailable (and I was amazingly good, too, now that I think of it – being the luddite I am now! … huh). Created, edited, produced, and all but wrote our newsletter – complete with all those yummy, delicious sales stats our guys loved to show off publicly. I got myself Life/Health licensed and was on the way to some securities certifications, too. I took on responsibility for all our orphan clients, and over the course of my tenure there I was assistant to at least four different folks, some of whom were founding partners. This was where I worked that amazing day the Dow first topped 10,000. This was where I encountered one of the best managers I ever expect the privilege of working with. She saw what I was good at and what I enjoyed, and maximized both those things in a balance that paid off DEARLY for our employer. I still have such respect and gratitude for her, though I haven’t seen her now in 15 years.

I got to be well enough liked that I got professionally felt up. “Do you know an admin who’d like to get paid what you might think is megabucks … ?”;

I still remember calling my dad that night – “dad, was this guy asking what I think he was asking?” “Yes, that’s pretty much international code for ‘would you like this job?’”;

To this day, I honestly could not identify what I ever did for this particular client that got his attention and made him offer me a job, but I didn’t stay with that outfit more than four months anyway. The fact was, it was the single worst job I ever had, and when I walked out the door the daily notice of the stock price was plummeting, and I cannot pretend that seeing their name in ugly WSJ headlines didn’t fill me with gleeful schadenfreude.

But that job – the salary I thought was megabucks at that time, and the first time I ever got to put “executive” in front of my “admin” – changed things for me profoundly. My next job paid better, and was itself a great gig. I became indispensable across the largest national division out of four. Over my time there, I taught all the other divisional admins how I did my job. I loved my team (most of whom I never had the opportunity to meet) and they loved me. I also got vice presidential bonuses – every quarter. But it was the nineties. Times were different …;

Even going unemployed for eight and a half months after 9/11, I never lost my home. And was blessed with a temp gig after that, which I was able to promptly parlay into full time (a manager who saw the benefits of advancing his people; he was known for running something of a nursery for promising contributors). From that, I promoted myself two more times, finally spending five and a half years with that employer, over the course of four positions. By age 40, in the space of ten years, I had improved my financial standard of living by forty percent. I was proud as hell of that – could quote statistics, for the longest time, of the relative movement of my career from “can we afford toilet paper?” while I was married in the Midwest to owning my own home and having a car I’d actually chosen, not had handed down to me.


***


And so it is that I came to my new job – now three years old almost, unbelievably – with a bit of a “thing” about how good I am. I hated my last gig – the last thing they needed, wanted, nor knew what to do with was a secretary with a fully functional brain (that one manager was impressed with me – and OUTRAGED when they laid me off – but they laid him off in turn, and we’re both probably very well out of that place). By the time they severed me, I’d been looking for work already for over three months. I still remember that, too. The case of bitchface our executive had, as if my being fired by her somehow offended her. Whatever, lady, you abandoned our group a year before I did. (Bloody COBRA. Stuff your bloody COBRA.)

And here we are.

Things being what they have been, it’s not surprising I suppose that this past year-almost has seen some difficulty. Last summer was the litany of losing Siddy, being in a wreck, having a cancer scare (and all that in one WEEK), and so on. Then sustained frustration with myself at work owing to lawyers and life itself, not to mention debilitating horror at what lawyers can do to a somewhat decent living, hard-earned. A good amount of trouble with certain relationships. Life, life, life, life.

Every time I think things are getting better, ONE mistake crops up and turns out to be visible to the wrong people. Last night, I sent that whole list of “here is what is done” and found out this morning that item one – a crucial bit having to do with someone’s expense reimbursement – was NOT done, and I had mistakenly relied on technology which never did its job.

I tried again today. Tech thus far has stayed mum on its part of the bargain. This time, though, I did some confirming, some follow up – things are done.

And thus – the Conversation. As Top Boss put it the first time we had this chat – there is fear I am overwhelmed. “It’s not a problem with attitude nor aptitude.”;

Surprisingly, my response to this concern is not to admit the problem. It is to over-own, as one of my coworkers puts it, and to try to pretend away the sheer volume and try to take on MORE.

My mom, and dad too, were he here to read this in any way those of us still tramping the dirt of life as we know it could recognize, would probably scoff, even if only inwardly, at this idea. Diane is Bart Simpson. Diane is good, but she’s never been THAT good.

My own response to my own responses is enormously skeptical. I know I only do what is most necessary.

