They say that you should write what you know. I don’t know who they are, but that’s what they say. So last month, as I mentioned, I started writing a novel. I wrote just over 50,000 words, and it’ll be at least 50,000 more before it’s finished, if it’s ever finished. I don’t know.
The novel isn’t about me (that's what they all say, right?) But of course, I used details and memories from my own life. What else do I have? What else does anyone have? Including one scene in which a character is making cookies; or rather, her children are making cookies, and all she can think of is how fast they can get the cookies in the oven so that she can clean the flour off the black countertops, and wash the bowls and the baking pans and throw away all the eggshells and the chocolate chip packages and put away the cookies and restore order.
Most of the other real-life details that I used were just that--details, scene-setting, atmosphere. But the cookie part is one hundred percent me. I have a very hard time with disorder, and cookie-baking is inherently disorderly.
Today is cookie-baking day, but yesterday was cookie-dough-making day, and cookie dough making is the hard part, the crusty countertops and dirty dishes part. Today, all I have to do is take a melon baller and form 300 or so little balls of cookie dough, laying them out in neat parallel rows and baking them until they turn into cookies, which I will freeze for a week until it’s time to deliver them to neighbors. And eat them, of course.
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So if the worst part of cookie baking is the mess (it is) then the best part of cookie baking, even better than the eating of cookie dough, is the moment when you finish cleaning up and all is once again right with the world. I don’t have to bake cookies again for another year. I know that there are many people who love to bake, and who do it just for fun. Sometimes, I wish that I was one of those people. But I am not. I never will be. I’m just too neat.
In fact, I’m too neat to even sleep. When I wake up too early, sometimes I get up because I can’t go back to sleep. But sometimes, I get up because my need to restore order is greater than my need to sleep. My socks are on the floor where I kicked them off, and my half-finished water is on the nightstand with my jewelry and my weighted blanket needs to be folded up and my bed needs to be made. So I get up and I put everything back in order, and I make my half of the bed, leaving undisturbed the sleeping form of my husband.
Yes, I know. But at least I don't wake my husband up to make his side of the bed.
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I have a new day planner for 2021. So now I have another reason to look forward to the end of 2020, which can go fuck itself as far as I’m concerned, because my 2020 day planner is really messy, and I’m running out of room for lists. Without lists, the whole operation will fall to pieces. I can’t emphasize this strongly enough. Plus, the pages are fraying a bit, and there’s a mark on the cover, and I just need to start fresh, with clean white pages that I will write on ever so carefully.
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Today, a person at work asked me to fix a tiny error in a presentation. I had pasted a screenshot into a slide, and I hadn’t noticed the little indicator marks that still remained at its edges. There was a time when such a glaring and obvious blemish would have jumped right out at me and demanded that I address it immediately, but my eyesight is not what it once was. The person pointed it out in an apologetic manner, suggesting that it might be “too anal” a detail to worry about. I responded immediately that there’s no such thing as “too anal,” and realized too late that this could be interpreted very wrongly, very wrongly indeed. But I think that they know what I meant. I certainly know what I meant. My baking skills are so-so, my handwriting is terrible, and my eyesight is going from bad to worse, but my commitment to neatness is everlasting.
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