Returning from vacation has filled me with an utterly predictable and totally unshakeable sense of ennui about everyday life. I’ve been writing a lot, which is a wonderful feeling, but wish it wasn’t so frustrating to interrupt myself every morning and start cracking on some advertising copy. Still, though, that’s how we pay the bills. (And I’d rather be frustrated than not get any writing done.)
You know how women in 19th (?) century novels are always being told to “take the waters” as a rest cure, swimming and bathing and baking in the sun to bolster their delicate constitutions with a few freckles and some salt in their hair? The whole time I was in Mexico, that’s what I felt like I was doing, which is to say: perfect vacation. Wake up, drink coffee, walk down the jungle path to the ocean, swim for a few hours, read on a beach chair, go have lunch, write, nap, swim some more, then eat a gigantic fish someone has grilled for you. You can see why I miss it.
Coming home does have some advantages, though, namely: my dog, access to the library, our pretty house (which Dave is starting to KonMari, god help me), our enormously comfortable bed, television, wine. Tonight I’m going to see my writing friends, and we’re going to have a steak dinner and then go to the new craft whiskey & donut shop for dessert. I haven’t decided if this shop is pure genius or hipster nonsense (aren’t donuts too sweet to pair with whiskey?) but since it’s hitting all my buttons I guess I shouldn’t complain.
Also nice is seeing The Daughters on this great list of “Books that defined 2015” for the editors of The Missing Slate, and showing up twice (twice! Thank you Carmen Maria Machado & Sofia Samatar!) on the Strange Horizons Year in Review. I really love seeing The Daughters considered as fabulism, since that is certainly an interest and aim of mine.
Finally, just because they are giving me joy today, here are two videos that are goddamn hilarious.
- Philomena Cunk’s Moments of Wonder (this is actually a SERIES god help me)
- Patricia Clarkson on 7 Minutes in Heaven with Mike O’Brien. Watch Patricia Clarkson wrap her sexual charisma around him like a blanket.