Taking a break from all your worries
// April 22nd, 2010 // 2 Comments » // house buying, philosophizing, writing
I’m not watching the first round of the NBA playoffs.
Yup. It’s true. If you’re a member of my twitter following, you’re probably wondering where my snarky comments are. It’s not that I hate basketball. But with the Hornets out of the playoffs, I’m finding it hard to summon the will to care about the rest of the postseason. And really, it’s a good thing. I’ve got a lot going on right now. Last year I suffered from the same sort of burnout after the Hornets’ rather spectacular… well, burnout. But by the time the conference finals rolled around, I found myself right back in the middle of things, tweeting entire game commentaries in haiku form and compiling long posts about Lamar Odom’s bizarre outfits.
This year? I can’t bring myself to get invested in the few teams I care about that are inevitably going to get stomped in the first round. And I can’t bring myself to watch a series featuring two of my most hated Western Conference teams. And frankly, I can’t bring myself to get in front of the TV at all.
On April 5th, I started the process of buying a house for the first time. By April 8th, I’d made an offer. And now, on April 22nd, the loan is on its way to the underwriters (I am assuming this is a good thing– go underwriters!) and I’m continuing to freak out over every little financial detail. So, to all those people who advised me, “You can buy a house in under a month but it’s really stressful”? Yeah. You were right.
But the house is gorgeous. The neighborhood is funky and very New Orleans and very “me.” And I find it occupying a lot of my time, if even just my thinking time. We arrived at the Hornets’ last two home games straight from doing various stuff at “the house,” and let me tell you, it was hard getting into a basketball mindset. Mentally, I’d already moved on to “house house house” and “moving moving moving.” And now, stuck in some sort of weird “house limbo” it’s damn hard to concentrate on anything else.
I’ve also just been hit with a new story idea. Yup, still in the middle of revising my NaNo draft, which is about 95,000 words of “stuff” that doesn’t flow exactly the way I’d like it to, let’s just say. But I find that when I get a good story idea, I have to pull out Scrivener and toss everything into it, getting it all down so I’ll have it when I’m ready to start that project. And that includes going on Deviant Art and getting pictures that look like my characters, and naming places, and doing all sorts of little pre-writing things. I have this great fear of losing ideas, if I don’t work on them right when I have them. And honestly, it probably doesn’t look much like work. A lot of it is just thinking, rolling things around in my head and letting them percolate. Frankly, it looks like lying on the couch with my eyes closed. Or going on Wikipedia looking up the history of clipper ships and the first radio transmission across the Atlantic. Or showering. (I find that some of my best writing– well, I won’t say writing, but plotting– takes place in the shower. It’s the place where strings of story get connected in ways that make me go, “That’s it!”)
Still. Even with all this stuff going on, it feels weird to not be watching basketball. And there is a certain amount of guilt associated with it. I think I just need to repeat to myself over and over in my head, “IT IS OKAY TO NOT WATCH THE PLAYOFFS.”
