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Okay, I’ll admit it: I’m seduced by pretty boxes (and shame on some of you for what you’re thinking). To some degree, we all must be, judging by the sheer amount of creativity and colorfulness we see walking down the aisle of our neighborhood grocery store. But most of us are so used to the advertising noise in these settings that we’ve tuned them out as unconsciously as we surf channels to escape commercials..

boxBut for me, and other box lovers out there, there’s just something enticing about a well designed containment unit. Be it a lovingly designed, perfectly fitted hinged affair made of daintily-thin wood, or a shiny aluminum big cousin to the Altoids tin, there’s just something about a well-crafted portable storage space that makes me happy.

For example, my last attempt at buying an appropriate gift for a friend fell into this latter format: a beautiful silver case the size of a fat ebook, hinged, with a pretty olive green sleeve lovingly describing its contents. In this “case,” it was a set of those magnetic words some of us enjoy littering the front of our refrigerators with, for randomly arranging pithy quotes, silly poems, or lurid insults to unsuspecting future appliance users.

It wasn’t until after my starry-eye-inducing purchase was safely out of sight in it’s frumpy paper bag, when I was well on my way home, that I began to realize that perhaps a set of magnetic words for creating poetry … as a present to a poet … might be like giving a teddy bear to a taxidermist: an exercise in the superfluous..

I’m often proud of myself for thinking outside of the box in most situations, but I also need to stop admiring the damn box while I’m out there*. The poet agrees: we’ll be revisiting the store to find something a little more appropriate for her.

Perhaps something in a cute little box …

[ * And lo, when I get home with an especially lovely little box, I find myself wondering what I will do with it . . . or any of the others I’ve collected to date. I don’t want to talk about it. ]

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Perhaps you’ve noticed: I have a time machine.

It’s a lovely little gizmo manufractured by WordPress, designed to allow wily writers to schedule blogs for future dates. But beware, it sometimes goes awry! More than once I’ve accidentally sent a blog into the next millennium. (If you read something from me in 2415, will you please send it back? I miss it.)

Tardis Love PoemBut what’s really cool is that the scheduler can be fooled into sending things back in time, too, . . . like to those quiet Sundays when you’re far too busy doing absolutely nothing to have time to write. Or after an unexpected Procrastinators’ Holiday. Yes, of course, they’re actual holidays! They just never got around to putting them on your calendar. But you’ll know them when you see them . . . usually in retrospect, like I do.

On days like this I sneak in and fire up my handy time machine. Shhhh . . . Don’t tell anyone, but I’m using it right now. ~giggle~

So . . . if you’re ever disappointed I haven’t written something on a given day (hey, I’m allowed to dream, right?), but then feel silly a few days later when you see a lovely little blog in what was once an empty spot, . . .  it has nothing at all to do with me tearing a gaping rent in the space-time continuum so I can sneak a post into the past to fill in my blog-a-day world. It just means you’re silly.

Because It’s my job to spread silliness whenever I go: past, present or future.

[ Tardis love poem belongs to http://laura-tylluan-draper.deviantart.com/art/Tardis-Love-Poem-341952036. So there. ]

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I spend a lot of time in coffee shops.

It’s not the coffee that keeps me coming back . . . If you’ve seen what I do to coffee before I drink it you’d call the CDC (Coffee Defamation Committee). The sheer amount of dilution I instigate on a cup of coffee will make you wonder why I even buy the stuff in the first place. I’m addicted to it, of course. But it doesn’t mean I have to enjoy it. Sheesh!

I love the smell of coffee–I will go out of my way to walk through the coffee aisle at the grocery store just to inhale the lovely pungent aromas wafting about playfully there. But pour a little water through it and it tastes like yesterday’s soggy Amazon shipping box after it fell out of the FedEx truck, got run over–twice–peed on by a wombat, rained on for three days, gnawed on by a rodent destined as tomorrows roadkill, pecked on by a chicken on its way across the road, and finally rescued and served to you in a cute plastic cup that tastes just like a cute plastic cup.

But, to stop making a short story long, it’s not the coffee that brings me here.

