50,000 Words

For the past few weeks I've been hanging out in the teachers' room at Nathan's school, mostly because I happened to have a lot of free time. That was spent mostly dinking around with some new programs, or maybe subtitling. What I was really doing, though, was putting off what I always imagined I'd do when I found myself with substantial blocks of free time; obviously, that'd be producing a staggering work of genuis, or napping.

I do think I should take more naps, by the way.

What's about nice about wanting to be continually motivated and inspired is that I'm pretty much surrounded by people who pretty much amaze me everyday. For Friday's Example of Amazingness, my housemate, Hannah, cobbled together a band she insists is "jazz funk" and two months later they played a gig at an annual charity fundraiser, overcoming truly ridiculous obstacles (bassist broke his ankle 48 hours before, and another drummer had to go back Australia on short notice). It didn't matter; at the end people were dancing and generally having a great time and begging for encores until Jess, the lead singer, simply said "We have no more."


It also helped that, in their moment of need, Dan, an unassuming Canadian, mentioned that he was a classically trained guitarist. Those Canadians and their modest ways...

Despite being surrounded, I still yet have written anything like I used to in college. (This, of course, is maybe a good thing.) More accurately, I've not yet sat down and seriously tried to do anything creative. Good thing Hannah has roped us all in to National Novel Writing Month then.

As the name suggests, we're taking on the insane task of producing a novel in a month. The guidelines require that the finished products (ha!) need to be at least 50,000 words long (ha!).

I think that it is likely that I will be napping less.

Jelly Belly

The bloom is off the rose and changes are afoot. Or is that in the air? I can never keep my figures of speech straight.

Speaking of change and figures, one of the kindly techs pinched some of my belly flab the other day and pegged my weight gain to the kilo. She said I'd been looking a little too skinny, which I found confusing, because most Vietnamese girls make beanpoles look like Sophia Loren. However, I could definitely do without the added roundness; luckily, Thu, while rubbing my tummy at a book signing (as one does) noted that it was very soft, which meant it would be easier to get rid of.

She's a yoga instructor. Have you ever seen a fat yoga instructor?

A Rip in the Space-Time Continuum...

must have been where August and September disappeared to, because I blinked in July while on a plane and opened my eyes to find that I'm more than a quarter of the way through October. The other day I caught myself absently wondering when the weather changed, for the rainier, the muggier, the Seattler.

It's kind of nice.

I've taken to liberally drinking coffee mixed with condensed milk. Less you wonder how this is any different from my normal routine, let me explain; it's Vietnamese coffee. I used to steal my father's mug of coffee as he read the newspaper and I read the Sunday comics. In college, on the Ave, I ordered a Vietnamese-style coffee at a specialty tea and coffee cafe because I had never before seen Vietnamese coffee advertised as being Vietnamese, like it was something unusual or hand-roasted by Colombian priestesses. The barista hesitated before warning me that a cup of the Vietnamese coffee was equivalent to six shots of expresso.

I had always wondered why Starbucks coffee never really seemed to induce a caffeine high.

At any rate, despite (or perhaps because of) this longstanding history with strong coffee, I don't remember drinking an awful lot of it in college. Mostly I preferred sports drinks and banana-flavored steamed milk. Unfortunately banana milk isn't packed full of stimulants, and lately I've been leaping before looking and running before walking, so this fall is looking pretty crazy. Crazy dangerous.

I'll have you know that I've become considerably less clumsy.