the deep moans round with many voices

My alarm went off this morning and I rolled over in bed and my body said NOPE. :(

So I called in sick and went back to sleep for another four hours. Then I got up, showered, and puttered around for two and a half hours after which I fell back into bed for three hours or so. Then I got up again and decided to take a walk into town both for general health reasons -- fresh air and exercise and the psychological high of movement and seeing running water and maintaining a pretense of routine -- and to pick up a library book I had on hold since the next time I could get to the library is Monday evening.

I intend to go back to bed around 9pm, which will make a grand total of, uh... six and a half hours spent awake during a 24-hour day. Ugh. Being sick is exhausting.

I also blew some brainpower on helping Mom figure out exact times and dates for airplane tickets for my June vacation (but she did the actual ordering because I'm not sure I should be trusted to navigate financial stuff at the moment), and then I... may have just been gently recruited to run for my church's Board of Trustees? I mean, I said up-front that there's a strong possibility I may move to Minnesota next year, but even so. I think I also promised to attend the Board meeting this coming Tuesday evening. I am... pretty sure? that my Not the IRS schedule allows that?

Um.

Yeah, definitely time to read innocuous fanfic and then hit the sack.

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Tangentially, I have little song I sing to myself when I'm sick, and on other useful occasions. It goes to the tune of "On top of Spaghetti" (which I guess itself is the tune of "On top of Old Smokey"? but whatever), and the words are as follows:

The human body
Is totally gross
It's badly designed, dear
And hopelessly gross.

So when your own body
Does something gross
Just remind yourself, dear
That dead's worse than gross.

Repeat as necessary. :)

You know what? I'm going to post the terrible poetry after all.

All spelling, capitalization, and punctuation faithfully reproduced (though you are missing half the effect of the purple ink and my weird handwriting). I have inserted line breaks between the poems for clarity, though the original text marks them only by a single blank line.

( cut for length and embarrassment )

---------------------------------------------

Now I kind of want to find twelve- or thirteen-year-old me, give her a hug, promise her she'll make it at least to age thirty-five without humanity blowing up the planet, and gently suggest that if she wants to keep on writing poetry, she might find the constraints of strict poetic forms a useful challenge. *wry*

Since my house burned down
I now own a better view
of the rising moon.

---Mizuta Masahide


...I am quite sure I could not manage that degree of equanimity, but it's a good reminder that the way one looks at a situation can make a huge difference to one's emotional state.


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I did some more encyclopedia article editing today, both before and after work at the smoke shop. Dad says he'll send more tomorrow. I am crossing my fingers that my current can-do productive mood will last!

Other things I have done today: responded to an email about another potential editing job (for a smoke shop customer who runs a historical society about trains) which I had left hanging all last week because I did not have the spoons, answered several reviews, written 300 words of "Trollstuck" and 300 words of what might turn into an Aradia<3Aradia kinkmeme fill (hey, if the timeclone thing works for Dave, why not for the ladies?), and made a serious stab at cleaning out my real-life email address's inbox, which had become dangerously overgrown this past month and a half.

I am of the school of thought that says you should move any emails you want to save into specific sub-folders and delete everything else, because clutter is dumb and inefficient. Also, who cares about a series of six emails between me and my mom deciding what restaurant to eat at each time my parents come to Ithaca? Posterity does not need that kind of junk and neither do I. So away it goes!

ETA: 600-ish words of "Trollstuck," and part 20 is ready to post. Buuuuuuuut, I want to draw Jothan's picture first, for reference. So you will have to wait for Monday night. Sorry.

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ETA, 2/16/17: For the record, the customer with the editing job I mentioned? Is Longwinded Man. That interaction did not end well.

1. A few days ago, someone did another non-traditional poetry installation. It consists of a series of clear plastic bags, filled with water, tied to the railing along Cascadilla Creek between Tioga St. and Aurora St. Inside each bag is a short poem.

This is not as reader-friendly as the poems tied to the shrubbery from a couple weeks back. For one thing, these poems are handwritten, which makes them slightly harder to read in the best of circumstances. Some of the inks bled into the water, staining the bags interesting colors but rendering the poems completely invisible. Some poems have partially disintegrated. Some poems twisted in the bags so they are curled up and, again, impossible to read. Even the ones that are both in clear water and facing in a visible direction are difficult to read, because of the creases in the plastic bags and the refraction of the water.

But it's a nice idea, and the two poems I've been able to read were interesting.

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2. I filled in for my absent co-teacher at church today. I was expecting to teach a lesson on Beltane, but when I received the lesson plan on Saturday, I discovered that the curriculum had been adjusted.

We did a lesson on Earth Day instead.

Now, this is less far-fetched for UUs than for many other religions -- we do, after all, include "respect for the interdependent web of all existence of which we are a part" as one of our Seven Principles -- but still. I was under the impression that Earth Day is a secular thing. *sigh*

Also, I have now led guided meditation twice, and I have led basic yoga exercises. This is not at all what I am used to in a religious education program!

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3. I'm still poking away at "Intervention," which is now at 11,450 words. I actually wrote more than that tonight, but I also rewrote some previous scenes to tie in better with current and future plot threads, and to give Jahiem a few lines via ship-to-ship com, which required me to cut about 150 words from a scene to remove a suddenly extraneous com conversation.

"Intervention" requires a lot of thought and logistical planning: to keep track of who is where doing what when, to track who knows what when, to make sure the characters' actions are practical, to integrate technology into the plot or explain the absence of tools that should be in use, to hopefully not violate physics and biology too badly, and to clue in readers what's happened in the time jumps between scenes. I am very glad I am writing it all of a piece rather than trying to serialize it, because I keep running into things that I need to have laid groundwork for in previous sections, and every time I go back and stick that groundwork in, I have to make two or three other adjustments to pick up the logical consequences. It's like putting together a puzzle, only each time I slot another piece in, the other pieces change shape around it. *beats head against desk*

Also, when I'm finally done I will have to go back and work in some more descriptions of people dying, of the Cordites dealing with the sick and the dead, and the Red Cross people having, you know, emotional reactions to the tragedy they find themselves in the middle of. Because right now, it's a rather dry story -- there's some worry, and a fair amount of people expressing anger because it's easier to get angry than to break down crying (and also, they are genuinely angry at the way the Cordites are dealing with the plague and their attempts to help, and at the mineral Macguffin's interference with their diagnostic technology), but there should be more depth.

But I would like to get the actual plot finished before I do too much elaboration work on scenes (or puzzle pieces) that may well get shuffled around a lot more before I am done.

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4. The new ink cartridges did indeed seem to fix my printer, so apparently the problem with the black ink was just a dud cartridge. :-/ Anyway, this means I ought to finally print ch. 14 of "Secrets" and edit it. Except, oh god, I do not want to deal with that right now. I really, really don't. I don't even know why, but every time I think of that I have this... I dunno, non-physical total body flinch.

Very weird. I should buckle down and edit it anyway. Perhaps Wednesday, which I have off from work?

As I was working on Tug of War, my 15_minute_fic response for this week, I at one point looked up Shel Silverstein's poem "Hug o'War." That ended up having relatively little to do with the fic as written (though if you were wondering about the title? now you know where my head was), but it did remind me of another Silverstein poem I have always loved:


Listen To The Mustn’ts

Listen to the MUSN’TS, child,
Listen to the DON'TS
Listen to the SHOULDN’TS
The IMPOSSIBLES, the WON’TS
Listen to the NEVER HAVES
Then listen close to me-
Anything can happen, child,
ANYTHING can be.



...So is that Naruto's theme poem or what? :-D