Perforation Problems

If left to my own devices I stay up too late. I don't do the dishes, I don't put food away. I leave pairs of my shoes all over the house, in the middle of the hallway, next to the coffee table, by the back door. Why do I wear so many different pairs of shoes? On Tuesday night I tried to clean up, thinking it'd be a productive way to get my 10,000 steps for the day. But by Wednesday night it was messy again, so what's the point? I've gotten a lot done this week, both for clients and for myself (cleaning the printer heads on the O&C printer, picking up a card order, buying supplies for camping this weekend, laundry, going to yoga class, putting away all the clothes that were piled on the guest room bed, cleaning the guest bathroom for Clyde's dog sitter), but now on a Thursday afternoon it doesn't feel like enough. Productivity when you work for yourself is a tricky thing. When you go to an office, you end up feeling like you're doing your job just...

I used to do this thing when I was younger and feeling dramatic and emo in that way that only a teenager / early 20-something can – I'd sit at my computer, wanting to write but unable to, listening to music and feeling the immense weight of the world on my privileged, naive shoulders. I'd start typing the lyrics to the songs I was listening to in time with the music, as if it were a way to sing with written words, each letter shaping into existence on the screen like notes in the air. She put him out like the burning end of a midnight cigarette. That's one of my favorite images ever. It was a bit of a game – can I type the words fast enough to keep up with the music? Can I space them out visually on "paper" so they mimic what I hear? The life and times of a young English nerd! If only everyone could experience the joy I feel in typing out someone else's single, perfect phrase. Yeats or Bieber, it doesn't matter. I don't spend a lot of time l...

Sitting in a coffee shop, supposed to be writing. Two writing projects in my head – one of them a new one I was excited about a few hours ago. But I'm tired, and my head won't settle and focus. I have a headache, a dull throbbing in my sinuses that's been plaguing me all week. Weather changes fuck with my head. My stomach feels a little empty – what am I going to make for dinner? Should probably figure it out before Michael heads home from Cincinnati. It has to be something he won't mind eating but something that doesn't blow up my attempts to be healthy. What haven't we had in awhile? Do I have time to stop at the grocery after this? We have no milk. My mind skitters to a phone call I have early tomorrow morning, and the work that will come out of it. He's a doctor I'm interviewing about relationship counseling for a campaign for a client. If I don't get enough info out of him – or the right info – it's going to make the content harder to writ...

People who leave chicken bones on the sidewalk. There are trash cans everywhere! Use an effing trash can! Do you not care about ANYTHING?  My dog who insists on eating chicken bones left on the sidewalk and making me pry them out of his mouth.  Designers who change my copy just because they feel like it and never even let me know. Of course you know better than I do. It's not like I actually researched keywords or do this for a living.  People who send me an email and then immediately call me to let me know the contents of the email they sent. 

Everything's irritating me today. I woke up early to take Clyde to be groomed. They make you drop him off between 7 and 8:30, which really isn't very nice because that means he has to just sit there in a crate or wherever they put him, feeling anxious because he's Clyde and Clyde is always anxious unless he's sleeping, waiting for hours till it's his turn. He was really not feeling it today – the groomer had a hard time getting him to come back behind the gate. Before I dropped him off, though, I had to get a poop sample for them, which means I had to take him on a walk. Sargent Rd is not the most walker-friendly street, especially at the moment, because traffic from construction closures on two surrounding streets are sending a bunch of cars down our little, sidewalk-and-shoulder-less road. So that was stressful. And I got mud and rocks in my shoes. Then when he finally pooped, it was smelly and messy and gooey, because, duh, it's poop, and I had to scoop i...

I've been obsessed with yoga headstands and handstands since February. I'm not sure what my deal is, but I just want to be upside down. It started when Amanda and I began taking a yoga class at the gym. It wasn't a great yoga class – the teacher did a pretty crappy job of explaining moves and talking us through things. It mostly just made me nostalgic for the classes I took in Indy last year. BUT it was yoga once a week, and it got me to start doing some yoga on my own at home, too. It's a common reaction to panic when a teacher says it's time to work on inversions – they're scary. Your feet are above your head, you feel like you're going to hurt your neck, you could fall over and break your face...and the chances of queefing are high. No one had ever told me the correct way to do a headstand, so I mostly just flung my feet up against the wall and hoped for the best. But as I started getting back into regular yoga practice (ho ho, that phrase is so fancy...

Somewhere in my house, maybe in a box in the attic, is a tape recorder with an hour of my great grandma's voice. A few years before she died, I decided in the middle of one of my obsession-with-genealogy phases that I wanted to make a record of what she knew about our Irish ancestors, one of whom had stowed away on a ship during the potato famine to make his way to America. I remember putting the recording aside and thinking, "This is important – I'll want to keep this." Having a record of Grandma T's voice seemed precious even while she was still there. And yet somehow I've let it get stowed away in a box in the attic. It's depressing to think of how many stories get lost, either diluted by time and memory, forgotten, or made inaccessible once we're gone, locked in the shadows of our brains without any way out. My grandpa tells me stories all the time – he's an amazing storyteller, with the knack of making you see what he saw and hear the voices...