AW: Week 9 Check-In

1. Morning Pages?

I did morning pages 3/7 this week. I've been on call for work and that plays merry havoc with my schedule. Frankly, sleep is more important and I've had little brain left to do "daily pages" in the evening - nor inspiration to. I've been very down on the whole occurrence. I did finish out the journal I was using for MPs.

I decided to switch to unlined because writing larger/more freely makes the pages go faster, but it also feels wrong on lined pages. Words scrawled through lines look ugly and wrong to me. Thus, bye-bye lines. Unfortunately, I don't have many unlined books handy (and being on call I couldn't just go buy something easily - I tried the stores I could get to and still get home in time, but they had more lined crap). I did have one, so I switched to it, but I'm not very fond of the paper. Or the journal. I bought this a decade ago and what was I thinking? But I can fix the not liking the look part, and I've already started on embellishing it to that end. It won't fix the paper but maybe I'll get used to it. If not, I'll re-purpose it for something else - after I manage to get a replacement journal.

As far as U-turns, I haven't addressed them, in my MPs or anywhere else. Since I'm still working on finding places to send my poetry, and I'm even working on the crafty stuff - both slowly due to the dearth of time this week, I confess - I don't feel like I'm in a U-turn or worrying about one just now. Whether I should pay attention to it or not, I haven't been. (And I find the term "u-turn" to be absurd, since I have always thought of a u-turn as what you do when you realize you're going 100% the wrong direction and you're now trying to get back on course, whereas Julia treats it as what you do when you're scared of the direction you're going and want to go the wrong direction. I find that interpretation hard to use, and the term therefore grates on me.)

2. Artist date?

No. See 'on call for work' which has been hectic. (Unless coming home early so I can rest a bit before the on-call period counts, which I don't think it does. Or modifying my journal, but that was being creative, not feeding my creativity.)

3. Synchronicity?

In February, we were going to get snow one day. I wanted snow so bad. I was quite disappointed when it didn't show up, even though snow in mid-to-late February is unusual here. And then, this week, in March for crying out loud, we got snow! And it was gone in time for me to go into work as normal, but there for me to enjoy, too. See earlier post. There were a few other bits of synchronicity too, but this was the big one.

4. Other significant issues?

Complete lack of time due to work? Not getting a single exercise done? Also, Cameron's nuts. Don't read your MPs for 8 weeks, then read them? If you've been doing them diligently, that's 168 pages. Even if you haven't, it's probably over 100. That's a lot of reading. (Actually, it wouldn't be that much reading for me in a week that wasn't this chaotic - I read whole books in an evening, and they've got a lot more words. But it's a lot of reading when I'm busy, and I also know that lots of people don't read as fast as I do.) Also, highlighting is the ugly and I never like to read anything that's been highlighted again because it forces its attention-focus onto the reader. So, when I do get around to rereading (maybe this weekend?), I'll take notes of interesting items, thankyouverymuch.

The next paragraph should be skipped by those who are tired of my rants about the tone of the book. *wry* I guess it's time for another one, since one came out, and this being a stressy week for me outside of AW no doubt contributed substantially to it.

I'm very disenchanted with the whole process these past two weeks, to be honest. I can't tell if it's resistance or just the buildup of all my objections to it along the way. Cameron presents things as "you must do it THIS way" (even if she does say 'use it creatively' in the intro somewhere, that is NOT the tone of the text), and I have a real hard time with deviating from 'orders' without rejecting whatever I'm deviating from, so every time she's been 'wrong' for what I should do, I've either wanted to reject the whole process or ended up doing something not right for me. It makes me very snarly. My MPs today were very grouchy about this, very rejecting, but as I said in them - it's three more weeks and I'm going to do it. If only so that I won't be tempted to reattempt it a third time in another decade. I will be glad when we get through it and go on to other creativity groupings and approaches that don't have a single central One Text To Rule Them All sort of feel....

I also got some scrapbooking papers with quotes/affirmations on them, cut them into the component pieces, and dropped them in an envelope. I'm planning to pull one out and affix it to the page, then write on about it, when I get stuck. It beats the heck out of "I'm tired where's the end of this page I don't have anything more to say come on I just want to go to work now will this stupid page ever end". Which doesn't happen often, but which I hate when it does. At the same time I found a lovely "postcard" scrapbook thingy, which I had no use for whatsoever but loved. So I got it - and then affixed it to my desk. No doubt it will eventually tear and have to be removed (and yes, the way I put it on, I can remove it when I want or need to), but for the moment I think it looks quite nice. I tried to get a photo to share but I did not like how they came out. I may try again but I have a lot of other things to do first - look up the places I may submit my poetry, more fake water (same projects still, but this may be the last application for both of them, whew), maybe the zen sand gardens I've been thinking about for a month or two now.

Speaking of which, my company gave us small gift certificates to Amazon.com as a Christmas gift. I hadn't used mine yet. So I did - I will be getting a book called The Practice of Poetry (I have a copy out from the library now; it's full of wonderful, inspirational exercises) and I will also be getting the 2006 Poet's Market - no more drives to a library in another city to use it in the reference section!! :)