Easy Day

Completely took the day off. Can't remember the last time this wasn't illness-related. Felt marvelous. Really, not just an adjective - I was marveling at feeling this good. It was a physical marvel.



I slept 'til eleven, dreaming strange dreams of sci-fi and imagination. I seem to recall jetskiing and saving a civilization of koala bears. They made me their prince, until I explained to them that I was female, and then they angrily stole back the sash and snubbed me out of the village. It's okay. They didn't smell so great. And I had toast.

In hopes of meeting my sloth quota for today, I proceeded to stay in bed another hour after waking. Reading. Denise came in to share body space and blankets, and we got into a few short discussions about what she was reading. She missed a comma in a verse that made the proverb in question far more entertaining, and we had some fun with that.

Read more over breakfast, and listened to Denise practice some piano. Read four more books while she took Beau to the dog park. Thought about watching The Postman again. Haven't seen it for about a year, but there's something about the story that I like. Denise and I now have a date to watch it together sometime before Christmas.

I do actually have another sister, we all live in the same house, but her schedule allows fewer meetings some days.

The Postman had to be postponed, as one of my books slipped to the floor and I took a four-hour nap by the Christmas tree. Very cool, balsam-flavored dreams. I was in Narnia, but I never left the wood outside the wardrobe, just kept going through the trees, because I had this job about finding lost travelers and guiding them. Guiding them away from the witch, or back to the wardrobe, or to Aslan's How, I don't know. But I kept waking up and seeing the lights and needles and familiar ornaments that I've seen since I was a child, and they made me smile before I slipped back in again.

Had supper with the family (save for Mom, who's at Jazz rehearsal). There's something funny about having Chinese days before Christmas. When I was a kid, Chinese was in the same mental category as McDonalds - it's fun junk food that you pass off as a meal when you don't have time for anything better. I like it better now. Mostly because the place up the street from our house believes in giving everyone more rice than they should be able to eat in a night, so I can have a whole little bucket to myself.

My carb-loving is the reason that my middle sister and I have the same skeletal frame and drastically different weights. And, happily snacking on my bread, mashed potatoes, or rice, I don't particularly care. Weight's a number, and you cannot measure happiness in units.

We tried once, using a kiss as a unit of happiness. Fresh bread translated to four kisses of happiness, fresh bread that Mom made translates to about sixteen. This is now a touchy concept, as two of the three girls are unexpectedly single. It also doesn't work - I haven't been kissed in months, and I'm plainly happy on a deep level, though it gets a little random near the surface.

A fit of whimsy seized me while I was checking my email, and I doodled a caricature of one of my favorite teachers. As my caricatures go, this one isn't half-bad. Came out looking shorter, and the facial expression was more what I thought about grading papers than anything the instructor might actually wear, but it made me smile.

I'm usually drawing women. I need to practice drawing guys. Guys don't have the curves that girls do, so I have to think of them as walking polygons. With girls, the more dressed up they are, the tighter and more form-fitting everything is that they're wearing. Up to a certain point, it also means that they're wearing less. With guys, if they're wearing tight stuff, it's usually very casual, and the more formal the attire becomes, the more layers it seems to involve.

I usually draw while listening to music. This might be the one time when Christmas carols don't work, and Pandora fails me. It has to be something more controlled, because I stay with the same emotion the whole time I'm sketching. Once the emotion shifts, whatever I was drawing just wanders off.

But it was good. Really laid back, accomplished squat, but y'know, that might be okay sometimes. It didn't feel like guilt, when you think you'll feel better for knocking off a few chores and then later you feel worse. It just felt good, like this needed to be done. "Nothing" needed to get done, because I hadn't taken care of it for awhile. It was a good day.