Nil by Mouth

That Big To-Do List in the Sky

I need a serious blog redesign. The current incarnation is not meeting my needs anymore. I’m not taking pictures enough to update the “Photo du Jour” at even the most minimally acceptable levels. My one entry per page thing was to force me to write longer (and in theory better) essays, which I did, except that now that I’m actually writing articles, I feel constrained by this tough-love format. Also I’d like to have an area of my published stuff (even though most of it is really boring, i.e. my last feature on candles).

But I won’t have time to do this for awhile as I have shit to finish up, before I leave for my fabulous trip to Peru. It’s the only thing keeping me going in these last few weeks of fall and insane amounts of work. Actually yesterday I did not work at all. I had a birthday brunch (not mine) with friends from college which predictably turned into an entire day of drinking domestic beer at various locations.

I played Bocci Ball for the first time ever, and our team kicked ass. It was a slightly ghetto version of the game, as it was really dark no one could see the balls very well, balls kept getting lost in piles of trash, under plastic bags, behind the waxed paper from a pizza slice. One ball may have been peed on by a small dog, and we played Frisbee while waiting for our turns. Nice.

The real point is that I did not do any work yesterday. It’s been since September that I have gone a single day without working. After this day of friends, fun, fall leaves, and also hot wings I proceeded to have the absolute worst nights sleep. I dreamed I had 2 long articles due that I hadn’t even started and that print people were calling me all day. And time would not move forward so that I could just totally screw up and not turn in the articles. There was always just 2 hours to go – not enough time to turn them in, too much time to just face the music. One of the articles was on hair-dryers and the other was on cake ingredients. There was also a very disgusting sexual component to the whole thing which may have had something to do with the conversation among the nearly entirely male company I was in yesterday. Yech – it was awful.

I actually had to sit up in bed at 5AM and run through my mental to-do list just to convince myself that I wasn’t forgetting something horribly important. I did flake on one thing yesterday – but I just had to, and I’m gonna do it tonight, so stop pestering me already! Sorry, it’s just my brain needs to be reprogrammed – probably by an adventure in the Andes and the Amazon…

• Nov 24