Oh for Ice-Skating Thoughts

I must say that I am a little disappointed that I haven't managed to blog every day of the NaBloPoMo challenge.  My inner perfectionist and pleaser is nervous.  My inner relaxed chilled out mystic says, meh, I tried my hardest, so who really gives a shit ultimately anyway?

Some of those days I missed out were health-related.  But yesterday's I lay squarely at the feet of my dog ... and my job.  Or, to be more accurate, at the attention deficit issues I face when doing my job.  These two things collided in the middle of Tuesday night that made for a slightly hellish Wednesday in terms of bushy tailness.


Do your thoughts jump around or glide? NaBloPoMo asks me today.  Well, when it comes to my job, they tend to Duracell bunny.  I work from home doing transcription work, which I am excellently good at and which pays pretty well, but which (a) I hate and (b) is boring beyond belief and (c) feeds right into those attention deficits.  I am never any more attentionally challenged than when I am on the internet, where I'm about as successful at keeping only one webpage open at a time as I am at eating only one row of confectionery masquerading as chocolate.

On Tuesday I did a job that ended up taking a whole lot more time than I could have anticipated (this is a regular occurrence.  Two hours of daily audio can be quite different to assess in terms of how long it's going to take to get done).  Add to that the fact that I'm not so great at time management.  Living under the threat of a clock is difficult at the best of times.  And working from home gives a certain sort of flexibility so that going out for a walk when it is still daylight in the middle of winter is much better use of my time than sitting on my numb bum typing interviews conducted by governmental bureaucratic cogs to employeeish bureaucratic cogs.

All of this translated out to me finishing work at about 2.30 on Wednesday morning.

Which is insane by anybody's reckoning.  I am embarrassed to admit that I took so long to complete the day's work.  But some days every single day I struggle with concentration.  Which means flicking backwards and forwards between the job that pays the bills and reading much more interesting fare on the interwebs.  I also write blog posts and submit writing to editors when I should be working as well.  It stops me from impaling myself on sharp objects.

(Actually, Tuesday was a record in terms of submitting a piece and having it rejected.  Writers get used to submitting something and not hearing back for months on end.  It's unavoidable but that doesn't make it not rude.  This one though - I submitted it to The Monthly at 1.31 pm and at 3.51 pm had another rejection email to add to the mix.  Albeit one which said it was "original".  I'll take encouragement, even while it's nestled in the midst of rejection, whenever I can get it).

So because I felt so shite yesterday, I thought the best way to utilise what was left of the morning was to watch some David Attenborough.  His stuff is like balm to my inner raw baby's bum.  Even an episode  about insects, which sounds dangerously boring to watch when tired, was fascinating.  I watched a bunch of ants climbing up blades of grass and chewing their way through the blade, and then falling to the ground with their prize and take it back to the nest, along with all the other ants doing the same thing (hilarious).  Ants can't digest grass.  What they are doing is taking it back to the nest to feed to the fungus that they share their housing with.  The fungus lurves the grass.  And the ants lurve the fungus.  A win-win situation).

I was also happy and completely unsurprised to see a crow in this episode.  He was having his heels nipped by irate insects until he went away.  And so the universe delivering me crow/raven symbolism continues.

So anyway, where was I up to?  Oh yes, that's right.  The dog.  I haven't yet got to the dog.

The dog has taken to getting up in the middle of the night and barking.  By the time I got to bed on Tuesday night I managed to get about 30 minutes before he started.  Got up, let him out, went back to bed.  Fifteen minutes later he was barking again, and this time Anthony got up.  Rinse and repeat.  And then rinse and repeat.  Eventually, the dog, in his senility (he does not get entitled to a name when he is in the doghouse) managed to settle down to sleep, and so did I.  And even though I managed to sleep for somewhere between four and five hours, I still felt like I'd drunk a row of Sambuca shots before I'd gone to sleep.  And hence no blog post.

So.  Do my thoughts jump around or glide?  Well, see how I've jumped around in this post?  This feels really structured compared to the thoughts that slid past the void and came out of my mind to form the words of this post.  They were pretty much all over the joint.  And I write much more cohesively than I talk.  Which is a concern.

But my thoughts really are all cohesive.  It's just that so often I seem to be a big picture thinker, and so while one thought may seemingly jump from one subject to the next, from within my head they're all part of the same fabric, all linked in with each other.  It's just that sometimes it's a bloody big piece of fabric, and those words have to traverse the Chasm of Cottonness to come out of my mouth.  And in the meantime there are about 16 other thoughts that all link to the first thought I've had, and they want to speak too because it's all linked, and I simply must make some sort of an effort to try to define what's in my head, even though I am always, and constantly, disappointed that what is in my head to say is never, ever, ever anything quite like what is spoken or blogged out into solidity :)

And this is why I'm off to do some yoga.  Because yoga helps take me to the space where my central nervous system takes a deep breathe and from there, even I get to sometimes experience the beauty of a mind where the thoughts glide through like an ice skater and out the other side :)