Yesterday (Thursday) was a bad day. I woke up in an odd mood with a bad 70's ballad in my head (don't ask me where the heck that came from because I wouldn't mind forgetting it -- the only good thing was that it wasn't a Rod Stewart song) -- and spent a lot of the day in a funk and dealing with ennui, feeling unproductive and unaccomplished... gnawing on the questions, why does it seem that all our friends have moved away? why don't we go dancing? how come I'm not doing group ritual at full moons or solar holidays? why haven't I made more writing sales? why am I feeling nothing?
My writing is stalled in world-building mode right now; I've got a great setting, but no characters have come forward to have their stories told -- well... that's not entirely true, I've got some ideas, but they feel very contrived. But the planet the story is taking place on is stunning. Ugh; I need to re-read this list a few hundred times. Maybe I should stop writing. Maybe I should stop writing short stories and try a novel.
Despite my setting up some calendar events, I completely forgot about the Starhawk lectures being given on campus and in the Eugene Public Library. That I could have forgotten would have been unthinkable in 2003 -- because it would have been the only think I could think about and I would have been in a community of folks also unable to think of anything else. She was talking about writers and social change; I wasn't sure how it would apply to either my writing or how I live, but it would have been interesting to hear how Starhawk made her choices when she was writing "The Fifth Sacred Thing" (granted, I enjoyed "Walking to Mercury" more), especially in the light of the anthology "Sword and Sorceress."
I went to the gym. 200 cal in 20 minutes on the elliptical. 100 cal in 10 minutes on the cable rowing machine. Downstairs some tattooed gorilla was grunting and dropping his barbells on the floor. That, combined with "Dust in the Wind" playing over the gym's sound system sent me upstairs for some assisted dips and chin-ups. 3X12X60lbs on the pec-fly. 3X12X70lbs on the lat pull-down. 3X12 hanging curls on the Roman Chair. 3X12X30lbs barbell curls. 2X12X20lbs on the triceps pull-down. Some assorted 12lb dumbbell work... um, some reverse pull-ups, some over-head triceps pulls, and a lot of shoulder shrugs. There was an awkward moment when a thirty-something guy on a bench next to me was doing butterfly-curls on his back -- he was wearing clingy (and high definition) spandex shorts and I quickly focused on the reflection of my nose in the gym's mirrors as I did more over-head curls -- all the while wondering if this was some form of gym flirting or if was simply a leering fifty-year-old.
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