Wrong Side of the Bed Day

Must have woke up on the wrong side of the bed today. How else to explain such an addlepated day. And to top it off, I totally forgot that I hadn't posted today until I came in to lay down at 5AM Tuesday morning. I'm cheating. I'm back dating my post a few hours so as to not break my streak of daily posts. If I'm going to stay awake long enough to write this post about Monday I might as well get to call it Monday's post.

My niece brought my coffee to me at nine-thirty this morning as we had agreed after we said our weary good-nights about 2AM. I'd been sleeping on my right arm and it was half asleep. I couldn't hold my coffee cup with my right hand. I guess my body has to get to know this new bed. It is much more comfortable because it is much firmer but that probably contributed to my arm going to sleep. But it wasn't just my arm that was not itself. I felt so disoriented. Nothing is where I am used to it being. I don't do change well.

All day long I was putting my foot or hand or arm or shin into places they were not meant to be. I was off balance because of sore muscles and my left foot (the one I broke when I kicked the iron duck two years ago this month) was aching again. Bad enough I couldn't put my full weight on the left pad (is that the right word?) the part below the two smallest toes which you roll onto when you walk normally. I had to either walk flat footed or tilt my foot onto the right pad below the big toe. Ether way it threw me off balance. I bumped into walls, doors, door casings. I kicked into the back porch steps, the stake Merlin was leashed to, the hassock in the living room, the recliner's raised foot rest. I dropped things, knocked things over. I broke a finger nail and three toe nails. I knocked Ed's jeans into Merlin's water dish. I spent half an hour looking for a gold garlic capsule on a gold carpet before deciding maybe it had fallen into my soft-sided faux leather attache case. So I emptied the bag and put the things inside away into their new homes. I didn't find the capsule but I found many things I had misplaced over the last months. The bag is the one I had been putting the pieces of projects I was working on, or intended to work on, those nights I moved my work station into the living room. I kept putting things in but seldom took things out.

One of the things I found in that bag was the pages of a writing exercise that I performed for nearly a month in July of 97. The seeds of my poems, Implicate Order and Sounding Central Truth were both sewn and sprouted in that exercise. It was one of the few things that I printed hard copies of before I felt things had reached late draft stages. Which is why it wasn't lost with the majority of my writing notes and works in progress when we abandoned our storage unit in San Jose in 2001.

I had mentioned that writing exercise to my niece earlier this weekend and had tried to describe it but I could tell she wasn't really getting it. She is interested in writing poetry and wanted to know how to get her thoughts out of her head and onto paper. So I took those pages in to the living room where she was patiently waiting for me to join her to watch her Gilmore Girls DVD. I showed her those pages and after she had looked at them awhile and handed them back, I started browsing through them looking for the phrases that had become parts of those two poems. They were easy to find because I'd highlighted them with an aqua highlight pen. I had printed off those pages for the purpose of underlining phrases and metaphors that intrigued me or struck me as having potential for a story or poem.

As I scanned those pages, my eyes lit on phrases and words I had not marked but which now struck me. Not necessarily as poem or story material but as bizarre and hilarious. I started reading some of them aloud and soon she and I were giggling and then I was gasping for air because laughing silently so as not to wake the sleepers with day jobs is hard to do without holding your breath.

After a few more minutes of this we popped in the Gilmore Girl DVD. Season 1 first disk. I have never watched Gilmore Girls and my niece is gaga over them. She loaned me the first three seasons last November. I was waiting for NaNoWriMo to be over to start watching them. Then news of the impending library closure changed my plans. I was planning to start watching them in April but then came the malware attack on my laptop (which is my DVD player). Sometime in May I realized how close the end of the school year was and kinda decided I wanted to wait until she was able to watch the first ones with me so that she could be present to witness my intro to the girls. I'm glad I did that because it has created a special memory. But after watching the first four episodes with her, I am totaly hooked now and I told her I probably wouldn't be able to wait for her next visit to continue. She practically demanded that I not wait.

Over the months she had brought me seasons 4 and 5 and this visit she brought me season 6. Along with Pirates of the Caribbean 1 and 2 and the first 4 Harry Potter DVDs and Harry Potter books 3, 4, and 5 to go with book 6 which she loaned me in November and which I still have not read. I told her then that I probably would need to re-read 5 before I could read 6 as I couldn't remember much of it at all. There were several more DVD and several more books in the bag she brought me. Or rather us. The Harry Potter books and movies as well as Pirates are as much for Ed as for me. She has taken it upon herself to be our lending library.

Well, I just realized that I am closing in on 24 hours awake. Although the clock and calendar say it is Tuesday, my head is still in Monday. This is no time for me to be depriving my body and mind of healing sleep. I must apply my head to the pillow.