Old-Fashioned Fruitcake
Supposing you were to assume a nom de plume (or nom de whatever it is you don’t want to be caught doing under your personal name). What would it be?
Try this generator if you’re stuck for ideas, and be sure to share the cream of the crop in the comments!
It seems to be a quirk of creative types to be accoutred with a cat – or several. Writers are particularly prone to cats – Ernest Hemingway’s collection of polydactyl cats being perhaps an extreme example – but the link is well-documented in both word and image, albeit not entirely understood.
“A catless writer is almost inconceivable,” says Barbara Holland. “It’s a perverse taste, really, since it would be easier to write with a herd of buffalo in the room than even one cat; they make nests in the notes and bite the end of the pen and walk on the typewriter keys.” But not all writing cats are so unhelpful. Kerry Greenwood says she has “a censorious cat called Belladonna who supervises the process and won’t let me write more than two hours without a break. She slyly hits the caps lock with her little black paw. Thus I am saved from carpal tunnel syndrome and she is well supplied with cat treats (those expensive green ones).”
It’s the same with knitters. As Stephanie Pearl-McPhee notes in her book At Knit’s End, “the tendency to be accompanied by a cat is an oddity among knitters that cannot be explained…. Most cats have a thing about knitting. They are honor sworn to pester knitters and be involved in knitting as much as possible. They lie on patterns, play with balls of yarn, bat at the end of a moving needle, and given two seconds of opportunity, will spread themselves all over your knitting, intentionally shedding as much fur as possible. When selecting a cat to share my life and knitting with, I will consider choosing one whose fur doesn’t contrast with my favorite color yarn.”
My cats know better than to play with an active ball of yarn (though you can see the temptation growing on them as they stare at it) but they do like to be in a lap that has knitting on it. The more mature of the two is happy to just sit alongside the knitting (she’s the one who’s a fibre snob), but the junior seems to think his life will not be complete until he has somehow climbed into the needle-portal and merged his dimensions with those of the knitting. I live in fear of ending up with a Klein-bottle-sock-cat (which isn’t a Dr. Seuss book, but should be).
Then there are sewing cats. Cats love sitting on rustly paper. Newspapers are better than books or magazines, and the delicate tissue of pattern paper is even better. Add the plethora of textures afforded by fabrics, and you have an irresistible cat-magnet. Leimoni Oakes, aka the Dreamstress, has a whole category of blog posts dedicated to the ‘assistance’ of her sewing-cat Felicity. The blog at Cation Designs has both a tag and a tab about the dedicated sewing-cat and model Walnut.
There are also cats who dwell with artists, no doubt taking every opportunity to filch food from still life compositions, leave little painty footprints about the premises, and bat shards of stone across the floor to where an unsuspecting foot will encounter them. (Cats are very thoughtful in that respect).
Doubtless there are many more examples of cats and their creatives, which simply don’t happen to have come to my notice (but please mention them in the comments).
Whatsoever your hand findeth to do, you can pretty much guarantee that your cat will climb into it. Knitting? Yes please. Sewing? Let me help you pin that down (with my claws). Reading? I’ll hold the book open for you (by lying on it). Hanging out the laundry? I’ll turn unintentional back-flips while trying to uproot the washing-line pole (since you won’t let me play with the pegs). Pruning? I’ll hide in the bush and dab at the secateurs as they come past. Playing pétanque? Let me lurk on the sidelines and dash madly into the path of the steel balls as you hurl them. Cooking? The floor will seethe with cats at every turn, especially if you’re cooking anything animal based (although one of our cats will eat bits of raw kale that have fallen on the floor – if she thinks you’re not looking).
Why it is that cats do this is unclear. Boredom? It’s hard to bore an animal that is content to spend its days eating, sleeping and licking itself. Are they offering support? Are they offering – or seeking – companionship? Or do they merely wish to come between their person and anything that might look like it’s getting more attention than they are? Whatever the reason, it seems the attentions of a determined cat are inescapable, so we might as well accept them for the furry little joy-bringers they are, and do our best to get on with life despite their ‘help’.
