When I set out to learn about my mother's bridge club, the Jewish octogenarians behind the matching outfits and accessories, I never expected to fall in love with them. This is the story of the ladies, their game, their gen, and the ragged path that led me back to my mother.
This week I kept hitting a wall with my writing project. I could barely concentrate. I drank an oil tanker worth of diet soda. I pruned my bookcase. I pruned my manuscript pile. I shopped for bras online. I literally drove to the nearby Krauser’s and bought more diet soda, three bulls eyes, and three tootsie rolls. I cleaned my monitor. I cleaned my glasses. I printed out the pages and started reading them aloud, fell asleep. I had a saintly cup of green tea. I walked the dog twice. I put away two baskets of laundry. I watched a Keanu Reeves movie.
What do you do when you hit a wall?
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Betsy Lerner 
I like to take all my books off my bookshelves to organize them in some new way and then lose interest midway through the project, leaving stacks of books across my office floor.
I’ve read that clutter in your home may represent emotional clutter, but who knows. I mean, what could piles of books stacked all around me while I’m trying to work possibly mean?
Hello Betsy,
Once again I can’t figure out how to copy and past. Hours of work lost. Turned off computer. Opened a bottle of wine. Thinking of shredding all the hard copy.
I call friends. It’s a sure sign of pure desperation and procrastination since I don’t even like to talk on the phone.
What’s your favorite Keanu film?
“What do you do when you hit a wall?”
I climb over it, or I burrow under it, or I go around it, or I turn my back to it and walk some other way.
I’m a pinball, bouncing from bumper to bumper, trying to stay in the game.
Is the game no longer pinball? Mutatis mutandis, away I do play.
I read. I haven’t figured out what it is about this, but, if I find myself circling my ms like a buzzard over a dead body, taking in someone else’s words has saved me more than once.
Walk. Clear my head and then fog it all up again with thankfully now legal substances. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn’t, but at least I’m in an altered frame of mind.
What I really need is reverse ear phones/ear buds, you know, the kind that don’t fill your head with music but instead take out the clutter and random musings and plop it on a disc or into a ipod or something. Maybe Amazon has them in stock.
I walk away from the wall. On some unconscious level, I’m still working out a problem. I go back to the wall, chisel away.
Clean.
My house is a mess right now.
Um, funny how anon has 2Ns too.
Funny that Anon has 2Ns too.
I binge watch Nordic police procedurals.
Justin’s Peanut Butter Cups. They are the only unhealthy gluten and dairy-free Jones I can find. (I’m stuck, but not suicidal). If these don’t work, I grab the toothpicks and clean the gunk out of the stove’s crevasses. After that, I clean the washing machine and dryer. I always get an idea before I Mop n’ Glow the water heater.
Eat dark chocolate. Lots of it.