When I don’t update this blog, I don’t check in on it because it absolutely ruins me to think of hundreds of visitors coming here every day (PS, who are you? I love you, thanks for coming, tell me what to read) and getting nothing except the same old links to my hack writing about how I like children’s books because they are the most appropriate to my attention span so pure. Don’t get me wrong, I appreciate that my blog still exists and functions when I don’t pay attention to it, but I feel so bad about not improving it and so undeserving of my traffic that sometimes I pretend it doesn’t exist. It’s a similar situation to Peace Corps, when I had no way of exercising, no way to bathe, and no mirror, which led to a convenient mental illusion that my body was a metaphysical object rather than something devolving into a spinal column surrounded by sheep fat.
But that’s a terrible analogy, because the reasons I haven’t updated my blog are much more surmountable and can be summed up as follows.
1) This puppy.
Her name is Luna! Two Saturdays ago, my boyfriend and I got up at 3 AM, drove to a suburb of Dallas, picked up this nugget of fluffy rescue joy, and took her back home so she could sleep in front of a different air conditioner. I’m an anxious, doting mama and every time I consider writing something asinine about how the main character in Ian McEwan’s Saturday clearly wants to fuck his daughter–”Despite my fantasies, this is no child” is the line that really set that theory in stone for me–I look at Luna and decide, incorrectly, that she needs something.
2. The series.
I mean, what a time-suck. A worthy one. But a time-suck nonetheless. I’m not going to say that I’m glad that it’s over, because I was really enjoying a) watching basketball all the time, which I haven’t really done since the Space Jam days, and b) switching my loyalty to first the Bulls and then the Mavs, which–since I moved to Houston in ’94 and naturally used to loathe those teams–gave me a certain transgressive pleasure. It was like having an angry threesome in the room where I used to hook up with my middle school boyfriend. Actually, I was in third grade in ’94, so that analogy is not just bad but also totally foul, please excuse me.
3) I’m writing a book. Not about me or related to me, don’t worry. It’s about a health care company running an amazing clinic in Africa. Turns out this is a lot of work! Turns out when I take tons of notes all day about business practices and international development (which is what this fascinating tome will be about–but actually I swear it’ll be good!) I have a hard time switching to the part of me that wants to sit around reading and kvetching all day. Which, in the long run, is probably a good thing.
4) I spend 75% of my free time just drinking water. This is a fact. It is like 100 degrees in Houston every single day, and one of my major hobbies is–yes this is stupid–hot yoga. (Not Bikram! Bikram is for people who make better to-do lists than I). So literally I drink out of a vase from Ikea and consider setting me and Luna up with an in-home salt lick.
5) I don’t have a good reading list. Again, if you’re reading this, I love you and I need your help! I just finished The Possessed, which I liked a lot, but I’ve been reading so much business nonfiction that I need something seriously good to get me going again. An Atlas of Impossible Longing is on my list, so is A Visit from the Goon Squad (I really hate the cover of this book and it’s keeping me from buying it), but other than that I’ve got nothing except David Foster Wallace titles that I am afraid will depress me. All the titles I see on the best-seller lists look sappy. I just want to read something by a fiction writer who has something new. Help me help me.
