Tag: Beauty Sleep

(Just Like) Starting Over

I am always a bit disconnected from my life whenever I return from a trip, and the older I get, the harder it seems to settle back into my usual reality. The lack of sleep for weeks before hand (and during) certainly didn’t help much, but I was very pleased to finally have the prescription refilled last week and I have had some absolutely marvelous nights of sleep ever since. I also feel somewhat more centered, and more in control of myself than I have in weeks. I decided to take some time for myself as well once I got back, and focus on cleaning the house and staying off social media as much as possible, and it’s really been lovely; I think that going forward, I may continue doing that. Over the three day holiday weekend I found myself with so much more time than I usually have, and not feeling rushed about anything–and the feeling of being behind on everything, of needing to rush and hurry through everything, inevitably leads to stress and anxiety and that inevitably leads to insomnia and…yeah. Self-care is something that I really need to focus on, and stay focused on, going forward for what little may be left of my life.

I spent a lot of the holiday weekend cleaning and organizing–always cathartic–and getting the Lost Apartment back into some sense of order. It was rather horrifying to see and realize how out of control everything around here had gotten; I started with the laundry room and made my way into the kitchen (we really need to get a new vacuum cleaner, and a good one; these cheap ones I’ve been getting cease operating well even with maintaining them the way the instructional manuals say I should, which is enormously frustrating). I cleaned out and reorganized drawers in the laundry room and in the kitchen, and the counters were so filthy I literally cannot remember the last time I actually took the time to wipe them down (obviously, it was before the trip, but still-what the fuck was I doing on the weekends before I left for Kentucky?). My printer also died over the weekend and needed to be replaced; while I was annoyed at the suddenness of an unexpected new expense, I then realized the printer was at least five years old and hey at least it happened at a time when you could absorb the cost without it seriously hurting. The new one is cheap, but it’s also a Canon like the last one and I don’t really use it all that much; so even if it proverbially shits the bed in a short period of time, at least I’m not out that much and it served its purpose briefly.

See what a difference that prescription makes in my life? Had this happened before, I probably would have had a meltdown of some sort.

Better living through chemistry indeed.

I am still not really back completely on track with my life as yet; I was thinking yesterday between clients that I don’t really remember what I was working on before I went away to Kentucky, and of course, my memory is still shit–the self-care and relaxation hasn’t changed that at all–but I really need to make a to-do list and start going through everything on my desk and in my inbox to figure out what needs to be done and what else I need to get a handle on. I know I need to start getting back to the gym–which is now open it’s old, normal, non-pandemic working hours again, which makes it more accessible for me and lessens the pressure about needing to rush off to the gym–because my muscles can tell they haven’t been worked and stretched properly in weeks, and I also got the martini glasses and the cocktail shaker I ordered in the mail finally; so tonight perhaps I will experiment with my first dirty vodka martinis with extra olives. I also need to do some more work on the apartment–it’s ridiculous how quickly it gets disheveled looking around here–but perhaps tonight when I get home from the office I can finish the laundry and put the dishes away and start filing and emptying out the inbox and so forth.

I know I had started a story in Kentucky called “Beauty Sleep,” which has a wonderful opening (there’s a part where a Goth girl reads a poem at a salon in the Quarter, and she unironically calls herself Joan of Dark) but I wasn’t really sure where to take the story from there; one of the problems I have with stories when I have an interesting opening is that I inevitably always try to force them into the crime story box, and maybe, just maybe, that isn’t what the story is actually supposed to be. I’ve decided, more or less, to open June working on short stories and novellas, rewriting the first chapter of Chlorine, and rethinking the work I need to do on the Kansas book; I really need to make my writing more of a priority in my life these days.

So, on that note, I am heading to get ready to work and will start pulling together a to-do list. Have a great day, Constant Reader.

Bette Davis Eyes

And I am at Louisville Airport ready to fly home to New Orleans. I have to change planes in Tampa–the very airport I used to work in; even the same airside where I used to work–and should be landing at Armstrong around five thirty. I need to make a couple of stops on the way home; I need to put air in a tire and get some things at the store and also need to possibly pick up dinner–the jury has yet to come in on that one. I am going to be pretty tired by the time I get to New Orleans, and having to deal with rush hour traffic isn’t exactly something I am looking forward to, frankly.

