Holiday Blogging Break

Writing, it turns out, is a solitary enterprise. Sure, many of us writers so shamelessly seek public approval through our work. But the act of creation itself is done in private, with no audience. I suppose like laws and sausages, it is best not to witness how a written work was manufactured.

I've fallen into a bit of a routine with my writing, using the moments of scheduled solitude spread out about my day to "work," writing for this blog or for any other project that temporarily demands my attention. But this holiday season has thrown that schedule off.

Sami has a couple of weeks off work, and Adam has a couple of weeks free from the tyranny of preschool, so I no longer have my lonely mornings spent with nothing better to do than peck at this obnoxious keyboard, which never fails to misrepresent my thoughts almost entirely. As such, it's been a little while since I've written anything worth writing. If this season holds to form it may be quite a while still until I have a sufficient measure of loneliness to do some decent writing.

In the meantime, a couple of updates:

On Friday I had my cast removed. You don't know fear until you've had a lunatic apply a circular saw to your wrist. But the wrist remains attached, and thankfully the fiberglass which once surrounded it now sits in a dumpster behind a doctor's office, waiting to torment some other sad fool who lost their fight against both gravity and reflexive stupidity.

Now begins the slow and painful process of remembering how to use this worthless limb. Not only has it atrophied, but it also has both

a.) a fair amount of scar tissue in the joint, and

b.) a new permanent addition, a screw that holds the bone together.

In the face of these twin obstacles, my darling wife with her degree in physical therapy (and another in psychology, so she can always fix what ails me) tells me that it moves quite well. Of course, I never thought that getting my hand to move no more than an inch in any direction would count as victory, but I'll take it.

However, every victory - no matter how small - comes with its own setbacks. I guess that's the universe's way of balancing the ledger. Now that I've got my hand back I've picked up the stomach bug that's been circulating Adam's preschool. So, instead of writing something deep and insightful, I'm off to test the recuperative powers of Ginger Ale, saltine crackers, and Sami's homemade tofu-noodle soup, a vegetarian alternative to the miraculous chicken noodle soup, made with a vegetable broth base and tofu instead of chicken. No bird should have to part with its life just because the contents of my stomach are bouncing around like an obese belly dancer.