Fighting Entropy

Today I was supposed to draft a paper on entropy in Thomas Pynchon's The Crying Lot of 49. That has yet to happen.

Justifications:

• My kids are home because of the impending storm. I say impending because the story has yet to really hit, and it is nearly 2 pm. Good thing they got the day off.
• I'm experiencing my own physical and mental entropy.
• I'm tired. I have been working out more than usual, which is not to say I have been working out much. My fatigue is alarming me: I am not a person who, in the recent past, has gotten tired working out 12-14 hours a week. But I spent the months of September-January doing very little, and my body seems to think that 12-14 hours is a very unreasonable amount of work now.  Also, my brain thinks 12-14 hours is unreasonable. It has dawned on me, after hard-driving for many years in a row, that there are many things I could do with that time, other than to work out.
• Coupled with my actual fatigue is mental fatigue. (see above) I'm exhausted from the war waging in me--Mary versus Mary. The truth is, I just don't feel much like training-- except the swim. And Mary of last year and the year before fought valiantly against such apathy. But this Mary--the Mary who has enjoyed not having training control her life these last months--is fighting hard against the Mary of yore who worked like a worker bee whether it made sense, or not. 
• I don't quite get entropy in The Crying Lot of 49. The text is obscure and difficult, and I understand Pynchon's other books are even more difficult. I tend to feel resentment when an author's unbound brilliance makes me work too hard. Pynchon has me working, and I'm a little bit pissy about it. 
• I'm obsessed with a story I just wrote, and I can't let it go. I keep going back to it, but I am stuck. What needs to happen now? This is a part of being a writer I don't quite get yet. When you have finished..but yet you know you haven't finished. I need a teacher to step in and gently guide me to the next point.  I struggle a great deal without the structure offered by school. 

This brings me full circle to my paper. I need to get on it. 

Meanwhile, the snow is piling up. Generally when it storms I feel a release. What was expected is no longer expected. I don't have to shuffle Jordan to and from practice. I don't have to go for that run because I did it already to avoid the snow. But today I still feel weighted down. I have this paper. I should be on my poor bike, which sits on her trainer waiting for me, tapping her wheels impatiently.  I should be doing something of consequence. I can't escape needing to feel that what I do is of consequence! Argh. And this, even though the physical world holds no inherent meaning except that which I place upon it-- a veneer. 

I want to take a nap.

And more than anything I want something juicy to appear in my inbox or online... something I can latch onto that will wake me up. 

Do you know what I mean? 

I'm so tired, and I want something thrilling to wake me up. Coffee just isn't cutting it. You know you're depressed when even coffee has a sedative effect. 

I just finished reading Plath's The Bell Jar. I read it when I was younger and I connected to it then. I still connect to it, probably even moreso. They say she was afflicted with schizophrenia, but the way she describes it seems to be just .... mental entropy. Just a slowing of the chaos -- into systemic disorder. There is energy--but none is available for work under the suffocating bell of the jar. 

You may not still be with me. 

If you are, we're sisters (or sister and brother?). 

xo and love to you.