the vet sent us a celebratory email
Let’s chat, albeit one-sided since this is just me writing but you can respond in the comments or by email, if you want. The most important thing is that you have a gigantic iced coffee, like the one I have on my desk right now. (It’s massive. I could put out a fire with it.)
We went to see Fontaines DC at College Street Music Hall (opening band Jadu Heart) in New Haven and then drove home afterwards because someone had to be at school the next morning. The show was awesome — since my daughter has gotten into music, I’ve gone to more live shows in the last few years than I had in the decade prior.
I like when my xiphoid process thuds in time with the bass guitar. Never gets old, even as I do.
I finished a third draft of First Book and am prepping it for a new set of agents. That’s the good thing.
I also had a follow up call with the developmental editor I hired and firmly decided that she was worth the investment, is a kind soul, and is hopefully available when I scrawl out THE END on Second Book.
The not-great thing is how intensely and sometimes insurmountably lonely book writing is. I love the writing part. The lack of conversation with other humans during the course of the project is intensely quiet. I’ve tried writing in coffee shops but I am highly distracted and I end up watching people or listening to their conversations or joining their conversations and my social muscle starts flexing and nothing gets written.
This is why I love my local writing group because we work in 20 minute clumps and then we talk while sharing what we’ve written. It’s the perfect mix of focused wordsmithery and then chatty-chat-chat.
Diabetes? I still have it. I KNOW! The intensity of the cortisone shot is over but residual effects remain. My basals are back to baseline but the insulin:carb ratio is ticked up, only not predictably so sometimes I need 1:9 and sometimes I need 1:6 and sometime I need to chase a meal with fruit snacks because I borked the math. (Shout out to Control IQ+, though. It’s been several weeks of that algorithm now and it’s bringing my TIR up without me doing extra shit. High-five, little algo.)
Today is Loki (the cat)’s birthday. She’s seven. Or six. I forget. I only know it’s her birthday because the vet sends us an email every year, one that’s borderline winky-nod, with subject lines like, “Guess who’s having a birthday?” or “Someone super cute is having a big day” and now I feel crushing, self-imposed pressure to celebrate. This is a direct result of everything being A Thing ™? (see also: St. Patrick’s Day, the frigging elf during the holidays, the dress-like-your-favorite-marsupial day at school … so many things), as my parenting reflexes immediately said, “Okay, let’s put up some streamers and make a cake FOR THE CAT.”
I didn’t do that. Instead, I sat down to write this post as an act of rebellion against the part of my brain that thinks big deals need to be made about everything.
… except it can be kind of fun to make big deals out of random things. But for me, it’s fun if it’s not expected. A flowers-for-no-reason moment. I went to get breakfast with two friends and we were talking about how much time had passed since the last time we hung out “for no reason.” “We’re here to celebrate the birthday of [friend name]!” Which was true. But it was also because we all had time to hang out on a random Tuesday morning. It was warm enough to sit outside by the ocean. It was windy enough to steal your napkin but not enough to pull your ponytail loose.
It is essential to enjoy the company of other humans.
Let’s do more of that. Less busyness and errands and task-rabbit style nonsense. More celebrating the randomness of a free Tuesday morning. Go for a walk because you took the recycling to the curb on the right day, for once. Turn the music up because your son knows all the New England state capitols. Get silly because you scheduled that appointment you’ve been putting off.
Make a cake for the cat’s birthday, damn it.