The problem is that I have become a person for whom it is necessary to be perceived as NEVER offloading. Anything. At work. (Heh.)

My standard phrasing on our chat software is “What can I do for you?” I’ve given at least one manager a complex, because I say that and he gets all guilty that he only ever chats me when he needs something from me.

But – I mean, dur, that’s what they pay us all for. Right?

My standard phrasing in email is, “if there is anything I may do or provide.”;

Now, let’s get this bit straight right here – I am not this interested in just doing, doing, doing. HOWEVER. I am PAID to do, do, and do.

What I am not paid to do is to fail at doing.

Which means … I actually need to learn to say no.

Mamma knows – and Mojourner can testify – this is not something I am naturally programmed for, when it comes to authority. (Moj learned how to do it early – heh – but as much of a pain of a girl as I’ve always been, actually refusing anyone I perceive to be superior to myself (a surprisingly high percentage of the population, some days) is damned near impossible.) At the bottom of my stylishly-soled feet, at the bottom of my whitening roots – I am still the little brown-haired girl who desperately cannot take power. And so, oddly enough, I take ON … too much?

Top Boss was clear, today. I need to put people off, I need to push back.

Oddly enough, I’ve actually done that a couple of times lately. It made me half sick with guilt, too. I hate asking ANYONE else to do my job.

Top Boss himself, actually, has headed me off personally – asking that one “what can I do for you” manager to take on some of the logistical planning for the huge events we have coming next week. It makes sense.

But my little, shy, brown-haired core is terrified it means I haven’t been good enough. I’m actually near tears of frustration just typing it here. I feel like a disappointment. It’s a pretty sick feeling, because – again – I know how disappointing I actually *am* deep down inside where nobody sees past all the fakery of professional alacrity.

There’s a gratification in competence, and I am surprised by my own pretty much every time. Because I know how happy I would be to go home, curl up on the couch with a good book or a particularly bad movie, and perhaps never work again, if only I had the option.

Intellectually, I know most of us feel that way, at least some of the time. But I also know, believe deep in myself, that “everyone else” is better than I am, if only by some variable degree. “Everyone else” had some thoughts, when they were younger, about what they wanted to “be” to “do” … Everyone else earned some position or other legitimately, and is pushing to improve. I’m not interested in “improving” – as defined by getting out of my current job. I happen to LOVE my job, and what I do. I also know how much everyone else hates the work I do – and so I am loath to give it to anyone else, ever.

It isn’t so much greed – “This job is MINE, and you cannot have it (and it is thin at one end and thick in the middle – oh, wait …)” – as it is, “I know how sucky my job is and I would never give it to anyone else, plus I don’t think it’s sucky, so let me do that.” The number of times, especially given the extremely virtual nature of my team, I have had the conversation “I do NOT want to ask you to do my job!” is incalculable.

For a while there, taking it all on was do-able.

But this past number of months … it’s more than one job, anymore. Need to learn to “push back” as Top Boss put it. Need to learn how to measure scope and set other people’s expectations. Need to put people off.

That’ll be a trick. I’m just a girl who can’t say no.

Who ever would have thought? (Not my mom …)

Yes

Yes, the dizziness has gone into day 3.  Yes, I did finally let my mom take me to the doc.  No, this didn't really yield any useful result - *and* it was a horrible, miserable, unnecessary experience.  Followed by a trip to the grocery store so I could find something other than toast to eat ... and I ... apparently bought $68 worth of sandwich fixin's, dog food, and - erm - yogurt.

Never shop while dizzy in the head, fella babies.  I *still* feel like I have no food in the house.

Because, seriously - sourdough, ham, and cheese - just not doing it for my appetite right now.

Yes, I am an idiot.

Happy New Year to all.  I'll probably be in bed by nine.

Angry Sick

Day two of this (or even day three, really - if we count the attack on December 4) and I am just sick with frustration at the lost time of this weekend.  Getting NOTHING done.  Just pasted lamely to my couch.  I need a bath - but sinking that far down means getting UP again ... and up is very, very, very bad indeed, with the dizziness.  Never mind that this was a mini vacation I'd hoped to enjoy with friends, and is instead a whole lot of lost productivity and physical misery.

This all also nixes the likelihood of my going out and having fun tomorrow night; proximity to quite this much lassitude and wooziness reduces the attraction of loud music, crowds, and certainly staying up late.

I just wish I could get cleaned up (myself *and* the house - which is ugh right now), dressed, and out for a simple run of errands.  Maybe tomorrow.

