Friday, February 16, 2007

Running Out of Gas

It's getting very hard to fill two different blog spots, I tell you. I just finished typing a story about Lizzie into Facebook, which I then copied into LiveJournal and appended with another scene, and now here I am, on empty.

I could write about the disappointment I experienced with the Nevada Barr book on tape, Blind Descent, that I checked out of the library. Tape 2 was completely screwed--every other phrase or so was gargled or deleted--so I had to return it after getting a whole tape in. Boring.

I could write about how hard it is for me to remember things lately, but that's old news.

I could write about the Qigong class that I'm starting this afternoon, or how I can't drive Dave to his appointment with the oral surgeon (he's getting all 4 of his wisdom teeth yanked) because of it, which makes me feel guilty and less than uber-wifely, but that's ho hum at best.

I could write about the quiz taker down the hall, making up a missed exam and coming, now, to the end of her 50 minutes, so that means I have to get up, ugh, and go down there and pry it loose from her hands. The equivalent of doing the dishes.

I could just announce that I've had it, I can't keep this pace up, I can't think of pithy things to write about writing (or anything else, for that matter), so I quit, I'm going back to one blog and that's it. But that would just be a momentary tantrum and I'd regret it later. Like at the end of the sentence. And I'd delete it and have to think of something else to write.

I could pull down one of the binders overhead and see what I was writing 18 years ago, since I've got all the letters I wrote on my first computer (a Macintosh Plus) printed out, or dip into one of the dozens of notebooks stacked on a shelf behind the comfy chair, here in my office, but usually that makes me a mixture of bored and queasy. Also embarrassed for myself, the self I was in the past.

I could read some of the poems I was writing when I was an undergrad, but I did that yesterday. I could look at my dissertation notes (saw into my veins with a dull knife) or the letters Daddy Roy MacDiarmid (the dead one) wrote home from college and grad school. The first will make me dizzy and the second will make me lonely.

This has become one of those arch, self-indulgent meta(non)fictional accounts of my arch, self-indulgent middle class middle aged life.

So I'll just end it and go to the bathroom (turns out I've been holding it in for a bit here, inventing urgency). Piss out this discontent, this vague ennui, go to lunch, read my students' love poems, and Qigong myself into the weekend.

3 comments:

Megmander said...

you could write about getting vibrated during the first production of the Vagina Monologs at our fine catholic institution....just, you know, a though.

I like qigong. We practice it during our warmups. Sometimes I'll do it in my cubical when the phones are dead and I am dying. I can never seem to maintain the deep breaths that expand my abdomen. My chest never remains hollow and relaxed and I end up tense. I'm still working on it, though.

Unknown said...

you'll be happy to know that my qigong class was fantabulous. i think it's just what this middle aged woman needs--i particularly loved the man standing in tidepool move, for the haaaaaaaaaa WOW move. i'm planning to practice it before faculty meetings.

Anonymous said...

these are all the symptoms of an artistic blockage, yo. rereading old work, cutting and pasting, fatigue, feeling like a negligent spouse. etc.

you need to be writing something without instant readership. that's a lot of pressure, instant readership on three blogs. but don't stop posting in at least one blog b/c now i'm addicted to it.

--quigong master