Cult of Jef

I’m usu­ally upbeat–one of those annoy­ing peo­ple who makes Pollyanna look like a goth girl. How­ever, today I had one of those days where I just felt out-of-sync, like a poorly dubbed Japan­ese mon­ster movie where my lips moved, fol­lowed by a B-List char­ac­ter actor say­ing in Eng­lish, “For the love of God, don’t let Godzilla reach the Golden Cor­ral! They have the only all-you-can-eat salad bar in Tokyo!”

I woke up Sun­day morn­ing, refreshed after finally catch­ing up on my REMs. (When I say that this blog is writ­ten under severe sleep depri­va­tion, I’m not kid­ding.) I had the day off from my full-time job at a non-profit and my part-time job at an inde­pen­dent book­store. I told myself that there were only four things I needed to con­cern myself with today:

1. Exer­cise
2. Iron my work clothes for the week
3. Buy gro­ceries
4. Fin­ish writ­ing the next chap­ter of my novel

Piece of cake! So I started with the first item on my list. I was about to head to the gym when I remem­bered that I wanted to find a work­out plan specif­i­cally for an ecto­morph, which refers to peo­ple, like myself, who have a body type like Flat Stan­ley. I want to build some mus­cle and bulk up a little.

I fired up the Inter­net and did a Google search. Hun­dreds of web­sites popped up and I checked out one after another. And there was some­thing wrong with every one of them. Many of them required work­out ses­sions of an hour or more up to six days per week. With my sched­ule, that did not seem realistic–unless I gave up eat­ing and uri­na­tion. Oth­ers required spe­cial­ized equip­ment that I had nei­ther seen before at my gym nor were legal in the great State of Georgia.

I glanced at the clock. It was after lunch and I had lost the entire morn­ing. It was just like those times when a ques­tion comes to mind, like: How many num­ber one hits did Michael Jack­son have on the Swiss Music Charts?  Nat­u­rally, I must run to the com­puter and find the answer at once, usu­ally get­ting sucked down a rab­bit hole of one intrigu­ing piece of infor­ma­tion that links to another. (For the record, Michael Jack­son topped the Swiss Music Charts four times, with “Bil­lie Jean,” “Remem­ber the Time,” “You Are Not Alone,” and “Earth Song.”) This habit makes me a lethal weapon for trivia night, but not so suc­cess­ful in the pro­duc­tiv­ity department.

I could feel my insides knot­ting up. I told myself to eat lunch and then I’d start work on my chap­ter, since I usu­ally tend to put the most impor­tant thing to me last on my “to do” list. I don’t know why. It’s doubt­ful that the world is going to end if I don’t clean the toi­let. But after lunch, I thought I should warm up to writ­ing by read­ing a bit. At the end of each chap­ter, it seemed like I needed to stretch my lit­er­ary mus­cles some more, so I began another chap­ter. The after­noon wore on. The tight­ness in my gut increased. The sounds of min­utes tick­ing away grew louder, which is really inter­est­ing, because I have a dig­i­tal clock. And the the voices in my head started talking:

You are such a loser.

If the Depart­ment of Fam­ily & Child Ser­vices inves­ti­gated cars that never seemed to get washed, you’d be locked away in prison with­out any chance of parole. Why aren’t you wash­ing your car now instead of read­ing this book?

You’ll never fin­ish that novel.

You do look exactly like the actor who plays Freddy Krueger in all of the Night­mare on Elm Street movies.

This is just like when you wanted to join the band in the sixth grade. You never prac­ticed “Pen­guins on Parade” and dropped out. That trum­pet is still on the top shelf of the closet in your old bed­room in your par­ents house!

Even though I know bet­ter than to lis­ten, I did, any­way. I felt like I was on the bot­tom of a swim­ming pool, pinned down by the pres­sure of all these unsur­mount­able tasks, the drain of the pool mak­ing a painful waf­fle pat­tern across my cheek.

I walked through the house and saw all the unfin­ished projects that awaited me. It reminded me that on Fri­day I had finally fin­ished every­thing I was sup­posed to do before I left for the Erma Bombeck Writ­ers’ Work­shop that I had returned from  two weeks ago.  I real­ized that I prob­a­bly would prob­a­bly be late for my own funeral. I could see myself rush­ing in and plop­ping down in the back row as the pall­bear­ers car­ried my car out to the hearse. I’d turn to the lit­tle church lady to my right and say, “Tell me the truth, how did I look?” She squirm on the pew and scrunch her face up, then say, “Kind of waxy. I’d ask for a refund.”

I shut my book, closed my eyes, and curled up into a fetal posi­tion on my bed. I couldn’t under­stand why I was shut­ting down. I was hopeless.

I thought about the scene in my novel that had me stuck. A high school senior invites a new stu­dent home for lunch. While his friend is wash­ing up in the bath­room, the senior checks his hair in the hall­way mir­ror and his friend catches him. The friends says …

I know, it isn’t rocket sci­ence, yet, for some rea­son, I’ve been frozen at this point for three weeks.

And then my mind started to wan­der. I recalled an e-mail that I received a few days ago from my mother. She had writ­ten about a dilemma. She dis­cov­ered that her 50th high school reunion was sched­uled for the same night as her Hafla, which is the recital for her belly danc­ing class. Mom mulled it over. Ulti­mately, she opted to attend her Hafla instead of her class reunion. She fig­ured that she could either spend her evening lis­ten­ing to a bunch of old peo­ple she didn’t rec­og­nize talk about their bod­ies falling apart, or she could spend it doing some­thing wild and crazy that sixty-eight-year-old women don’t nor­mally do. My mother chose to do some­thing that made her feel good.

My mom inspired me.  I have fun when I write.  I wanted to feel good when I wrote again.  What would make me feel bet­ter right now?

I fig­ured I’d bet­ter knock out the things that I had to do before the day was over, so I could focus on writ­ing with­out those dis­trac­tions.  So, I unfurled myself from my fetal posi­tion and I did my reg­u­lar work­out. I felt bet­ter, so I ironed my work clothes for the week. Com­plet­ing half of my list felt good, so I drove to the gro­cery store and stocked up on food for the week. I felt my mojo return by that point.

Now, I’m back home typ­ing up my blog post for tomor­row, which will be your today. It feels good for my fin­gers to be tap­ping across the key­board.  I decided to move for­ward in the chap­ter of my novel to where I knew what hap­pened next.  As a result, it helped me fig­ure out what the friend says to the senior when he catches him look­ing at him­self in the mir­ror.  The waf­fle marks on my cheek from the drain of the swim­ming pool have faded away, and that low point with the weight of all the pres­sure I put on myself now seems so long ago. It’s a good reminder that even after we grow up and move away from home, we still need our mothers.

How has your mother inspired you recently?