Open Note to Self

Dear Genevieve,

You can not expect to get up at 4:30 in the morning if you keep going to bed at 11:30 at night. It is both unrealistic and demented. I know that you pride yourself on your ability to function on very little sleep, but I'm afraid that your perspective is horribly flawed. Mostly because of the term "function."

Sure, you're as capable of not sleeping as the next person, but the image you have of yourself as some kind of super human who can power nap between 3-5:00 in the morning, fix breakfast, clean the kitchen, write for two hours, shower, get the kids to school, put in a full day's work and then come home to do it all over again in the evenings is WRONG, WRONG, WRONG. You will die.

I know how this misconception got started. Remember when you were 18 and you would stay up until 5:00 in the morning with your friends, and then show up to work at the coffee shop at 6:30?  You have this memory of how you were able to open the shop, work until 3:30, and then go back out again the next night. In reality what happened was you staggered around deliriously sipping iced coffee, which did nothing to curb your exhaustion, and then told your boss you were sick and had to go home by 10:00 am. And then you went out again that night. Perhaps if you had become addicted to cocaine you could have pulled off the kind of bad ass social life that you think you accomplished, but you didn't. If your manager at the time hadn't been constantly stoned you would have definitely been fired, and so the only way you really succeeded in this scenario is that you didn't lose your job because the cafe was run by substance abusers who were passive about their dysfunctional employees.

Your only responsibilities in the fall of 1993 were to serve coffee, pay your car insurance, party, and listen to Nirvana, and you barely had the energy to do those things. You weren't even in college yet! You had almost NOTHING to do, and you were tired.

This is the person that you are thinking of when you imagine yourself as someone who can get a whole lot of stuff done on a few hours of sleep. If you hadn't been so sleep deprived at the time, you might now have a clearer memory of how you really were but this is not the case. Your memory of yourself is a lie.

This brings us up to speed. It is 20 years later and I know this might come as a shock, but your body has aged. And your workload has fucking exploded. You to go to work, come home, cook dinner, help the kids with homework, force the kids to help you tidy the house, and then force them to go to bed. Then you have time for yourself, but if you're going treat yourself to some you time until 11:30, then you need to sleep until 6:00 and not 4:30. While it's admirable to try to wake up with the Amish and get an hour's worth of writing in before chaos of the day begins, it just ain't gonna happen unless you go to bed for 9:00. And that's not happening if you decide to start watching "Dr. Who" at 10:00.

But that's what you did last night, and so now you are on your lunch break and you are ready for bed. This is not good. I suggest that you go to a Starbucks and have a stoned 18 year old serve you a latte.

Stoned 18 year old baristas. The circle of life continues.

I want to show you something

It's hard to think of what to write about when I really just want to show you something. I'd show you a picture of myself sitting in Cafe Luna, the coffee shop I'm at right now, which I think was an old house. Its got hard wood floors and high ceilings, and across from me is a fireplace with an iron door closing up where the wood or the coal would go. I wonder if this was someone's room, and if that person liked coffee. It's cold in here now without the heat from a fire or anything else, but the coffee's warm.

I've been on a vacation of sorts. The kids and the pets have been with my ex-husband for two weeks and I've been staying with a friend uptown until the new house is available next week. I haven't had anyone to take care of but myself. I can't tell you how long it's been since I had this kind of time, the kind that's quiet.

If I could I would show you a picture of myself on the fifth floor of an open parking garage this morning, and how I looked up unafraid the vastness of it, how I grinned up at it, not even afraid that the wind might sweep me up and drop me to the ground.

I would show you the runners in the park, and me weakening as I jogged along until I stepped off the blacktop-path and ran on the grass. Then I stopped struggling because then I was playing, hopping over tree roots and startling the ducks on the side of the pond.

I don't think that I'm only less stressed because I haven't had the kids. I think it's that I needed to stop commuting and I needed to be back in New Orleans. I don't know why but I can't write the same in Mandeville as I can in New Olreans. The rhythm is off. Somebody told me before that it didn't matter where she travelled to or where she lived, and she lived in a lot of places, because she was grounded inside of herself. I don't feel the same way, and maybe that's because I'm not grounded, but whatever the reason, I need to be close to where I feel a creative pulse.

And if I were to play something for you it would be this song because it's a little sad and more than a little beautiful and that's kind of how I feel right now.

****SUDDEN, UNEXPECTED TONE CHANGE!!!****

Ok, so now you've listened to it and if you're under 40 you've probably watched it and said, "Holy hell, how OLD is this woman? She's making me feel old AND sad." Well, first of all, I'm under 40...and that's all you need to know. Second, if you're not feeling that song exactly, I offer you a Strict Machine. I've been digging on Goldfrapp lately, with her sexy, confusing lyrics. "I'm in love with Strict Machine." What's that mean? I don't know but I like it.

And now off to write more. The first draft of my new book has exceeded it's self-imposed deadline by seven months. EEEEK! Barista! More coffee!

Coffee Shop Closing

I'm at CC's Coffee House and they're going to close soon, which I wonder if they will still do if I explain to them that I haven't finished blogging yet.
"You haven't STARTED blogging yet," the barista tells me.
"Yes, I have. I'm blogging right now. That's why I'm typing while we talk, because I'm posting this conversation on the internet."
"....Go home."
"Oh come on! I haven't written anything about your enormous ear holes."
"Ear holes?"
"Yeah, your ears are big and I can almost see inside your head through your ear holes."
"Well, have you taken a look at your feet?"
"What about my feet?"
"They're like tennis rackets attached to your legs."
"Ear Hole!"
"Sasquatch!"
"...so can you stay open for twenty more minutes?"
"NO!"

And now they're closing and I have to go. But I will be back tomorrow to harass the barista some more, and perhaps get a blogpost out of it. Besides there's a lot to update you guys on. Yee!