This post is part of my 2022 Word Project. You can read what that’s about here.
Thursday, March 3, 2022
5:03pm
Do you know what I want to do? Nothing. Nothing except sit on the couch and write.
I don’t exactly have a word for today but I have ideas and I have 30 minutes walking on the treadmill right now to figure it out.
I would love to rely more on photos because it makes life less thinky. Outputting photos is a pain but it doesn’t require thinking or pontificating. I was going to add pictures to my green blog last night but then it got late and they were boring anyway. What was I going to do, take a picture of a shirt folded in my closet?
29 minutes.
I’m glad it’s Thursday except tomorrow we have calls all day and that is going to put a crimp in my ability to write. Now that everything is on Zoom (damn you, pandemic!!) I can’t even walk and talk. I know the calls are necessary and will lead to good in the end but… goodbye all day.
28 minutes.
Maybe I need the word to be countdown. It didn’t make my growing list of potentials, which includes words like vex (could have a field day with that one, plus it sounds very cool), and face (got inspired by some really awesome photos I want to share one day). But sometimes words speak themselves.
Sometimes the more seconds and minutes pass, the easier I get to please when it comes to word choice.
27 minutes.
I could just hang out here on my treadmill, because it has to be done anyway, and walk and talk to myself, just count down every minute and see what comes to mind during that minute. It will probably be very boring for anyone else and a lot of things about food. But it’s grown on me.
26 minutes.
This could actually work for me.
This morning was not good. I woke up exhausted, like I hadn’t even slept for the past, what, 6, 8 hours? I must have slept, I mean I woke up and it was a different day. I don’t think I entered a time warp.
25 minutes.
So I was tired, then did a long-ish DDP yoga because I wanted to, because I didn’t want to phone it in again, I wanted to get a good workout. I am so out of shape all over again that I can’t even do pushups anymore. So easy to fall out of shape, so hard to climb back in. I had a call at 9, which means I had to get all my texts and updates in beforehand.
24 minutes.
And I was literally… literally… three minutes late calling, and I know this because when I got on the phone my client said, I just texted you, and I said oh? And he said, I was wondering if you were going to call. And I looked at the clock and it was 9:03.
23 minutes.
I guess I am just so perpetually prompt that he couldn’t fathom I’d call three minutes late. Clearly he thought I was dead. That is exactly how I am interpreting it. Had that call, then got sucked into the next client app launch, then had to go back to regular old everyday work.
22 minutes.
It’s interesting what you can say in 30 minutes when you have no plan and are just word experimenting. The answer is: a lot and nothing at all.
I made bread. The quick kind where you mix it in a bowl, wait 20 minutes then throw it on a pan. I made it because between the two of us, and to be fair, between mostly me and myself, we ate every bit of bread that was left from the last two batches I made. And I wanted bread for my lunch today.
21 minutes.
20 ½, really, because I went on too long that time. Lunch was smoked salmon with cream cheese and capers and dill. I love it so much. I would put it on a bagel if this wasn’t Tennessee, and the nearest bagel I know about wasn’t 900 miles away.
20 minutes.
Things they don’t do well here, or at all: bagels. Pizza. Pretty much anything ethnic that isn’t steak or burgers. There is a Latin place in Nashville that we quite like but… Nashville.
19 minutes.
On a good day that could be a 20 minute drive. On a not good day that could be an hour. And who has an hour to spare?
Anything calling itself Mexican here is just Chipotle with a sombrero stenciled on the window.
See, I told you this would end up being about food.
18 minutes.
So today didn’t start out so hot, tempered only by the fact that it’s Thursday. It didn’t improve much, either, and I’m worried that this is the part where I go pour myself a glass of wine or make four cocktails and regret it before I even find my way to the pillow. Or maybe don’t find my way to the pillow because it’s in a whole other room and that’s a lot of navigation after several adult beverages.
17 minutes.
I was just frustrated to blindness this morning because I was tired, because I knew I was getting thrown into the deep end of the day starting at 8am, because the minute I opened my laptop, Chrome ate my plugins and bookmarks and everything in it so I couldn’t even log into my password manager which meant I couldn’t log into any of my accounts to do any of the things that were already three minutes late.
