A Quick Note on Those New Year's Resolutions

Remember those? Yeah. I had resolutions once. One of those concerned the reclaiming of lost hobbies, and it's that particular resolution whose progress I'm currently reporting on. However, "progress" might not be the best way to describe what's happening. "Regress" might be a better word, since it seems like rather than reincorporating any of my lost hobbies, I have managed to squeeze even MORE hobbies out of my life. Frankly, there's some important actual work that's being squeezed out of my life. I'm not exactly sure where this mysterious time black hole came from, but something is wrong with the fabric of space and time, I'm pretty sure.

Anyway, it seems like my hobbies currently boil down to the following:

• Sleeping. One might think this is mandatory rather than an optional activity. However, when I ask myself, what do I do in my spare time...it seems like sleeping takes up a good portion of it. What can I say? I needs my 7 to 9 hours.
• Eating. As above. Kind of mandatory, but I like it and I have fun doing it, and Rob and I both enjoy eating as a recreational activity (not as in, like, hot-dog-eating contests--more as in eating strange, fancy, or, occasionally, shockingly expensive stuff).
• Cooking. It facilitates the eating, so I justify spending extra time on it. It's not unusual for me to spend two hours working on a meal just for the two of us. I don't do that every DAY, but at least weekly. I like puttering around in the kitchen, experimenting and improving my skills. And, again, you gotta eat, right? Since I'm in the kitchen anyway, cooking dinner, I might as well enjoy it, right? 
• Social Obligations. I am not the most sociable of people--most of you reading this know that I would be reasonably happy not talking to anyone all day except my husband and cats, the majority of the time. It's just that we have somehow acquired at least one to three major social engagements per week and now this is a major time suck.

And that, guys, is pretty much it.

Hey! you shout. You didn't put "reading" on the list of hobbies! No, I did not. At the moment, all of my reading hours are spent on books related to the HUX classes Rob and I are taking. Seriously. I take a pen and notebook with me to bed along with the reading material, just in case, during the 15 minutes I manage to stay awake before bed these days, something strikes me as usable for writing a paper.

Funny how this sounds like a TOTALLY DYSFUNCTIONAL person's schedule. Ah, the life of a part-time college student.

One final parting thought: I've been so pressed for time that I almost considered putting "fiction writing" on the Hobbies list, because I've unintentionally deprioritized it over the past few weeks. THAT is a real problem. It's all too easy to fall into the trap of "I have to do this other stuff over here, because if I don't, I won't get paid/nobody else will do it/the world will explode." And then, suddenly, it's sleepy-time again and yet another day went by that I didn't even come close to having time to work on my novel.

I fear this: the idea that the measure of a real artist is how willing you are to shove everything else aside just so you can work on your art. Food for thought. (And now, I'm off to create food for the body...)

Where Am I?

That is a GREAT question. The short answer is, I'm home now. The long answer is, well, long. Suffice it to say that the past month or so has been beyond hectic--going to weddings, visiting parents, a trip to Disneyland, summer classes starting (the ones we're taking and the one that Rob is teaching), writing papers, etc. etc. As one friend put it, we're 1 wedding and 1 funeral short of a movie.

That's right--we went to 3, count 'em, 3 weddings in 3 weeks. One per week. TWO of those weddings were in Ben Lomond, which is in the Santa Cruz Mountains, approximately 2.5 hours' drive away. One of those involved a full weekend stay (see details here). Somehow, we managed to cram in a trip to Disneyland last Wednesday, and were appalled to realize we hadn't gone to Disneyland in about 14 years. It was awesome, but I have to say--pardon my French--that shit's expensive now. Somewhere in there I wrote a 5-page paper about James Joyce. Oh, and did I mention that our 10-year wedding anniversary was this past Saturday? We already went away for a few days to celebrate--wisely, we did this back in early May, before everything went nuts. Sadly, I was sick during that trip. Rob was sick during Wedding #1. That's right; germs made an appearance this month, too.

Even without all that stuff, I've been kind of appalled at how little time I have to do things lately. So blogging has fallen by the wayside, except for the YA blog. ALL WORK AND NO PLAY MAKE HOMER SOMETHING SOMETHING. That's all I have to say.