In which she goes to a conference...

Tomorrow I head off to the Iowa SCBWI Spring conference for some thrill-packed writing adventure. I can't possibly attend any portion of the conference without agonizing. Not over my manuscripts, mind you, I leave them home. My wardrobe. Because this just isn't an outing with other writers, the dreaded editors will be there, too.

What to wear, what to wear so as not too look too old, too short, too fat, too serious, too frivolous, too unprofessional, too self-involved, too uninvolved, too...something that you shouldn't look like you are. (But might be. I chew my lower lip. I'm not any of these things, am I? I hope not. I mean, what's the worst thing on the list? Too fat, maybe? I've met a lot of skinny editors...) So I'll go and try on everything in my closet. And decide I look fat in all of it.

So I will go to the mall and try things on. And look fat in all of it. I'll try on something conservative and feel old. Then I'll put on something trendy and feel...like an old person trying too hard to look young.

So, I'll give up and try on shoes. All of which hurt my feet or are too expensive or the wrong shade (exactly what I'm trying to match I don't know, but never mind that, they're the wrong shade).

The calender is ticking away and I still have nothing to wear.
I go back to my closet and see if there is something that could work if I only had the right accessories...and get disgusted at myself and pull something out, hang it on the closet door, deciding !THIS! is what I'll wear. Sheesh. Enough already.
Until the next day, when I think...so-and-so will be wearing jeans and if I wear something dressier it will look like I spend too much time on what I wear...and I'll go back to the mall, because all of my jeans are worn and not the right shade to wear with a really cute top, which I don't have...

At which point I'm glad that only signed up for one day of this three day event, because I'm already exhausted. Imagine what it would be like if I had to find things to wear for all three days!

I need another coffee.
Susan, who is going to go color her hair now...

In which she tries a little physical therapy...

It is self-evident truth that any new endeavor will be met with an interruption equal to or greater than the endeavor, thereby creating friction which will result in a failure to sustain momentum. Which is what all Physics textbooks should say if they were really any good.

So, I started my blog, wherein I would indulge my own personal version of crankiness, and developed a problem with my right foot and later injured my left shoulder...which just goes to show the essential balance in nature, seeing as how I had pain on both sides of my body. SO I did what any busy adult would do, I put up with it all and kept going. I used painkillers (the OTC kind until a doctor gave me some anti-inflammatory ones). *Note: pain killers don't actually kill pain, they just confuse the pain for 4-6 hours after which the pain remembers how much it doesn't like you, your foot, or you shoulder and rouses itself with a vengeance.*
In all fairness, this did ramp up my crankiness, but not my desire to write about it...
so...after months of limping and holding my arm clamped against my side...I went to two specialists (because you can't see just one, shoulder and foot being so totally not the same thing). Both had the same amazing treatment plan: cortisone shots. I don't do needles. Seriously. No needles. Well, at a more basic level I just don't do pain--ok ok the foot hurt, the shoulder hurt, what I mean here is INFLICTED pain, as in pain doctors think is good for you--and since needles and pain have a disturbingly co-dependent relationship, I avoid both. Which I expressed in the most eloquent and firmest of terms.

NO needles, I shrieked.

I must have made my point because the foot doctor wrapped my foot to relieve the pressure and the shoulder doctor sent me to a physical therapist.
which involves a whole other brand of pain...

You want me to eat what?

Have you ever wondered why your friends can't just eat things 

without feeling the need to feed them to you? I mean some 

things just don't inspire in me a deep abiding desire to put 

them in my mouth. Seriously. Like cottage cheese...pasty 

little bumps...what are they, anyway? Sour milk lumps? 

Smooshed up cheeses? I'm not even sure I want to 

know.

So a posh friend offers me a slick white plate of little

wafers topped with a quarter teaspoon of glistening black 

goo...

Caviar, she gushes, try one.

And I'm thinking, isn't caviar fish eggs? Isn't that 

cracker smeared with dozens of eggs full of teeny tiny baby 

fishes? Teeny tiny RAW baby fishes. This does not make me hungry. 

I demur, watching my cholesterol, I murmur.

(do teeny tiny raw baby fishes contain cholesterol?)

Oh, silly, she says, pop one in and crush it against the 

roof of your mouth. 

She demonstrates.

I feel queasy contemplating the slaughter of myriads of teeny 

tiny baby fishes...and eat an egg roll instead. Egg rolls do 

not contain eggs, but have little shrimps which are shrimp, 

which are not fishes exactly, or at least not teeny tiny baby 

fishes...those are grown-up fending for themselves 

shrimpy-fishes I'm eating. Which is totally different. 

Not to mention cooked.

In which she gets cranky...

I used to have a blog where I wrote about writing. Craft. Book reviews. Book news. And I discovered that after writing fiction the last thing I wanted to do was, well, write about writing. So I avoided my blog. Gave it the cold shoulder. Humming (being constitutionally unable to whistle--now why is that? Must ponder that one sometime)  tunelessly to drown out the whining nagging and increasingly strident voice of my neglected blog calling to me to update it already. So I taught it a lesson; I deleted it.

But I miss it. (oh, the perversity of human nature, never satisfied! And any minute now it will think it wants a cookie, which it DOES NOT NEED.) Then a writing friend of mine (the best kind of friend to have) suggested to me that I blog about my crankiness.

Crankiness? you ask, what the heck. No, really, crankiness...not cranky as in crabby (ok ok so maybe a tiny bit crabby, sometimes) but crankiness as in crank. As in the little lever that turns things. The niggling little issues of life that turn one's crank and set one's blood simmering. Not boiling, just simmering.
AH, let the crankiness commence!