sarah eve kelly

You know, I’m turning 30 in six days. I really did think that by now I’d be able to wake up at seven, be working by nine, take a civilized lunch break at noon, and then get back to it. Nothin’ doin’. It’s twenty past four in the morning (make all the jokes you want), and it is ever at about 2:30, just when I’m poised for sleep, that I decide I can change the world by updating my calendar, making enormous lists that I have no intention of consulting again, and then posting publicly about it.

I had high hopes for my thirties, I really did. Although it might be that the Special Powers trademarked by that particular decade don’t actually take effect until one is properly thirty. I hadn’t thought of that.

I blame it on the US election (although that really doesn’t account for the past month). Being five hours ahead of the action means you have to stay up late, and it’s not just about the numbers: it’s the punditry, the reviews from everywhere. I’ve had an awful lot of fun reading the curmudgeons over at National Review Online’s The Corner, I read an apocalyptic piece about Obama’s first security briefing on CNN, and listened with interest to the total silence issuing from the mouth of Sarah Palin in the past 24 hours.

(Does anyone else think she’s going to spend the next four years in finishing school? Hiring private tutors, taking courses in rhetoric? Learning to walk across a room with a book on her head? Doin’s are transpirin’ in that mind of hers, I’m telling you. Something tells me she stays very quiet in Alaska for the next couple of years and re-emerges as Sarah Palin 2.0 in time for the Republican primaries.)

Anyway, the prospect of staying up till five in the morning last night really didn’t bother me; it rarely does. I feel more adult when I get my work done during the day, but I’m putting in the same ten-odd hours regardless, and, as Stephen King would say, it’s darker than a carload of assholes out there these days, so it doesn’t really matter when I’m working. The bonus is that I detest natural light: my previous works will attest to my attempt to foster perpetual twilight.

Still, though. There’s something a bit deviant about being awake at this hour. I thought being back in a student population would put me back into an anything-goes atmosphere, but these cats genuinely seem to work by day, attend choral rehearsal by evening, eat their pulses and get their Five A Day, and tuck themselves into bed by ten-oh-oh. I can’t be the first disorganized Cambridge student, can I? But perhaps I’m the last.

I take a multivitamin, anyway. Sometimes two, when I’m feeling the need for extra virtue. Or toxicity.

Between reading The Compleat Midwifes Practice and working on novel revisions, about 85% of my life’s work has me more or less confined to this chair (there are worse chairs, certainly). At this time of night it’s always tempting to consider the All-Nighter, to just go until I drop, and then drop. But then I remember the birds. Thanks to Daylight Savings Time (a professor at a readings seminar recently told me in a very smug voice that DST is a “social construction”; I returned that time itself is a “social construction” - maybe this whole thing is just an attitude problem), the birds will be out in full force in about an hour.

Everybody knows what it’s like to hear the birds of a morning when you haven’t slept. It’s a warning that reality is setting back in: the day is beginning; the robins are opening up shop and soon everyone else will be too. One’s stolen season is stolen back when one is uniquely ill-equipped to deal with it: tired, cold in the extremities, reading the same line over and over, but of course there’s no getting to sleep now because of the fucking birds. The world has woken up and it’s only just occurred to you that you have no idea how you’re going to get through the day.

So yes, I’m trying to be civilized, I’m trying to be grown up. I’m failing parlously. The whole reason my husband and I came to love each other so was these habits, but now he’s a Morning Rower so he gets his carbs and is in bed by midnight. I need a new night owl. Katrina the teddy bear is great, but she’s not big on talk. She just sorta sits there, judging me. (She started judging me when the felt started leaving her face a little bit - she’s a case study in Velveteen-Rabbititis - now she’s got this sort of wry half-smile on her).

Katrina is telling me to go to bed, and the fact my stolid, wise bear has become animate tells me that she’s probably right all round.

Till next time, if God wills it, &c &c.

Looking for more? See Sarah’s recent weblog entries here.

… just doesn’t have the same ring, does it?

You’ll all be pleased to know that my spots have reached a consensus and decided to go pester someone else. Soon I’ll be very much myself again, for whatever that’s worth.

Random non-zinging zingers:

Item. I should be in bed, probably. This is the trouble that haunts you when your job doesn’t have fixed hours and the man you live with is far too kind. Hours get out of control. An hour ago I realized that I hadn’t eaten supper, and though I probably won’t collapse from missing a meal anytime soon, I was starving. So I went into the kitchen and looked for the usual suspects. Finding none, I marshalled fusilli (well, cooked it) and went casting about for something to put on it. No sauce in the house, you see. So I gathered up single cream, one filleted chicken breast, mozzarella cheese, garlic, salt, and thyme, dropped them into a pot with my eyes closed, and hoped for the best. Does this qualify as real cooking? I don’t know if I have food poisoning yet, but it sure tasted good.

So supper at one in the morning and posting at two. I wonder what the sequel (viz Friday) will be like.

Item. I clipped past 70,000 words this week; the good news is that it’s a high watermark and things have never been going better with my manuscript; the bad news is that the manuscript itself seems to be demanding far more wordage than I originally budgeted. I suppose there’s nothing for it but to keep going, which is what I love to hear, so I say it to myself, a lot.

