Saturday Morning (chat)

Good morning! After a week of crazily warm, T-shirt weather (the nice side of scary climate change), it's normal February weather again: a cold & windy 21ºF this morning.

I'd met with J & D almost one-year-to-the-day ago to talk about my idea for a fandom project before I went up to Duluth with Marz before my 55th birthday. And that week, the publisher said yes, they were interested in seeing a proposal on that topic.

So, for the entire past year, I've felt I should be researching or writing, even when I wasn't (for long stretches of time). And even when I wasn't, I was musing on fandom.

Now I have nothing I should be doing until the editor sends my ms back in a week. In fact, I've had to taper off fandom stuff because I kept wanting to add more to the ms., while the challenge had been getting the thing in slightly under word-count, a triumph! when I had material for 10x as much.

There're lots of things I could do--get a hair cut? start looking for a job!
But it occurred to me it's Saturday, and I don't usually treat the weekend like a weekend, since it's all the same when you freelance.
(That's not entirely true--other people's energy is different on weekends--I can tell it's Saturday by my neighbors.)
Anyway, I thought I'd officially grant myself a weekend off. Whatever that means. 

I'm feeling quite happy sitting here in the sun at the coffee shop, but I felt weird all this past week after coming back from WI. Laura said I sounded like the Peggy Lee song, "Is That All There Is?"
Yeah, kinda. 
I hadn't expected anything to change, I swear I hadn't, but when it didn't, I felt like,... really? That's it? 
It was freeing, as I'd written (unfettered), but in that existential free-fall way... always a little stomach-dropping.
I'm back on the ground now. It's OK.

Uh, yeah, so, what now? What do people do on Saturdays?
I googled it and found a pretty neat list,
"102 Things to Do on a Money-Free Weekend".

Write your will!
Blog! (heh)
Edit Wikipedia! 

That reminds me--I did a little editing on US Senator Amy Klobuchar's Wikipedia entry this past week--specifically about her calling for an independent commission to be formed along the lines of the 9/11 Commission to investigate Trump & Co's ties to Russia.
It was a really good thing to do: 
I know so little about how government works, I had to puzzle out a lot even to add one sentence, which was fun. (How did the 9/11 Commission work?)

I even went to the library to get Klobuchar's autobiography, The Senator Next Door. I read half of it--very nice, well written--before I decided it went much like all the other political autobiographies I've tried to read:

"I was born, and then I started to work, work, work. I don't like to sleep! In kindergarten I organized the neighborhood kids to stack sandbags for flood relief; in second grade, I converted the school newspaper to entirely recycled paper; and every year I trick-or-treated for money to donate to UNICEF..." 

[Klobuchar actually did that last one.]
You know?
Admirable! And, oh, unworthy me to say so, boring.
I so appreciate these people––Leslie Knope!––but please don't make me pay close attention to the hardware.

I don't know why I have to keep proving to myself I am not cut out for politics. All that administrative, systems work just... zzzzzzz

(Oh, yeah, I know why I had to check that out again. 
These times. It's a sign of political break-down when people who aren't suited to politics start to think they should be, right?
Good representative government should work so people who are bad at it don't have to do it, and the people who are good at it can be effective.)

So, I'm sticking with adapting the stuff I like to do anyway to slightly more political application. Besides editing Wikipedia, which is genuinely useful for spreading information, I will keep making thank-you cards, though when I read Klobuchar's book, I realized she wouldn't think much of the water-colored Rebel Alliance card I sent her. 
I hope some aide enjoyed it. Anyway, it keeps me from feeling hysterical and isolated from the important political work going on.

Oh, hey--I did get a sweet e-mail from an aide to the state attorney general! (Also a Wikipedia edit of mine. I didn't even know what the AG does.) It was––fair enough––mostly a form letter, but she did address me by name, and the first sentence did refer to my note. So, that was cheering.
__________________

P.S. A really neat thing I learned reading about Amy Klobuchar: her dad Jim was a pioneer in long-distance biking:
"Born to ride: Jim Klobuchar and the birth of the Minnesota bike tour"

In 2013, Sen. Amy Klobachar and her father, Jim, re-enacted a popular photo taken in 1981 before she and her father rode from the Twin Cities to the Grand Tetons.