A shot in the dark

I scurried over to the Puerto-Rican market last night (out of cigarettes again). The round trip usually takes about five or six minutes, and I don't think it took any longer than that last night.

On my return, however, the sidewalk was blocked by a teenager sitting spread-eagle with his back against a wrought-iron fence. He looked like he was growing out of the ground, so firmly planted and permanent. I actually started to convince myself that of course he must have been there on the first leg of the journey, but I would have recalled stepping over or around a body. He just seemed so comfortable that I momentarily mistrusted my senses.

As I approached, I realized he was making me nervous. He was watching me walk, and I spotted a few other youths on bicycles circling a parked car who I would have to pass first. I wondered briefly if they were planning to ambush me. It seemed a little overly elaborate for my neighborhood, but you never can tell.

When I finally reached the spot where I had to walk around his outstretched legs, he hoisted a large, clear vodka bottle unsteadily at me. It was nearly full.

"Wanna shot?" He could not possibly have been so much as 17 years old. It was about eight at night.

"No, thank you." It struck me as a weirdly polite response, considering the circumstances. It came out like I was refusing an aperitif at a lavish party.

"You sure?" He was visibly disappointed. I got the impression that he had planted himself there in the hopes that I would join him in a drink. Maybe he wanted to hear my stories, or he had stories of his own he thought I might like.

I was sure, but I didn't respond. I went home instead.

So I ask you, Blogreader: did I miss the chance at an exciting new drunken friend, simply by mistrusting the contents of a bottle offered by a drunken underage stranger on the street? Would you have sat and taken a long pull from the bottle and let the night go where it wanted? Or would you have done the same as me?

My job is kicking my ass

Caroline's comment a while ago following a post about my work was "Please stop working there..." followed by something about my employers and coworkers being actively engaged in a plot to drain my creativity.

Reading over my posts recently, this is no longer quite as amusing a concept as it was when I first read it.

The problem mostly lies in the fact that no sooner do I arrive home from work than I begin work all over again on a different project. It is making me grumpy and sleepy (among other dwarves) and I have noticed a return of my being vaguely angry all the time without any real reason. I am sniping at people. I don't like myself much when I get like this. I imagine others feel the same.

I usually get home from the on-site thing feeling ok. My mind is still reasonably playful and could be used for creative things, except that the realities of work are intervening and keeping me from doing so. I just have very little creative time right now. I had a great breakthrough on the current novel on Friday, but haven't really had a chance to translate it into words on the page yet. So I think I'm going to have to force a better recognition of boundaries upon myself. Set aside some time when I am not allowed to do anything except write.

One of the big projects I'm doing at home will be finished within about 2 weeks, about the time the fiction contest wraps up. I am really looking forward to this.

New Links, Bloglines and how I accidentally helped someone

There's some new folks in the links section. People I've been reading and what-not. Click 'em if you wanna.

Which brings me to the devil's tool I've been using lately: Bloglines. Basically they just collect feeds for you and you can read all the sites you like at once, from within their page. At first, I marvelled at the convenience and ease of use.

But I noticed something else: Bloglines makes it far less likely that I will post a comment to a blog I read. You can't do that without going to the site, and since I'm just reading the feed, I keep thinking of things to comment but then then not going to the actual page and posting the thing I wanted to say.

The title of this post was almost "Bloglines begets bad blogging," as I like commenting on other blogs, and consider it a part of keeping up this one, and I haven't been doing that so much these days. Plus I'm robbing my colleagues of site visits, if they track those, and it seems like most do. So I think Bloglines has to go.

I had an Argentinian visitor recently who was referred off a Google search for "'preparation for the funeral' cezanne location." This directed them to the post I did from London about the Cezanne exhibit at the National Gallery. I think the painting is still there, that the exhibit is still up. It looks as though someone wanted to know where the painting was, and that they found reasonably current information about their question from my blog.

So that's nice. I'm like Wikipedia now. Chock full o'facts.

To keep this public service active, I will now reply to those of you who are referred by queries as to why Nyquil® changed their formula:

Nyquil® changed their formula because the old version contained an ingredient which people could easily convert into crystal meth. Seriously. I don't think this is a great reason. They didn't outlaw any of the readily-available huffing materials when people started abusing them, so why I have to suffer to make it a little harder to make an illegal drug is beyond me. It's not like they changed the formula and crystal meth disappeared. If it had, I'd have been all for the switch. But Nyquil doesn't do what it used to, and I've sadly abandoned its use myself. Now I use whiskey.

It's pretty clear to me that I'm blogging right now to avoid work on my novel. So I'll get back to what I'm supposed to be doing right now, and leave you nice people alone.

Twiny

My head was made out of string today, twiny and unkempt. Nothing connected to anything else. Frayed, fraught, frustrated.

I did some work with a cat percolating in my lap. I had to stop when I had too many misfires in a row and could not remember the color palette for the project I was working on long enough to toggle to another document and back. This is the kind of thing at which I normally excel. This is exactly the sort of idiot thing for which I am paid.

I am aware at this moment that I have lost my momentum on my novel. I haven't written a single new word in at least a week. This is something I have to do better with: the time-management and staying motivated and making progress sometimes for the sake of making progress. These are the lessons I learned during NaNo, already needing a refresh. I feel like I did that whole thing about two years ago, even though December is only 12 days old.

But if I stop writing, it's hard to see how I'm going to be a writer. Seems like the one necessitates the other.

Right now, I have taken Julia's advice and made myself something large and hot and filled with whiskey. I bought the whiskey at the Puerto-Rican store, and they slipped it into a tiny paper bag so that I might enjoy it on my way home without falling prey to open-container laws. I was, however, able to restrain myself until I had locked the door behind me. It's not a single malt, though. This here is Tennessee sour mash. I don't really know what the differences are. I am not a whiskey drinker.

The whiskey is plugging the gaps in a cup filled with a lemon/ginger tea and an obscene amount of honey. The drink burns me three times: once because it is too hot; again because of the whiskey; and last because of the ginger.

The honey is intended to nullify the taste of the whiskey, and it does this job half-heartedly, shoving itself out of the way so that even the cheap tea with its artificial lemon taste can rush in and hit the taste buds first. The honey comes in only after each sip is through, cleaning house and putting the stools up on the bar for the night.

When it finally flicks off the lights, I am left with only the ginger.