The voices in my head are singing Keep It Loose, Keep It Tight by Amos Lee

What I’m Reading: Winter’s Child, by Margaret Maron

One of the most heinous tricks in the Jazzercise manual is where they take a perfectly good song, like Mary J. Blige’s Family Affair, and make you perform unnatural acts to it. The Queen of Pain currently has Family Affair in her set.

Visualize yourself doing this: Put on some ankle weights–about 4-5 pounds on each ankle will do. Get down on your hands and knees. Now, stick a leg straight out (either one, cause you’ll switch back and forth). Move your leg from the hip, and tap your toe out to the side, then straighten, lift, point, lower and repeat. Do this 5,000 times.

Now, with your leg still behind you, do PUSH-UPS while curling your leg toward the ceiling–yep–one of the two with a weight on it. Repeat, switch, etc. for FOUR MINUTES AND TWENTY-SIX seconds. Trust me, it will seem more like four hours. Try it.

On Monday, when I heard the opening beats of Family Affair, I reminded the QOP right off that A) my ankle weights have been mislaid, and B) I DON’T DO PUSH-UPS on account of the built in weights I sport on my chest make it impossible, from the whole gravity and physics perspective. She growled that I could do SOME of them, so I did. Three, I think. It was exhausting.

Yesterday, when the music started, she growled at me that I was going to do ALL FORTY-EIGHT push-ups. I laughed out loud. If she had asked me to run around the ceiling I would have taken her as seriously. I pointed out the obvious, and reminded her that she well knew this was not workable.

“Shut up and do them,” she said. “All of them.”

Here’s the part y’all won’t believe: I did.

Here’s what I learned at Jazzercise yesterday. Sometimes you should just shut up and do it.

At the beginning of class she asked me what I’d been doing all day. “Editing,” I said.

This was true–sort of–in a metaphorical kind of way. What I had been editing (or trying to edit) were my career goals. I’ve been rewriting the same novel for several years, trying to get the first one just right. (As I understand it, some writers put their first book or three in a drawer never to see the light of day and publish their second or fourth novel, and others write the same novel many times until they have it right. I’ve always thought of myself as being in the latter group.)

It’s REALLY difficult to get a first novel sold in a good economy. When the economy is tight, well, it just gets harder. So, I’ve been trying to convince myself that I want to do something else–anything else. I have had zero luck with this. I am a writer. I need to write. I need to publish what I write, because, as Leonard Pitts allows, “…a writer without readers is like shouting in an empty room.” That’s where you get your loons, and Lord knows, I teeter precariously on that brink to begin with.

So today, I will just shut up and do it.

Everything you need to know about life you can learn at Jazzercise…

Well, okay, maybe not, but you can learn to pole dance (which is a good backup career plan–it’s recession proof) and you get an occasional kernel of philosophy.

Peace, out…

Susan

The voices in my head are singing Keep Me in Your Heart by Warren Zevon.

What I’m reading: Your Heart Belongs to Me by Dean Koontz

I came across a quote today that really struck a chord with me:

“If you stuff yourself full of poems, essays, plays, stories, novels, films, comic strips, magazines, music, you automatically explode every morning like Old Faithful. I have never had a dry spell in my life, mainly because I feed myself well, to the point of bursting. I wake up early and hear my morning voices leaping around in my head like jumping beans. I get out of bed to trap them before they escape.” Ray Bradbury

I think for too long I’ve been starving myself, always being afraid to read too much while I was writing. I had the idea it would mess with my voice. Don’t get me wrong, I devour fiction. But I’ve been in the habit of stockpiling books and waiting until I’m in an editing cycle before I read them.

I’ve officially abandoned that policy, and am going to gorge myself daily with everything imaginable. I’m hoping my morning voices will wake me and haul me out of bed to capture all their insanity. Right now I’m engrossed in Dean Koontz’s latest. He’s one of my three or four favorite authors of all time. Who are the others? Okay, I have eclectic reading tastes. In no particular order, I also get email alerts from Barnes and Noble when Carl Hiaasen, Sandra Brown, or Michael Connelly has a new book coming out. I also love John D. McDonald’s Travis McGee series.

