CSotD: Benefits of procrastination
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Sarah Laing is back. You'll have to go to her blog to read the rest of this cartoon, and you should want to.
It's easier to bookmark a link than to delete that bookmark later (well, marginally), so when Sarah put "Let Me Be Frank" on hiatus a few months ago in order to work on her novel, I kept loading it each day with the rest of my stuff anyway. And then clicking it shut each day as it continued to be the last strip in which she said she was putting the blog aside.
Don't get me wrong: There were still plenty of strips and blogs coming up that I was delighted to see each day. I was okay. Just kept thinking, "maybe I should delete this link" and not doing it.
But she has a voice that I missed, and I'm glad I didn't drop the bookmark. If you haven't been a fan, you should become one now.
She actually began updating again a few days ago, and, after you read the rest of the current post, you should scroll down and see her current work, including pictures of fellow-kiwi Katherine Mansfield, whose "Garden Party" blew me away freshman year in college and continues to do so these many years after.
Not only is it worth seeing that plus what else she's up to, but it will provide some context for the current piece about people who know what you ought to be doing instead of what you are doing. The key to this is that the person who knows what Sarah ought to be doing instead isn't actually sure what she's doing now.
I seem to be avoiding those people in my current round of freelancing. It's likely because I don't go to cocktail parties anymore, or, really, any sort of party. I mostly socialize with other dog owners, which is to say, most of my best friends these days are dogs. And, as a tangential result, their owners.
Dogs never tell you what you ought to be doing, unless you either have treats in your pocket or a ball in your hand. And then you're asking for it.
But I remember the first time around, when I was younger and married and apt to turn up at a party rather than a dog park, and people would tell me that I should write spy novels or mysteries, as if you could just choose a genre at random and start plopping out successful books.
Perils of the profession, and not the only job that comes with them. I was at a fairly large party some decades ago, hanging out in the basement with the under-30 contingent, when my brother-in-law, who was in the Air Force at the time, entered and said, "I just become a jet pilot upstairs, so I thought I'd come down here for awhile." Yup.
Of course, you are supposed to take an interest in the other person. I don't quite know where the line is, between taking an interest and becoming tiresome, though, as Sarah suggests in this strip, there is a way of talking about another person which is a very thinly disguised way of talking about yourself and that's not the ideal.
But, then, I don't miss parties at all, so perhaps other people are more comfortable with the whole thing than I am. They would almost have to be.
In any case, I'm glad I never gave up and deleted Sarah's link, because she's back now.
Doing just what I think she ought to be doing.
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