I'm terribly late this week.
I'm blaming the Oscars and income taxes.
I have watched the Academy Awards ever since I was a little kid, first with my mother and my sister, then with friends, and in the past few years by myself. It's best that way now. In my current grouchy years, I can no longer stay riveted on the proceedings. I have to be doing something else while I watch. Otherwise I would be bored. I would feel like I had eaten multiple boxes of candy. Don't get me wrong. I love chocolate. But I need only a certain amount, and I need to accompany it with something meaningful.
This year, I started watching at my typical time—the beginning of the red carpet festivities. I studied fashion far removed from my typical home uniform—a bathrobe beloved by our young cats. One of these cats, Samantha, will only sit in my lap if I'm wearing this robe. Both she and Indiana love to suck on the right sleeve. The left sleeve? Blah. The right sleeve is irresistible. And while this pageantry of color and glamour and varying necklines unfolded before my eyes, I would look down every moment or so at the papers scattered around me to start preparing my taxes.
I think in the future I will always hyphenate what I once considered Academy Awards Day. From now on, I will call it the Academy Awards-Tax Preparation Day. It worked quite well for me. It's hard to feel anxious about numbers while movie stars in evening wear pose in front of you. And there's the feeling of synchronicity when the ceremony begins, and while they're announcing the results of categories, I am working my way through my financial considerations. I ended up feeling quite satisfied, even though I hadn't seen hardly any of the films this year, and I still don't know the answer to my taxes, as I was just getting the numbers ready for my accountant to notify me of the final verdict. I will say that, to my surprise, I liked the no-host option, and I was thrilled to see Queen 2.0 with Adam Lambert take us through a few songs to launch the show.
So what does this have to do with writing? Well, usually Sunday, I spend time figuring out what I want to write for this blog, and I get it done, while this week, I celebrated my holiday which I've honored ever since I was small and which now is a hyphenate. That's one reason. The other is, a kind of awards show wriggled its way into my draft a while ago, and while it now seems that it will turn up in a later book, it was one of my favorite things ever to write. Because even when previously adored things grow to seem a bit silly and maybe even tedious, they are still much loved, and that makes them really fun to stick in a scene. Try it and see!