Dreaming Crazy

King is still alive. For now.

The past couple of nights have been full of bizarro dreams. Both nights due nights due to storytelling. When I can't sleep, sometimes the little girl in me wants to be read to. It takes me away, and gives my Monkey Mind something to grasp onto so that it doesn't start obsessing over dogs that died twenty years ago. (which is always how I know it's time to simply give up on sleep and get up and vacuum or something because I'm beyond hope)

Sunday night I listened to stories by Neil Gaiman. NOT a good idea at bedtime. Garaunteed to give you H.P. Lovecraft dreams. Last night I went to sleep listening to a murder mystery, which seemed fine when I started, but gradually the story got more and more suspenseful until finally I sat up and shut it off right before they found the second body. It was just too much at bedtime!
I need to listen to Proust or something. In grad school, literary theory was my ticket straight to slumberland. Oh who am I kidding? I never cracked my theory book. Not once. I managed to stay awake through a lot of stuff that might have put others to sleep... had no problem translating Old English, for example. But the 18th century about killed me. Except for Johnson. I have the highest regard for Samuel Johnson.

Tonight, no more books on tape. I have to just go to sleep like normal people.

Grayson is complaining of "feeling like pus" tonight. Not sure exactly what that indicates, but I'm pretty sure it's not good. Lately I'm never sure if I should believe him or not when he says he doesn't feel well. In his favor, he was dozing on the sofa when I got home, which he never does. Against him: he did run around the living room shouting "tickle me! Tickle me!" after dinner. In his favor: he asked for pancakes for dinner ( a special favorite), but then only ate half of one pancake. Against him: he later devoured a bowl of icecream. I just don't know which way to jump.

I reminded him that a day out of school means a full day's worth of schoolwork that will have to be done at home. I'm just hoping he's functional tomorrow.


We got his school pictures back, as you can see. He's never this serious. But in last fall's picture he was wearing this lopsided smirk, and he was determined not to do that again, so I suppose he just opted for the almost-smile instead. He does wear his glasses like this: half sliding down his nose. It drives me nuts: always makes me want to give them a shove into place, but apparently it's how he likes them, because that's where they always are.

He's a handsome boy, isn't he? I mean, aside from the obvious geekiness of being a ten-year-old. I think he will grow up to be handsome. I realize that, as his mother, I may be a bit biased, particularly since people tell me all the time that he looks like me. Lately, though... he just looks more and more like Grayson to me. His Own Self.

Dead in the Water

Still stalled out on the writing. No excuse, just stalled.

Once again I'm resolving to Do something with my life: get off my ass, make something of myself. At least get into shape... and not the shape I'm headed for at present, which is sort of bulbous and squishy. (She heaves a great sigh). So once again I'm off to the gym, which I despise, because otherwise I'm just going to degenerate into a great glob of goo, which won't make me feel very nice about myself, and lord knows I need all the help in that department I can get.

We killed a crab, already. Oh, had I not mentioned the crabs?

I allowed Grayson to adopt two fiddler crabs from his classroom at school. They seemed easy enough to take care of. A little salt water, some banana and dried shrimp... But one of them died within a week. I think it got too hot for them. In typical fashion, as I was trying to do good, I accomplished the exact opposite. I put a warming light on the tank, and it got up to 100 degrees in there... a temperature Mambo probably would have loved, but it was too much for poor Neil, one of the two male fiddlers. Now we are left with only King... who is King of no one now that he doesn't have Neil to push around anymore. Just chalk it up to the long list of creatures I have killed in the name of providing unusual pets for my son, who cried when I told him Neil was no more, and I wanted to kick myself for, once again, breaking his heart.

Gray told me, when I mentioned adopting the crabs, that I don't have a very good history with non-mammalian pets and maybe I should think twice about adopting more. He was right, it seems.

Today King is still alive. I checked. He's boring as all hell. They don't do anything. I never even catch him eating anything. I think they're even more boring than Mambo was.

Today it's windy and I've got nervous dogs to deal with. I don't know what it is about wind that turns Kobi into a neurotic mess, but I've noticed lately that storms, or even just wind, make her very quivery and clingy. It would be sweet if it wasn't so damned annoying. All morning I was shoving her off my lap, or trying to get comfortable with her lying on my chest, panting into my face while I tried to hold a book to read over her shoulder. She's usually such a cheeky little thing, it surprises me to see her come to pieces that way. I finally gave up reading, just to escape her.