But it is what it is. I am a little tired already. I never sleep terribly well when I travel under the best of circumstances, and the insomnia lately has been incredibly brutal at home–so I didn’t have very high expectations for while I was here. I think I got maybe one good night of sleep on Friday–I was so completely exhausted at that point the surprise would have been had I not lapsed into a coma.

Well, my travel day Thursday turned into quite the nightmare, but overall, I handled it as best I could; rolled with it, and just finally had to laugh about it all. I had trouble getting up in the morning and then had even more trouble being awake–the cannabis oil might not have knocked me out, but it really relaxed me–and of course, it was pouring rain as I headed to the airport. I also forgot a mask, but remembered before I got on the highway and was able to get back home quickly, grab two of them, and dash back out in the rain to the car and head for the airport. The parking lot for the airport is now two exits past where we used to get off the highway; which felt weird, but I was able to find the lot in the pouring rain, get the car parked, and head to the airport. I checked my bag, got my boarding passes….and just as I reached the gate I got a text from Southwest that my flight was going to be two hours delayed–and I only had an hour and a half to change planes in Dallas to begin with. I wound up being routed from Dallas to Louisville via Chicago Midway–and arriving almost five hours after originally scheduled. The rerouting also cost me my priority boarding, and I wound up in the C boarding group on the last two flights. Yay. So I was stuck in a middle seat on both of my last two flights…the greatest irony was I had originally booked my ticket to leave on Wednesday with the same itinerary; only to be notified that Southwest had changed it to a 12:30 departure arriving in Louisville at 9:20, with two changes of plane. I didn’t want that, so I changed it to Thursday…yet wound up leaving New Orleans at 12:30 and changing planes twice and not getting to Louisville until 9:20–and the last flight was about twenty minutes late; it took forever to get my bags…we ended up leaving the airport for the ninety mile drive around 10:15 and not getting to my parents’ until almost midnight.

So far so good for the flight home today, though. Fingers crossed that will hold.

I read From Here to Eternity on my travel day down, but wasn’t terribly vested in it. I was about 250 pages into it when I arrived at Louisville, and while it is entirely possible the horrors of the travel day may have influenced how I felt about the book, I wasn’t into it, didn’t like any of the characters–the most likable was Maggio, and he’s barely in the first quarter of the book–and so put it aside. I may try it again another time, but I am not sure I will like it any better the next time around. I then started The Complete Stories of James Purdy–an almost forgotten writer of the 20th century, and the stories are interesting and well written; he reminds me of a hybrid of Shirley Jackson with a dash of Flannery O’Connor filtered through a John Waters sensibility. I read half of the stories, but last night before bed I wanted something else, so I got out the iPad and my ARC of Laura Lippman’s new one, Dream Girl, and the next thing I knew it was past time to go to bed and I regretfully had to put it aside. I will read it on the plane today; hopefully finishing before I land in New Orleans. It’s quite good and interesting and absorbing…but I won’t review it on here until it’s closer to the release date.

I also started writing a short story, “Beauty Sleep,” Saturday night. I got about 700 or 800 words into it–not sure how far–before realizing that I wasn’t sure where the story was going. I hate when that happens; my short story writing methodology clearly needs work. I never really know where the story is going when I start writing them–very rarely do I know how the story will end, or what it is really about–and they inevitably wind up in a computer folder and languishing in the electronic drawer, as it were. It can be annoying and frustrating, sure–I probably should try to work through what the story is about and how it is going to end before starting to write it, even though I inevitably start writing because the opening and the characters are interesting and I want to get that down before I forget them in the mists of my mind–but it’s also a good writing exercise. And sometimes I get lucky and the story starts coming to me as I write. That doesn’t happen as often as they stall out, of course, but often enough that I keep doing this.

Okay, I think I am going to go try to find something to eat. Talk to you tomorrow, Constant Reader!