Spring Breakdown

Not a clever blog title.

I'm sitting in "It's A Grind" coffeeshop with my BFFHSAB (Best Friend From High School and Beyond). The coffeeshop always makes me think of the old, brilliant "Weeds" credits -- and I'm currently drinking an iced coffee, which makes me feel like Mary-Louise Parker in the brilliant first season. Which goes to show you how mediated by television my life experience is. (It might work the other way, though: I do think that the first three seasons of "Weeds" do capture some aspects of life in a Western gated-community-suburban-type place fairly accurately, even if it does get increasingly over-the-top. I love that moment in season 1 when MLP admits sometimes racial stereotypes are true: "I like gin. I'm not fond of hugs." Like her character I like iced coffee, hybrid cars, my own bathroom, and gin -- and I'm not fond of hugs).

Before I typed all that, I should say that I'm back in my Western Suburban hometown for Spring Break. The idea was to get a lot of work done on my thesis, write a draft of my thesis essay, catch up on a bunch of miscellaneous projects, do some job/grant application stuff...my parents are actually out of town, meaning that Spring Break was supposed to be largely a self-designed writer's retreat, a la the summer. After all -- a huge lovely suburban home for me to work in, all on my own-io.

One my thesis advisers emailed me days ago asking how it was going. "Did you finish the last part of your novel? How's all that solitude?" I just wrote her back, saying "Um. It's going okay."

It's not going okay.

I spent two days lying around in my own pee (as the divine Miss M puts it) before realizing that my BFFHSAB is also on spring break and has tons of actual work to do, too. Trying to follow her example, I went with her to a coffee shop at 8 am this morning (suffice it to say, I still wasn't out of bed when she got to my house -- I had to be the Getting Ready Ninja). She's sitting in front of me, industrially doing work, because well...she's smarter and harder working than me.

The sheer amount of work I blithely thought I'd get done in what amounts to five days is started to press down upon me. WTF was I thinking? Why did I waste two whole days?

My lovely BFFHSAB has just lent me headphones (I forgot mine) -- which might help. So I'm going to take a crack at working, gulping my iced coffee all the while.

Gulp.