For now, I am sick and tired of *toast*.  Blah.

Hell, Oh Kitty

Ten meclizine in my gut has but dented the severity of this whirling illness - and perhaps not even that.  I'm still so dizzy that, trying to put the harness on Pen earlier, I ended up in angry, miserable tears because she was distressed by my distress, and was leaning on me to be in close.  When a dog with enough size, who is frantically wagging and wiggling, leans on you when you are dizzy:  that is hell.

I did get her out, though, and she is on her tether, so it's me and Gossamer.  He seems to be largely behaving in my illness, but he has several times used me as his high ground for games of King of the Mountain with Penelope.  He has also apparently discovered what a soft place to stand a breast can be.  But at the moment, he's harmlessly stowed alongside, sleeping like me at my worst.

I'm nauseated this time, which along with a headache is contributing (along with my whinging and, it may be admitted, very shrill frustration) to making this instance of hell far worse even than the first time, which is the worst sick I've been in what feels like a long time.

So happy times at the ranch today.

Times it SUCKS to be alone.  Times it feels so profound.

Hell II - If I Boogaloo, I HOPE It Kills Me

I have been struck once again with labyrinthitis.  Just cannot express how angry and frustrated I am at having to endure this hell TWICE in less than a MONTH.  It makes you want to die having it once.  A second bout with dizziness this severe, and all I can think is how this is not fair.  I am utterly disgusted.

Have dosed with meclizine (hey, turns out I have a non-drowsy supply; didn't find that blister pack last time) and gotten the pets fed and dog out for a wee.  That she chose to come inside and poo is my own fault; I didn't go out with her and she needs to venture at least as far as the front yard for that event.  That I believe she's already eaten the result is just not contemplatable in my state.

And so we nix the idea of getting together with the charming Cute Shoes, or my friend T who still hasn't met the babies.  Of balancing the checkbook.  Of loading up all those clothes and getting them donated.  Of getting, essentially, ANYTHING done.  No writing nor querying either - typing even this is awful, but I'm angry enough to be stubborn and spit out an ugly post I should probably think better of but am too mad to clam up.  In some ways, maybe the sleepy-meclizine would be better.  Because the un-sleepy kind, unless it CURES me, doesn't make these things magically doable.

Seriously.  So mad and so utterly physcially miserable death would seem like an improvement.

Gah.  This isn't any fair at all.

Stop.

Four ibuprofen in, and the headache so bad the pain has me nauseated is only getting worse.  I see an early night tonight.

Which is probably not going to be true.  Which is a shame.

*Eyebrow* At My Stats

550 hits today, mostly from Canada, Spain, and the Netherlands.  Odd, that.  Odder - usually bots don't go to my pages; the excerpts etc. - but today, two and three hits apiece to all of those pages.

I find this not a gratifying uptick, but a depressing sign that even the one indicator of actual human visitation (hits on those pages) is no longer reliable.

*Blah* for monster day stats.

Progress, Then Off to Bed

An update for those who (astoundingly!) claim to find this sort of thing interesting (hi, Cute Shoes!) ... querying still going well.  After nothing but eliminations last night, found a good one tonight, and got that off a little while ago.  One query in a night may not be much - perhaps other authors do more at a time - but I start with a pretty large list as a rule, research carefully, and eliminate based on a fairly well-educated-at-this-point set of criteria.

I don't query in hard copy.  This made me feel guilty for a bit - what if I am missing out? - but in this day and age, it's the rarer agency who won't accept electronic than who will, and I look at this as a business consideration.  If even a Luddite such as myself finds email etc. a convenience, the refusal of the practical advance using it represents (not to mention the affront to trees; what a wasteful practice, even with recycling) and the excesses of time it requires are, valid or not, a deal-breaker for me.  We're coming to a time when refusal to go electronic almost looks like pointless posturing - whether to intimidate or just look snobbishly elite - and I don't need that noise.  (Yes, it has occurred to me that sticking with hard copy reduces the slush pile flow.  But I have to draw my personal lines somewhere.  Your lines may vary!)

If an agent's idea of historical fiction is undefined, and their website is predominantly pink and precious, I won't query.  It's my guess you're looking for romance-in-a-corset, and that's great stuff, but I'm writing ahead of the (European) invention of that bodice-heaving accessory, and my work is passionate, not romantic.  It also involves an awful lot of blood and blades ...

