Delightfully suspicious

I'm reading a draft of a novel that a friend of mine wrote.  It's my second time through some of these sections, but here I am on a new one.  A group of friends are together for brunch -- a very "Sex and the City" scene.  I've met these friends before in previous sections.  And I'm having fun with the images coming through in my head -- it's like reading the book after seeing the movie.  Because I've had many of those "Sex and the City" brunches with my now-author friend.  I'm sure a lot of women will relate to this.

Funny, they seem to be in roughly the same location that we used to have brunch.  Which makes sense: write about locations you know.

Then the story mentions another location: one of the fictional women happens to live on the same street that one of us actually lived on.  And her name ... is almost the same in the book as it is in reality.  And there's another one with almost-my name, but I just thought that was a coincidence.  But then there's another one with almost-another-friend's-name, and, um, her personality even coincides with the real life person.  Holy cow.  So that almost-my-name might be named after me?  I don't think she is me, though.  My friend is too smart a writer.  

I now have to reread the draft.

Time to wake up

The universe has been shouting at me since that last post: Stop dreaming! "I dream of being active." Get over it! Get out of the house and go work out! Rejoin a hockey league -- you can do it midseason.

And, while I miss hockey, I am certain that if I started playing now I'd injure myself immediately. I mean, I play recreational hockey, but I'm not even at a recreational level of fitness. And that's the problem. I really don't like all that fitness stuff, except for how it makes me feel afterwards. I can walk for hours, given something to look at or listen to, but going to the gym? Sweating? I don't think so.

Things I can do instead of working out:

1. Read
   
2. Nap
   
3. Watch my latest Netflix video
   
4. Do a crossword puzzle
   
5. Do a sudoku
   
6. Knit
   
7. Nap
   
8. Paint my walls
   
9. Go online to play with paint colors on fictitious walls
   
10. Unpack boxes in my extra bedroom
    
11. Clean something
    
12. Write something
13. Get together with friends and sit around and talk
14. Get together with friends and sit around a table and play poker or some other game.

All that time I was working out with a trainer and going to yoga: it was because

• I was bored, and
  
• I had an appointment, had paid money, and appreciated having someone make decisions about what I was going to do next.
  

I'm shaking my fist at the universe right now, shouting, "Um ... well, yeah, you! I ... um...."

Manual typewriter music

Walking through Rockridge, I heard the lovely tap tap of a manual typewriter. A portable manual typewriter. They have a softer sound than a nonportable. It did not strike me immediately that this nondigitized, nonplastic tap tap is not a sound one hears nowadays. It sent me back, viscerally, or manually, to the specific sensation, kinetics, smell, sound, of having my own portable manual. It made me want to buy one just to have it again.

I wondered what the people who have never had to write 30-page papers on a typewriter thought of this sound. I take it for granted, the way they take things like wireless connectivity for granted.

The guy was selling poems outside of Pegasus Books. As I shopped inside I could still hear him typing away. It was like music. When I walked out, I commented on the lovely sound. I had a dollar in my pocket that wasn't mine -- it was found -- and I had decided already to give it away to a stranger. Here was my stranger.

He offered to write me a poem and asked me for a topic. While I mulled over this, he pointed out that many people were walking by with pillows and considered it was perhaps some weird California College for the Arts thing. "Maybe they're having some sort of sleep-in for Valentine's Day," I said. Aha, he shouted. It was for the pillow fight in San Francisco. He packed up his typewriter in an instant. "Do you want one of the poems I already wrote?" he asked, riffling through the scraps of paper he had been writing poems on. Someone shouted for him to hurry, it was almost 6:00, almost time for the pillow fight. "Do you want my best one? It's about this person who had balloons. Here, take it, and just email it to me, it's my best one."

I gave him the dollar, telling him I wanted to make sure he could call himself a professional writer. We exchanged names; his is Zach.

I didn't want to retype his text into an email -- it's so different to see it with the formatting and the dropped a's. So I scanned it and emailed it to him. And here it is.

Writer's block (encouragement requested)

So, it's been a long time since I've written.... I have a whole list of ideas, things that inspire me, but they haven't come out of my fingers. Perhaps it's that I've had some visitors and suddenly I'm self-conscious about writing for my own joy; I'm risking judgment. Google analytics says that I've had visitors from (servers from) three continents:

• Boston, Chicago, Las Vegas, Berkeley, Emeryville, Alameda, Dallas, Lexington, KY, Renton and Tacoma, WA, and Eden Prairie, MN
• London, England, and Bo'ness, Scotland
• Barranquilla, Colombia, and Porto Alegre, Brazil

Of course, since I just checked again, mulling over data in Google analytics, I could stop short again.... Visitors from around the world (or around the block), feel free to drop a note of encouragement!