When I said a week ago that the next two weeks were gonna be big, it was a statement largely guided by intuition and the knowledge that I’ve got a lot going on. It’s the confluence of all the fires of my life colliding into a massive pire. I’m either gonna walk out the other side, burnt to a crisp, my strawberry blonde waves smoldering on the top of a pile of ashes or ordained the newest Mother of Dragons, a crown of words stacked and trailing behind me, the most decorated woven wedding train that ever was.

My finely tuned spidey sense is tingling and the intensity of it grows bolder every day. I have inexactly four days left to submit my first packet of poetry and essays for review and criticism from my mentor. I set the bar high, reading books and trying to connect the dots to come up with something brilliant to showcase that I’ve actually learned a thing in the last month (when the last 3 days would be more accurate). In other words, I’m trying to pull something great out of my ass like that time hell froze over or maybe some pigs flew.

That makes me think about flying monkeys and the Oz somehow where I’m always the Wizard faking it behind the curtain but really quite a genius to have fooled everyone in some imaginary dream land for so long. I really wasn’t kidding when I wrote in my list of goals of the semester that I was trying to convince myself of r someone else that I wasn’t a fraud. The difference between last semester and this one is that Graham never made a comment about that goal and Teri urged me to take it out. That was my first clue that this semester was going to be very different.

Despite that, there are threads of the same color running between my experience, tying them together, weighing them down like a common denominator. The dominators of my personality.. high expectations and constant procrastinations.

So here I sit on the rainiest of rainy Sundays unable to complete the tasks at hand because all I want to do is write poetry. How ironic. I’ve already sacrificed, or more appropriately aborted about a dozen screaming babies begging for oxygen because, for the love of the universe, I need to write a critical essay about imagery. Hey does this blog post count? No.. I can’t work the crank and pull a few knobs behind my beautiful velvet curtain and turn that trick again. This time I have to authentically put in blood and sweat and push a different sort of beast out the birth canal.

Now I’ve retreated to the elliptical in the basement to try and force the faucet of sweat on. I’ve ingested my favorite drug of choice to inspire the kind of line of thinking that can get the job done (or rather started). Still, I’m having a hard time tearing myself away from the fire in my future to focus on now.

You can’t have confluence without equal streams of input. There’s Poetry now flowing like the Colorado river through the grand design of the mind of Natalie Diaz and there’s this beast of burden trying to get born. These two will not be bested by the clock ticking in my brain that is now reminding me hourly like a true born-again bell that “halfway day” is but a week away.

In seven short days, approximately 168 tolls, I will have traveled 45 times around the sun on this universally insignificant blue orb (shhh, let’s just keep that between us). I included it on a calendar list this past spring in an effort to plan for significant events happening this year. My darling daughter inquired (because she cares thank goodness), “halfway day?” And so I explained.

“I’ve taken pretty good care of myself for most of my life and I’ll likely live longer than my grandparents did and also all of yours (who are all in their 70s now and have already lived longer than their parents). By my estimation I’ll live to about 90. That means, my sweet pudding pie, when I’m 45 I’ll be halfway there.”

She frowned and furrowed her brow appropriately and replied “Gawd Mom”.

People choose to place significance on numbers that end in zero because our whole mathematical system is base-10 or, in other words, a decimal system. Incidentally machine language uses a base-2 system, or binary. Think of it, the entire compute capacity of the world is built on a pile of bits. Every last one of them a 1 or a 0. So what’s the significance of 45?

I guess I’m just a complicated girl in love with division, splitting that ultimate numerator in two. In hind site, it really was the logical thing to do. If Dorothy really was here, she would too.

I can’t settle on that note though, because bad things come in threes and these converging streams are no blood moon bad omen. They are a grand canyon of thoughts turned upside down and besides that there, are four. The last one is super hush-hush because I’m having a hard time trusting my instincts on it. Which means, that’s all I’m gonna say about it right now. Ask me sometime next week after I’ve successfully navigated my way through the crossing of the streams. If I get puffed up and blown to brown and white bits all over the city like Mr. Marshmallow, I’ll just shrug and say that “Egon Spengler made me do it”.

That’s enough for now. Time to go try dominate my denominators and pop another essay out of my twisted brain stem.

Is there an Anesthesiologist in the House?
~Miss SugarCookie