Last night, we watched It Might Get Loud and I thought about art and what it means to struggle and then about important things like sentences and how pretty a black suit can be when set against a backdrop of grass so green it verges on neon. I thought about what it meant to play a guitar so hard your fingers bleed. I have finished (another) first draft of the book. I am taking a few weeks off, to give my brain a break, to try and get some distance, before jumping into heavy revisions.

Oliver has been impossibly cute these days. In the mornings, while Jesse showers I sit on our sink so we can chat before he rushes off to work. Oliver picked up on the pattern and now sits on my lap. Gracie sacks out on our bed (which is nice when I’ve already made it up, but poses a dilemma if I haven’t—do I move her to make it up? Oh, but she’s just so comfy!). I sit between our sinks, and Oliver sits on my lap, and Jesse showers, and we talk. The other day, I was getting ready to go somewhere and was putting on makeup while talking to Jesse. Oliver sat on the sink and meowed at me until I finished and sat down, at which point he quickly climbed into my lap and immediately began purring and licking his paws. He’s on my lap right now, as I type this. Making up for the fact that he was on the kitchen sink this morning, checking out the pan I’d left soaking from last night’s dinner, trying to see if he could find any morsels to supplement his diet-food breakfast.

I dreamed of Congo again last night. Jesse was there too, and we were eating Mama Lily’s cooking and I was showing him how to brush his teeth without using the tap water. Yesterday, I was thinking about electricity, how I have it whenever I want it, how it felt to sit around a living room with flashlights and candles, talking in the dark, about candlelit dinners that were born out of necessity rather than romanticism. Only ten percent of Congo’s population has access to electricity. That kind of blows my mind. And even the ones who do… Every day, we lost power at least once, and our compound had a generator. Bishop goes for days without power. He loves ice-cold soda. He apologizes to us when he has to serve it warm. Some days, it’s not war, it’s not rape, it’s just this—it’s just Bishop, looking embarrassed, handing his guests bottles of warm soda.

For days, I’ve been trying to write about Haiti, but it keeps coming out Congo. I have a friend who is tirelessly campaigning to get tents to Haiti, and she asked me to blog about it, and I’ve tried, I really have. I care about Haiti, and we’ve given money to relief efforts. But it’s not the same. Congo is more than a cause now. But what is it? I don’t know. I don’t know what it is. All I know is that I can’t write to you about Haiti right now, not with any real conviction or passion, you’d see right through me, you’d know my heart was saying Congo all that time, and while it makes me feel a little heartless, a little guilty, not to have enough room for both, what I really believe is that everyone has their Congo, whether they’ve found it yet or not, and we’ve all got to latch on and fight like mad to do something.

And there it is, the man who plays guitar until his fingers bleed, because he’s trying to say something. Something about life and about art, the way we couldn’t paint without dark colors, and there is a beauty about Bishop and his bottles of Coke and Sprite and Fanta that I will never find the words for. But I will not stop trying.

(If Haiti is your Congo, here’s one way to help: www.ahomeinhaiti.com. The rainy season starts soon.)

We spent a whirlwind weekend in Charlotte, house hunting for my aunt, who is moving from San Francisco to Charlotte and needs a place to rent for half a year or so. If house hunting is difficult, just try doing it for someone else! Yipes! The pressure was kind of intense, even though Joannie’s instructions were something along the lines of “As soon as you find a clean house in a decent neighborhood, just stop and go do something fun.” We couldn’t take the advice, though—and by “we,” I mean “me”—we had to pour over listings online first, swapping emails with a realtor who was kind enough to help us out, even though he’s basically not getting any money off this deal. The prospect of a future sale and the referral from Jesse’s dad were the only reason we got through the door in the first place.

At any rate, Jesse and I spent half the day on Saturday driving around kind of aimlessly, waiting for the rental company to get back to our realtor so he could get the codes to show us the houses. We snagged some wraps from a Trader Joe’s and ate them in the car, sharing a little jug of orange juice and finishing the meal with a couple of old chocolates the store had been giving away, pretending they were for the Superbowl, when really it was obvious they were just leftovers from Christmas.

