I had so many plans for today but instead, I've busied myself by, among other things, reading about those little sweet-faced, porn-loving pandas. (I have so many questions about this: Do they prefer their...um...entertainment with the bad dialogue and do they really like the actors with the shaved little parts and the dirty feet? Do they, like the average American, only watch it for 13 minutes, a statistic that leaves me wondering who the hell keeps track of this stuff? Do they lie to their spouses and quickly change channels when The Little Missus lumbers into the room, with the tv landing on something presumably more appropriate like, um...Animal Planet? Or is, in fact, Animal Planet their porn? Oh don't give me these half-baked news stories...my mind races far beyond those neat little parameters of tee-hee, pandas like porn. In fact, um, post us some panda porn--I'd consider paying for that!)

And I worked out.

And I watched football.

And I cooked, ate and cleaned. Likely all of the same damn stuff that you did, assuming, of course, that your 13 year old son answered your Thanksgiving menu questions with, "Instead of cooking a big turkey for the two of us, let's celebrate like the Indians and have curry."

"Um, D,"" I interrupted, "the folks who eat the curry are the slurpee Indians and not the casino Indians...besides, the curry you prefer is actually a Japanese curry."

"Well, just because some guy got lost a long time ago shouldn't mean that we can't have curried chicken for Thanksgiving." And so we did.

*****************

Justified e-mailed me on Monday. I responded to her by saying that I was struggling with my writing, working on something very different than anything I'd ever shown her. I prattled on and on and on, detailing problems I'm having with the process of the maturation of a narrative voice, my struggles with writing a dialect without writing in that dialect, the difficulties of structuring what I'm doing without losing those voices. She asked one question and one question only: "Uh, does somebody die?"

***************** 

Bard called me on Monday morning. "Did you do much writing this weekend?"

I hated to admit that although I had written, I hadn't gotten nearly as much accomplished as I'd hoped. I told him my woes, all the troubles I'm encountering, and said, "I have given myself a goal. Thanksgiving Day at 5 pm, I want to have it completed. That'll mean that I've been kicking this thing around for a month--that should be plenty of time."

My mind started racing again as the phone line lapsed into silence. "Bard, I don't think I'm going to make my goal. I know where I want to go with this, I'm just struggling. Yeah, I'm almost certain--I won't have it finished by Thursday."

I pictured him standing behind his desk, flailing his arm back and forth high in the air, with his index finger fully extended, when he replied, in an elevated voice, "Self-fulfilling prophecy, table for one--self-fulfilling prophecy, table for one!"

*****************

Yes, Justified, someone dies. And yes, Bard, it ain't finished.

Dammit, I hate it that he was right, but maybe he wouldn't have been if I hadn't learned that pandas like porn. So you see, it really wasn't my fault at all that I didn't meet my deadline and, yeah, I am gonna blame the pandas on this one--those cute little boogers aren't as innocent as they look, y'know.