Domestically Conscious

Last day in Sweden before heading back to Brooklyn - wonderful change of pace. Spend a lot of time by myself otherwise, and have now had a month of full-on FitzFamily goodness.

My sister is singing showtunes - currently the ENTIRE Chicago soundtrack - in the next room. Off key. "If you're good to mama, mama's good to you."

Indeed:

As I type, my mother The Great White Chief, is instructing me from across the television set (Holiday Getaway, a show about English people buying second homes in Southern Europe is on, and not to be missed) on how to avoid carpal tunnel syndrome. One of her admirers, from Haifa, sent her a disgusting email about CTS this morning - probably the most positive communication between Sweden and Israel in the last few weeks - and she has now added it to the list of illnesses and disabilities that her children can avoid through proper surveillance and instruction from their wise and wonderful mother.


Re-read a book by a Swedish physicist called Bodil Jonsson about time and what we do with it. One of the things I'd forgotten is that she talks about "warm-up" times necessary for different sorts of tasks, and that you need to accept that different sorts of work will require different warm-up times. I always feel bad about how long it takes me to get writing my own fictiony stuff, compared to the fact that even at my most fiercely exhausted, brainless and hungover states, I've never needed more than ten minutes of coffee, diet Coke and some online facebooking and celebrity gossip to type up a couple of hundred words. But writing something for myself can take me hours of pottering around before i get anything on paper - and unless I'm in good mental shape, I can pretty much forget it. Anyway, one of the things that Jonsson talks about is how warm-up times can be divvied up in to four categories;
easy tasks with short warm ups,
easy tasks with long warm up times,
hard tasks with short warm up times
and hard tasks with long warm up times.

Thinking about it like that might actually help my procrastination-guilt - writing fiction has got to qualify as a hard task with a long wamr up time... At least for me. If not for fricking Trollope the younger, who wrote 2000 words a day, guaranteeing his presence in every SINGLE "how to write fiction" thingy EVER. Wanker. Though I was reminded why I've never read anything by him when i was in a bookstore the other - CRAP they're LONG! And look BORING as ALL COME OUT.

(I might just be resentful that writing fiction was clearly a short-warm-up task for Trollope. But that's OK - I'm not above resenting dead people.)


The other evening we were three women in the kitchen in my mother's flat in Lund, (J, my mom and I) sipping decent wine, flicking through magazines half-heartedly and talking about life and love and all those things as mom was preparing dinner. J had delivered the smack to ber boyfriend about saying really ignorant things, threatening him with the dreaded FINAL breakup, and he'd replied that he didn't really think about stuff. And i piped in, incensed, that "YES, guys seem to NEVER think about stuff until THEY HAVE TO." J and I agreed taht this was stupid and started nodding and getting worked up and talking about how we'd both lost sleep about the worrying thoughtlessness of boys and other people we care about. At which point, my mom looked over at two of her favourite overly intellectual young ladies, and laughed and said "Sweethearts, I know TWO people who lose sleep about why they think and say the things they do - and they're both sitting in this kitchen." This may be a lie. Because i found a thingy from tolstoy saying that he did the same thing:

'I was cleaning a room and, meandering about, approached the divan and couldn't remember whether or not I had dusted it. Since these movements are habitual and unconscious, I could not remember and felt that it was impossible to remember - so that if i had dusted it and forgot - that is, had acted unconsciously, then it was the same as if I had not. If some conscious person had been watching, then the fact could be established. If, however, no one was looking, or looking on unconsciously, if the whole complex lives of people go on unconsciously, then such lives are as if they have never been.' Tolstoy, Diary entry 1897


I pointed this out to the mothership, and she maintains that citing a dead Russian aristocrat as a benchmark of sanity and well-adjustedness is contradictory.

Now: CRAYFISH DINNER! SWEEET!