Then, around 2:00 we finally got to see the first house. We spent the next several hours inspecting place after place, taking note of the carpet and the location of the laundry rooms, the noise levels, the quality of neighborhoods, and so on. I took notes on a little pad of paper, and after each house Jesse and I spoke our thoughts into a voice recorder. At the end of the day, we had settled on the two best possibilities, and we sent notes and pictures to my aunt. Now we wait and see…

So far this week, I’ve just been at home, doing chores and writing. Yesterday I went through some of my kitchen drawers, getting rid of things I never use and making room for some new gadgets from the Pampered Chef party. I washed everything—all the tools in the drawers, all the utensils in the holder next to the stove. I washed the cabinet doors. Then, I did laundry and baked this bread. Just call me Susie Homemaker! (By the way, you absolutely must try the bread recipe—it was freakishly delicious.)

Today I’ve spent the day writing. And reading about writing. And writing some more. I’ve got some shrimp thawing for dinner, and I’ve discovered this blog, which has me transfixed (the author survived a plane crash and is rebuilding her life and finding joy in the simple things—I found it via The Thin Chef, which also introduced me to the no-knead bread recipe, so bonus points to Kate for finding awesome things!).

Tomorrow my respite ends, as there are children to watch and groceries to buy and another Pod meeting to plan. But before that, I’ve got dinner, and small group, and LOST. Good day.

Today, I spent several hours at two different occasions on the phone with two of the smartest, kindest, most creative people I know. I feel charged up and inspired. Funny, it just struck me that they are both writers, and they’re both blonde. If there were any two women to slaughter the stereotypes of the ditzy blonde, it’s Simona and Visha.

Simona’s hair is light and wispy, wavy in just the right way, and it always looks perfect, like a halo. I once saw her after she’d spent the day at the beach, and her hair had taken on a windswept look that stylists spend hours creating for movie stars in movies about coastal romance. When I spend the day at the beach, my hair stands straight on end, the frizz propping up the rest of my hair in what I can only describe as Wind Tunnel Chic (well, without the “Chic” part). Simona speaks in an almost-whisper, with such a calming voice I always feel like everything will be just fine, if only because she is in the world. She talks about spirituality, about reality, about Congo and Darfur, and she quotes literature and tells me about philosophy, always having the decency to pretend that I already knew the complex concepts she’s outlining for me, listing off philosophers as if I know exactly who she’s talking about and might chime in with a reference to the philosopher’s third book, which I just happened to have read last week (when she talks about Kierkegaard, however, I do get rather animated). And in return for her brilliance, I tell her about my book, the fits and starts and endless rewrites, and she does not think my existence invalid because I don’t have a full-time job with benefits.

Visha’s hair is straight and strawberry blonde, and she’s got this wonderful radio voice, distinctive, a little husky, memorable. She’s spunky and fiery, but incredibly and unfailingly reasonable. She knows how many female directors have been nominated for Best Director in the Oscars, and she has trained two very large dogs into thinking that she—petite, adorable Visha—is bigger than they are. I think she’s magic. And funny, dear heavens, have I mentioned that Visha’s hilarious? If you know her, you already know she’s got a sharp wit, but you also know that she’s unendingly kind. Though I’ve given her plenty of ammunition, never once has she used that humor to make fun of me or to make me feel anything other than entirely good and happy. She cries for people with Alzheimer’s, and she pulls off the side of the road to care for dying dogs hit by cars that long ago sped off. She works at a bookstore, has read probably more books than said bookstore has in its inventory, knows all about experimental film, rails against injustice, defends the defenseless.

How lucky I feel today, not only to have such friends, but to have hours to run down my phone batteries with them, to listen to them and to talk about writing with them, to find out what they think about plot and beginnings and the plight of the MFA workshop. The three of us are trying to do the same thing, really, to struggle with the words on the page, to find the balance between art and life, to find where the line is and to cross it.

I believe the holidays are causing a loss of brain cells. By that, I mean mine in particular. And at all those Christmas parties—I haven’t had a single drink! I blame the sleep deprivation and stress. When I showed up at Sharon’s place this Tuesday to watch Story, I just bust into tears for no good reason at all. For some reason, Sharon still felt okay leaving her child under my watch.

As Story and I cuddled on a giant bean bag, reading and re-reading books with happy pictures printed in primary colors onto glossy-finished cardboard, I think I regained a shred of the sanity that had threatened to high-tail it maybe an hour previous. That night, I went to the last party of the week and stayed late to help clean up (we got home sometime before midnight). Little sleep and hours of chocolate fondue probably got rid of my recovered shred.

