Monday, August 9, 2010

Pear Is Barking

I love structure, if you haven't noticed. But I also less obviously believe in paying attention to your life as it naturally grows out of you, as I wrote in an earlier life:

Sometimes you can form the days of your life from the outside, like making pears grow into little Buddhas; you clamp a mold around Tuesday and Wednesday, and an outline for a time travel screenplay, amazingly, pops out. I wonder what the failure rate is for Buddha-shaped pears, though. There must be some runty pears that never fill out into full-figured Buddhas, and others that overflow into Jabba The Hut pears. Because life sure isn't a bowl of serenely smiling pears. Well. Possibly the reason for this is that life is nothing like a pear. But pretend that it is! Pretend that it's just like trying to grow Buddha-shaped pears, and sometimes the pears don't turn out. Because that's how my life is. Because inside, the pear has its own instructions. Sometimes you can stop telling the pear what to do, and take instructions from the pear for a change (10/29/09).
Well, this is what the pear wants: nights off practice during the week, I can do housework or bills. Or you know, spend time with the sweetie man while awake. Not: writing. Not even on days off work, when what seems most important is to wash the kitchen floor.

So fine, early morning practices on the weekend. Truthfully, the pear wishes practices were at ten instead of Saturday at nine and Sunday at eight, and actually the pear wishes we didn't have to practice Sundays at all. It likes being on Second Wind, though. It's tough to get out of bed, but practice wakes you up. You're done by eleven and ten, so you have the whole day ahead; you could clean the house then, or sit down and write your screenplay. But no, the pear wants to eat a bowl of cereal and go back to bed. For the rest of the day, pretty much. I really could not care less about cleaning or writing. And I have cured myself more or less of being able to do things that I don't want to do. This sounds pretty terrible, but I'm serious about being serious about recovery. I will have more to say about this later, but it seems that my subconscious has gotten with the program. Though I just heard my subconscious roll its eyes. Just because you're verbal doesn't mean I'm not way ahead of you. But because I'm verbal, I can tell you that I'm doing a lot better now that I'm not struggling with my subconscious or with my body more to the point. I can't expect my body to succeed if I ask it to work and don't allow for rest. Doing derby is like an iceberg, the part that doesn't show is how much rest you need. I mean, everything is like an iceberg. Everything takes more time than you think, you have to calculate the whole volume of the iceberg you're taking on or you're going to sink your little boat.

Except then Monday morning, I go into work and then I want to write. The switch was off, now it's on. Ideas are spewing out of my head, I should probably say, not for my screenplay, but for freelance articles. When what I need to do is redesign this database. If the pear had its way like it does on the weekend, I would chuck the database and work on articles; but the pear has to pay rent, and also, hello, plays derby and needs health insurance.

Just because I'm not answering doesn't mean that I don't hear you, pear. I'm thinking. Don't give me hives or anything to get my attention.

My mom used to say, Dog is barking! when nobody listened to her about dinner being on the table.