Item. The quest to become bona fide “in this coun-treh” continues apace. I am currently registering with a physician, interviewing for a National Insurance Number, and (lazily, sadly, leaving great black heel marks on the pavement) looking for a job. I am, happily, on the electoral register. I am learning not to say “pants” in mixed company (slowly). We have wireless internet at home - good news for us and for the marriage, as we were not good at sharing one ethernet cord and we did gnash our teeth at one another more than once.

Item. I’m finally starting to feel less like I have one foot in London and the other in Edmonton, although cars still wreck my head here. When I see a single occupant vehicle (sorry: terminology left over from Governance days, happy times) I tend to think it’s driving itself. But other than that I’m getting used to the mores of being here, and oddly, people have stopped looking at me funny - at least in such large numbers. I’ve also learned that here, when people come up to you and say “All right?”, they’re not trying to tell you you look ill or miserable. It’s just a how-do. I have to try to explain - or I have to stop trying to explain, I suppose - that my sixteenth-century English is perfect, my nineteenth-century English is perfect, but I’m not really up on anything past the death of Edward VII. I still expect people to say “corking”.

I really should be in bed. I’ve never had a lot of luck saying goodbye to a particular day and then heralding the next between six and ten hours later. In this Mike and I are the same, which makes for occasionally chaotic nighttimes. We’re constantly “going down for naps”, never entirely committing to the idea of being down for the night. I think it might be symptomatic of some greater mental condition.

The bad thing, for me, is that it’s lovely out here right now. The streets are quiet and dark; the air is cool. Naomi was over last week and we were sitting in the garden; she convinced me to name the two spiders who come out to visit every night. They’re now named Sipperley and Sanchez and, thus anointed, are no longer frightening. So the night is replete with joys. But if I go to sleep, I’m going to wake up to - yes - sunlight. Not so bad in the morning, but our garden windows are west-facing and even if it’s not so hot, it is bright and as such deeply unpleasant to me. There is a specific moment every day when this goes away. It is 8:02 pm. Happily this moment will get earlier as the autumn approaches.

But I’m tired: I’m good for nothing unless I sleep. No use fighting it off. Now I just have to figure out what to listen to while I’m going to sleep. Stephen Fry’s Harry Potter marathons are out of the question, as they are back in Edmonton (deep sighs all round). I suppose it must be Sherlock Holmes. More on the relative value of audiobooks later.

Till next time, if God wills it, &c &c. (That’s for you, Liz!)

No, not quite suckling it yet, but I am now unemployed.

Did I think this would be glorious as I bundled my nameplate, my hand lotion, my Robaxecet, and my thesis back home from the office on May 18? I think I thought it would be, despite every experience I’ve ever had with unemployment.

Well, it hasn’t been. I don’t know if this is because I’m deeply lazy or if I just have too little experience with having a day to myself. Probably both. But combine unemployment with Mike being gone and what you get is longer days. Longer days, mark you, with no car. So, by some preternatural and deeply weird feat of non-jet jet-lag, I am now waking up - bolting up, even - at seven-thirty in the morning, and thinking “Good God, I’ve got fourteen hours ahead of me,” and while I should be grateful, the whole thing feels insurmountable.

Till recently, the only good thing about waking up early in the morning was the prospect of a possible Sausage McMuffin to start the day. This rarely happened, but the possibility of it made me slightly less likely to gait in the direction of suicidal thoughts. Now, I have no car. Also (did you know?) brides aren’t allowed to eat. Well, they can eat some form of non-food food: half a boiled egg, or shredded celery on cottage cheese, or, you know, cardboard (as long as they don’t swallow).

I’m getting married in twenty-three days. Joy, joy in the morning - joy in the afternoon. Yes, it’s wonderful and all that. But I’m not allowed to eat. Also, I’m being mired in trivia, dense pounds of miscellanea that call not only for my presence, but my attention. Flowers; music; trout or salmon? Bone heels or silver sandals? It goes on.

I’m also getting poorer and poorer. My chequing account is wailing “Help me!” from the bottom of a well, the cry muffled by car rentals, jewellery, hair deposits (OK, that sounds like it belongs on CSI, not on my Visa statement). Last night I came this close to ordering the Complete Sherlock Holmes Starring Jeremy Brett just for the sake of petty rebellion. But I climbed on the stepping stones of my dead self to higher things and it remains, as it should, on my Amazon Wish List. For, you know, anyone who’s interested.

I don’t see how anyone can get married more than once.

I could cut off a leg and lose fifteen pounds that way, and then I could have my burger, right? I hate not eating. I’m a food person. Not eating makes me grumpy.

These are all happy things, yes they are. In a month’s time I’ll have a husband. In a week’s time I’ll have my sweetie back. In two weeks’ time I’ll be spending a wonderful three-day holiday in Phoenix with our friends. In two months’ time I’ll be ensconced in Wimbledon Park, writing and gardening and all that. All this will be but a sweet memory.

I just think my thesis was easier. Did I post complaining about my thesis? (No, because I wasn’t posting at all.) It was great and terrible, in its way, but at least it was a way that played to my strengths and didn’t require me to get out of my pajamas or take my hair out of its ponytail. Or, you know, be polite to people.

I’m going to shut up now because if I were reading this on someone else’s site I’d probably want to sock that person in the face. I’m an ungrateful brat.

Till next time, if God wills it, &c &c.