Tired and a little grumpy

I am wicked tired. I don't know why exactly, but I would guess that a day of eating, movie, more eating, another movie, yet more eating and finally surfing around on the 'Net is probably to blame. It is amazing how a whole day of nothing can just wear you out.

I shared about the tiredness so I could solicit some props for writing this entry. I really, really, really do not feel like writing. I actually have no problem with the physicality of typing, that's no problem, but the effort of stringing together words into coherent thoughts just feels like some Herculean sort of effort. If I could expand yesterday's running metaphor: today I feel like I am trying to run in sand, or through mud. Every word I push forward into my consciousness to replicate on the screen here is hard.

My wrist has decided to act up, too, giving my some little twinges. I have to say, my body is good about producing psychosomatic symptoms. If there is something I really feel like I don't want to do, I can find a pain or an ache to use to put it off. And this was true even before I got quite so fat and old and things actually started to mis-fire without some hypochondriatic prodding. When I was younger and in better shape, I was better about pushing through my aches and pains to accomplish things.

PSA: I have stopped my above rant/whine to produce what I feel is an important Public Service Announcement. Twice in two days (yesterday and today), I have lost my draft post off Blogspot. Yesterday it was because I was testing an internal link in the post and lost my draft when I came back. Today, in my tiredness I hit some wrong combination of keys and kicked myself off the Internet altogether. The lesson here is to compose in the word processing program of your choice and copy it into the blog. Luckily for me, I had been copying and pasting my blogs into Word so I could check the word count and therefore was able to retain almost all my text. (I lost the last 15 minutes of work yesterday. It was a good post, but I think it could have been better, but that little bit of inspiration had already gone by.)

Okay, message sent to any random person reading this. If I can save just one other person from the heartache of lost writing, my job is done. I was pretty upset last night about maybe losing my work. I had really enjoyed the whole running metaphor, plus the humorous bit about the blazer, and I feared that I was not going to be able to recreate it before midnight came and turned the blog into a pumpkin.

I wonder, if I had not been able to get the draft of that blog yesterday back, would I have given up on the daily blogging process, being defeated by a little bit of technology? This calls to mind The Courage to Write: How Writers Transcend Fear by Ralph Keyes, required reading the first semester of graduate writing school. There are so many things that could abort the writing process – being afraid of messing up, being afraid of notoriety, being afraid of looking fat on morning talk show while promoting your book (I actually considered this stumbling block to my writing career). So many of us feel compelled to write, but there seem to be an awful lot of factors that can derail us. It makes me mad at myself to think I would have let the inadvertent deletion of 500-some words stop me in my tracks. I am going to try to keep that righteous indignation in mind for later in the month when I feel like blogging is too much trouble, or I’m tired, or I just don’t feel like it.

So, more to come this month. Stay tuned.

~Noelle 07/04/08