Breaking new routine, cancelled craft fair plans, hauling inventory, passage of time and sunlight, packed boxes...
11/19/11
12:39 p
She had completely broken with the new routines she had been establishing over the past few weeks of working on the Nanowrimo writing project. She had not gotten herself ready for the day before having breakfast. She had only done half of the step routine she usually tried to complete before breakfast. And, here it was far later in the day that she was sitting down to write.
She had felt there had been unintended and unwelcome physical consequences from the new routine. She wanted to see what would happen if she let up a bit on the discipline. She was by now reasonably confident that she would be completing this project, though nothing was ever for sure. That also gave her the freedom to relax a bit. She supposed though that she would be able to accept it if she did not complete the project. That too, she would not know where she stood on that until she got there.
The evening before, she had decided to scratch her plans to participate in a craft fair she had signed up for that was to take place the next day. It was one where one could set up the night before. She had been working so hard on her writing that day - first the Nano project, and then a press release for the upcoming fundraiser Christmas tree sale that committee would be having, that the thought of now having to go set up for a craft fair and with not much inventory on hand, was overwhelming. The idea of having to turn around and switch focus so radically was too much. It might have been ok if it required no preparation but it always required preparation. Customers would expect to be able to buy from her. They would be just as pleased to be able to buy the prints which she had plenty of on hand, but she always felt an obligation that she was supposed to have a good inventory of cards on hand. As the frequency of craft fair occurrences had grown less and less over the years, she had lost her own momentum and enthusiasm to keep up with the business. She needed something on a weekly basis that was a manageable regular pace. These fairs were now clustered together on just a few weekends of the year. Neither was she willing to do the shows that had been lackluster to be at, especially those where she had sold very little. She was only willing to do that kind if it was simply an extremely enjoyable event to be at. For anything else it simply was not worth the effort of carting out all one's selling stuff. This was perhaps one of the reasons she was yearning nostalgically for selling on the busy streets of NYC. There, yes, one was dragging one's wares around, but one could quickly set up shop for a little while, scope out whether it was a day to do business in, and move to another spot if that one held no business. The problem with NYC though was that the streets had grown increasingly full of vendors. Turf was tight. One could no longer go set up anywhere. That had been her experience already almost twenty years ago, the last time she had done it.
She had been wondering for several years now if there was a format she could create that combined performance with her art, and that might be able to be done on the streets. She was tired of having to drag around things to sell.
1:10p
Even the conversion of her creations into a format that others could produce themselves she found as too mechanical a procedure and that she no longer was willing to engage in. If there was no reasonable assurance that spending that effort would not yield an immediate result, she had no patience with it - if it was a routine, automated, mechanical type effort to execute. She wanted to operate in the present. She supposed she might be somewhere, somehow, in contradiction with thoughts she'd expressed previously.
She could only hope and assume that the craft fair organizers had gotten her phone message. She had had to leave it on their landline phone number she believed, as, if they had a mobile phone, they had not given that number out to the crafters. She had considered going down to the set-up to inform them in person, but then decided that was too risky. She already felt guilty enough and in person could feel too obligated to having signed up for the fair that she might be tempted to change her mind again. She had reasoned that they too had to accept the consequences of not having a mobile phone as an organizer. She wondered if part of her lack of enthusiasm for this fair had been because when she'd called about it, the organizer had sounded like the fair was probably all full up already and would only be open to the waiting list after a certain date. The implication had been that there was no room at the inn, since she had missed the last year's fair. Then she had received an application anyway. What was meant by that? Was she suddenly on the list of preferred vendors for some reason, and if so, for what reason? She had already felt put off by it. She hated what she saw as tunnel vision thinking - rigid or inflexible views that closed one off from possibilities.
She had felt guilty about bowing out, but she had not felt depressed about it. She felt very relieved and glad. She knew her found time would fly by very quickly, but she had needed to have that time unstructured. She needed to counter structured activity with unstructured activity.
