cooking

Three a.m, destined to stay awake another hour, because I'm cooking. Yeah, cooking.

I know it's a bit strange, but it's a creative outlet and very soothing. Tonight it is "brook lodge water chestnuts." Last night it was "red velvet chocolate cake"... earlier this week it was chocolate chip cookies. Those are all gone. I have sons.

Why cooking? Non-threatening, left over mid western comfort I suppose. Beats depressed angst-ridden writing, wouldn't you say?

In this room.... the Christmas tree, eight feet tall and nearly as wide. Douglas fir…. The branches are a bit weak, but the needles are soft. That's important when you leave it up for a month and forget to water it starting about the second week.

There weren't enough branches for all the ornaments, even as wide and tall as it is. The ornaments are a habit, some would say a collection but we spend money on such silly things I think habit is more appropriate. They were something easy and inexpensive to trade as youth, and I've collected them since the early seventies. Nothing of more than sentimental value, but there are ornaments from all the milestones it seems. One from our honeymoon, one for each child's birth. One my husband gave me the third year we were married that says "twenty five years together"… it would have been romantic if he'd actually read it!

So many of the ornaments have stories… were gifts or purchased with special people. The tree is like a journal too, keeping its memory pockets.

Last week I was in Chicago, in time to get snowed in. I felt like I was there for my lethal injection of Christmas cheer. Everywhere I went, the decorations seemed gaudier, the music relentless, the compulsion to buy buy buy overwhelming. I succumbed enough to tire of wearing my heavy wool coat, to realize the tax was as high in Chicago as it is in Houston, and to know that if I bought anything of substance, I'd have to check my luggage.

And now I am back, where cold is fifty degrees, and the time warp that goes along with travel has overtaken me. The injection of Christmas spirit took over on Monday and I invited some fifty people to my home. On Monday, there were no signs of a holiday here. Now each corner is adorned with something festive and if I were anyone but me I'd be "bubbly."

Instead, I am cooking. And the chimes to the oven timer say I'm finished for tonight.

from Chicago

I wish I had a camera today, one that would capture the light from the view out my window. I'm staying at the Swiss this time, "where the river meets the lake" and the view is amazing. Navy Pier, snow covered and flanked by lake cruise ships docked for the winter frames the left, tall luxury condos on the right. In the center of the view, the lighthouse out in the water, marking the levy that protects this bit of shoreline. Farther down the beach, which I can see if I stand at the window, the waves are frozen in quiet fear, as though the wind and cold came at just the right moment to scare them to death, their curls and tendrils turned white with the fright of it.

Yet there isn't the silence that I know from the west side of the lake. Around me the city is awake and vibrant as always, despite ten inches of snow last night. Cars along Lake Shore Drive are moving at a healthy clip and even the construction crews on the 27 floor (I just counted) frame of a new building between the lake and me have kept working.

My daughter's college in Austin cancelled classes yesterday due to ice on the ground, yet here in Chicago, life goes on. "Ice on the ground." she laughs. "Texans."

And for her, it explains it all.

frustration

It only takes about half an hour for the day to wake up, going from tormented clouds in a granite sky to wisps of glittered cloudstroke on a backwash of blue. I envy the accomplishment.

I was looking for some magic this morning, I admit it. Something to restore faith and hope and anticipation to my life, or even as non-ambitious as the day. A little Christmas spirit, or anything really. All I found was more negativity, more emptiness, more …nothing.

A failing in myself, of course. What is spirit if not the energy from within to find joy or triumph? What is happiness if not communication, resolution, peace?

Pen to paper, ass to chair.

This is the writing advice I was given by a writer who never seems to have a lack of something to say. It annoys me. Not his work, of course, but that I sit here, fingers poised on the keyboard and words, my best and only friends it seems, evade me. I am ready for them, have purged the 50,035 words of nonsense from November and feel I've paid my dues. It is time to be able to write something good, something interesting, something special! Yet… nothing.

I know how I got here. I know I'm a person who thrives on feedback. Some say I need "validation"… but that's not it really. It is that I …

No, I'm not even able to type that.

That's the problem. I'm not willing to expose my weaknesses. I’m not willing to give anyone the power or the right to judge feelings truly felt, ideas that may not have merit. I’m not willing to risk my tenuous grip on sanity for someone who thinks I'm full of shit. And only when I am willing to do that will the words make sense, make anyone at all care.

In short, I don't have a trustworthy reader, and I'm too chicken to take a risk. I'm like the cat in this room, so brave on this side of the glass, chattering at birds in the garden. He is all talk and no action these days, grown fat and lazy and satisfied. He wants to chase the birds, but what if it means he can no longer lay here by the fire, and watch them out his window, and just talk?