The insatiable urge I still manage to resist

Lazy, lazy Sunday. As my husband works a seven hour shift then returns later for a two hour meeting. It was a comical moment of contrast when we were home between his work stints, and I was lying bonelessly on the bed, "complaining" about how hard my day of spending time with a friend at the mall was. He was taking off my shoes for me, too. :)

I will never, ever, ever deny how good I have it.

Prior to that, between leaving Brandy at the train station and retrieving Reagan up from work, I languished in the Home Depot parking lot. With only a half hour between drop off (A) and pick-up (B), it was pointless to labor our poor car up the hill for what would be a mere 15 minutes at home. That interim was spent, against all odds, drawing.

I dream of being an artist who can draw anywhere, anytime, at the drop of a hat. I want to be found, under any conditions, sketching in a battered notebook because nothing else will satisfy my restlessness. Tiny bits of progress towards creating on demand have been made as I doodle every morning when I wake up, and today a greater step forward was taken.

I'm glad to always carry with me a scratchbook in which quality takes a back seat to the purity of practice, and I'm even more glad that the book is achieving its intended purpose. And so I show you, with oblivious pride, the things I drew when I couldn't do anything else:



Sadly, the victory is not complete. Upon my arrival home, when the urge was still strong (and I had escaped the loving clutches of a husband who had been deprived of his mate for the previous hours), I instead spent many minutes on the empty calories of internet games, mentally fighting myself the whole time. And convincing myself to log off and darken my screen, I rewarded myself with more lounging-with-Reagan, then a snack, then 20ish pages of Midnight's Children which culminated in a nap.

Reminded by the status messages of far distant friends that "SOME OF US ARE WORKING", I am encouraged to blunder onward and tame my noodly, boneless hand into productivity. I wish I could say that leveler heads were prevailing, but I think it is the slanted ones (with slippery slopes!) that are wooing me to more reading. They promise me that before me stretch three days of uninterrupted drawing potential. No matter that those days will be punctuated with DANCING and interrupted by COUNTY FAIR (maybe), a siren* is calling me back to book-and-nest.

Do you think Salman Rushdie is having an (adverse) effect on my writing?

More drawings, not from today:



*Darren Rawlings makes nice drawings. And he seems like a keen guy.