A Bulleted List

I miss the inside of my eyelids.

Oh hey. How’s it going? I miss the inside of my eyelids. Bullets are the only way to communicate this week. Let’s get into it.

• My daughter has a before-school club that takes place a few days a week, which means we’re in the car, driving, at 6 am. This is an early call time. I am proud of her for pursuing her interests.

• Related: We are a tired people. When 10 am rolls around and I’ve already been awake for five hours, those are the days when everything feels fake. The birds sound like puppets from the Tiki Room. I know the couch cushions are real but … like, are they? Toast is just a bunch of crumbs held together by heat fight me, I’m so frigging tired right now.

• A friend reminded me of froast, which is what I used to eat on occasion to treat a low blood sugar. Froast is bread from the freezer. Frozen toast. Froast.

• Not to be confused with a grosst, which is a gross post. For example, a post about an infusion set that you pull out and it bleeds everywhere. The moment? Gross. Writing about it? A post? Mash ‘em up? Grosst.

• Our resident cat is in mourning. She has taken to flomping onto the floor and just yowling, sending her cat voice up into the ceiling so that it bounces back towards here, maybe so she doesn’t feel so alone. She stands at the food bowl and yells. Early in the morning, she has wild and intense zoomies, where she runs up and down the staircase, screaming. Loki is lonely without the Loopster.

• She’s not the only one. There’s exactly zero cat hair on my office rug now. This is unacceptable. I think Loopy was my muse. Or at least the coworker that I liked the most.

• Which is why I’ve been visiting an animal shelter in state, checking in on a small pile of kittens that might be available for adoption in a few weeks.

• “Checking in” includes, but is not limited to, sitting on the shelter floor while an army of kittens walks all over me. I do not mind this at all. They weight a pound apiece and their claws feel like nothing at all and they mew with that sweet, high-pitched baby cat meow-sound. The cute factor is impossibly high.

• Loopy is missed. A lot.

• I've been taking a writing class (online) and it’s really helped me keep my writing nose to the writing grindstone. Which sounds not optimal, because wouldn’t that file my nose down to a stub? A metaphoric stub? Either way, I’ve been putting a lot of hours into writing these last three weeks and I’m now juuuuuust about to cross past 60,000 words of this entirely new, reworked draft.

• It’s really hard.

• It’s so frigging satisfying.

• I’m never sure which way I’ll feel about it on any given day, but it’s usually one of those two. I can’t wait to be finished so I can bug out about whatever the next part of this process might be.

• Unsure if this is a thing that happens to everyone with pierced ears, but over the decades (pierced lobes at the age of 9), my earring holes have drifted slightly. At this point, when I have earrings in, they are quite low on my ear. Not a fan. I visited a piercing parlor in Providence and talked with one of the technicians and they recommended taking my earrings out for several months, letting the holes close, and then re-piercing.

• Sure, I can do that.

• Only after about two days, I felt naked in the ear region. But I want to let the holes heal, so I bought a few ear cuffs to get me over the sartorial hump, and I LOVE them. They are inexpensive, claim to be “chic & artsy,” and are exactly what I needed to stop wearing posts through my piercings but still have a little decoration where I want it. These are the ones I picked up. (And no, this is not a sponsored post or shout out and not an affiliate link.)

• I am so tired. I feel like I’m in a dream sequence.

• Substack posts I’ve been enjoying? Sure, I’ll share some!

  • I loved Worm Regards (and all the illustrations) from Kate Horowitz.

  • This interview with Deesha Philyaw had me at "I am a fuckery whisperer." Via Oldster

  • How An Inside Outline Can Save Your Revision via AmWriting helped me get my head straight about draft 2. Good read.

  • Lather, Rinse, Repeat from Jennifer Weiner’s Inevitable Substack was a solid writing-read.

  • The Emotional Stages of Editing felt all too real. Via The Crows Nest

  • What Makes Women Clean was a fascinating read on Culture Study.

  
  If you’re reading something that grabs you by the gut, share a link. I’d love to get more words in my eyeballs.

• I need to go to bed now or I’ll start to fold in on myself, like that kid who sucked on the straw of his Pepsi so hard that he ended up stuck in the bottle.