Category: Journal

My brain went on strike about forty-five minutes after I finished the novel draft last week, and it’s still picketing against any notion of returning to work. I do keep trying to explain, quite reasonably, that I don’t need the entire brain back – just the bit that does the re-writing, and maybe the bit that writes the short stories would like to pitch in again? Heck, at this point I’d settle for the bit that writes haiku, and I’m so not a haiku kind of guy.

So it appears my primary activity today has been waiting and that three thousand words is beyond ambitious. Got the news that my uncle was hospitalised not long after this morning’s post, alongside a request from my sister that we get in contact with my parents and bring them home from their overseas holidays on the chance they’d get back here before the inevitable happens. On one hand that’s all pretty easy – this wasn’t entirely unexpected and it’s mostly a matter of e-mail, SMS, and some websearching for the phone numbers of hotels – but on the other hand there’s a lot of waiting around for news so we can move onto the next step. I’m not terribly good at waiting. Nor at knowing what’s appropriate during the period where all you do is wait. At this point I’ve basically rattled around my flat for six hours, and I think I’m hitting the point where I either need to

So last night I started twittering in a fit of moderate curiosity, working off the theory that “hey, I write a bunch of status updates about coffee on facebook anyway.” I’m not sure I truly grasp the medium yet, but we’ll see. I mean, I said the same thing about facebook originally, and I’m still hovering about over there (although I’m still picky as hell about which applications I’ll add in). Now I’m off to see if I can break this habit of being distracted by shiny things and get back to the writing.

One of these days I’m going to learn that no good comes of Sundays when I factor it in as a day in which I can do work. No matter how much I pretend it’s a day in which I can get things done, the fact that it’s my designated day to engage with the outside world largely means that I’ll whittle away the time doing nothing until the appointed hour when I get to actually go out and see real people.

Yesterday I cancelled my Foxtel subscription. Not a huge surprise, given that I’ve been trying to get it cancelled for months, but it seems I was finally given the correct end-date for my contract and I could get the deed done without spending more on the cancellation fee than I would have spent keeping it going until the lease ran out. My credit card, who effectively made this decision for me, is justifiably pleased about this turn of events. I, on the other hand, am getting twitchy. Primarily this comes from the fact that pay-TV was my only real option for getting any kind of TV reception in my flat – we’re located in a ditch by the train-lines, which means that internal antennae are next to useless, and the sole external aerial doesn’t feed into my apartment. Since I live alone the television was the primary source of other human voices in my day-to-day life. The flat seems irritatingly

Last week was dominated by day-job dramas; this week has been dominated by bad news (often of the medical kind) among friends and family. On the whole, I’d rather go back to the job-dramas.