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Oh this blog post is forced. I have nothing to say today. Just aching for a weekend off…

These posts take an inordinately long time when you find yourself just staring at a blank screen. I feel like I’m on a date with someone I have nothing in common with and am helplessly staring at my feet trying to come up with something, ANYTHING to get the conversation rolling.

Ok, there’s a book called The Artist’s Way, by Jules Cameron…I don’t remember too terribly much about it but I do remember an exercise in it called Morning Pages. If I recall correctly, the goal was to write three pages in boundless free-writing style. Grammar and linearity and even coherence were to be thrown out the door in exchange for an unencumbered flow of ideas as they flitted into consciousness. I like to employ this method when I am feeling stuck and AS I am feeling stuck, free-style is to commence in 5, 4, 3, 2, 1…

Too much computer plus preggo symptom = carpal-tunnel syndrome. Common thing, I read. It’s just in my right wrist. I think it is supposed to go away eventually. Need to stop ignoring the playwright issue and decide if I am going to send in my work as-is or re-write all day tomorrow. Wonder if the Saints will be playing tomorrow. Dismal season thus far, my 80-year-old grandma is crushed. She hates LSU, rude football fans, thought she’d come around with me w the PhDs but not looking likely. I don’t talk to her enough, came to LSU in part to be near family and am negligent in my time and care concerning them. Just half a semester/exitexams/dissertation. Picked up Derrida today and put him down, need to pick him up and finish, want to get ahead this week if I can, day to day isn’t my goal, want to have a buffer. I have a mentor of sorts, not mentor but woman of…something, I talk often of her…from Russia, learned English and moved to NY, pregnant with husband in a different country while she lived off of Gray’s Papaya hotdogs and got her PhD, heavy into theory and very young. When I am tired, face-down (well, not face down these days as it is now impossible), I think of her when I feel like I am walking through cement. She did it. I will. Wish WISH WISH. My wrist is hot and aching and I get embarrassed for folks who only post things about what kind of soup they had for lunch and how much they like the color they painted their walls or their toenails and I am feeling like that person right now. The little girl I am packing around is uncomfortable right now. Hunched over a computer is cramping her style evidently, she is rearranging furniture or something. HOW is it POSSIBLE for folks to not be absolutely endlessly FLOORED by the process of having babies? Women SERIOUSLY carry people around and grow them under their skin? SERIOUSLY? And the day goes on and nobody blinks an eye? I do it…I walk around all nonchalant sometimes…sometimes for days in a row, but it never ceases to stop me in my tracks on occasion. Are you SERIOUS?  Reminds me of a line from the third act of Our Town. After her attempt to return to life after death, Emily asks the stage manager if ANYONE really understands…if anyone really sees life as they live it and he says - NO. Poets and philosophers, they do some…

Are we poets and philosophers? People of the stage and the classroom…are we awake and paying attention, paying homage?

And I really would like to know how much, how often different people ponder existence and purpose. I would like a percentage number printed in a bubble above peoples’ heads.