Dear Diary: I Couldn't Possibly
This morning, after a spate of taxing dreams, I woke up thinking like Eve Harrington in the New Haven hotel scene at the end of All About Evei: “No, I couldn’t possibly.” The mere idea of getting out of bed was crushing. The thought making up for all the work that I didn’t do this weekend (because I was busy with other work) was totally flattening. I wouldn’t claim that I’ve given the performance of my life today, but even if I were to stop the day’s work with this sentence, I’d be somewhere between impressed and amazed. And what was the secret? One thing at a time.
First, I chose the links for tomorrow’s Daily Office. The show must go on, after all. Then, putting all of that away, as I would now do on any day, I got to work on the delinquencies. I wrote a Monday Scramble that linked to no new pages at Portico — there weren’t any. I threw together a “Have a Look” entry for this afternoon. I wrote the Book Review review, and then a note about Precious and a short page about the Sam Shepard story in The New Yorker. All of that got published. Then I tackled the Daily Office links. I won’t say that it now takes as long to publish the Daily Office as it does to write it, but I’m still new at this business of cross-publishing (if that’s the word), and I have to think about what I’m doing. (It helps, enormously, that I’ve been playing with two sites for five years now — I know more than I think, going in, about what a new project will entail in the way of checklists — lists that in fact never get written down. A by now unconscious understanding of the interrelation of the blog (with its WordPress platform) and the Web site (an accumulation of .htm pages, manually uploaded to the server by me) tailors my sense of What’s Next from the very beginning. But I still do have to second-guess myself about publishing the Daily Office once at The Daily Blague and twice at Portico.)
Am I in the middle of some de-blogging phase? I do wonder. The principle blog entries appear at Portico as well, every day. It’s as though I’ve celebrated the fifth anniversary of The Daily Blague by making it redundant.Â
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Last night’s dinner had one too many courses. Having just made the first winter batch of tomato soup was no reason to put it on the menu. It wasn’t a question of too much food. Rather, there was the extra pot on the stove. Things would have gone more swimmingly if I’d had that burner to work with — or, at least, the stove-top space.
Shrimp risotto — a dish that I’ve made so often lately that I’m almost tiring of it — followed by a three-rib standing roast of beef, with its Yorkshire pudding, horseradish sauce, and a dish of steamed asparagus — would have been plenty. Not to mention the store-bought Opera Cake (an Agata & Valentina specialty that takes the place of coffee at my table.) Yorkshire pudding, by the way, is the easiest thing in the world, if you make individual puddings instead of one gigantic one. Even if you spill some of the 425º hot lard on your trousers because there isn’t room on the stove-top to set down the pan properly.
On Thursday, we’ll be tootling up to Claremont Avenue for a feast to which we’ve been kindly invited. I’ll be weighted down by a quantity of champagne but otherwise untroubled by culinary exercise. Our hosts have the only Manhattan view that I would be happy with if I had to give up the one that I’ve loved for over 25 years: looking east, over Barnard’s campus, at the dome of Low Library. There is something intensely Antonioni about the composition, but I’ve never been able to put my finger on exactly what.
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What was different between this morning and right now is the small but regular body of work that was due at midnight last night and that has now been completed. It’s simple and obvious, but still somewhat strange to observe that work — meaningful work (and this work here is very meaningful to me, regardless of its use to anyone else) — is a weight that we discharge by doing it. That’s what I minded so much about being tied up with other things over the weekend: I wouldn’t have the pleasure of having done things that were supposed to be done. It’s gotten to the point where I couldn’t possibly put off until tomorrow what I could do today.