Writer's block or word slavery?

I stayed up late one night, and now I can't sleep. I close my eyes, lying in bed, listening to everyone else breathe deeply around me, and I can't sleep.

Words float through my mind. They are gentle at first, lazily swirling around and barely taking shape. Rapidly, rudely, they become more demanding. Crashing into one another, and the edges of my brain, they chant and stomp inside my head.

Write me, they command. You know you must.

Because I can never find balance there. I either have words, or I have no words. They don't come at me slowly, measured over time. They either crash in on my awareness and demand full attention like a baby with an empty belly or they dry up inside me and blow away like a dandelion's parachute ball in the wind.

(see how I'm practicing my metaphors? how'm I doin'?)

So, I write. I write until my hand cramps and I run out of lead in my mechanical pencil. I write about an author, and a business woman. The two become friends. I think they want to be lovers.

I have just begun reading The Tao of Writing; it's supposed to help writers write. I had been feeling like I have a block, the dreaded writer's block, and I realised that I've never not had that block.

I lament this block and its unfairness. I shut my book and turn off the light, and as soon as I do the words start their seductive dance inside my head. I thought about opening the gates of creativity, and then it happened. How cool is that?

Now, Universe, about that million dollars and the good night's rest I've been seeking...

I forgot to go to bed

I sit curled on the couch with my Tinkerbelle blanket (don't laugh at me, Internet, I know you heart Tinkerbelle too) draped across my lap. I am reading Loose Girl: a memoir of promiscuity.

It is 2am, and I can't stop reading.

My kitten burrows under the blanket and presses himself as close to me as he can get. I pet him, because I don't know what else to do.

We're comfortable, reading our book under a warm blanket and drinking frosty cold Mtn Dew. We wish we were in bed with Mr. J.

We're not ready to put the book away yet though, so Mr. J will have to wait.

Paying attention (or not)

I got really mad at an employee today. A mistake was made on Monday that came to light today: someone forgot to attach the whosits to the whirlygigs, and instead sent the lot off to the doohickey factory without all the right components. It was quite a problem: I got a call from Mr. Foreman who couldn't reconcile his thingamajigs, therefore wasn't paying his bill, and he needs his whirlygigs RIGHT NOW. It was a big fucking deal.

Aside from causing a problem for a customer, I really felt like whoever made the mistake should have known better. I mean, I'm a responsible manager and I have worked very hard at providing information to my group so that these types of mistakes do not happen. I have spreadsheets to help people do their jobs better, what more can a person need?

So I do that manager thing where I breathe deeply to get the murder out of my brain and then I start creating documentation. I figure out who made the mistake -then I had to do some more deep breathing because that person has worked for me in the same capacity for close to five years and why in the name of all that is right in the world would she suddenly forget how attach the whosits and whatnot?- and I start filling out forms. I furiously type of the nature of the incident, filling in dates and employee numbers and what is expected of a person in her position, and so on.

As I do this I prepare myself mentally for the conversation I will have with her: I will explain why her mistake is such an incredible problem for me, and for us all. I will elucidate the sort of research she should do in the future when she performs the same task -the task she has performed a thousand Mondays in a row. I will outline for her, both verbally and in writing, what I expect of her (attention to detail, thankyouverymuch and god-dammit) when I expect it and what will happen if she doesn't straighten herself up, posthaste.

Attention to detail is among the most important factors of what my group does. There isn't a mistake that I cannot fix; there isn't one thing, no matter how bad, that anyone who works for me can do that I haven't already fucked up royally. I have made the worst mistakes of anyone and I know how to fix them all. And from it I have learned that the majority of the mistakes I have made were from lack of attention to detail. Follow the rules, clarify what you don't understand, and pay attention to what you're doing and why you're doing it, and everything will work out fine. I drill this into their heads, have been repeating it for years. Imagine my frustration.

Because I'm such a busy little bee (or maybe just disorganised), I can rarely complete any task before getting interrupted. I don't get to finish my forms before someone comes to remind me that I'm late (again) to my weekly meeting with my core support staff. So I leave my half-finished forms and head into the conference room.

Straight off one of my (favourite, shhh) employees says to me, "You know, I think I made a mistake last week when I was putting the whosits with the whirlygigs, and the more I think about it the more I'm sure I didn't do it right. Can you help me figure that out when we're done here?"

Imagine my blank stare. This isn't the person I was boiling mad at. I was certain it was a different employee. After the meeting I went back to my desk and double checked who made the mistake and I had the employee all wrong. I was looking at a different column when I was doing my initial research and almost jumped down the throat of the wrong person. The girl who actually made the mistake? Well, she's new to that task so the mistake is suddenly a lot more forgivable.

Some attention to detail I've got, huh? Oops.

Dying kitten inspires Buddhist monk

I was reading in the bath tonight about mettā. That's loving-kindness meditation for those of us who don't speak Pāli. Ajahn Brahm -quite possibly the coolest man ever (sorry honey, he updates more often than you do)- tells us to start our mettā meditation with an object towards which we can feel immediate loving-kindness.

He chooses a kitten (how perfect is that?). A broken, hungry, mangy, cold, rejected, bloody, half-dead kitten.

I get what he's doing: find something you can project your love at without hesitation, something that inspires feelings of compassion and love without question or doubt, without judgment or a second thought. And what better object than a kitten which needs his love, and his kindness?

Even so, it tickles me that he describes in such detail the horrible, scared, lonely death his imaginary kitten will suffer, and that's how he reaches that loving-kindness inside himself. It tickles me that his style of teaching and writing isn't all head-in-the-clouds enlightenment talk that only other totally evolved supreme-being types would get. It's real stuff that even I can relate to.

