Life in the cube

Oops, it’s been a while since I blogged. Busy week you see. Busy, oh my, how can I be that tired when it’s only Tuesday kind of week. I have these days when I find myself at the desk at 6.30/7, knowing I still have heaps more to do, knowing that the longer I stay the later I will get home, which means less sleep time – everything seems squeezed. Work, play, sleep, all squeezed into smaller bite sizes than I would like them to be, all nudging each other, elbowing sharp jabs to make room for themselves. And it’s self reinforcing. The problem with doing project work is that turning up to work and making it through your shift doesn’t cut it. You have to actually produce what you said you would by when you said you would. So if you are feeling tired and crap and don’t get much done, there is just more to do the next day. It kind of slides towards the end of the week like a landslide. And if the work you have in front of you to do takes longer than planned, or is icky and complex thinking and needs some concerted skirting and procrastination, forget it – you’re screwed. So you work later. So you sleep less. So you’re tired and work less effectively. So you work later. So you sleep less. Well that’s how it seems to me this Wednesday.


Rejection bites

(In the spirit of ‘oh fuck it we’ll all be dead one day anyway, let’s not stand on ceremony’ I offer you the following far too much information and undiluted teen diary style confessions.) Well I heard back from the writing thing, and I didn’t get a fellowship. I suppose I’m not all that surprised, really, but you know, I am also a bit sad. Sure it might have been unrealistic to think the very first thing I sent in anywhere would be received with fanfare and offers of publishing. Sure, I submitted about a zillion (actually 67 but who’s counting) probably very crap poems and some fragments that were hardly stories. Sure I have absolutely no history as a writer and so the bio I wrote was very lame. But nonetheless, it kind of bites. I think maybe I thought somehow it would end up (with a few steps in between) with me settled in to a stucco house in Mexico, quietly licking my pencil and scrawling away during hot mornings, sipping coffee, watching shafts of sun move across the high ceilinged room, light coming through big calico curtains and illuminating dark red walls, looking forward to my walk to the dusty markets at lunchtime, an afternoon spent squeezing colours out of tubes and getting them on to canvas, and then an evening getting a cooking lesson with local friends, laughing at my bad tortilla making, eating mole and maybe heading out to the zoccalo for some music and dancing with tall* strangers in the cool dark. Licking lime juice and salt off skin, smelling ocean, tasting spice in hot chocolate. So no wonder I’m bloody disappointed! It wasn’t just a measly 3 week writing retreat I missed out on, it was my entire imaginary life funded through and linked to writing.

*Huh! In Mexico?? Told you I was a dreamer.