It’s been a rough April and also quite a good one. I’m doing a little Halloween stories project for Camp NaNoWriMo, hoping to come up with something good to polish for a Halloween stories contest in October. The local daily had a contest every year for decades (I entered it a few times), but didn’t have it last year, so I may be looking for other options.
I’ve come up with a couple of good ideas, one of them stealing from a theme I came up with during Camp NaNo last July, when I wrote those fifteen microfictions in 31 days. It’s a fun theme to wind a story around: dumb things guys do to impress girls.
The focus on Camp NaNo has meant almost no real media consumption in the post-work hours. I haven’t seen a movie or watched a TV program in what feels like ages. It’s kind of nice, to be honest, but the Criterion Channel launched its new streaming service on April 8, and I purchased a yearly subscription back in February. I haven’t been able to take it for a spin, thanks to Halloween stories month.
I’ve spent mornings and lunch breaks rereading Harry Potter, and finally finished the Deathly Hallows this past Saturday. More on that later. Without TV and movies, reading books and writing stories has proven not a bad way to go through life.
I’ve ramped up my beach game this month, too. When I bought the wheels last September, the main reason was to get myself back in the water on a regular basis, but man. We had an incredibly rainy winter, with the kind of rains that push lots of runoff into the ocean. You really don’t want to swim in that, so I sorta went from November through March without a trip to the beach.
Which is really inexcusable, considering where I live. So April has been about reestablishing formerly excellent habits, and I’ve been swimming four times a week for the past (nearly) four weeks. It’s been mostly outstanding. I hit a few personal milestones I thought I was far away from the last time I was a regular beachgoer, a few years ago. It’s like some switch was flicked, and I’ve totally rediscovered my stroke and a surprising reserve of stamina I didn’t know was there.
I’m motivated primarily by just not wanting to die. But there are side benefits, such as a very good mood at work on days when I hit the ocean first. Oh yeah, I go in the mornings before work. My new office is super close to the beach.
I can’t really talk about it here until I figure out a way to do it in code, because this writing space is too public and too Googleable, but I’ve been crushing pretty hard on someone, and the swimming has made some of it a bit more bearable. Just taking that 45 minutes or so to let my brain rest a little, to let my whole body breathe, helps with the other 23.25 hours of the day when I can’t seem to stop thinking about whether or not there’s another relationship left in this battered and (let’s face it) aged heart.
Interestingly (or not!), I’m not at all worried about getting hurt, or making myself vulnerable, or going out on a limb to say hey, wanna see a movie and get dinner this Friday night? And I’m only slightly concerned about messing up what seems to be a growing friendship. I think if certain realities were different, I’d have asked this person out already, but certain realities are what they are, and there’s more at stake than just my feelings and this new friendship.
Once upon a time, the stakes would have been prohibitive. I’m slowly talking myself out of the prohibitions, though. But I can’t actually do anything about it until I decide if this crush is more than a crush, and that’s usually a matter of time.
Maybe it is. I’m so into women that I’ve always got a crush going on, plus a crush in waiting and a crush emerita, and time is almost always the factor that nudges the line along, and I’m grown up enough not to take any of it seriously or to mistake a crush for something else. It’s just a nearly constant feel-good.
But holy moly. This one doesn’t feel good. This one aches. It’s been some time since I’ve felt that. Could be an illusion, so I think the only thing to do is nothing.
This week’s Friday 5 is about impressing people. It’s related to this topic. I’ll answer the questions later.