Lately, she gets to drive around in the car a lot. She's always out of the yard, and the fastest way to collect her is to simply stop at the side of the road and let her climb into the car and go with you wherever you happen to be going. Consequently, she gets to ride around a lot, but she also spends a certain amount of time cooling her heels in parking lots. The wages of sin, I suppose. I really should fire up the electric wire on the fence again, to keep her in. But it freaks FLower out so much, that I'm reluctant.

Off to the gym now, armed with a new book on my iphone to hopefully keep me entertained enough to keep me there for the required hour. Sigh.

Reach for That Brass Ring aaaaand.....

I've decided not to feel bad about myself for not being Neil Gaiman. Neil's the Super Genius who wrote Coraline, the Sandman series of Graphic Novels and, one of my favorite books ever: Neverwhere. He's prolific and amazing. Me... less so. But I am plodding along, trying to get the hang of this writing thing.

At present I'm stalled out. I haven't written since Monday because I can't figure out What Happens Next. I am familiar with the overall arch of my story, but I am at a point where I need a bridge from Here to There, and I'm in a quandary. I'm going to need to take a few long, hot showers. Maybe then it will come to me.

Writing is hard. I admire the authors, like Neil Gaiman, for whom it seems to just spin forth... and I also admire those others for whom it is a more laborious process, or seems to be, but they just keep at it. Myself, I'll consider it a wild success if I can just manage to finish this one book... this one story I've been carrying in my head for years. If I can just get it on paper, I'll have won.

I am hoping to get back into it soon because I'm wildly bored otherwise. I have to admit that lately my job bores me beyond words. Oh, I love the museum: I love all the crazy specimens and the crazy curators and the exhibits and the visitors and the wonderful volunteers. But I'm heartily sick of writing the same press releases year in and year out, cranking out the same old tripe. Even the newsletter, which used to be a labor of love, has become a chore. The blog is more interesting, but you can't maintain a PR program on blog entries.

Part of my malaise is seasonal. This is a classically slow time of year. Programming trickles to a standstill by the first week of December. I won't have a new exhibition to write about until the spring, curatorial field work is at nil. Part of my problem is the routine. And part of it is this new fundraising function I've been handed.

I've been tasked with raising the next year's crop of corporate sponsors. Whoops. We're now calling them Corporate Partners. Essentially I need to go in and ask a bunch of businesses and corporations for money. Well... at first that was what I was doing. Now it's been revamped so that I'm essentially selling them advertising via the museum. So instead of asking for money, I'm a salesperson. Either way, I'm uniquely ill-suited for it.

I tried to approach this new role with enthusiasm. I tried to tell myself I just needed to hit that learning curve full force and go for it. But I'm petering out. I can pitch the museum all day to anyone who will listen... and plenty of people who won't. But I don't like asking them for money. This is, I think, the main problem with me and work now. This is the Big Thing I should be working on at this time of year, and I just haven't been able to work up any enthusiasm for it. Every day I futz with it a little bit, worry over it, move papers around. Make a couple of phone calls. But I'm not diving into like I know I should. And it's wearing on my conscience.

Today! I tell myself. Today I'll go after this project like Roxy with an unattended steak dinner. And so this morning once more I'm girding my loins, so to speak, to prepare for another day of figuring out which end of this thing to bite.

There. That was my do-gooder talk for the morning.

Yesterday at noon my student assistant and I went over to the OU Art school for the annual "Chili Bowl" fundraiser. For $15 you get to pick your own hand-turned clay bowl and fill it with all the homemade chili you can manage. There were probably 25 crockpots full of chili! Long tables filled the school's Lightwell gallery, and students, faculty, OU staff from every department, staff from the Norman CVB and the Arts Council, just about everyone in town was there, cheek-by-jowl, comparing their bowls and snarfing chili. It has to be a terrific fundraiser. Nearly zero costs: just for the sodas and supplies to make the bowls. The students do the turning and glazing. The staff and faculty come up with the chili. Genius. And fun, too, to see so many different folks piling in together for comfort food and an earthen dish. I sat between an art history faculty member and a first-year art student who was coming back to school to learn photography after spending several years in the oil business with his electrical engineering degree. Go figure.

Bob popped in only briefly, large social scenes being not his Bag, baby. I think it still sort of scandalizes my assistant that her first-year drawing teacher is dating her boss. His contribution to the chili cook-off is several cans of Hormel, dumped into my crock-pot. Its title is "More Fartsy, Less Artsy."