1:35p 980 words
Again she had written a list before hand of possible things she might write about in the day's writing. She had not looked at it once she began her session. She had no idea if what she had written so far touched on anything on the list. Yes, she had noted down the blowing off of the craft fair, however the things she had said about this were so different than what she had assumed she might say about it, (if she had even thought that far ahead).
She had been wondering just what was it about the light around 2:00 pm in the coming winter season that gave such sadness about the soon to end day? Why should it feel so different than the morning light that was only 2 1/2 hours after sunrise? The angle had to be the same - the look of it had to be the same, just as if one had moved the lamp over to the other side of an object. But there was always an emotional tone or an atmosphere to this afternoon light that wrenched at her. What all did it mean. It signaled more than the passing day. It signaled a passing year. It showed how quickly the years flew by. It was not just that it signaled time passing.Could it be that it also said, time is passing and you are still caught up in this treadmill of obligation - making things that other people supposedly want but for reasons that you don't really accept or condone, or even believe are wanted authentically enough. Don't people's own actions or lack of actions express how much they want something?
She had stood in the bedroom door around noon, having just noticed how the sunlight was flooding straight in. A bit later, coming back into the room she saw that the light had already moved to the right, to the west. The window edge and curtain were like a sundial in the angle they threw on the floor. She contemplated about this fast movement as she stared at the floor. It seemed to her as if she could see the shadow as it moved. Was this because of age - that things moved so much more the older one got, it almost seemed as if one could see people change and grow or age before one's very eyes - like stop motion camera photography. She would do a little test to see if she was actually seeing the shadow move or imagining it. She planted her foot over the shadow where it crosse the door jamb, so that the line intersected her right big toe. She watched. Not only did the shadow move swiftly but it made her head swim with a dizziness. It was unnerving. It did not feel as if the shadow moved but as if her foot was moving over the shadow and she was actually herself moving, shifting her position. That was what caused the dizziness.
2:03 p 1482 words
She longed to be able to write much more than the quota so that she could be done with the confines of this project earlier. She wanted to be free of feeling like she had to do this. The whole point of doing this ( was it really the whole point?) was to
2:08P PHONE?
experience what it was like to write non-stop without editing for an extended given number of days - but to experience how that would affect what one wrote. She had read someone's point of view about this Nano project, that pointed out that planning was almost impossible and probably useless because this writing pace would cause spontaneous things to happen that would take the writing off its planned route. Perhaps this was like the weather, like life, like any unforeseen circumstances. One was also to learn, to experience, that this inner direction could be trusted somehow. There was actual direction to it. Something like the idea that chaos was not the chaos one believed it was.
She was fishing for ideas of what else she could write about now. She did not want to refer to her list. She considered the 'looking around the room' trick. She had come up with the idea, that in the looking around the room trick she had been ignoring the obvious - the room was filled with boxes, each of which contained the stuff of her life. She could look at any box and wonder about its contents. Many of the boxes she recognized and remembered their contents. Others she would need to either open or look up their number on her box inventory list to see what was inside. These boxes were still filling up the middle of her living room from when she'd moved to this apartment over a year ago.
The packing and the moving had been such an ordeal at the time, though it had all worked out well, that she had been unwilling then to start unpacking the boxes. She liked that her stuff was all in boxes. The trouble was she wished she had another room she could put all the boxes in. She would love to be able to leave things packed away. She had made a basic inventory list as she had packed, that described the essential contents of each box. Each box also had a number on it and on the list. Once moved in she had made a map of all the box locations so that she could find things if she needed to. It still took time to find things. One could not find things if one was rushed, but one could find them if one worked methodically.
Recently, around the one year anniversary of her move here, she had taken the step to unpack her art books and put them into one of the bookcases. She had also moved all the art lesson file boxes into the bedroom. They were along one wall, four boxes high. There was also a four box stack of her journals. Perhaps also a stack of file boxes with art. The work stopped as she had had to work on other projects and unsure what she wanted to do next with the rearranging.
2:30p 2025 words
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