Late today for a complex of reasons. But I’m here nevertheless.
Thinking about – oh, what have I been thinking about already this morning? The weather? Light persistent drizzle. Motivation? For writing, extremely low; for housework even lower; though I could spend the morning listening to the radio and knitting or sorting out my accounts– either of those seems quite appealing at the moment. Two lines from Bob Marley’s Redemption Song: ‘Emancipate yourself from mental slavery/None but ourselves can free our minds’
I’ve done my morning exercises, had a shower and washed my hair, cooked and eaten a bowl of porridge – although usually I do my writing before breakfast, it felt as though time was running late, so had breakfast deciding whether to write or not. Seems bizarre, the amount of effort that goes into writing about how I can’t write – except, that it isn’t any effort, not usually. Writing that requires effort is something that I stay well clear of. Writing just what comes into my head is easy – and, arguably, pointless – but I will keep doing it anyway. Sometimes it leads my mind down interesting new paths, though I’ve long given up the idea that it will lead me into writing a novel.
The disconnect between mind and fingers continues: I just caught myself typing ‘so they’ when my mind was thinking ‘though I’ve’… It’s quite disturbing when you think about it. Normal typoes caused by pressing the wrong keys are to be expected, but this is something else, like ‘typoes’ created in my brain outside of conscious control. ‘So’ rhymes with ‘though’, and ‘they’ starts with the same sound as ‘though’… it sounds bizarre, but I can kind of see who it could happen – even more bizarre, I’ve just noticed I typed ‘who’ instead of ‘how’ (though of course that is an anagram, so not so bizarre, except for the coincidence that I did it while thinking about how I do that).
I need to train myself out of looking at the keyboard and into looking at the screen when I’m typing – I’ve never been a ‘proper’ touch typist, I taught myself from a book forty years ago, though I’ve certainly had a lot of practice in that time. At least it’s usually possible to interpret my typing, which is more than can be said for my handwriting.
Just had a text from my yoga teacher to say that she’s cancelling classes for the foreseeable future, not due to Covid, but because she has had to move out of her flat and can’t get transport from her temporary place. Although in some ways it’s a relief because I don’t always feel like I want to go, I feel bad for her, and will miss her. However grim I feel, her classes always lift my spirits. Even when I’m thinking that some of the things she gets us to do are just daft, somehow, for her, I can suspend my disbelief and chant along with the rest of them.
