This weekend is ending as it began: with very little productivity. I did do 2-3 hours of tutoring each day, so I guess I earned a very tiny bit of my keep. What else did I do? I took a restorative yoga class and then spent the next 24 hours trying to figure out how 90 minutes of lying on the floor had somehow made my back pain worse (but I did walk in on the instructor when he was peeing, so at least I got a good story out of the experience). I took my cat Cleo to the vet, got out the door for only $169, and spent the afternoon searching the sky for pigs. (The vet actually said, “She’s healthy!” San Francisco veterinarians NEVER say “She’s healthy.” Consider all the financial opportunities one abandons when one utters those words. I hope she didn’t get fired.). I made some progress on the Great Dining Room Cleanup of ’16, though not enough progress to merit more pictures. And today, I returned Your Heart is a Muscle the Size of a Fist to the library after trying very, very hard to like it. The first chapter is great. But after about 75 pages what I realized is that I am deeply, deeply tired of novels that flick back and forth among half a dozen or more points of view. This is an alarming epiphany to have because I am in the middle of revising a novel that uses this very technique, with another in the drafting phase that also rotates through multiple points of view. Is it time to retire Modernist narrative? After a century, can we finally admit that Faulkner and Joyce did it best and that the rest of us should stick to good old-fashioned third-person limited? I don’t know, but I think this bit of disgruntlement will inform my reading choices – if not my writing choices – for the upcoming weeks and months.

Oh, and I also made a week’s worth of vegetable bean soup so I’ll have healthy lunches to take to work every day. Haha – just kidding! Believed me, didn’t you?

What I did not do was read enough to write a real review. I will try to change that this week.