My taxes are done. I hope yours are too.
***
I have been trolling all over the booky internet for the last few hours and I must say I feel a bit defeated, a little shrunken in the brain. With all my attempts to narrow my focus and work harder on fewer things, I seem to be missing out on a lot of fun and interesting thoughts. To make matters worse, my efforts do not seem to be producing much in the way of results. I still feel as stressed, scattered and one-step-behind as usual. In fact, I feel like this in more aspects of my life than usual. It feels bad. What do you do when doing what you do feels bad?
***
Last night I watched a NOVA special on "The First Flower." It was really very visually beautiful and I learned a bit about China and angry paleobotanists while watching it. The best part were all the interior shots of Kew Gardens' buildings, all ornate ironwork and big windows. The last time I was there I really enjoyed myself. The melancholy of a place that is meant to take you far away from another place, a place for whatever reason you can't leave, appeals to me. During my visit some of the glasshouses were being worked on and the workers seemed to take great care with what they were doing, unlike the grubby, glassy-eyed construction guys I see around here. My father and I spoke with one of them for a while. He seemed so perfectly balanced and sensitive beneath all his denim that it was like he sprang from the pages of a bad novel about middle-agers finding love... for the second time.
Sometimes I wonder what my neighbors think of me when they see me squatting around in my garden, stirring compost and molesting my plants. Do they think of chick lit? I hope not.
***
I just started reading H20 by Mark Swartz and enjoying it. I don't have much of a grasp what it is about yet. It was sent to me with the idea that it was SF-y back catalog stuff from Soft Skull press. Last night I finished the other book in that package and brought it with me to the bar where my boy's band was playing. I ended up talking to a group that liked SF and one of the people said that he had brought two SF books along with him to the bar. After I showed him mine, he wouldn't show me his. It was lame. Obviously there was going to be no fun made. He did recommend someone named Dan Simons though. Anyone know anything about him?
4 comments:
Dan Simmons wrote this series of novels about this creature call The Shrike - I think the first one is Hyperion. They were all right. Anyway, he recently wrote a book called The Terror, about the HMS Terror's trip to the North Pole, if I'm not mistaken. It's a horror novel (a monster-in-the-house story in the parlance of Blake Snyder's Save the Cat.)
As for missing out on fun stuff, no matter what you do, that's going to happen. As for dealing with it... all I can tell you is htat eating away the pain doesn't work.
Thanks for the info on the author.
I know about missing out on actual stuff, I do that all the time, willingly, it's more that my brain is all wrapped up in books and stress and the fun and rewarding ideas just aren't coming.
As for eating, I have a tendency to do the opposite, despite what you may have noticed in our "office."
PS. I linked you over there--> Good luck with all your projects.
I watched that Nova and thought of you, knowing how much you enjoyed flowers and plants in general.
Matt:
Yes, I had a little nerdgasm during it. Plus all the shots of that flower-covered place in China was almost too much to take.
Post a Comment