Cloudy days...

...are far more interesting than sunny ones.

These are from my drive to work yesterday.

I wish I could capture how underwater I felt driving beneath these clouds with inexplicable waves and undulations. Ripple effects.

The odd thing is in Illinois, these would be rain clouds. But in Georgia, they're just for show. Georgia gets some of the coolest clouds passing over, billowing, flowing, randomly wisping in an otherwise clear sky. And these. I was so giddy by the time I got to work--I really am happier when it's cloudy.

Cat FAQs 2

Q: Are cats social animals or solitary?

A: Cats are social; they enjoy having people or other animals around to play with/groom/hang with. If they're by themselves or ignored most of the time, they'll start exhibiting the anti-social behavior with which cats have been unjustly stereotyped.

That said, like anybody who grew up in a big family knows, sometimes you just need a moment.

Follow-up Q: Is that the bag from the first FAQ?

A: Yes. Observe the gangsta necklace in the upper-right corner.

Cat FAQs

Q: Why are cats flexible?

A: So they can sleep like this...

...and so that later, when they're playing in a paper shopping bag and get their head through one of the handles and start running like a maniac around the house thinking a loud crinkly blue monster is chasing them, they won't kill themselves when they finally run between the piano bench legs and detach themselves from the bag while keeping the handle around their neck like a piece of gangsta jewelry.

zzzz's

Sorry for my long absence from blogging. I've been uncharacteristically disciplined with reading, writing, and school work lately. I'm determined to stay on top of things my final semester of grad school, and I decided to start with the last deadline for my third semester.

Three weeks ago, I sent my advisor a revision of a short story called "The Pond," and a rewritten and polished version of my craft essay on nature in fiction (see these - three - pages I wrote having to do with this essay). And one week ago I put the finishing touches on (and forced myself to quit tweaking) my translation of a Spanish short story by Samanta Schweblin. Here's something I wrote at the beginning while learning so much about the process of translation.

So aside from that news, this here note has nothing to do with writing, except that, being busy doing so lately, I needed to make sure I got enough sleep. That and, being a writer, I don't particularly gravitate toward mathematical skills, as you'll see later. Also I feel compelled to, in any order possible, finish my April A-to-Z blogging challenge.

So I found this sleepyti.me bedtime calculator and boasted about it one night to Andrew, who after looking at it on my iPod said, "Why don't you just count either 6, 7.5, or 9 hours from now?"

Oh, so it's that easy?

Well, for someone who doesn't have a brain wired for calculation, or who doesn't want to have to think very hard right before they want to fall asleep, this is awesome!

Tell it what time you need to wake up and it will give you four times you could go to sleep to get a good night's rest. For example, if I know I need to wake up at 7:30 tomorrow, it tells me I should try to fall asleep by 10:30pm, 12am, 1:30am, or 3 am.

Or, you can click a button to find out when to wake up if you go to bed now. The screen displays six times, with your best two highlighted in bright green.

The concept is based on 90-minute sleep cycles, plus an average of 14 minutes to fall asleep. For a good night's rest, you need 5-6 complete sleep cycles, (7.5 or 9 hours of sleep).

When I use it, I usually wake up without the foggy, brain-dead, need-more-sleep feeling. Usually. I'm not convinced it can make me into a morning person, but maybe it is helping me feel more rested.

Now I just can't decide if I need 7.5 hours of sleep or 9. Nine seems too much, but several days of 7.5 leaves me feeling like I need to sleep in on Saturday. I heard recently that introverts need more sleep than extroverts because we have to function in such an extrovert-friendly society. I know this whole thing seems inane, but I'm really curious about the physical and psychological effects of sleep.

So how much sleep do you all usually need, if you know?

Tabs

I'm bending the rules a bit--need to be good and put school work before blogging, since I have a big deadline in a week! So I'm not going to finish this A-to-Z challenge in April. But I will finish. Aiming for posting every other day now. On to my topic!

Who else out there opens their internet browser--Chrome for me--with the sole intention of checking their email and ends up with a dozen or more tabs open? Just say the magic words, Open link in new tab, or Ctrl+t. And follow the rabbit down the hole.

Borrowing the idea from someone else's blog, I'm going to share what tabs I currently have open (or cheated and bookmarked on Friday when I came up with the idea). I think your browser tabs tell a kind of story, maybe about you, about your day, about what's happening in the world.