It’s the table. That long smooth expanse of polished wood just crying out for the warmth of a laptop, hard drive thrumming excitedly, the sheer delight of a stack of books to be joyfully riffled and absorbed, the orgasmic joy of a mechanical pencil set upon its ready surface, or–OMG–a couple of Pilot G2’s. Sure, splash it with coffee, get coffeecake crumbs on it! It can handle the degradation for the sheer joy of feeling someone create upon it’s trembling surface.

funny-squirrel-drinking-coffeeOkay, maybe I need to stop drinking so much coffee . . .

Actually, the table is nice, but it’s the people I’m truly placating my addiction for coffee shops: I may seem shy when you encounter me, deftly staking out my corner of the table, but I need my daily people time to fuel my creative reserves. I guess that’s why I call myself a shy extrovert.

Not only does the energy of fellow humanity inspire, but they’re friggin’ hilarious to observe, too. They do all kinds of silly things when they don’t pay attention to themselves. And it’s my job to duly note these things and write a blog about them . . . or include it as character seasoning in a movie screenplay, coming soon to a theater near you!

I shouldn’t talk about it, but that’s a well-kept secret* of how writers can make such quirky characters you can identify with so well . . . by watching you!

Keep up the good work!

[ * My editor called and ragged me out for letting the cat out of the bag. Actually I think it was a wrong number, I’m not sure why they had a cat in there in the first place. People are so weird. ]

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Welcome back to Foible Monday!

This one is about a thing I call my “speech impeddlement,” because certain words seem to jump on a bicycle and pedal away whenever I go looking for them. I’ll catch them yet . . . then they’ll be sorry. Oddly, it only seems to happen when I’m speaking–not when I’m writing.

Apparently my fingers are smarter than my mouth (big surprise there . . . not).

Most of my friends already know about this. They laugh and laugh and laugh. Okay, maybe I just imagine they do on the inside. I admit it is pretty weird. I don’t want to talk about it . . . so I’ll type it instead. It’s safer that way . . .

Word Finding D— … uhm

Disorder.

swiss-cheese-brain-150x150If most human brains resemble a glob of overcooked spaghetti left to drain too long, then mine more resembles swiss cheese: it has big round holes in it that words fall into. There aren’t that many holes, though I’ve never tried to count, but there’s no telling which words will trip and fall into them.

The first holed-word I remember not remembering is “backhoe”. I know right? It’s not like this is a word I use often in daily life, but when I saw one parked in my neighborhood one day, all I could tell you was that it was a big yellow hole digging machine that began with a “B”.

This is another weird side-effect of this phenomenon: I can almost always tell you the first letter and a nice definition of the lost word but, for the life of me, I cannot tell you the word itself.

In programmer-ese: It’s an indexing problem.

The latest victim seems to be “passport.” I only know this from a curious teenaged member of my family–at the time–who periodically quizzed me on the green and blue bird with the amazing tail feathers that begins with a “P”, or the place where they put dead bodies that begins with a “G”, or the sparkly round things sewn on dresses that begin with an “S” … or that thing you need to cross an international border that begins with a “P”, which apparently I have already forgotten.

All this good-natured quizzing actually helped pull an abused word or three out of its hole into the light of day. I can remember that big yellow machine now, sometimes. But I’ve found as soon as I help one distressed word out of its hole, some other poor hapless word will fall into it.

Memories …

If only my brain holes kept themselves to my speech centers. Occasionally an entire memory falls victim to this indexing problem, as well. Take a common, ordinary occurrence we both partook in the other day, such as meeting an interesting person at a local park. hdd-crashingA few days later you may wax poetically about this chance meeting and notice my brow furrowing. You’ve caught me attempting to query my index.

Another memory has gone AWOL.

But if you happen to mention the strange rutabaga earrings she was wearing that day—bing, flop, “index match complete,”  bonk, ping!—suddenly it all comes flowing back in HD Technicolor with special features and deleted scenes!

Don’t ask me to explain it, as if it made any sense to me; especially since I’d probably lose a word or two in the process. I’m not terribly motivated to try to fix it anyway, because it keeps my friends amused.