16 minutes.
The details are not important. Let’s just say I was three minutes late to my call. All I’m doing now is waiting for dinner because… food. And thinking about whether this will be my word. I have a list of words, I can surely find one that inspires, interests, strikes. I have plenty of pictures to browse. But. I came so far…
15 minutes.
I really wish I had my box of actual photos from Brigantine. It wasn’t something I thought to ask Kevin to bring, because why would I? But now I can see where they might have come in handy, since they contain everything in my entire pre-cell phone life, which really only accounts for the past decade or so. I’m a bit older than that.
14 minutes.
I keep telling myself that I will go get them myself, when I go visit, after three years. THREE YEARS. It’s a thing I don’t even want to think about. After March, after all the things change that are currently in various degrees of changing, in the death throes of change, I am going to visit.
13 minutes.
I’m wearing my Apple watch on my ankle because it doesn’t think I’m walking if I wear it on my wrist. All the technology and apparently nobody took into account that a person might be walking on the treadmill and not be swinging their arms. It reminds me every hour to stand up, if I haven’t. When I’m walking on the treadmill it still reminds me to stand. Because it doesn’t know I’m moving. Stupid watch.
12 minutes.
This has been a fun experiment, sort of like the two minute brainstorm on Twosday. I’m sure I have bored the rest of the world to tears, but I’ll put a picture of a cute bunny or something at the end and it will be Summer Camp Rule and everyone will get over it.
11 minutes.
On top of Chrome eating itself and being three minutes late to a call, all the rest of the things went about as wrong as technology always goes. But is this how I want to spend my remaining minutes? I think not.
10 minutes.
I discovered half of a leftover quiche frozen in the freezer today, so that bodes very well for dinner. It ended up being salmon and goat cheese, so I guess I am going to get all my omegas.
9 minutes.
I learned something today. The water in a whale’s mouth weighs more than the actual whale. Put that in your blowhole and spout it. I love little factoids like that. Ralph had me listen to a piece of a podcast that was all this random cool stuff. Of course I am way too obsessive to believe any of it until some other, quite possibly also wrong, internet source corroborates it but at least I feel better about it.
8 minutes.
I also learned that Beyoncé has released more perfumes than albums. And that’s all I get to say this minute because I had to pause to go look up where the accent goes on Beyoncé.
7 minutes.
This is actually harder than writing something with a grander point or a cohesive thought because then at least I get to go away for a while and think about it. This all has to come out in 30 minutes.
6 minutes.
I’ll edit it later.
5 minutes.
Needed a brain break. Do you know what I bought? A bread slicer. It’s this plastic square thing and you wedge a loaf of bread in it then put the knife down through a slit so you end up with perfectly even slices every time. Unless you’re me, and you end up with slices that are fat or thin or shredded. But if you’re careful and hold the bread in place it’s really pretty awesome. Ten bucks.
4 minutes.
I remembered that just now because I made bread today and forgot I had the slicer so tried to do it on my own and ended up with a lot of crumbs. It’s official. This blog is renamed: Food. In Many, Many Words.
3 minutes.
Other thing I learned: there is a reason they don’t tell you to grease the pan before putting the bread on it. It may not stick, but it also ends up with a soggy bottom. And that’s something nobody wants in their life.
Two minutes.
I’m going to need a photo for this at some point and I’m thinking the sand timer on my desk will do. It just occurred to me that I also have one in lime green. Missed opportunity.
Doing something in a finite amount of time is both absurdly difficult and entirely liberating. It’s like the law of traffic and how it will always fill up a road no matter how many lanes you build. The amount of time it takes to complete a task will expand to fill the amount of time given to it.
One minute.
Last chance to say something important.
Thank you. To anyone who has read down to this bottom part here because if you have, then you are someone very important to me. Or a magical unicorn. Maybe both.
And I appreciate you. I bet you even understand what that means.
Zero minutes.
Photo: a thirty minute sand timer on my desk, next to the treadmill console I know so well. And above, your promised photo of cute bunnies.