Time's Up

Well, I just wasted the first hour of my birthday on the Internet. What's new? I also wasted my last half-hour of being a 48-year-old on the Internet. I guess I should have somehow savored that last little bit of 48-year-oldness -how do I stop time again? - but I just kept clicking on this link and that link, and when I looked down at the computer clock it was, oh yeah, Happy Birthday.

Here's the exciting life of an unsuccessful writer. It's one o'clock in the morning. My husband is asleep, but dressed, on top of our bed. He has this convoluted idea that his wife (that's me, I'm the wife-thing) should actually go to sleep with him each night. Since I don't actually sleep this causes some problems. My kids, however, are asleep, in pajamas, in bed (I can't actually swear to what the 13-year-old wears to bed anymore and I'm not checking). And I am sitting up, working on an assignment for my on-line nonfiction writing class, worrying about the assignment for my in-person class, and wondering, what am I supposed to do again about the book I wrote? My opus? You know, the thing I was born to write?

Yesterday I woke up a little sick. I lurched out of bed and made my way to my medicine cabinet. The house was very quiet and suddenly I heard these words in my head, and I'm not schizophrenic. The words were, "Time's up." Now I'd like to think that's divine intervention, like the name of a book I should write, but, I don't know. It sounded a little like a death knell. I give a lot a weight to the little thought that pops into my head without me thinking it in the middle of the quiet, sleeping house.

So, since I'm not dead yet and it's been eighteen hours, I'm going to give Mr. Time's Up a positive spin. Time's up on the training to write. It's been eight years - I think I know how to write. Time's up on the preparing and the over preparing, on the proceeding gingerly. Time's up on all that. And if it's the other Time's up, what better reason to get my stuff out there than immortality?