... but, muscular as my work may be, I'm also not quite Bernard Cornwell, Conn Iggulden, nor even (and I love this guy!) Ben Kane.  If I think the cover designs for your histfic would work as well for genre video games, I might not query there either.  Or I will be pretty careful about it.

I'm even getting so I want to eliminate agents who don't clearly state their taste profile on their website, or at Agent Query, QueryTracker, or another such clearinghouse listing site.  Yes:  the need to research agents and read interviews is understood; but, if I have to open three or more pages to get to the meat of the matter, you're fatiguing me unnecessarily.  It's almost as wasteful of my time as snail-mail querying.  And wears authors out.  Have a page on your agency website with a blurb for each agent, and IN THAT BLURB please tell me what you want to see - genre, taste preference, authors on your list - I don't care which way you do it, but give me some sort of an indication.  With everything we have to do to appeal to you guys, coyness is just a cruel return on our quest to attract literary (publishing industry) attention.

So only one query out tonight.  For me, given the grumpy exclusions above - that's not a bad night at all.

It doesn't stop me querying extensively.  I just don't blanket-spam every member of the AAR without any consideration.

Privilege

One of those things a certain stripe of middle-aged, middle-class white women like me are attached to - apart from the privilege of our position - is the privilege of our bodies.  For those of us not blessed with ill health and a fetish for the attention we are trained that may bring, there is an expectation of wholeness, even as the minor cracks and complaints of advancing age prove to us, really, how minor our physical quibbles really are.

Threaten that, and we wig out.

It's been a long time since I was a solitary spiritual fool, looking at the full moon and taking the Roman implications of my given name too seriously.  Still can't help but notice the big, golden thing is hanging out outside the window.  It's a good thing the praying for tonight has been farmed out to Mr. X.


***


Edited 8/3/2012:  Privilege intact.  One less lesson of humility to bother to learn.  Today.

It's That Time of Year ...

... I haven't been able to breathe, waking or asleep, in at least a week now.  And, yep, it's getting worse.  It always does.  This is that magical time when I wake up at night and in the morning, gasping because my body just STOPS breathing.  When I can't get a breath, and just give up, and go without it.

Oh,well, at least the honey helps the allergies a bit, and I like lightnin' bugs.

Sunday

Last night, in between having a little fun, a headache started, and tugged at my sleeve a little bit, but decided to bide its time.  Its time, as it turned out, was apparently 3:00 a.m.  Terribly painful.  By four, five ibuprofen into a losing battle, and lying in bed unconscious - but mummified, and unmoving, rather than experiencing actual sleep or rest - I knew my hopes of an SBC meeting might be dashed.

Last month, seeing Mr. X, I'd canceled actually hosting the SBC.  These women are forgiving, but I felt bad about that - even with an obviously compelling reason.  I was excited to see them today - and ended up not doing so.

I got the least sleep last night I've had in a good while, and for a worse reason than in years.  Night headaches aren't unusual for me, but an hour or three of sleep is the usual solution.  This kind of pain is a different matter.

Unable to just roll over this morning, I gave up and got up.  Pretty much went right out the door, to get done what was necessary - gas, dog food, groceries for me, a prescription - and came right home to recuperate.  I was hoping for sleep, but have only gotten an hour.  Have done some revision, but word count isn't down much right now.  Just waiting until I can go to bed.  I expect that will happen early ...

Grump

I got stood up three times this weekend, I've taken over seven months and am not halfway complete in my revisions, because I just can't get any feedback, and the man I love is 4000 miles away.

Oh, hey look:  HORMONES.  Who'd have guessed.

*Grump*

Plan-less

My supposed plans for Friday never materialized, when I could not reach, and never heard back from, my supposed date for the evening.

The neighborly cookout has evaporated.

The call I was going to get today, about a movie tomorrow ... not so far.

Considering I'm the only variable here, I have to assume it's me.  But dang.  I thought I at least brushed my teeth enough SOMEBODY might materialize if I weren't too offensive just to be in a room with.  (Clearly, I'm a bit big for my britches.)


It's not that I mind getting a lot done on a long weekend.  It wouldn't matter a poo if people didn't say they *wanted* to make plans.

But this many blowoffs in such a short space is a little bit much.

Old

It's hard to believe how much my back still pains me, after two and a half weeks now.

Follow-up, with an open mind to everyone's much-insisted-upon advice to get physical therapy (ugh - time out of the office, and what a hassle), will be Friday.  I'm still bent like a crone, in between periods of feeling pretty normal.

Not a fan of pain.

*Bleah*