Another Caitlan Post

I forget who told me this, or maybe I read it somewhere, but it's a fun exercise: Imagine that you are retired, or have inherited money, or robots have taken on all of the labor in the world leaving people to follow their bliss- whatever seems most accessible. And then, spend one hour every day doing what you'd be doing in that scenario. ~4% of your time sounds like it's not enough, but I think most people don't even do that. For my things (I have kind of a lot of free time for a full time student with 2 jobs) I picked getting a tan, painting, and writing a book.

I sort of feel like books are a really good method of getting to know someone's life, and every person alive has the raw material, if not the inclination, to write something really intriguing. People downplay how interesting they are. Like, last night I stayed home, worked on homework, and watched the Pink Panther on DVD.

But to put it another way, I hid inside and brought my housemate's dog inside because my devil worshipping neighbor was doing a kind of ritual with a smoking chalice to curse my other neighbor's trailer, and someone called the police to make her stop. Then I worked on my painting of Keck observatory until I was so tired I spilled glazing medium on the dog and the floor, and then I fell asleep. But people kept phoning the trailer all night and leaving messages for my roommate. Every time it happened I checked the time before falling asleep, because my alarm sounds a lot like the phone. I went from "Don't they know it's rude to phone past 12?" to "Why is it 3 am? Why am I awake at 3 am? I am going to go put the phone in the bath." But instead I fell back asleep for half an hour, until the next call. The messages were such urgent things as "I was thinking about what you said about not having money to do certain things, but I think it's a matter of priorities."

So, what I mean is that life is quite interesting if you think about it. I am really struggling with the writing of a book, though. So far I have a stream of consciousness word document titled "Book!" that I have been working on since april and it is almost one page long.