Most of my tabs have something to do with writing and books, which is unsurprising. Other pages relate to my other interests, like food and travel. The last tab is a little surprising, especially because I don't remember how I got there.

* * *

First there's my Gmail tab. Gotta take care of FreeCycle digests and school emails and friends' emails and, oh yeah, the endless stream of articles I send myself to read later, which I don't usually get to but I feel better knowing they're there.

Then Twitter. Between gmail and twitter came all the sites below.

A WSJ interview with Jennifer Egan, who just won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction for her novel A Visit from the Good Squad.

Next is a peek at a creative ad campaign for a bookstore in Vilnius, Lithuania that specializes in classic books.

A Rumpus article on Self-Publishing Dos and Don'ts--haven't read it yet, but I'm curious since the "literary" world is pretty biased against self-publishing, from what I've seen. The Rumpus seems to tread an admirable line between the indie literary arts and "serious" literature, whatever that means for sure.

A YouTube video of record-setting mountain climber Ueli Steck speed-climbing an Alpine mountain face. Maybe I'll use this for a story. Apparently I like writing about extreme sports I've never tried. I already wrote one on freediving underwater based pretty much on research and watching YouTube videos.

My friend Erika's blog (chambanachik), on which an epigraph for a certain entry quotes Anais Nin: "If you do not breathe through writing, if you do not cry out in writing, or sing in writing, then don't write." I went to high school with this girl but because we were a few years apart, I never really got to know her until I found her blog and realized what a talented writer she is. Go Erika!

Another one of the many blogs I enjoy following: clock&bell. A lovely writer, photographer, daydreamer, currently residing in Toronto, Canada. I found her through a story of hers that was published on Storychord, which I found when I read my friend Lindsey's story on that online literary magazine. Lovely people, they.

Next is a "Blogger of the Moment" feature on ModCloth.com, highlighting fashionable and crafty blogger Little Chief Honeybee.

Via The Rumpus once again: A link regarding a writer from Pittsburgh. My husband grew up in Pittsburgh and was kind of glad to leave, hence I was curious how this writer, a self-described Pittsburgher in exile, "explains why he wrote The Metropolis Case, 'set partially in Pittsburgh, [...] largely from memory.'"

Jim Wallis of Sojourners and the God's Politics blog, on his recent Hunger Fast for a Moral Budget.

A recipe for Veggie Pad Thai. I'll leave out the egg and the fish sauce, but otherwise, YUM!

And finally, a Google map of the town of Greystones, where I stayed during a week-long visit to Ireland in the fall of 2008. 

And, of course, my Blogger tab, which makes fourteen total tabs at one time.

Thanks for joining me on the ride! What kind of tabs do you find open after getting lost in the internet?

Random, Weird Things I Do Instead of Write

It's high time I finally posted a note here.

I was busy wrestling with a couple projects for school. A friend from my MFA program wrote a great post about the process of writing. How writing is what we want to do, but we are tempted to find anything and everything else to do but write. Don't be ashamed, Lindsey. I feel the same weakness, the same self-doubt. "Why am I doing this if I am so easily tempted to avoid it?" I don't have the answer, but I am comforted that I am not alone. I've heard many good writers admit to this.

I still have one author interview to complete before officially "finishing" the second semester of my MFA. But last Thursday, after fighting procrastination/distraction demons for weeks leading up to the deadline, I felt a lightness of spirit when I handed the manila envelope containing my story and annotations across the post office counter to a nice lady named Heather. I had proudly defeated many (but not all) potential distractions over the last few weeks (including the blog god reminding me condescendingly that I still had not posted after several weeks MIA). So on Friday morning, I let myself indulge in a few choice distractions in celebration of being "done."

Here are three random and possibly gross things I did that morning instead of writing my interview questions:

1. Dumped the contents of my purse and discovered a week-old rotting apple core partially wrapped in a napkin. I ate the apple at work and wanted to compost it, OK?
2. Watched and cried at a weather channel video about a girl rescuing a starving horse from the side of the road (near my hometown, no less!). 
3. Cleaned out my belly button.

Yes, it's true. These are the kinds of things I find to do instead of write.

And now the blog god can stop looming for a few days while I get my questions written.