{"id":1068,"date":"2015-03-17T00:51:37","date_gmt":"2015-03-17T00:51:37","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/torturedpotato.com\/the_comeback\/?p=1068"},"modified":"2015-03-17T00:51:37","modified_gmt":"2015-03-17T00:51:37","slug":"at-any-time","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/torturedpotato.com\/the_comeback\/?p=1068","title":{"rendered":"At Any Time"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Oh it is so hard to sit down here with nothing to say, no point to make, but it&#8217;s the ritual or, more accurately, routine of it I&#8217;m after. Not the content (obviously, she said, self-deprecatingly) but the being here. Morning is too crowded already, evenings are a slow slide to sweet sleep, the skytrain\/bus, as entertaining and beautiful as it can be, is no place to type on a laptop. I do write in my notebook, though, yes, now I have made it so anyone can recognize me on transit because I haven&#8217;t seen another human writing in a notebook. Yet. I could draft posts on my phone but I don&#8217;t want to draft posts on my phone. Ah, I don&#8217;t want to draft anything at all. I want to be creative and I want to write and I want to stop talking about it just do it so that&#8217;s what this is. This is just doing it.<\/p>\n<p>Let&#8217;s take blogging back and make it back into a boring hobby that no one pays attention to, a place to practice turning over buckets of sand. PERFECT.<\/p>\n<p>I am in the middle of cooking dinner; a mixture of wild and brown and japonica rice, stir fried steak strips, and vegetables. The meat is marinating. The rice is cooking. My lips burn a little with the dust of habanero and lime-flavoured tortilla chips. The happy birthday banner we hung up yesterday is dangling from the ceiling like this: Happy Bi<br \/>\n                  rthd<br \/>\n                     ay<br \/>\nIt was my father&#8217;s birthday on Saturday. There are a lot of birthdays at this time of year. A lot of fathers. Well, two. Plus several aunts, a few friends. My co-worker&#8217;s niece and then her mother. Happy birthday, all you March babies. Happy blossoms and tiny green buds on trees and allergies, to those who celebrate allergies.<\/p>\n<p>In a month it will be Eli&#8217;s birthday and he would like a Pokemon themed party. Can someone make that happen, please? Thaaank you.<\/p>\n<p>I just finished a great book called <a href=\"http:\/\/www.amazon.ca\/California-A-Novel-Edan-Lepucki\/dp\/0316250813\"> California by Edan Lepucki.<\/a> I recognized the writer&#8217;s name, possibly from The Millions or somewhere else on the Internet, otherwise I wouldn&#8217;t have picked it up, as this book was not my kind of book. It is a future-story, set in the wilds of a de-urbanized California\/America. But it is a character-driven future story, which IS my kind of book. Once I dug into it, I enjoyed it a great deal. Although the end felt a little rushed, but to be fair, I was rushing through the last chapter, trying to finish the book before we had to return it to the library. I was keeping Eli company in the dentist&#8217;s waiting room while he waited for his turn, my nose buried in this book, but he kept talking to me. I offered to read it aloud. Four pages was all he needed, then he politely told me I didn&#8217;t have to read it aloud anymore.<\/p>\n<p>At my job I get to talk to people using a microphone several times a week. I have to constantly remind myself not to hum when I am paused between sentences. You don&#8217;t realize how much you hum until you have a microphone under your face. I&#8217;ve developed quite a humming habit in the past few years as solitary child-minder. Time to curb it.<\/p>\n<p>Unconscious-tic&#8217;ly yours, &#8217;til tomorrow.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Oh it is so hard to sit down here with nothing to say, no point to make, but it&#8217;s the ritual or, more accurately, routine of it I&#8217;m after. Not the content (obviously, she said, self-deprecatingly) but the being here. Morning is too crowded already, evenings are a slow slide to sweet sleep, the skytrain\/bus, [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[12,23,27,85,17,22],"class_list":["post-1068","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-america","tag-blogging","tag-books","tag-brave-new-world","tag-music-soothes-me","tag-writing"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/torturedpotato.com\/the_comeback\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1068","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/torturedpotato.com\/the_comeback\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/torturedpotato.com\/the_comeback\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/torturedpotato.com\/the_comeback\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/torturedpotato.com\/the_comeback\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1068"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/torturedpotato.com\/the_comeback\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1068\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1070,"href":"https:\/\/torturedpotato.com\/the_comeback\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1068\/revisions\/1070"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/torturedpotato.com\/the_comeback\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1068"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/torturedpotato.com\/the_comeback\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1068"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/torturedpotato.com\/the_comeback\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1068"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}