Antsy

ant-sy: adjective. agitated, impatient, or restless

Many of my blogs deal with my inability to really understand what's going on, or how things work the way they do, or how people react the way they do. Not infrequently, this lack of understanding includes myself. I am unaccountably antsy today for no apparent reason. It may have something to do with the weather, which itself doesn't quite seem to know what it's doing or wants to do. Lately we have been fluctuating wildly from almost hot one day to heavy jackets the next.

Part of it may be due to there being so much going on that I'm not sure what I should do next. Part of it may be due to the fact that while I drank my morning coffee with no problem, every other time I have tried to swallow any kind of liquid it has immediately run out my nose.

Having, a week or so ago discovered a bedbug in my old fleece-lined bedroom slippers, I threw the slippers away immediately, notified the building management, and slept on my sofa-bed while waiting a week for an army of bedbug inspectors to descend on my apartment only to find nothing. The point being that I have been padding around either barefoot or in socks and need to buy a new pair of slippers.

I quickly discovered that buying a new pair of slippers is, for me at any rate, very much like buying any other piece of clothing: I can look at 4,000 of whatever it is I want to buy and not find a single one I like. After running around town looking for slippers (Payless Shoes had one...count 'em, ONE...pair, Target had none—though their website shows several), I concentrated on looking on line. While I've had some success with online shopping, when it comes to buying anything where a size has to be specified, it's iffy at best. So I don't yet have a pair of slippers.

When I do find some piece of clothing I like, I tend to buy three or four of them and rotate wearing them until they completely fall apart. While I still lived in Northern Wisconsin (it's been seven years, now) I found a pair of blue casual pants I liked. I ended up with six pair of them, and three of them are still wearable. But seeing the handwriting on the wall, as it were, I've been keeping my eye out for their replacement. And do you know what? They don't make blue pants anymore. Not the kind I like. There are 471 shades of black pants and olive-colored pants and a couple other shades of whatever, but no the-shade-of-blue I want.

According to the old saying, the only two things sure in life are death and taxes. I've expanded that short list considerably, including my fruitless search for anything I need to buy. And without question, frustration (which often accompanies being antsy). I find myself so busy trying to promote my books to people who might not have read them that I have very little time to write.

On the writing front, I've been really trying to get back to work on my latest work in progress only to be sidetracked by...well, just about anything. It isn't that I have a short attention span, just that I don't seem to have the time to develop a long one.

As you may have noticed, I sort of wandered off in several different directions from the original point of this blog...being antsy. Well, fear not, dear friend, for you see this is exactly the kind of thing I do when I am antsy. So there.

Dorien's blogs are posted by 10 a.m. Central time every Monday and Thursday. Please take a moment to visit his website (http://www.doriengrey.com) and, if you enjoy these blogs, you might want to check out Short Circuits: a Life in Blogs (http://bit.ly/m8CSO1).