Innie

I have not been outside for more than 5 minutes in the last 24 hours. And that was only to the corner of the house to put out the compost and the garbage.

What I have done, however, is

• make 1 pot of lentils and barley
• make 1 bread pudding
• scrub 2 bathrooms
• mop 3 floors
• read 4 stories
• wash 1,000,000 dishes
• drink 2 cups of coffee
• read 8 blog posts

My house was filthy. Not by 20 year old boy standards or anything. But by my mid-30s anal-retentive lady standards? Ew. I haven't done any real housework since about the first week of November, right around the time I was getting into the thick of the novel.

And that's no big deal, I know, except it was wearing on me and making me feel weird. I like to putter. Making some things clean and putting other things in their right places fills me with a sense of satisfaction and there-ness that I can't get in another way. The laying on of hands, as it were, as if my house and I were both living organisms, symbiotic.

I was already feeling weird, too. Still am, a bit. Uncomfortable in my skin weird, wavery around the edges. A restlessness.

It was very strange to go from writing 2000-5000 words a day to writing none. I feel the withdrawal symptoms off and on: an itching along the insides of my fingers; too many thoughts too fast to write down.

Every time I thought of sitting down to write anything though, my writing muscle balked. Or rather, I pressed on it and realized it was clenched up tight in recoil after being used so hard. It's loosening up slowly now.

And as always, I wish it were getting more flexible faster.