Don’t mind me; I’m just a writer

3 Notebooks and a Pen

3 Notebooks and a PenI like to write my first drafts on real paper, long hand. I seem to think better that way.

And I like to spend my lunch hour over at the cafe across the street from my office, hunched over one of the tables with earphones on, music playing, scribbling madly in a notebook.

Sometimes I laugh.

Once I cried.

Half the time, I’m staring off into space trying to figure out how to put what I’m seeing in my brain into words and onto paper.

So needless to say, I tend get a lot of strange looks from the people passing by my table. (Especially when I laugh. I sound a little bit like an intoxicated donkey.)

One pair of fellow lunchers even stopped next to me and started talking about me.

“What’s she doing?”

“Oh look! She’s writing!”

I wrote that experience down in my notebook, actually, while they were there talking about me. Every conversation or experience is fodder for the imagination! Especially mine.

So if you happen to run across me at lunch and I look or act like I should be escorted to the closest padded room, pay me no mind.

I’m just a writer.

Where There’s a Will There’s a … What?

pancakes
Hello, delicious food.

As I prepare to expand my writing horizons with a new blog, here’s another “blast from the past” post from my original marathon training blog!

Alas, this one shows just how weak-willed I can be. Sometimes, when the flapjack calls, I just have to answer.

These are the very habits I’m hoping to break, actually!

But, here’s another oldie but goodie from January 2006.


Pancakes

January 10th, 2006 at 8:41am

Well, getting to the gym sort of fell through.

I went for pancakes with my mother instead. The call of the flapjack was just a little stronger than the call of the leg press.

Or maybe it was just that my mom was driving, and she didn’t feel like dropping me off at the gym.

“You’re wasting away! Here, let’s go eat pancakes.”

I could have struggled. I could have fought. I could have hurled myself from the moving car and out onto the six-lane highway. I could have dodged and weaved through traffic and ran to the gym screaming “Blessed weights, I come for you!”

Instead, I sat in a booth and and shoveled a plate full of buttermilk pancakes into my mouth.

All hail the flapjack, covered in butter and maple syrup with a tall glass of ice cold milk on the side.


There you have it! My breakfast food addiction in black and white. Being gluten-free has helped me cut down the amount of IHOP runs to zero, but I still struggle with will-power.

See you next time! I hope to launch “The Writer’s Fitness Plan” within the next week.

In the meantime, you can follow my rambling here (this blog isn’t going anywhere) and find me writing “How To” articles at ComputerGeeks2Go!

Photo Credit: iStockphoto

Odd Finds in the Memory Vault

Karen Bristow and her sister, circa 1983-1984
The tall, goofy-looking brunette is me, somewhere between 3rd and 4th grade. The cute little blond is my sister.

Ever wonder what causes certain people from childhood to stick in your brain for no discernible reason?

People who, when they pop up on your mental movie screen, cause you to pause and think, “Whoa. Where’d they come from?”

My memory vault is stocked with some strange standouts. I mean, I can understand remembering my very first BFF, the first kid to bully me in school, or the first boy who’s heart I broke.

Those people had a profound enough impact in my life to scorch their own trail to my long-term memory.

But Ian and Derek from Mrs. Gould’s 4th grade class? We did nothing more than share space in the back of the classroom and swap yogurt for Twinkies at lunch. I’d understand remembering them for nearly three decades if we’d at least swapped spit. Maybe it was the unique name or the leather jackets? Or just the fact that they were complete opposites.

Ian, who to me, had the coolest name ever, sat to the right of me for most of the school year. His desk was as orderly and pristine as mine was a black hole that swallowed up my homework and barfed out excuses.

He came to school every day in dress slacks, loafers, a button down shirt and either a navy or red sweater vest. He never misplaced his homework or had to borrow a pencil. Nor did he have a problem loaning his pencils to me when I needed one. He was just a sweet kid who, thankfully, hated Twinkies as much as I hated yogurt.

Behind him sat tall, dark and Polish Derek. The “Bad Boy” of 4th grade. (If the 4th grade can have “bad boys” that is.) He wasn’t a jerk, that I remember, but he sure could pull off an attitude that matched his “Thriller” uniform; leather pants, either black or red, a matching jacket full of zippers and buckles, and high-top shoes.

He was the only kid in the school who could outrun me, but not by much. And if my desk was a black hole, then his was a supernova. Nothing that entered his desk came out unscathed, or at all.

Though the three of us did team up once in a while (a very unlikely-looking trio) for assignments or kickball, I can’t pinpoint one thing about them that stands out enough to make them so extremely memorable. Yet I’ve named my firstborn after one and pillaged the memories of both for personality traits and quirks for characters that haven’t yet found a home in stories.

Somewhere, somehow, in the ten-month span of 4th grade, they did something that caused my subconscious to freeze-frame them permanently in my mental photo album. And the ego part of me sometimes wonders, “do I stick out for no good reason in their memories too?”

Do you have any memories of people that cause you to ask yourself – “What the heck? Why him/her?”

Photo Credit: My Dad