Wednesday morning was more child-watching, and then the afternoon was nearly blissful as I realized the Thursday block on the calendar was empty. Big, white blankness. Bolstered by the thought of nothing scheduled the very next day, I went into a wave of productiveness, breezing through the grocery store and stopping by the bank. I made the good old beans-and-rice “stoup” for dinner, which we ate after nine because Jesse had to work late. And then, around ten, I suddenly felt the need to bake. I managed to botch chocolate sugar cookies, whose directions consisted of little more than “mix well, shape, bake.” Well, they were still tasty, even if the texture was all wrong.

Then, a Facebook friend posted that she would be attending something called K-K-K-K-K-Karaoke, and I posted the joke—and this is literally what I wrote—“Is that bowling for white people only?” And it took me a full second to realize what I’d written. I scrambled for the “delete” button. I’m still not sure how my brain confused the off-key singing of cheesy songs from the ‘90s with pushing glossy, heavy round things down glossy lanes at a collection of red-ringed pins. But it did.

Today was surprisingly productive. I put away the approximately three loads of clean laundry that had been piling up in our bedroom. And then I washed the three loads of dirty laundry waiting in the hamper. I knocked out the dishes. I wrote like three thousand words. Three freaking thousand words! I rushed to the library before it closed to snag a book on tape about Nixon and Kissinger and a few Vietnam-themed movies. Another trip to the grocery store for cold-related items for poor Jesse, who was working late, again, and whose immune system is in protest.

On the way home, I stopped by the gas station, which apparently is what everyone else in our town was also doing. I waited in line behind a van whose driver was nowhere in sight. I figured the driver was paying and would soon return and drive the vehicle away. Turns out, she was prepaying. So, I waited still longer as she pumped her gas. Finally, she drove away and I pulled my car into her slot. I climbed out, credit card in hand, and looked at the side of my car. The side the gas tank is not on. I’ve driven the same type of car since I was seventeen. The gas tank has, shockingly, never been on that side.

If I continue at this rate, I’m not sure what state I’ll be in by Christmas, but I believe this picture might sum it up:

The only way to accurately describe this week would be through a series of grunts, but I haven’t quite figured out how to translate those to words on a screen yet, so I’ll do my best without them.

Let’s see, on four of the past five days I have taken care of one of three different babies. (And, in case you’re tempted, just know that I will punch the first person to say, “God’s preparing you for something…” Well, okay, I won’t punch you, but I will scowl at you angrily. Fear the scowl!) And on three of the five past days, I’ve had lunch or tea get-togethers with friends. Plus small group, as always, on Tuesday. A dinner party Wednesday. And I’ve had this random pain in my side that is quite preoccupying and distressing. It goes away. It comes back. It hurts to breathe or sleep on my left side. If you notice me bending awkwardly to my right, clutching my ribs, and making a funny face, don’t worry, I’m just dying from some rare and sudden Left Lung Disease.

The house has been in varying degrees of disrepair all week, and by “varying degrees” I mean “unkempt to messy to messier to even messier to no one can step foot in my house.” Yesterday, I finally slogged my way through a couple sizeable mountains of laundry and one enormous summit of dishes, and today I tackled the bathrooms (including the tub).

And on top of everything, I decided this was the week to start new writing goals. I want to finish a draft of the book by the end of January. So, I’ve got this month and the next two, plus three major holidays in between. For the rest of November, my target is five thousand words a week.

With the kind of week I’ve had, normally I would have written some terribly small number of words that I would later just delete in one fell swoop. But, determined as I was with my brand-new goals and my nearly frantic desire to have a draft of this book done soon, I actually went over my goal! Happy grunts (while clutching side)!

Now that I’ve successfully navigated this week, I’m going to grab the brownie Jesse bought me from some charity bake sale earlier in the week and curl up in front of his computer to catch up on Ugly Betty. Friday, I love you.

Check this out: Wordle. It’s a site that makes a little word picture of your blog or another piece of writing, based on the frequency of the words you use. Seriously addictive. Rachel O. shared this delightful site on her blog yesterday. Thanks, Rachel. Now, instead of actually writing, I can Wordle away! (The very best part of this site as distraction is that it can actually be useful, since I tend to overuse words that don’t really add to my meaning, and this may help me better notice when I’m doing it…so my appreciation is not altogether sarcastic.)