resentment, yoga, stuff

You know what's good fun? When one doctor says to a loved one, "You have to have x procedure if you want to live more than a tiny bit longer!" and another doctor says to the same loved one, "You cannot have x procedure if you want to live more than a tiny bit longer!" And the universe does not decide that this must be a typo and make them go back and edit it. They can both be right. Whee. I love that.

There are other things the universe has not fixed for loved ones of mine, either, this week, and I resent it.

Poodle-assisted yoga helps me keep the fussing to the minimum required by the circumstances, though. Ista has all kinds of theories about what it is that I'm doing. Anything that involves a reaching stretch, I must be looking for something, and so she thoughtfully brings me her toy maki: "Here you go, monkey! You can stop reaching now! Monkey? Here it is. Monkey!" If I'm reaching upwards, it means that there is something good up there that she isn't seeing, so she bounces next to me, trying to see what it is I'm reaching for. And if I hold a pose too long, perhaps I have fallen asleep and need to be awakened with a puppy's investigative licks.

But today there will be stuff: errand stuff and writing stuff and so on. I'm attacking "At the Sign of the Fish and Amulet" again. I think it'll be okay. I'm almost sure. There's only one way to find out.

Guilts

dlandon has tagged me to do one of those memes where you list your guilty pleasures: culinary, literary, audiovisual, musical, and celebrity.

I don't have most of these. I am no good at guilt. If I'm going to feel guilty about eating something, I don't eat it. It's not that I never eat anything unhealthy, it's that I do so without the slightest hint of guilt. Ice cream? You bet. Often. Statistically, it's probably a miracle I'm not eating ice cream right now. (Okay, I exaggerate. I almost never eat ice cream before noon.) But do I feel guilty about it? Not in the slightest, thanks. And I carry around one of those little printable pocket guides the Monterey Bay Aquarium puts out for which fish you can feel okay about eating, environmentally speaking, and which are screwing up the planet at an alarming rate, and I consult the guide before ordering rather than feeling guilty after. (I am something of a prig about this, I suspect. But do I really need king crab instead of stone crab or Canadian snow crab? Not so much.)

Sometimes I feel guilty about eating one of timprov's bananas, because he needs the potassium with his medication. But he's already said I shouldn't, on the grounds that they sell more bananas. I don't think this is what the quiz means. Oh, I know! I've got it. I sometimes throw away the brown bananas instead of making bread or muffins or bars out of them. I do feel guilty about that, but some weeks other things intervene and overpower the guilt at the waste and the love of baking.

My celebrity guilt is that sometimes I fail to have compassion for celebrities as human beings and just respond to news items about them as though they were idiotic objects instead. "I'm sorry you're so stupid; it must be a terrible trial for yourself and your loved ones," would be a much better reaction here than, "What a moron!"

Similarly, my literary guilt is that sometimes I shut a book a few chapters in and announce to the absent author, "I don't care about you!" I do feel bad about this. What I should say is, "I don't care about your stupid book!" As a person the author might be quite nice, with their banality and their narcissism all worked out on the page.

That leaves audiovisual and musical. Umm. This is mostly like the food, though: I enjoy some dumb movies, but they're good dumb movies. The fits of giggles they send me into are not accidental. timprov and I recently watched all six episodes of "Police Squad!", and I don't feel the slightest bit of guilt about that. I love the endings particularly. I feel all skittish and squirmy about labeling a genre of something a "guilty" pleasure, because people do that to us all the time. I feel pretty sure that there's someone somewhere on lj answering this quiz that, they know it's all crap, but their guilty literary pleasure is "sci-fi novels." And I don't want to do that to other people's work, either, embracing it one-armed and dismissing it with the other.

Maybe I should substitute in a different minor guilt. Postural: I feel kind of guilty about how I often sit with my right knee under my chin when I'm typing, or with my right leg thrown over the chair arm. It's not good for me, and I regret it later, but it's so comfortable at the time.

Musical guilt: I played the piccolo for two years in my early teens. Enough said there? Yeah, I think so. I'll be working off pic guilt for years yet.

It could be worse; I could have played the banjo.

Sorry to spook

I am sorry if any of you got spooked about my first post this morning and thought I was talking about timprov. I am not talking about timprov. Very, very few of you have met the loved one I was talking about. So you may be sympathetic to me and unspecified-loved-one without panicking on behalf of a timprov you personally care about.

fishies flowing

Sometimes even being cryptic on livejournal is too cryptic and not cryptic enough. I really am sorry. I'll try to keep future railing at the universe either more general or more specific.

Anyway, the rest of the day has been both relaxing and productive. There were errands, and now my grandpa will get a birthday present. He tried to tell me not to spend too much, like he always does. I told him I didn't intend to get him diamonds set in platinum, and he laughed, but really, I have more sense to spend more than we can afford, and making my grandfather smile when he turns 79 seems like a reasonable goal to me. I think I've succeeded. We'll see. (Oh, who am I kidding -- he'll smile when we get there, and he might not stop all weekend. And the presents will just be part of that.)

I've been working on "At the Sign of the Fish and Amulet," and it's one of those times where my backbrain has been writing this story without my forebrain's knowledge, because it's all there now, all the bits where I would write two sentences and then stop and bite my lip and go get a glass of water and write another sentence and roll my shoulders and erase one of the first two sentences -- all of that is coming to fruition now, with sentences and paragraphs just falling in where they go, little bits of darting back to make sure things are set up, worldbuilding coming naturally in with the description and the dialog. I feel like -- this month, this year, I feel like something came loose that had been stuck before. I thought this was coming, and here it is, and I'm glad. I'm willing to plod along when it's plodding time, but I'm just as glad when it's not any more.

I hear markgritter and timprov laughing together downstairs, and Ista has just put her nigiri toy on my foot for the third time in a row so I can throw it to be fetched. There are complications -- there are always complications -- but my life is good, and most of the complications come from having so many people to love. That's the good kind of complication, I think. Even when the complication itself really stinks.