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A weekend alone just Jon and me. A real weekend alone, not on vacation or some business trip, but actually a whole weekend alone at home. Ahhh!
Tension just sort of flows away. I think I am just getting socialized beyond my body and mind’s ability to be happy about it. People, just like dogs, have different levels of socialization that they are comfortable with for extended periods of time. Jon and I aren’t hermits, but strangely the e-mails and phone calls for the comics; two publishers, which means you have two editors, two publicists, plus everyone’s assistants, plus my agent and her assistant . . . that’s a lot of talking.
Jon and Darla try to take most of it, but they can’t take it all. Some decisions have to be mine. And also Darla works from seven in the morning to three in the afternoon. (Her choice.) So there are two hours in the afternoon where Mary is done doing comp controller stuff for the day and off to pick the kiddo up from school. Darla is gone home. (Contrary to the way people send stuff to her here, or try to call, she doesn’t live here.) Jon and I are in the office working on the afternoon project. (Right now the comic script for the second half of the Anita Blake special, “The First Death,”.) So interruptions are not helpful to the creative process. It’s one of the reasons working in an office drove me crazy before I left corporate America. When I concentrate, I concentrate, and even a few minutes of interruption can be disastrous.
But this is Sunday morning. I told Jon to sleep in, I’d take care of the dogs and getting tea brewed. I have not turned on a radio, or a television, or anything. I guess blogging itself is an interaction with people, but it’s quiet, and it’s my choice. It’s not like you guys are beeping me on the computer to demand my attention. I get to sit down and blog in the quiet at my own pace.
I actually had to have Jon turn off the functions on my computers in my office so I could not get or receive e-mail or instant messenger. That little balloon popping up in the middle of me writing was incredibly distracting.
I do all e-mail from the ‘office’ computer in the kitchen. It’s the only area that everyone has access to, since Mary and Sherry both need it, too. We’re thinking about moving it somewhere else but no one has come up with a good place for it that is as convenient for everyone else. But as all computers must, it attracts paper and work, and it begins to creep through the kitchen. This idea of a kitchen office sucks unless you have a surface dedicated to it.
I am sipping the first cup of tea of the day, and enjoying the silence, and the strangeness of being actually alone. Unless the dogs count, if they count, then I am truly never, ever alone. But somehow dogs are not the same level of intrusion that even your best friend can be. Dogs do not demand the things that people do. I guess that’s why they are so relaxing.
When you get a puppy you have a window of weeks to socialize it. If that window is missed, then the dog can have a life time struggle with interaction with people. My days as a child were mostly just my grandmother and me. Very quiet, very scheduled. Sometimes I feel like a puppy that missed it’s socialization period. No matter how much I love my friends and Jon’s family, and how much fun I am having with the comic book and the script. No matter how wonderful the news is from New York and elsewhere. Sometimes it gets a bit too much.
I guess the quote I’m thinking of is:
“The world is too much with us; late and soon,
Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers:”
It’s the first two lines from William Wordsworth’s poem THE WORLD IS TOO MUCH WITH US.
I hadn’t read the whole poem in awhile. It’s worth reading and like all good poems worth rereading. Poems do not change, but we change as readers. It was the beginning of the poem that made me think of it, but today it is the end that makes me like it all the more.
“. . . I’d rather be
A Pagan suckled in a creed outworn;
So might I, standing on this pleasant lea,
Have glimpses that would make me less forlorn;
Have sight of Proteus rising from the sea;
Or hear old Triton blow his wreathed horn.”
I’ll have to get my book of English Romantic Poets back out. Time to reread. Time to rediscover, or make new discoveries.
Poems and books do not change, but the reader changes, and finds new messages among the old.