now cinderella don't you go to sleep - it's such a bitter form of refuge

I wasn't nearly as productive today as I intended to be. I woke up late and wasted the time between nine a.m. and noon. Then I wrote for an hour and a half, took a bath, and decided to buy groceries. But when I got to Whole Foods, the lines were ridiculous, and the last thing I wanted to do was fight a bunch of yuppies so that I could buy milk and frozen enchiladas. So I came home and talked to my parents for an hour and a half, then walked over to Peet's to get some coffee.

When I got home, I intended to write -- but instead I watched the second half of the Super Bowl. Despite my relative lack of interest in football, I still got caught up in it -- largely because Kurt Warner is an Iowan, and I much preferred him and Larry Fitzgerald to the dude on the Steelers' side who got called for unnecessary roughness after throwing some pretty vicious punches. Also, Kurt Warner has a neck and Ben Roethlisberger doesn't (although I don't have anything against Roethlisberger in general). The game was much more exciting than many football games I have watched, and I got into it enough that I was disappointed when the Steelers pulled it out in the end. Ugh.

But, I managed to recover with some judicious watching of "Flight of the Conchords" videos on YouTube, and then wrote for another hour and a half. All told, I churned out 3537 words today -- bringing my total up to 16794 words, or 77 pages. Good, but not the 5000 words I had hoped to complete. Luckily, I'm taking Friday off -- so while I will need to spend some time this week working on reviews for work, as well as starting the assignment for my short story class, I expect to make some more progress this week.

Now, though, it's quite sadly bedtime. I'm not ready to go back to work tomorrow, but I have an eight a.m. meeting, so I should get some sleep in preparation for the return to the slogging. At least my job doesn't involve getting regularly tackled in a platonic way by large men -- but then again, given how often one of the announcers kept referring to all of the receivers' "big, strong hands," maybe things aren't as platonic as one would think. And I suppose if you're getting paid millions of dollars, getting knocked down repeatedly for a few hours every few days would be worth it. Instead, I'll have to pursue the American Dream through writing, where the knock-downs are to your psyche through repeated rejections, rather than to your body by a bunch of hulking linemen. Sigh.