Sue Perry's Blog: Required Writing, page 39

My Unappreciated Rosemary

Driving home today, I passed a mass of lovely blue flowers. Wonder how long my rosemary bushes have been blooming?

I take my rosemary for granted. For many months it provides such charming flowers. It pleases bees.  It never needs water, it rarely needs pruning, it always spreads to cover the gaps, it drapes down the wall in an appealing manner. Its thick growth deters weeds. I could touch it every day and every day get a fantastic burst of powerful fragrance. Instead, at best, I brush against it by accident sometimes when I take the trash out.

It’s true I will always love the sage more but that does not excuse my neglect. I must try to do better.

Retirement Party Postponed…Indefinitely

So. When I was young I kept changing jobs and taking time off to do one thing or the other. I’d work on a novel. I’d do some traveling. I did a lot of worthwhile things and I pretended I agreed with Cary Grant’s character in HOLIDAY, who wants to have experiences while he is young then work later, after he discovers what he is working for.  (Pretended because I knew all along that what I wanted was simpler. I wanted to skip the day job thing entirely.)

I have friends and coworkers who chose less circuitous paths and a number of them have retired, or are considering it. So. I tried one of those on-line retirement calculators, and the results are in.  For the next decade, I only need to save 87% of my pay and then I will have enough saved to live at 22% of my current income level.  Of course if I could save 87% of my pay I probably wouldn’t need a retirement calculator.

Looking for a bright side – after living on 13% of my pay, my retirement income would really feel luxurious.

Overall, just one more indication that the kittens need to get jobs.

The Value of Shards of Writing Time

More progress with less time.  That seems to be the bottom line. Yesterday, the middle of three days off, I had all day to write. I frittered and chilled and squandered all those hours on doin’ nuthin’ (which has its own rewards but that’s another story).

This morning, crammed between the trip to the mechanic and the shuttling of kids – first items on a long must-do list – I knew it was now or never and I got a weekend’s worth of writing done in a couple hours.

These are recurring refrains. The tighter the time span, the more I get done, especially when preceded by a day of “nothing”, during which some part of my brain figures out what I need to write: when I sat down today I had it all figured out, but yesterday I had not a clue.

Communing with Vegetables

Winter’s not over yet but after weeks of cold, suddenly it feels like spring. Too early, certainly, and if this persists there will be wildfire hell to pay later. Nonetheless – I’ll take it!

Warm sun blue sky gentle breeze.  Just sitting outside is all I want in the world, today.

I really should get the chores done.

Birds singing.

I meant to do some writing today.

That sun really feels nice.

I’ve got work deadlines looming.

A cat and a dog lounging nearby on the warm ground.

I’ve neglected my blog of late.

This must be what it’s like to be a carrot, close to harvest time.

Lost Arts and Obsolete Skills

For some time I have heard kids say, I don’t need to learn how to spell or multiply. I have spellcheckers and calculators to do that for me. I disagree. The helper apps must remain just that – assistants – because these are basic skills we all need to communicate and make sense of the world. (Okay maybe not so much long division.)

However, there are some other kinds of training that I doubt we still need. Does anyone really need to know how to write in cursive? Or tell time using an analog clock?

What do you think? Are these obsolete skills? Are there others?

Eye Candy for Cat Lovers

Our new kittens, between mayhem sessions. For greatest realism, view these photos in a loop. The “active” phase is missing because all those photos are blurry.

P.S. No I cannot explain why we thought it was a good idea to get three kittens.

Resting up for the next round of destruction and adventure.

Waking up.

It begins again.

An Ode to Repetition

On one level, I hate routine. I’ve made important life decisions based on a futile attempt to avoid repetition. Changes of jobs, homes, cities – and probably relationships. I have to fight feeling trapped once I exhaust the options for fresh experience. But that time will always come. There are only so many ways you can drive to the store, if you are going to the same damn store from the same damn house.

Yet, concurrently, repetition and routine provide essential foundations to so much that matters to me. While it is always great to share a new experience with my kids, the comforting patterns of family life are constructed of routine. There is no question that I plan most of my writing during mundane tasks like toothbrushing or weeding. And one of the richest benefits of travel is how much I appreciate home when I return.

I have a friend who talks about Buddhist intent to stay fully present in each moment – aware of the give of the keyboard as I type, conscious of the flow of water and the scratch of the scrubpad as I wash a plate. She strives for this awareness to feel grounded and calm. I try it and discover subtle variations that make each repetition unique. Doing this seems to be as close as I can get to meditation -with all my Western impatience and resistance to organized faith.

An Attitude to Aspire To

Recently, through the book-lovers’ site LibraryThing, I have gotten to know a woman who is plagued by two spinal conditions, each of which can be impossibly painful. When I expressed my regret about this, she replied that she always likes to look for a positive and at least her condition gives her plenty of time with some things she loves, books and reading.

Whenever I think about this it helps me to stop with the petty bitching about trivialities, for at least a brief stretch of time.

The Idea Aggregator that Produces a Novel – Case Study

My novels apply a filter, sieve, microscope, and paintbrush to my life, with the occasional fun-house mirror or handful of feathers thrown in.

Scar Jewelry evolved through disparate experiences and observations that gradually connected inside my head:

When my twins were toddlers, a friend would look to incite reaction in me by stage whispering to them, I know things about your parents.
A decade later, I was hanging around with other parents at our kids’ track practice, when one mom came over to introduce herself. Her husband had pointed me out and said, She’s wearing a Billy Zoom t-shirt. Zoom was the guitarist for an obscure but legendary punk band, X, which we had all loved long before. From that point we became friends – and I looked at the other parents differently, wondering who they were before they were parents.
We set aside so much of ourselves to become parents. Some of us never regain those set-asides. Most children don’t much care about the non-parent parts of us and can be so dismissive of what matters – or used to matter – to us.
As parents, we don’t always appreciate what matters to our children. We make decisions that can dramatically and permanently change their lives, yet we rarely consult them as we decide what’s best for them. Hey, we’re the grown-ups, right?
I am adopted. As an adult I was lucky enough to be contacted by my birth family. It turns out that after I got adopted away, my birth parents married each other and had five more children. Meeting them transformed my views on many things and they’ve been a part of my life ever since.

By the way – though it may seem otherwise – nothing I’ve said here gives away Scar Jewelry‘s secrets!

Is It (All, Always) Just Me?

Is it just me or are there more narcissists than there used to be?

I suppose it is a which-came-first-chicken-or-egg-or-frying-pan? question to try to sort out whether blogging and tweeting have simply released our inner mirror gazers, or whether social media have become popular because there is a narcissism gene, or whether social media are causing a rapid mutation in humans to develop such a gene.

Overall, I must say that I find narcissism more becoming in cats.

P.S. I would be interested in hearing your experiences. I work with a supreme narcissist so I have always got stories to share…