427 words about nothing

Practice and Probiotics

So I’m feeling a bit squeemy today. That is a word of my own invention that reflects a typical combination of symptoms, sorta nauseous, gassy, faint headache, and crazy fatigue punctuated by the occasional rumblings from the more extreme regions of the digestive tract, all in all I see through the haze of slight fever, things are just not schmirpeedoo. I have picked up a stomach bug. Likely from the office as three of my close colleagues (office geographically speaking) were sequentially smitten with it last week and over the weekend. My turn. Oh yeah. So I was taking up space on the couch I was giving myself permission not to write. As you see that permission was declined as I am deep in the truth of the matter which is that writers write. Every day. Writing practice must rank with a dancer’s daily time at the barre or a musicians daily scales. It is not negotiable in that it is essential to keeping the mechanisms intact and the process, well, processing.

One of my Sisters of the Pen (whom I will consult with on the correct punctuation of that phrase) told me that she read that one must post at least thrice weekly in order to keep one’s blog followers following. Hmmmph, I thought to myself. I suppose that could well be true, however, I’m not certain that fact – if it is a fact given that I don’t really know who studied blogging frequency and stickiness – is motivational to me. Since I’m still not entirely certain why I’m blogging, both the whofore and the whyfore, I think I’ll take that with a grain of salt. Nope in fact with a slug of Pepto – excuse me a minute. Ah, much better, thanks for waiting.

This post is in fact inspired by not being inspired. After a week of experimental writing (for me it was, not necessarily for the others) one of our fearless leaders encouraged us to write even when we didn’t know what we were going to write about, let the writing figure itself out so to speak. So I needed to put in my practice and so the health report. I’m not sure it worked, and I promise to keep the symptom reports few and far between in future. Perhaps I’ll try riffing on the weather next time inspiration is lacking. Or maybe this was all warm up and I will think of something charming and fascinating to say before day is done. But don’t hold your breath.