Chatter: Life Will Conspire to Keep You From Working

One of the things that I (and many other Artists that I know of) constantly battle is the tendency for Life, or our own habits, to get in the way of our creative productivity.

My own habits are often to blame: maybe it's that my studio isn't clean or organized, and I can't find the pair of scissors that I need, or the fabric I intended to use, or the pattern I wanted to work from; maybe I just don't feel like working, so I fritter away the day with little unproductive distractions; maybe I do feel like working, but I'm up against a creative block and I just don't know how to break through it....the list goes on.

Most of the reasons we artists don't get things accomplished is, truly, our own doing. We over-schedule ourselves, we procrastinate, we wait for inspiration, we insist on perfection, we harbor unrealistic expectations, we overestimate our skill set or underestimate a learning curve... in short, we undermine ourselves at every opportunity.
Eventually, we learn how to curb these habits and apply ourselves with regular effort to achieve brilliant results of which we never could have dreamed ourselves capable. And we get to ride on that comfortable and exhilarating little wave of "I am ON A ROLL!!" (ah, how we look forward to that feeling!)

And that is the moment when Life steps in to undermine us since we dropped the ball on undermining ourselves. Life: that chaotic process that surrounds us and confounds us and even nourishes and inspires us -- that chaotic process with which we are inevitably intertwined for better or worse, which will be our steadfast companion to the day that we die.
For the most part, Life is well-behaved- and by well-behaved, I mean predictable. Gravity works predictably with astonishing regularity, as I am always dismayed to reconfirm when carrying just one too many items on a slippery walkway. I generally reconfirm the solidity of objects in the middle of the night with my little toe.
But overall we like predictability. It gives us a sense of security and comfort. It allows us to adapt ourselves to circumstances we don't feel able to change (e.g. Stockholm Syndrome), or to adapt our environments in ways that suit us (e.g. deforestation). We do this for better (an ergonomic office chair to bring comfort to the hours we spend in front of our computers), and we do this for worse (aforementioned deforestation, possibly as a tangential result of the production of our ergonomic office chair).

But now and then Life is not so predictable.
Of course, Life is extraordinarily complex, and perhaps if we had access to all the data all at once (assuming we even recognized what "all the data" would be!), we might be able to discover that Life is, indeed, thoroughly predictable, and the butterfly in Suriname does, in fact, cause the tsunami in Anchorage.
But in the meantime, snowstorms, floods, and power outages still catch us by surprise (as does, occasionally, gravity and the density of solid objects).

Life throws us curve balls to see whether we can retain our composure. Last week it was snow and a power outage. Last night it was this fellow:

He's a scraggly, undernourished, bone-thin, matted, beleaguered stray cat.
He walked right into my house yesterday.
When I picked him up to put him back outside, I felt how thin he was.
It's still cold outside.
I'm not sure how he would stay warm.
And he hasn't had enough to eat for a while.
But he's very pleasant and well-mannered (or maybe he's just too exhausted to be opinionated).
He's also intelligent.
He purrs a lot.
A LOT.
I mean constantly.
I couldn't put him back outside in the cold.


I opened up a can of chicken and fed him about half of it. I even squished it all up so that if he had problems chewing or swallowing, he wouldn't choke.
Then I gave him space in our bathroom for the night. It's warm and it's dry- perfect for a good night's sleep.

Today I took him in to the vet for a diagnostic.

Apparently he is not so well-mannered when he disagrees with what's happening to him.

The price for the diagnostic doubled.
(They need to administer a sedative for everyone's safety, and want to do all the tests while he is safely sedated instead of spread out a test at a time over several visits).

What we did figure out before he got too rough to handle: he is a geriatric, neutered male with ear mites and a slight heart murmur, and no microchip to track down a previous family of origin.
Oh great.
What am I doing?
This is NOT in the plan!
sheesh.