Did I dance today? Well yes, I did. I have several sore muscles for my efforts, although, I have to say, I’m not particularly fond of the set the Queen of Pain is currently using. With one or two exceptions, the songs don’t speak to me. This is unusual, as typically I really like her music.

Note: If I were the alien on the stage, I’d pick the songs I liked, not some whiny, VOLUPTUOUS woman who shows up erratically.

But I have discovered that not liking the music is not necessarily a bad thing. When the music moves me, I forget my sore muscles, and what a spectacle I’m likely making of myself, and shake shake shake my…well, you get the idea. This is a much more exhausting workout. When I don’t like the music as much, I don’t push myself. It’s not a conscious decision, it’s just the way it works out.

It’s actually a good thing that she doesn’t have my favorites in. I might hurt myself. I need to work up to the funk.

Peace, out…

Susan

The voices in my head are singing Where’s the Love Y’all, by the Black Eyed Peas.

What I’m reading: A Deadly Shade of Gold, by John D. MacDonald.

The Queen of Pain accused me this morning of suffering from Brain Crud, in response to my plea for sympathy on account of having the head and chest crud for eight weeks. Now, setting aside her complete and utter lack of sympathy, she has a point. I feel like I need to take one of those things the dentist uses to clean your teeth and scrape off all the nooks and crannies of my gray matter.

At first I thought it was just a holiday, family/mall/carb-overload hangover, but I now suspect it’s something far more insidious. I have television poisoning.

I typically don’t watch much TV–just a few favorite shows: Boston Legal (which won’t be a problem anymore as its last episode aired before Christmas), Monk, The Closer, Saving Grace, and more recently, Leverage, the new Timothy Hutton series. But over the holidays, I fall into bad habits.

It starts with watching a few holiday movies on the Hallmark channel with my mother. Nothing gets you into the holiday spirit quite like heartwarming romantic holiday fluff. Then, there are all those bowl games, and playoff games. Left to my own devices I wouldn’t watch much of that, but most of the family-and-friend pool like it, so we watch.

Before long, I have a customary place on the sofa that calls to me as soon as the dinner dishes are in the dishwasher. I start CHANNEL SURFING–looking for something to watch. I become far less discriminating, although, let me say right here that if I ever type the words, “I finally broke down and watched an episode of American Idol,” somebody just call up the nervous hospital and have them send a padded wagon.

Disclaimer: I mean no slight, aspersion, or snark to anyone who enjoys “Reality TV.” I just personally don’t care for it at all. I’m convinced it’s a vast Hollywood conspiracy to inflate profits. I like my escapism with a plot…you know, something that involves writers, some reasonably talented actors, and a set. I digress.

It’s not the shows that are really the issue, though I typically spend my leisure hours with my first love, books. It’s the commercials. Oh. Dear. Tara.

It’s so bad, that when a decent commercial comes on, I actually remark on how well it was done. This happens about once a week. The prescription drug ads are awful, but the really, really bad commercials–the ones that cause the maximum buildup of Brain Crud are the ones that include the words, “But WAIT!” You know the ones I’m talking about… the ads for things like Mighty Putty, Hairagami, and those plastic clips you put on your bra straps that guarantee to make you a cup size bigger and improve your posture. I’m also sick of seeing celebrities try to convince us that they lost 40 pounds eating Nutri System, or Jenny Craig food, or by drinking a bunch of Acai Berry Juice. Please, those people have a team of personal trainers and a kitchen staff to help them get skinny.

Now that I’ve figured out what caused the brain crud, it’s easy to fix. It’s not difficult AT ALL to turn off the TV once you realize you’ve fallen victim. If only all my unhealthy habits were cured as easy as picking up a remote and pressing “Off.”

Peace, out…

Susan