Are you exhausted?
If you're not, please reveal your secrets in the comments
Yawn….
I can’t tell you the number of times I’ve said this week “I’m so tired.”
Sometimes I worry it is age. Sometimes I blame politics. Or work load. Most of the time I can acknowledge it is the incessant change that the world is asking of me.
No one will let us just rest for a second.
My work week is packed with budget meetings, annual report planning, catching up on paperwork and important things that slipped through the cracks until December’s end of year checklists came out…
My free time is filled with advance planning for the novel release in 2026. To do lists, hopes, dreams, ideas… I have more sticky notes on my writing desk than an amnesiac librarian with OCD.
But truly - no matter what our day-to-day agenda holds, our environment shifts like quicksand beneath us. Not just random weather patterns making even getting dressed a daily challenge, and unexpected dips and waves in the economy making planning for the future a treacherous voyage into the unknown, but also our phones and laptops update while we sleep. The first thing you see, bleary eyed in the morning, is not the absolutely hilarious text from your current lover or new best friend, but the shock of a screen interface where all the familiar buttons have been moved to new places.
I tried to Zoom the other day and was faced with yet another popup asking if I want to walk through the new features.
No. I do not want to walk through a video or be informed of the way that the blue now matches the sky in the last desert environment I visited. I want to engage with the people waiting for me as quickly and efficiently as possible and get off the call and enact whatever next steps I said I’d do before I forget that I promised to do them.
I have no time for upgraded software. I’m behind on wrapping presents, sending out holiday cards, throwing parties, hugging my kids, eating breakfast, responding to email, telling my mom I love her, contacting my neighbor in rehab, and I can’t remember the last time that I sat down and stared into space because I was bored.
When was the last time you watched gravity and surface-tension dance raindrops into rivers on a rain-splattered window?
Sparks of Inspiration
This week started with a movie that was so good I want to see it again. Sentimental Value - it’s quiet, intimate, well-acted, and absolutely riveting and satisfying. I highly recommend it (also, see Train Dreams if you are male. It’s also good for other genders, but males will positively love it.) I stopped into the Museum of Modern Art because it’s so cold in NYC this week and I had an hour to kill between meetings. Saw the terrific show of Ruth Asawa.
The next day I saw the new Knives Out movie - Wake Up Dead Man - which happens to surprisingly also be a thought-provoking commentary on religion and how insular communities create their own cults of personality around their isolated pastors. It’s brilliant and funny and quite a staggering use of the cozy murder mystery genre to actually say something beyond whodunnit. I got to see it in the cinema with a talk back with the cast and writer/director Rion Johnson - my opinion of this director skyrocketed seeing him speak about the film. Just brilliant.
Tuesday I co-hosted Christina’s farewell Literary Salon. She was terrific and I’ll miss having her as an onscreen partner. Over the years, we developed an easy rapport and it was nice to know exactly how things would go before each event. Here’s the latest show, featuring Domenica Ruta, José de Piérolo, Renee Simms, and Sheri T Joseph - a staggering cast of authors and a great conversation:
I spent all day Wednesday at a Salesforce conference — then I came home and wrote a funny article about it and Counter Arts took it. Should be available on their publication now! It’s full of irony. Here’s When Your Marketing Team is full of Artists.
Thursday is for fundraisers, and I was no stranger to this. I went to the Lithuanian Consulate and gave my money to the good causes they were promoting: one NGO helped children stolen by Russians reconnect to their parents in Ukraine and one was to help the 70K amputees in Ukraine find prosthetics in New York City. Amid very moving speeches, the artistic program at the fundraiser featured a world-class Ukrainian cellist and Lithuanian pianist playing pieces both by Ukraine composers and Lithuanians. The cellist began the evening by quietly saying “I used to have family in Ukraine. They have been killed.”
Friday, an antidote, a Lithuanian play off-off Broadway called Dance, Edita, Dance! It was entirely in English and acted by non-Lithuanian actors. The piece is a one hour monologue with various other actors occasionally interjecting and sometimes bringing life-sized rag dolls dressed as men in leather jackets onto the stage. A strange little play. It could have used more dancing.
Saturday, breakfast with a beloved cousin and then an annual holiday party I love to attend, and Sunday (today) I’m birding all day (I’ve never done this - but the formerly-Audubon Society is hosting a Christmas Bird Count and I’ve signed up - it is four hours of walking around my neighborhood seeking feathered friends and I can’t be more excited. I love birds!
Despite my (clearly) childish passion for the winged dinosaurs, I’ll spin off the bird watching in an hour or so, because tonight I’ve got tickets to see the Christmas Cirque du Soleil! If anything makes me more gleeful than birds, it’s humans doing excellent, choreographed, extraordinarily graceful, outrageously talented, exquisitely theatrical circus things to beautiful music.
Right. And between and among all this art what did I do? I wrote budgets and grants.
As you do.
Random Final Thought
What is the musical equivalent to this canapé?
Love this SO much. That line about interfaces moving buttons while we sleep really captures something deeper than just frustration with tech updates. I've been noticing this too where the tiredness isn't just from doing stuff, its from adapting constantly without even realizing it's happening. The raindrop question got me because I genuinley can't remember the last time I just zoned out like that.
Spider canapes! Such refined/decadent tastes. Here's a spikey spider tune for you.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iX-AkG8UBas&list=RDiX-AkG8UBas&start_radio=1