Category: ragdoll rambles

Happy St. Patrick’s Day

Yesterday, I planted a window lavender garden in a pot, did the laundry, went grocery shopping, tidied the house and, oh yeah, finished up a major portion of my novel that I’d been working on the past two weeks. I’m about 30 pages away from being done a complete first draft, which is three years in the making. I’m tired, but excited.

And I’m celebrating St. Patrick’s Day by reading John Banville’s utterly brilliant and truly hefty (although swift of page count) novel, The Sea. This quote totally caught me off guard, the protagonist, having just found out his wife’s dying, notes:

Helplessly I contemplated her. For a giddy second the notion seized me that I would never again be able to think of another word to say to her, that we would go on like this, in agonised inarticulacy, to the end.

Adventures In Doctoring

Love arriving at the hospital an hour and a half before my regular scheduled appointment to get a chest x-ray only to find that the intern has filled the form out incorrectly, which means I’ve got to go bother poor Rose, the secretary, and get her to fix it, only to arrive back and discover that it’ll be at least another hour before it’s my turn, and then discover I’ve been semi-usurped by a seriously old woman with a lovely male nurse who are still in the change room when I poke my head in and say, “I’ve got an appointment at three,” which means they whiz me through because the x-ray itself takes approximately 17 seconds, and by the time I finished, she hadn’t even made it to the room, slooooowwww.

And I wasn’t even late for the Super Fancy Disease Doctor.

Where I discover that my tests are excellent (yay! double yay!) even if my blood pressure’s a bit high but that he’s still got no idea why I’m so bloody tired I can barely make it up a flight of subway steps, is it the disease is it not the disease, maybe I’m eating all wrong or maybe it’s just the weather pulling me down, down, down with every original flake that falls from the sky, and when they have no answers it just means you have to see them more often, so I’m back in a month for more bloodwork, more tests and a whole bunch of other non-fun health-related things.

I did manage to get home a little early and took a nice long walk to the streetcar stop.

But I’m so tired that I’m finding it absolutely impossible to even get one sentence down, completely unlike how I was on Sunday where I managed over 5,000 words (in a row!) before collapsing in front of the TV with a delicious vegetarian burrito and the teacher’s words are still echoing in my mind, “it’s those of you who work regularly that’ll survive,” the rest are just “tourists,” and the last thing I want to be today is a tourist in my own writing life, no my own life.

And isn’t American Idol on?

Denis Johnson – "Dirty Wedding"

This story knocked me flat this morning on the subway with these couple lines: “The last time I’d been in the Savoy, it had been in Omaha. I hadn’t been anywhere near it in over a year, but I was just getting sicker. When I coughed I saw fireflies.”

Six pages of story that travel as fast as the El train the narrator rides, but so rich with the experience about being a messed up kid who couldn’t handle much of life, let alone getting his girlfriend pregnant and then not having the baby. If I hadn’t finished, I would have missed my stop just so I could read the end.

My Mistress’s Sparrow is Dead, Eugenides rich collection of love stories, made my day even before 9 AM. And I’m having a real hard time with this ridiculous hip hurting as much as it has over the past few days. The pain is angry, constant and frustrating. I hate limping, it makes me feel awkward, ungainly, and really unattractive; and it’s not as if I need any more pushing in that direction anyway, being in this kind of pain just amplifies all of the things I hate about myself and all of the things that have happened to my body as a result of the disease. It’s like the ache just settles into my whole being and forces its way into every little crack of my existence.

While I know that it’s probably got something to do with my shoes and the weather, I refuse to give in to either. Bitter cold and high heels, who knew they’d be the death of me?

Today

I won the Oscar pool at work. $48.00 means I can actually eat lunch this week.

Oh yeah, baby!*

EDITED TO ADD: The song from the movie Once that won the Oscar had this beautiful line, “Words fall through me and always fool me.”

I liked it so much I emailed it to myself so I could remind myself to put it up here today. Sort of a quote of the weekend.

