It’s 10:30, do you know where your clients are? Writing, flogging, blogging, reading, watching re-runs? Drinking, spanking, on-line banking? Looking at art books, reading The Believer? Fighting with their spouse, sexting their neighbor, walking the golden, rolling a doobie. Correcting their pages, emailing their agent, snacking and by that I mean “snacking.” Watching Entourage, admiring Ari, making crepes, singing Adele, shaving legs. Writing in their diaries, cranking out footnotes, on-line dating, on-line shopping, playing poker, commenting.
What about you?
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Betsy Lerner 
watching Discovery channel asking the hubby how long we’d live if swallowed by a whale and rereading my blog entry thinking “they should all be this short”
Hissing at their husbands and children, pressing hard on their gurgling stomachs, and drinking wine from teacups.
writing in bed. reading in bed. not paying attention to my husband’s work story. not calling my dad back. trying to put together a letter that explains my whole life to my sister. wondering if i’ll remember tomorrow to order a cake for thursday not knowing why i have started biting my nails again why does the term executor makes me think of a guillotine before a will? wishing i’d written the book i bought tonight (one of them).
What was the book?
Reading your blog, drafting my next post, queuing up a collection of essays I’m reading as background to a gestating character, eyeing the issue of _Harper’s_ that came in today’s mail like it’s a box of chocolates.
On my knees, davenning and chanting hallelujahs for my son’s nurse, who just walked in the front door after a vacation to her native Guyana. Ten nights with fragmentary sleep (at best) takes its toll on one’s mental health.
Get some sleep, give the nurse a raise. With a knick knack patty whack…
Be grateful it was only 10 nights- my son did not sleep through an entire night until he was three years old and there was no nanny, nurse, husband nor family member to help me. Fragmented sleep, combined with strong coffee, only nurtured this Type A Mom into a different sort of multi-tasker.
Almost nine years old, my son suffers from a neuromuscular disease and requires round-the-clock medical monitoring and interventions. His bedroom looks like a miniature ICU. My wife and I have part-time nursing coverage but do a lot of his care ourselves — exhausting and stressful, to say the least. I call it “Extreme Parenting.” The good news is that he’s done well in the home care setting, plus we’ve educated ourselves on the nuts and bolts of his disease.
Contemplating tonight’s sleepy time combo. Maybe two whites and a blue. And the Kindle and King Arthur.
I just read the Amazon sample of my book. I love it.
What do y’all think about “The Paris Wife”? Is it going to make me all sad and stuff?
I found it disappointing. Movable Feast is more, well, moving.
I agree with Mary Lynne. The Pars Wife was blah for me. Couldn’t finish it.
Delivered food to 2 friends post surgery, listening to John Stewart and Calvin Trillin talk about terrorism and Scrabble, nursing a sick lab pup, having a glass of bad wine and wondering if I should just take the Zantac now, reading The Art of Fielding and wondering exactly how it’s “not a baseball book,” folding the towels the right way, checking email and waiting for a message from my teen niece who’s in trouble, hoping for some good sleep (for me and my sick pup), watching Steven Colbert test his new iPhone. So exciting!
After three days and thirty rounds with chapter two revisions, I’m calling it a TKO and going to bed with Advil and an ice pack.
I don’t have any clients. There, that’s settled. I was in bed, almost asleep, when I passed through the transition phase and came out on the other side awake again. Damn it. So I got up and returned the the study, where I am about to read from Brian Greene’s THE HIDDEN REALITY. It’s quite good and not at all boring, but it’s work, being all about Quilted Multiverses and Inflationary Multiverses and Quantum Fields and Inflaton Fields and the negative pressure of uniform fields and fundamental particles acquiring mass by moving through Higgs fields and all I’m questing for is a field of dreams. The chapter I’m about to start is about string theory and maybe reading that will tug me into the field of dreams or weave for me a gently rocking cat’s cradle where while sleeping I may venture into one of the infinitely replicating parallel universes where I’m doing both the exact same things I’m doing now here in this one while also doing everything else possible everywhere all the time. Sweet dreams are made of these.
10:30 is still six minutes away, Pacific Time, and hopefully, I’ll be asleep.
Sitting on my couch, eating moose bone marrow chili and wishing my Mexican tugboat captain lover would call me back.
Watching Q.I, writing a book review, drinking hot chocolate and telling my dog off for leaving hair all over my new sofa. Waiting for the Milk Tray man to deliver a box of chocolates and for the gorgeous one off of Strictly Come Dancing to whisk me around the room in a sexy tango.
Oh, I fell asleep. Tut.
It’s 10.30 in Italy and there is no spanking but some blurbs going out for stories I have coming up in Ether Books and now it’s time for orange peel chocolate and espresso grazie!
Nestled and snoozing.
Watching Danny Boyle’s Millions and loving the most compelling kid character I’ve ever seen
I was doing five of those things at 10:30 last night. What I can’t believe is that snacking wasn’t one of them for a change.
Gosh, I wish I had Mexican tugboat captain lover or a Milk Tray Delivery man. And a good spanking is always relaxing, but I didn’t have that either.
At work. As always.
In bed, sending and receiving love notes to and from my wife. Talking about the day, massaging away aches and stress; quiet caresses on a firm but giving mattress. Sometimes we make love, but last night we were too tired for that and wound up slipping into sleep holding onto to each other as if we were two teenagers who had unexpectedly discovered simultaneous orgasms.
Last night at 10:30, all randy activity for me was confined to reading this ridiculous book I won at a writers’ meeting. Claiming to be an “erotic paranormal romance”, I laughed myself to tears over the dialogue and sex scenes. Then, I mentally cried because this drivel gets published.
Hear, hear. . .
Writing an article on “pre-competitive space collaboration” in the biopharma industry.
Listening to Boyce Avenue’s acoustic version of Taylor Swifts’ Last Kiss. Annotating Wayne Koestenbaum’s Humiliation for my mentor, queried another pretty journal, holding my 2 lb. Maltese Notebook—wishing I only had to worry about my puppy because I’d be in Paris right now with some blue-eyed peach-colored stranger wearing linen pants that kidnapped me along some breezy canal. All this wondering, waiting, wanting, in my pajamas.
Last night, 10:30, finishing the last of a very good red, thinking about what my main character is thinking but God forbid I should actually write it down, catching up on Castle from dvr, and listening to my dogs slurp in the corner. No tug boat captains around here but a mighty fine old marketing man is snoozing upstairs
Nursing a pulled muscle, and yes I am whining.
Preparing a lecture, chewing Nicorette gum.