So are you enjoying Palindrome Week? When it dawned, I found it necessary to find the longest palindromic word in human parlance. And the Internet responded with saippuakuppinippukauppias, which apparently is Finnish for a wholesale vendor of soap dishes. As overjoyed as I am that this word exists, it has caused me to take stock of my daily routine.
As the year turned, and I listed a few things I want to accomplish in 2011, I finally succumbed to the reality that I absolutely cannot get any writing done while I have access to the Internet. Facebook and Twitter are just plain kicking my ass, and the only way to ward off this compulsion to snark with friends and click on links is to cork the deluge at its source.Which is fine, because as much as I enjoy Twitter, all those tweets and links sometimes feel like so many hectoring seagulls trying to build nests with my beardfuzz.
[Speaking of which, the manifestation of my wintertime facial introversion is still growing strong, to the point where I have to wash and brush it regularly. I've never grown one this epicly large before, and I'm starting to wonder how the world's Galifianakises manage.]
In order to accommodate my new, net-free strategy, I'm spending most of my days writing at the Rose Reading Room, which has always come up big when deadlines loom. I think my brain has come to associate the room's musty smell with the need to WRITEDAMMIT.
The new routine was steaming right along, uninterrupted for almost two weeks, when I got the call Thursday that TwoBert had pink-eye and had to be picked up from school. If you're five years old, pink-eye is sort of fantastic, because it's a license to hang out with Daddy in your underpants while your apoplectic brother has to trudge back to the gulag and memorize times tables.
Before TwoBert and I set to building our LEGO Ninja Whatevers, I put the iPod in its dock and hit Shuffle, and the first song up was "Down to The River to Pray," off the O Brother, Where Are Thou? soundtrack. My mind shot backward to the summer of '05, when I sang that song to TwoBert every night while he murmured himself to sleep in the crook of my neck. And now, that little larva is a 42-pound burst of sinew, who is reading, and throwing himself headlong down snowy slopes, and giving me daily tallies of the number of girlfriends he currently has. (As of Friday, it's seven.)
The years, they run like rabbits.