Ajahn Brahm uses the word "frigging" when he talks about awareness of the breath in meditation. Not words one would expect from a Buddhist monk, but words I can relate to.

Plus he giggles when he talks about how we're all going to die some day. How can you not love that?

I've been thinking about this mettā business, trying to decide what object I'll use. I thought about borrowing Brahm's dying kitten, but that just makes me think of Pet Cemetery then I can't control the giggling. I'm far too morbid to actually focus on something that might be dying, and not nearly compassionate enough to focus on something that actually needs me to nurture it. I'm too critical to focus on myself, and too bitchy to focus on anyone else. What does that leave me?

I think, for now at least, that I won't be reaching Jhāna anytime soon.

What do you focus your loving-kindness meditation on?

I sing in the shower

Cyndi Lauper keeps me company while I get ready for the day. Together we sing about our hat full of stars. I think we might cry a little, and I'm not sure why.

I multi-task, cleaning my contacts while doing silly exercises to slim down my butt. Twenty-five leg lifts for twenty-five seconds of rubbing solution onto my contacts.

I can't stop singing while I do it, and then I discover something new: I can visualise numbers. I have never been able to do that before, not while doing anything else.

So we sing together, Cyndi and I, and we cry and clean our contacts and visualise numbers while exercising. I feel rather productive, doing all that stuff at once.

Now I won't have to take time out of the rest of my day to cry or meditate or sing.

There's a stranger inside me

Five minutes ago I sat down to write my life story.

Only, it wasn't five minutes ago and it wasn't my life. It is the life of the woman who wears my skin. She's sort of a bitch, distant and mean.

She closes herself off and shuts others out. She makes up stories in her head, and the people in her brain never act the way she wants them to.

She never acts the way she wants to. She doesn't know how, and watching her try to learn is like watching a small child try to turn a screw with a hammer.

Confession

I need a confessional. With a priest and some Hail Marys. I have sins, badness inside me. Most of the time I am okay with my badness but sometimes... oh, sometimes it just claws up my insides, like a cat trying desperately to cover up its own shit with too little sand, it claws and scratches and tears at the inside of my soul.

I have mean thoughts about people, wish misfortune on people who irritate me in traffic; I do not practice loving-kindness all the time. I take God's name in vain. I have lustful thoughts about my neighbour's wife.

Frustration, like the badness inside me, wells up out of nowhere today. I have no patience, only mean-spirited thoughts. I have even less compassion than normal. I want to cry and pull my hair out of my scalp. I want to grind something fat under my heel until it bursts into a bloody mess.

Only I won't do any of that. Look at how I'm practicing such good self-control.

Starting over

I started over meditating today. I peed, put on comfortable yoga pants, applied lip balm, and did 42 different things that would begin to bother me about ten seconds into the meditation if I didn't do them beforehand...

I set the timer for five minutes: I didn't think I could handle much more than that. I sat down, closed my eyes, and tried to clear my mind.

Anyone who has been meditating for any amount of time knows just how.fucking.hard that is. My mind refused to be cleared, simply would not cooperate with all the whirly thoughts in my head.

I also started over with a new-old friend: I went to lunch with an old girlfriend today, and now I'm flooded with memories I haven't dragged out of the back of my mind in over a decade. We weren't together long, but she was an important element during a pivotal period of my life.

And now, I think she'll be a good friend. I feel like Harry, of When Harry Met Sally... "Hmmm. A woman friend."

And just as I started to get control of my racing thoughts and really focus on my breathing and do the whole present moment awareness thing, the bloody timer sounded. Go figure.

After the meditation I did some really great downward-facing dog to plank to cat/cow series that makes my body heat up from head to toe and my triceps ache in a delicious way.

My broken heart

I was talking to a friend the other day; his wife was upset at him and he was describing her behaviour, how she would come into the room to hand him things but wouldn't speak to him. I told him how that's a trick women do, something to make our husbands aware of our presence and how very mad we are while not speaking, just to build up some tension.

I was thinking about that today while I was getting ready; I remember when Colin and I were first together and I was so very young. I had no idea how to be in a relationship but I did angry martyr really well. And I would do that thing... stomping around the house stony-faced and mad and not saying a word. I remember the first time I really knew that I loved Colin; he said something that hurt my feelings and I did some silent, sullen stomping until he poked me in the arm and said, "I'm not going to play your game. If you have something to say just say it."

I cried today in the shower when I remembered that, cried like I did that first morning when I woke up in a new day and realised he really wasn't here anymore.

Nearly nine years dead and he can still break my heart.

Birds are dumb

There is a bird who lives in the tree outside my bedroom window. He (I'm assuming he because he has the poor taste to be so god-damned happy in the mornings) sings in his happy-chirpy voice at first light.

I've started noticing that he's also happy-chirpy in the evenings. I assumed, not being wild about birds and therefore not knowing anything about birds that don't live in cages, that after the sun was up he would go on about his day. Fly out into the world and conduct his little birdy business and return after sunset for sleeping-time.

No. That's not what happens. He sings in the afternoons too. And well into the evenings. I think this bird is mocking me. He's mocking my headache and my usual surly grumpiness in the mornings and my stress and my frustration.

I don't know why one little birdy can be so completely happy. Is it the way he's made? Perhaps his happiness stems from his existence. Maybe he is happy simply because he is alive and has a voice. Do birds have earthly pleasures? Do they experience confusion and love and torment and sexual desire?

Perhaps being a bird would be better, but I rather like my silly, twisted confusion about life. I just really wish this little guy would go sing outside another girl's window once in a while.