Barnstorming on an Invisible Segway

Here is how today goes:

1) Write something.
2) Decide it is stupid.
3) Delete it.
4) Repeat.

This applies, apparently, to fiction, to lj posts, and even to thank-you notes. I have never written drafts of thank-you notes before. This is ridiculous. This is just too much.

I think I am going to write an e-mail to Grandpa Lyzenga, because Grandpa Lyzenga loves me even when I am stupid. After that I have no idea what. Probably I will take out my paper journal, which is specifically designed to have pages that do not tear out and do not accept pencil well, and then I will have to write things down that cannot go away even if they are stupid. And then maybe they will give up and stop being so stupid.

(I know, I know. This post is stupid. I'm leaving it up anyway, dammit.)

Here's what I tried to get my brain out of its previous bad rut:

--writing to Grandpa L. as specified (this is markgritter's maternal grandfather, technically, but there's a point with each in-law where you shift from thinking of them as the other person's to thinking of them as yours -- at least ideally there is -- and with Grandpa Lyzenga and me, that took about 3.2 seconds, and he is just the very most you could ever ask a Grandpa Lyzenga to be)
--cleaning up a bit of my desk mess, which is there because I hate desk mess and will therefore deal with things put on my desk to drive me nuts
--working out
--reading a little of Blood and Iron, then stopping because getting all wrapped up in someone else's book wasn't really the point here
--drinking water
--showering
--drinking more water and taking an Advil
--playing with the dog
--putting on music
--putting on different music, and that finally did it -- thanks, markiv1111 (and thanks dd_b for being my supplier). Don't know why "The First Overnight Guest" did it, but there it was, "There's a chance of rain but no real chance of rest," and my brain went click click whirrrrr...and then it was behaving sensibly again.

And now I'm in late-afternoon crash and have learned not to beat myself up if I'm not useful for an hour or two, because I am definitely a morning person and sometimes an evening person, but what I am not is an afternoon person.

What are your favorite brain-reset tricks?

I hate it when childhood fondness gets besmirched by actual fact.

Tonight I flipped the TV on to see if anything was on for the five minutes I was consuming ice cream (because it is hard to read a trade paperback and eat a bowl of ice cream at the same time, if one insists on sitting on the couch), and "Footloose" was playing on VH1. The soundtrack to "Footloose" was one of the tapes my cousins and I wore clean through when we were small, but I had not previously seen any part of this movie. So I thought, well, maybe they'll play one of the songs I remember fondly.*

They did. Specifically, they played Bonnie Tyler's "Holding Out for a Hero," which was my favorite song from the whole soundtrack, because she just sounded like she was going to go out ass-kicking and wanted to make sure her boyfriend was going to be useful in the pursuit of thoroughly kicked ass, and I loved it when I was 6 years old, and the part of the movie they were showing was the part that had it playing in the background.

While Kevin Bacon played tractor chicken with some other guy. Tractor. Chicken. Like, driving your tractor straight at the other dude in his tractor and trying not to be the one to pull aside first or, y'know, die in a tragic tractor chicken accident.

She was holding out for a hero in the challenging field of championship tractor chicken.

Aaaaauughhhhhhh.

I can never see the rest of this movie. I have already seen too much. My brain, my brain! My mom was on long-distance (I can tell because the answering machine picks up if she's not just ignoring her call-waiting), so I have not gotten to berate her about this yet. But it's only a matter of time.

Now I have to go write the scene where Ansa Nikkanen has to escape from the skalds naked and stripped of charms** in the middle of the winter in the Saamemaa, known to folks who are still willing to use the term "Lapp" as Lappland. Just to make it right with my childhood self and her notions of the proprieties of ass-kicking.

I was thinking of something else, but then I saw this and it went flying right out of my head. That'll teach me to watch broadcast TV for anything but baseball and hockey. DVD is our friend. DVD would have indicated the tractor chicken nature of this problem long before it got to this point.

Tractor. Chicken. And not one but several people endorsed this idea, and it appeared on big screens across the country. Aieeeee. Tractor chicken.

So sad.

*Originally typed "one of the snogs I remember." Uh, no.
**In the "charms, spells, and hexes" sense, not the "her baggy sweatshirt did nothing to conceal her considerable charms" sense.