10 minutes or less…

Since I had less (rather than more) of an idea for a blog post today, I decided to address the official NaBloPoMo prompt for the day:

Thursday, December 5, 2013
Set a timer for 10 minutes and try to write your whole daily post.  Now go back and give yourself 5 more minutes to write about how you felt working under such a tight deadline.

Here I go:

Yesterday I wrote a heartfelt post about my son that just seemed to write itself. Some days are like that. This isn’t one of them, hence the resorting to responding to a prompt — and now finding myself limited to a mere 10 minutes to write. I should have planned better. For one, I want a glass of water but can’t afford the 30 seconds it would take me to get some. My cat is sitting on my computer desk, now gingerly trying to crawl into my lap, now standing in my lap. She doesn’t care that I have a mere 10 minutes to write. It is 4:17 a.m.

Let me think of the prompt this way, if I had but 10 minutes to share my message with the world, what is burning on my heart at the moment? Jesus! Of course, He is always the answer (unless I am giving a pop quiz in English class — though my students do try that answer often, just in case). Christmas? Last year we began drawing names, instead of buying gifts for every member of my growing family, and that has made the shopping burden easier.

My cat is now blocking the computer screen. Can I call “interference” and get another minute? She is now kneading my thigh — and she has nails. No time to stop her now.

Usually I hang Christmas lights the Saturday after Thanksgiving… but I didn’t this year. Now I have so few weeks before the holiday I’m wondering if it is worth putting them up…

Do I have to get a tree?

My cat is back in front of the computer screen, courteously blocking just the lower right-hand side of the screen. Perhaps she should be my inspiration for this timed writing… but she is blocking the computer “clock” so I don’t know how much time I have left.

How do we love these animals that are so selfish? While my cat is rather special and delightful, she is still a cat. She hides when she wants, sleeps when she wants, goes where she wants, seems completely undisciplined, and actually poops outside the litter box on random occasions. She scratches furniture, spills food around her bowl, splashes water around, blocks my path when she wants something, turns a massage into a teething massacre, and times the door to make an escape — which causes me to fret for fear of the great, big black cat that has once shown up and attacked her…. so I then chase her around the yard, into bushes, give up, and then worry until she returns to the house on her own accord sometime thereafter. Safe.

They give us so much trouble, and yet we love these pets.

So why do I feel the need to behave so perfectly?

We see bumper stickers that read “wag more, bark less,” clearly about dogs. Has anyone made a bumper sticker about cat habits?

Hmmm…

Time up. More or less. (I still can’t see the computer clock. Darn cat.)

———-

My thoughts on this 10 minute time limit: Well, I got a post done. 🙂 I can go about my day, feeling the “burden of blogging” lifted for another day. (I do love blogging, but NaBloPoMo can distract me from the other real parts of my life…) The time limit (I am still thirsty, by the way, and the cat is still blocking the computer screen) reminds me of what I do to my students — timed writings in class, of course, but, more importantly the timed, forced writings I used to do to a group of home schoolers in a creative writing class we had more than 10 years ago. In the spring semester, the children produced books, written and illustrated by them. I made the students sign a contract, telling me the book title and synopsis — in five minutes. Then they had to write, write, write to get the book started. Perfection came later. It’s amazing how many of the students were able to stick to that original contract and get the book written. Sometimes you just need to pressure of a deadline to make something beautiful. I’m not sure I managed beautiful this morning…