Have you ever seen your past laid out on a page? It’s unnerving.
Last week I typed up my 2015 work diary (a daily note of what I did or why I didn’t do anything) into a spreadsheet: a year at a view. It was disheartening, encouraging, and then disheartening some more.
Consider the numbers. There were 365 days in 2015. Of these, 52 were Sundays, and therefore days of rest. That leaves 313. (Yes, I work Saturdays.)
I took four days off for public holidays, including Waitangi Day, Good Friday and Christmas. I also took three days for private holidays: my birthday, our wedding anniversary, and our family name day. That takes the total down to 306.
I had a startling eleven sick days, although nearly half of that was eye-related – having laser surgery does require a certain amount of time spent in the offices of eye-people, and also a certain amount of time resting the eyes afterwards (total: 295).
Then there were visits to friends or family, including one for a wedding – a total of five visits, to my amazement, which between them ate up 25 of what would otherwise have been working days (270).
I also took Edith Sitwell’s advice and had some days in bed – well below her suggested quota, though, as I only had six in fifty-two weeks (264). Am I super-lucky? Well, yes, but if it’s any comfort, I haven’t had a paid holiday (or sick leave) in nearly two years.
That’s 101 days already off the total. Disheartening, yes? So what did I do with the remaining days? Did I, you may be asking, do any work at all? I am happy to say, I did.
I did 36 days research; spent 64 days writing; another 40 days typing up what I’d written; a further 8 days reading through what I had typed and taking notes; and a whole 44 days blogging. I also spent a day on a letter to the Prime Minister about the Polish children of Pahiatua and another day on a skit for a local Light Party. 194 days of writing work, not counting the three I spent overhauling my workspace between projects, or the two I spent on working out a mission statement of sorts. Call it 199. (That’s the encouraging bit.)
The advanced mathematicians among you will have realized that if you have 264 days, and write in 199 of them, that leaves 65 unaccounted for. What happened to those days?
I wish I knew.
Some of them likely included unrecorded blogging, since the frequency of posts appearing here certainly exceeds the frequency of blogging mentions in the work diary. But bits of the year seem to have just disappeared, like the calendar of Verrius Flaccus.
For the most part, the blank days are scattered in ones and twos about the year. There are two and a half weeks looking blank in December – I don’t much mind that, we had some very special guests I don’t get to see nearly as often as I’d like – but there’s also a great wealth of blank days in May. After the 6th of May, there’s nothing recorded til the 3rd of June. And I don’t know why. There don’t seem to have been any external causes, I just ground to a halt for about four weeks. Except for blogging. (So thanks to you all, for keeping me writing in some form at least!)
2016, I decided, must be different. In preparation, I did my version of the Relaxed Writer’s exercise I did two and a half years ago. Three columns: I Don’t Want, I Want, and I Will. I think I meant to look at my writing life in particular, but it came out very much more general than that. And very repetitive. This is apparently normal and shows you what you’re most concerned about. Happily, this meant that my list of forty-plus “don’t wants” were reverse-engineered to a shorter list of “wants” and in the end my list of “I wills” had only six items on it to cover the lot.
Two or three of these are specific to a single matter, but the others are very general. In essence, what I need to do this year is to trust the process and trust God. I have a routine which I am gradually converting to habit;*; a routine which, if followed, will make sure that the things that need to happen happen, and nothing gets wildly out of control. Like turning the heel, I just have to keep going in faith that it will all come together if I just keep going.
So 2016 will be for me the Year of Trust. Trust God. Trust the process. Keep going. And for my theme song, I could do worse than this (try here if you prefer to listen).
*In looking back at this habit post, I note it was written in late May and mentions that I’ve been sick for the last couple of weeks. This may explain a large part of the absence of May, although you would think I could at least have left myself a note. In the diary, rather than on a blog. Do I look like the sort of woman who subscribes to her own blog? Still, it’s nice to know I wasn’t slacking off entirely.