More Than One Week

I still haven't written in my new journal yet. But I'm back here, so maybe that's better.

Terrence McNally died today. For some reason, that news wrecked me more than anything else I've read so far about this crazy, heartbreaking disease and the mess it's making out of the world. I have amazing memories of seeing his plays, and it just seems so very wrong.

I wonder if someday I'm going to re-read this blog and have to Google Terrence McNally to remember how he died. Somehow, I don't think so. In fact, I hope I don't, because that will most likely mean that something more terrible came after this mess to erase everything that I'm thinking and feeling right now. I want this time to be a distant memory some day, but only because it got better and went away. Not because it was dwarfed by a lot of other disasters -- personal or global -- that make it seem insignificant.

I do not do well in the absence of deadlines and the presence of uncertainty. I'm having a hard time making "until further notice" work for me. At the moment, I am regretting every day in the past six months that I closed my office door to "block out distractions" and "get some work done." I would love right now to be distracted by someone other than myself and the sense of focus that I can't seem to find.

I also can't find a pork chop recipe that matches the particular combination of stuff in my refrigerator at the moment. I was looking for one when I remembered that I had started this post about two hours earlier (see above about my lack of focus). So now I'm wondering if you can substitute dried cherries for dried plums and trying to remember if the squash in the fridge is delicata or something else. I'm about to find out, I think.