2023-06-19 Journal Entry

🍃 Season: 🌷 Spring 🔆 Weekday: Monday 🗓 Date: June 19, 2023 📅 Week: Jun 19 – Jun 25, 2023

I haven’t journaled since we went to the beach, but I have a couple hours of flight time to kill today, so here we go.

It was a fun trip, although I’m constantly both reminded how fun kids are and how exhausting they are - having all three little ones in the same room, and especially about in the sand and ocean at the same time, is a lot. Their parents took the brunt of the work off of me anyways, but even with that I still find myself having to catch myself and giving them a wider leash than my default mode allows. They’re a helpful exercise in restraint and in letting go. Every moment becomes a teaching moment, but that means that you have to allow them to be wrong more often than not. With adults, if they’re annoying or disrespectful — or worse, violent — it’s difficult to see those as teaching moments, but with kids, there’s literally now way for them to know yet.

I also totally gave up any semblance of routine, which was probably a bad call. I think my caffeine habit finally came back to bite me yesterday. My guess is that I had so much caffeine originally in my system that the half life kept me upright for a while, but yesterday I had a splitting headache and some horrible sleep. The kids were playing in the pool and all the adults were making waves, so the obvious course of action was to do a big ol’ belly flop, but the impact made my headache go from 2 to 10 in an instant. I had to kneel over by the pool to keep myself from falling over, and I legitimately could have collapsed. I think I covered it okay, but then that night I couldn’t sleep, and once I did, I awoke throughout the night with leg pains. I had dreams of my body being pulled to pieces when I finally did fall asleep, split apart as if by Grendel himself were in full bloodthirst and I was the nearest unassuming goat. Some ibuprofen kept it at a distance for a while, but I probably should get some coffee or an energy drink when I land in Dallas.

I’m tempted to start doing this 90 day novel program in earnest. I bought it out of some random recommendation on my kindle page, but the emphasis on freewriting was really fun on the first day, and I’m curious how the strategy of “live in the world until the plot becomes obvious” works out. It feels like the approach that a lot of writers implicitly take — or at least the writers that I really like — but it’s always tricky to tell. Anyways, other programs seem to feel like “well its obvious where the plot comes from,” but those plots always feel flat to me when I can just pull them out of nowhere. Of course I can make a story about the same handful of things that other people write, but I always find that actually making intriguing plots requires enough context to flesh out that I haven’t really built yet. I’m going to keep going a bit and see if it works out.