Things about me that don’t make sense:

I just spent a good half hour putting up clotheslines on my third floor, which is completely empty otherwise. Yes, I live alone in a perfectly nice three-story house where I use only two of the three floors, and really don’t want to use my nice dry basement any more either. I don’t use my perfectly functional dryer, either, because I don’t feel like it. Now there are holes drilled all over the walls up on the third floor, because I stink at finding studs.

I am currently reading only four books, which is down from the six I was reading yesterday. One is a Michael Pollan book on consciousness which I am about to abandon because he is a deeply silly person even though he is a fine journalist. One is Scott McCloud’s book on comics. I neither read nor produce comics. One is a Laundry Files book by Charles Stross. I do not like books about bureaucracy or about necromancy, I don’t like horror, and I am reading all the Laundry Files books only because they are readable. I don’t know what the fourth book is, but my brain insists I am reading it.

The Laundry Files book I am reading currently is making me wonder if the government of the world is, in fact, run by cults worshipping evil undead deities from alternate worlds. It makes as good an explanation as any. I do not believe in any kind of deity, but I am furtively superstitious.

I just donated a book on color theory to the Little Free Library near me. I don’t know why I keep buying books on color theory. I should just accept that when I make art, all I want to do it use black and white. That’s how my brain works.

Yesterday, it was chilly and rainy. I looked at all the things on my digital to-do list, all of them things that I really want to be doing, and instead of doing them, I deleted them from the to-do list, and felt very accomplished indeed.

I have been writing a blog post a day for a good half year, for no reason. I will probably archive it when I’ve done it for a year. I’ve had blogs before, which I downloaded and closed. I keep a daily handwritten journal, and when I fill a book I type the things I want to remember and throw the journal out. Sometimes I read the entries and marvel.

I am working on another novel, which I may never finish. Last week, I received my royalties from my already-published books, a total of about $15, which is very nice indeed and unusual for this time of the year. I had an agent and was conventionally published, my first two books were combined in a SF Book-of-the-Month offering, my first book was nominated for a couple awards, and I have been translated into French and Japanese. I earned back my advances. Last year, I made approximately $70 in royalties in total. Several friends read my blog, which is nice, but I don’t write for my readers, nor do I write for money. Why do I write? Heck if I know. It’s a thing I do.

In a little bit, I will do my French homework. I have been studying French for several years, using apps, podcasts, and classes. I do not, in fact, speak much French. This is fine by me. I’m not doing it to speak French per se.

I bought a very nice recliner, and am enjoying it very much. My portly cat Uncle Louie has acquired it and if I want to sit in it, I have to put him on the floor, whereupon he comes and sits on my lap. Often during the day, I look at it and decide not to sit in it because there he is, all comfortable, and if I sat down, he would trap me.

There was an enormous dead waterbug (American cockroach) on my third floor. I have no food on that floor. There is no way that bug could have gotten into my house, but every year or so, an enormous cockroach shows up dead in my basement. I do have ants, which also appear out of nowhere in my kitchen every spring, even though there’s no food there, either. Everything is sealed and clean. My refrigerator contains only cans of soda, soy sauce, oat milk for my cereal, and parmesan. Apparently it is a law of the universe that you will share space with some kind of invertebrate.

Quite a lot of people call me and ask me for advice. The older I get, the less I know for sure, but it seems to make them happy to hear me say that.

I realized this month that my husband is, in fact, dead, and I am, in fact, not, though it has been three years since he died, and I saw him dead. They gave me a box with his ashes in it, and I buried the box.

Apparently, I am also not preparing to die myself, after all, even though at my age it could be any time between now and twenty years from now.

I have a doctorate. I never needed it for anything. I just wanted to do it. I don’t regret getting it.

It’s quite possible that I do not, in fact, make any sense, nor do most people. I am not sure there is intelligent life on Earth, let alone elsewhere in the universe, and I gave up thinking intelligence is important around the age of 22. Rationality is overrated, too.

The sun is out and I’m going for a walk soon, and I will luxuriate in the knowledge that I am deeply irrational. I wish I had known that when I was eight. It would have saved me a lot of trouble.