Did it manage to defray the many hours of boredom punctuated here and there by a Jon Stewart funny. Um, no.**

EDITED TO ADD TO ADD: I saw the female peregrine falcon today. And no word of a lie, I ripped the headphones off my head, shouted: “WHO ARE YOU?” and almost threw myself out the window. Clearly, the whole bird-obsession thing has got to stop.

And my tragic hip is bothering me a great deal. Making my whole right leg hurt, which is kind of bumming me out.

Down To Work

So, it seems I may have committed myself to a completely and utterly undoable goal of having a finished draft of the book (see, see how I’m actually calling it a book instead of a long story) finished by May 1st. Having successfully surrounded myself not only with books, but with other writers, we all seem to be egging each other on in all the good ways. I’m still not convinced that I’ll ever finish, but it’s nice to not be alone, if that makes any sense at all.

The candle is lit. The email is all caught up. There’s t-minus a couple hours until the Oscars. My RRHB has done all the laundry. I had brunch with one of my oldest friends who has just become engaged. I’ve obsessed over a certain something. Repeated”The King of Carrot Flowers” about sixteen times. This lead to a little dancing around my writing room. And read two stories in My Mistress’s Sparrow is Dead, one of which contained this quote from Chekhov:

Repeated experience, and bitter experience indeed, had long since taught him that every intimacy, which in the beginning lends life such pleasant diversity and presents itself as a nice and light adventure, inevitably, with decent people — especially irresolute Muscovites, who are slow starters — grows into a major task, extremely complicated, and the situation finally becomes burdensome.

Perhaps it’s time to start?

Oh What A Night

Let me first preface this entry by saying: I am an idiot who does not know how to drive a car.

Well, I have a license and I have never been in an accident, but I am not comfortable behind the wheel. In short, I have very little sense of myself in the world. Add to the mix a giant, hulking machine and I am stumped. If I bang into things all the time, imagine what happens when you put me behind the wheel.

Exactly.

So last night when I got home, I decided, oh so wrongly, to spare my RRHB the trouble of having to come out and drive the car up into the icy laneway to put it back in our garage. Oh yes, this was something I could totally do myself.

Or not.

As I made it halfway up the slight hill before the car slid back down and wedged itself into a snow bank kissing a concrete wall, and with ice all around, it wasn’t moving.

We had to call a tow truck.

Which cost me $157.50.

And then the battery died.

Sigh.

Add to that the panic and upset I felt for a) inconveniencing us so much for b) spending money we really don’t have right now and c) for pretty much ruining both of our evenings, and I didn’t sleep very well.

“No biggie,” I thought. “I’ll just get up early and make my way to the hospital so Dr. Kidney has everything for my app’t tomorrow.”

Hear on the news: “There’s a five alarm fire…all streetcars are going to be diverted.”

Even so, I still managed to get to the hospital well before 9 AM. Only to NOT have my bloodwork ordered correctly and have to wait almost 1.5 hours to get poked. So, after fasting (hangry anyone? [tm Charidy]), not sleeping, waiting for hours, getting the car stuck, being frozen waiting for the tow truck angel to do his work, being late for my own work, falling behind, and feeling sorry for myself, I started to cry. IN THE BLOOD WORK CHAIR.

Annnnywaaay.

I’m here now. And am about to get cracking. But thankfully, I had Jennifer Haigh’s upcoming novel The Condition, which is really quite riveting, to keep me company.

EDITED TO ADD: I just ate some soup for lunch and bit down (it was lentil, I like to chew), on a rock almost the size of my pinky finger.

It’s just that kind of day.

Ah, Valentine’s Day

The RRHB and I sent each other anti-Valentine’s Day cards from a really funny anti-Valentine’s Day site. And then I had a fun day because lots of people are reading my interview with Diane Schoemperlen as a result of her article being up on the homepage of MSN. And then I had a little extra time to read The Quiet American on the way to work because I had a funny test at the hospital. And then I saw the falcon today in the distance. And then the snow is just so much fun. And then now it’s just about time to go home where I can watch Coronation Street (gack, Leanne!) and Lost. And then I will go to bed early with a good book and a good husband and have a good sleep and wake up tomorrow barely noticing the saccharine holiday that usually puts just about everyone in a funk.