provoking avocados

S's birthday card for Ruth last week.


Happy birthday, Alisa!

Contrary to popular belief, when I'm feeling down, I don't immerse myself in chocolate; I shop for fresh produce.

Had a bad arm day yesterday. Tendinitis has gotten a bit worse recently, probably due to the fact that I have been trying to go back to my regular and sometimes overenthusiastic schedule, compounded by the week of doing nothing but lying in bed and on the couch semi-comatose without doing my arm exercises and stretches. I tried to work on my novel, but I gave up when I realized I was spending about 10 minutes agonizing over whether or not to it was worth changing a sentence structure halfway down a page because of the physical pain that would be involved.

So I decided to catch up on my finances instead, going through my box of receipts and sorting them. More pain. Tried to read a book, but I couldn't concentrate because I was fretting too much about not being able to work on my novel. Got an e-mail from an editor asking for changes in an article that would require a pile of e-mails that I knew I wasn't capable of typing yesterday, and ViaVoice (which I'm using right now) would require far more patience than I had in me.

So I shopped for fresh produce.

I find the fresh produce aisle in a grocery store strangely comforting. Poring over the colors and textures, poking avocados to see if they are ripe yet (ViaVoice kept insisting that I wanted to say "provoking avocados" until I manually beat it into submission), watching the cooling mist spray over the fruit and vegetables... it was all therapeutic in a bizarre "Eat Drink Man Woman" sort of way. I picked up the ingredients to help me make Terence Chua's Chinese fried rice recipe for lunch. Hurt to stir while I was cooking, but I was tired of eating leftover curried vegetables with dahl every day (I had made a giant batch the week Jeff was sick and froze the extras).

Because email has been more challenging for me this year, I've started to sometimes call out-of-town friends at the end of the work day or on weekends to keep in touch. The phone calls are sometimes very short because of long distance charges or because the other person isn't free to talk (which is fine, of course... one of the realities of phone conversations), but I began to learn some of the advantages of hearing a friend's voice, being able to interact real-time, even for just a few minutes. It's also interesting to compare the different types of answering machine messages and answering services that people have. And yes, Alisa, I'm starting to find our answering machine phone-tag conversation kind of fun. :-) Played phone tag with Andrea yesterday, talked with Mark Osier (yay! it's been a while), had a great conversation with my sister.

In the evening, Parki and Jeff and I went to see "Lost in Translation", a movie which all of us really enjoyed. I want to see this again very soon. I'm not usually crazy about Bill Murray, but I have to say that he was amazing in this. Loved the Japan footage. And the romance was heartbreakingly wonderful and understated; there were so many places where this movie could have taken the easy route, but it didn't.

And I purposely wrote a long-ish Blathering with ViaVoice to prove to myself that I can still do a lot of writing even if it takes me more time than I expected for my arms to get back to 100%. :-)

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