domesticity

ah, finally. the house was starting to get on my nerves. but the paramour went to check out the boat and pay the last bill, and i decided not to go along, and instead to clean, clean, clean. so now the kitchen and bath and living room are as sparkly as i ever care them to be. ok, so maybe "sparkly" is not quite the right term, *grin*. i am a proponent of the "clean enough" school of household chores, to enhance the body's natural desensitization to common germs. *cough*. yes.

i also spent some time cuddling missy who got all excited when she heard noises from up here. i am not sure what she associates with such noises, since they are never followed by anyone taking her for a walk; maybe she was just lonely. while i was playing with her, all the cats came out to observe what nutty stuff i was engaged in, and so of course some cat cuddling x 5 had to follow the dog cuddling.

also refilled the bird feeders -- putting that new gazebo feeder in front of my window was a great idea; now the cedar hedge is alive with chirping, bouncing, squabbling, and flapping all day long.

now i am making some quickie chow with portobello mushrooms and rice, since i completely forgot to eat.

which i will now gulp down. ah; productivity. makes me feel good.

on "writer's block"

and similar artistic getting-stuckness -- i was reading about rituals other people do to get themselves going again, which was interesting, in the sense of "what amazing tricks people play on/with their own minds". and i was thinking about how odd it is that i don't have this problem at all, just like i am also never bored ("never" in the sense that, left to my own devices, it doesn't happen. i sometimes get bored when i am stuck in a situation where i am waiting on somebody else and can't escape; though it feels less like what i imagine boredom feels like than it feels anxious, restive, fidgety).

the really amusing part of it was that i realized that i have something in common with those people anyway: i sometimes need to use similar rituals, just for what seems to be the opposite reason. i can be stymied by an excess of ideas, by an inability to pick what i want to concentrate on next. the white page doesn't scare me by making my mind go blank, it can scare me a little by making my mind race too fast to stop at any specific idea. but in general i really have no problem writing when it's up to me -- only when it becomes an obligation, and that's a different kettle of fish. when it comes to other artistic endeavours, however, i am often scared to start on any particular idea because i might not be doing it justice, because i do not have enough trust in myself, in my notion of what is important about the idea. i wonder whether this is not actually a very common cause for artistic block that simply expresses itself differently.