In Which All Is Not Crankiness

4 December 2003

Last night as I was going to bed, oh, I was cranky. Oh my oh my. Mark accused me of getting sick, and I hope he was wrong (not least because we don't want to give it to Roo and would have to postpone the Eighth Floor if I was -- but I show no signs other than crankiness and slight overwarmth), but if it wasn't, I was deeply cranky for no reason at all. Here's a small sampling of what annoyed me:
Coughing
Farting (When I was little my mom taught me to call this fluffing. She thought it sounded more polite. Brought me hours of laughter when I was 21 and went to the grocery store and saw a bag of cherry fluff. Heehee. Sorry. I'm mentally about 5 years old, but that still amuses me.)
Itching
The smell of my lotion
Running out of my lotion and knowing I'll have to go pick out new lotion that will smell different and have the smell of a stranger following me around for a week or two and then they'll discontinue that lotion, too, because they hate me
The fact that they discontinued Mark's shampoo scent, so I already have the smell of a stranger hanging around the house this week
Being touched
Not being touched
The prospect of eating
The prospect of just going hungry until morning
My old pillows
The prospect of breaking in new pillows
Being hot
Being cold
Having my hair loose
The prospect of braiding my hair
The prospect of cutting my hair
The drip of the master bathroom sink, which just started a week ago...
...and reminds me of the leak under the kitchen sink
Having to go back and get a different new part for the toilet because the two options I bought were both wrong (and luckily can be returned)
My back, shoulders, and neck
The prospect of staying awake
The prospect of going to sleep....

So yeah. Definitely Little Miss Crankypants. I was the kind of cranky little kids get and whine and twitch and don't make entirely clear what's wrong with them. I find it no more appealing in myself than in a four-year-old. And I'm afraid I'm still a little twitchy this morning. Maybe I should go out in the cold. I get like this in January, but I haven't been cooped up.

The obvious answer is the back. I haven't called Andrew's old chiropractor yet. I should. I need to. The back is no good. The back is not going to get magically good. I've been doing stretches that help a little bit, but mostly it's just no good, and I need help fixing that, not (my default solution) better hydration. Although I'm sure better hydration will help because, hey, when does it hurt? Even on the airplane when it doesn't make contact lenses bearable, it just means you have to use the airplane bathroom, hydration is not a bad thing. Right? Yeah. Not a mistake to drink more water. Probably won't fix things, though.

And we have rejections! Specifically, I got two forwarded rejections and a bunch of other forwarded mail, with postmark dates between 11/14 and 11/17. So, a fortnight delay from sending to receipt. Could be worse. (Part of me grumbles that they could send it by Pony Express in that time, but I try to make that part shush.) I have now gone through the NE-glected, IN-spected, and RE-jected parts, and I'm hoping to get the SE-lected without having to deal with the IN-jected. I don't s'pose Arlo has much influence with speculative fiction editors. Hmm. Or he may, but I don't have much influence with him.

So I've sent one of those out e-subbing and will get the other one in the mailbox today, and they're on the "safe" list now: no guarantees that they won't get lost along the way, but at least they're going to and from the right address. Which is something.

I went through all the children's book boxes and didn't find The Arm of the Starfish, nor the E. Nesbits, nor a lot of the other books from when I was a kid. So I think the folks have more somewhere in their house. It can't be an endless stream of children's books...one would theorize...and yet, it seems that there are more yet to come. Which is good, really, despite my ever-increasing desire to read The Arm of the Starfish; gives me something to look forward to. (Not that I lack for those. I am very good at Stuff To Look Forward To.)

Here's what I hate about the new hotmail format: it will tell you whether you have new mail from "Your Contacts!" (My contacts had better not send me mail. That sounds like the beginning of a very bad horror movie where someone's brain is eaten by their very own eyes. Muwaha.) It will tell you whether you have new mail in your junk mail folder. But new mail in your inbox, neither from some dumb list nor from someone they have pegged as a useless jerk? That's a secret. You have to go into the inbox to find out. This is not added utility, people!

But all is not crankiness. Despite back nasties, I'm feeling fairly cheerful this morning. I named the Nameless, I wrote some scene bits and edited a bunch of pages and worked on some other stuff on the concept level. I wrote in Christmas cards. I did stuff. It was pretty good, and it'll probably be pretty good again today, with editing and pondering and laundry and baking. And fixing the toilet won't be that big a deal, I hope, and all the other chore things won't, either. I hope. There's a lot of one-shot stuff to do around here, and if I can just get past it, things will look a lot more manageable. I hope.

It thought about snowing last night but then decided not to; it's supposed to think about it again tonight, but I don't know that I believe these things until I see them. I could do with a little more snow, though.

I seem to be oscillating, in my writing projects, between being excited about too many of them and being excited about none. It feels like those oscillations are damping down towards a workable median. I hope so. Yesterday I worked on bits of three novels and yearned after a short story. I do this to myself from time to time. I get over it, sort of, until it pops up again. I think I just need to have patience with myself with it now. I need to accept that sometimes this is just how things are, and that mostly it'll swing towards wanting to do too many projects at once. And that as long as I don't indulge that for too many days in a row, it should be okay.

Right. That's the theory. Acceptance but not indulgence. Organization but not obsession. Relaxation but not slacking. Balancebalancebalancebalance, and right now, darn it.

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