Cooking and reading about cooking and writing about cooking is not the sum total of my life these days.

It’s a gigantic part of it, of course (although after reading through my favorite food blogs I find my inner voice saying, Shut up about your excitement over learning to boil water already, would you?). But it’s not everything.

I have been writing. Not quite at the NaNo pace, but at the current moment that pace would be pretty hard to keep up. I was stuck for quite a long while on one particular plot point—no matter what I did or how I cajoled, my main character wouldn’t do what I told her to. I got nowhere with my rewrite for, dare I say it, weeks until last week I did an “interview” with my main character, me typing questions, “hearing” her responses. It was spectacular fun and reminded me of that strange way in which writing is an intersection of channeling and psychosis. Whatever. That interview (which lasted three hours) really sparked me to get going again.

Yesterday, in fact, during my Sunday morning writing session (during the weekends pretty much the only time I go and write is Sunday morning—Darin hangs with the kids, plays a little World of Warcraft, I go and caffeinate up and write) I had a spectacularly productive writing session, writing a scene that didn’t even occur during the first draft. I’m still hung up on the same plot point I was before, so I skipped ahead to write something else and found myself eleven pages into it. It felt really, really good to do that writing.

I don’t know why writing has that effect. I know that books and books have been written on the subject, but it’s still the closest thing I have to a mystical or spiritual experience. I see, hear, smell, feel something in my mind, and I write it down on paper to share the occasion with someone else.

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I am also attempting to get back into the swing of things at the gym. I’ve made it at least three days a week since the beginning of the year. My attendance gets iffy when Simon gets a head cold (and boy, he seems to have one at least once a month), because I can’t bring him to the Kids Corner when he has a runny nose. (Hey, I wouldn’t want anyone else bringing their kid in if they had a runny nose; fair is fair.)

It’s 1:15am, I’m even kind of tired, but I cannot fall asleep. It’s like I’ve drunk a pot of espresso without the thrill of, you know, actually trying to down that much coffee. I don’t have an account on WoW (if you’re going to be up at this hour, at least make it count, right?). I can’t write—I was kind of hoping I’d have a dream tonight that would help me past my current plot problem.

Ugh. I don’t even have any good munchies around here. What did I do to deserve this?

Tuesday morning: Ugh. Last night was a recent minima for me: at the very most I got three hours, and I’m pretty sure it was two or fewer.

Tuesday evening: Darin comes home tonight with not one but two pints of Godiva Belgian Dark Chocolate ice cream (the best bar-none mass market chocolate ice cream out there). He said, “I read on your blog you didn’t have any munchies last night and that’s not right.” I love this man.

Darin really wanted me to see Kill Bill, Vols 1 and 2—I hadn’t had a lot of interest in them when they were out in theaters, mostly because I’m not as sanguine (heh) about on-screen violence as I used to be, and because I’d heard that several times during the movie a child watches their parent die in hideous and graphic ways. NO THANK YOU. Stuff that wouldn’t have fazed me for a second pre-Sophia makes me crazy and start crying now.

Darin saw both movies in the theaters and loved them, though. He said I wouldn’t be affected by the parent deaths in the way I thought I would be. “They’re the best kung fu movies ever,” he said.

“This does not mean a whole hell of a lot to me,” I told him.

He brought the movies home and we decided that we would actually spend some time together (instead of me writing (which I’ve been doing of late) and him playing World of Warcraft (major, major friggin’ time sink of his of late). We watched Vol. 1 Sunday night and while I did have a lot of problems with several scenes, I agreed that the movie was so over the top in so many ways that the scenes with children bothered me but not in the make-me-retch (no, really) way I was expecting. Then we sat down to watch Vol. 2 last night. Darin was right: definitely a different movie (several orders of magnitude fewer bodies, for one thing), though it’s clearly an integral part of the whole story. The way Tarantino jumps around in time is extremely clever and almost novelesque: there are lots of scenes you already know the outcome to, but you’re hooked wondering, How’s she gonna get out of this one? Really good filmmaking, I think.

So, we’re watching Vol. 2 last night and after four hours of mayhem, murder, confrontations, kung fu training, standoffs, and a blistering pace toward the inevitable, we’ve finally gotten to the big confrontation where the Bride is going to kill Bill (totally not a spoiler), and they’ve got their weapons out, and here it is, we’re going to find out —

The DVD machine dies.

Totally. Freaking. Dead.

I looked at Darin. He played with the remote control a little. Power-cycled the player a few times. Felt the box to see if it had overheated.

Dead.

“There’s, like, ten minutes left in the movie,” he said. “Do we have any other DVD players? Besides the computer?”

“I’m going to bed now,” I said.

I still don’t know how the movie ends. I guess I will have to break down and watch it on the computer (unless Darin is planning on replacing our DVD jukebox—capacity: 300; currently holds: about 200—soon). But I feel as though I should savor this feeling of suspension, forever trapped in the confrontation.