Hi from 2020!

2/03/2020 10:15:00 AM Lexie Dunne 2 Comments

All Will Be Explained

Next week I’m off to Disney World, where I’m going to do my absolute best to unplug away from the internet and take a true vacation. I’ve never had a problem remembering my parents’ birthdays in my life. The reason? Their birthdays are adjacent and they made it even more convenient by getting married on my dad’s birthday. July 24-25th has been, for all of my life, this block of celebration.

(What’s neater about it is that my mother was born on a Leap Year (as were all of my sisters and myself), so because hers is first, there are exactly 365 days between the two birthdays.)

So now the 365 days between July 25th, 2019 and July 24th, 2020 is something of a special occasion. My dad turned 60 last year and my mom turns 60 this year. To celebrate, they wanted to do a big family trip. They wanted to go to Harry Potter world, as my mom adores that series above all else. And they wanted all of their children with them.

Orlando in late July sounds like absolute hell. As the years go by, I’ve deliberately tailored my life to avoid humidity as much as possible—a herculean task when you consider I live just outside of St. Louis, Missouri. So I suggested splitting the difference. To which I received a puzzled “You want to go to the Wizarding World of Harry Potter at midnight?”

Yes, fam. I want to spend exactly one minute in the Wizarding World of Harry Potter.

But no, splitting the difference meant going at some point between January and March. Dad booked the accommodation and gave us the dates, and we were off. He has a binder. I have a Notion page full of fast passes, reservations, all of the details for everybody’s travel. Everybody else just has notifications turned on through the family text chat.

We’re leaving Friday. Between now and then, I will deactivate all of my Twitter notifications, unsubscribe from the continuously growing number of daily emails I receive, and retool my phone so that only the absolute most important messages get through. My smart watch will be tracking my steps since I won’t be at the gym, but that’s as much as I’m going to think about there. I’m so insanely excited, and also apprehensive. I haven’t really gone on a roller coaster since I received my migraine diagnosis. We’ll see if that’s a trigger! Hopefully not!

This Gallery was empty and very soothing, all things considered.

The only thing I intend to keep up with while on my trip is The Artist’s Way. You might have noticed if you follow me on either a fandom or a professional level that my output in writing has absolutely shriveled. The ideas are still there—ideas are the penny candy of the writing world—but the writing well has absolutely dried up. So over a week ago, I bought a used copy of The Artist’s Way by Julia Cameron as something of a last ditch effort.

It’s pretentious as hell and I felt so damned self-conscious last week, but I dutifully set my alarm clock half an hour earlier and made myself go to bed on time. And for eight days straight, I’ve showed up at my desk with my SAD lamp blazing to write out my morning pages. I’ve made a promise never to show them to anybody and to avoid rereading them myself—in fact, I’ve extracted a promise from my sister to burn them should anything happen to me—and I can tell you, these pages are absolute dreck. So much whining about not liking mornings and picking apart the strands of neurosis through my brain. And grumbling. I’m very good at grumbling. I can fill whole pages of a college-ruled spiral notebook (the kind you get at back to school sales for 10 cents) with the stuff, apparently. And I have! For eight days now!

70 Degrees on the 2nd of February in St. Louis. Also that's Hercules.

I’ve also taken myself on two artist dates, which are sessions that the book declares to be of a weekly importance. Two hours taking your “inner artist” out and letting them have fun. If you follow me on Twitter, you saw the labor of my first “date,” which was a very colorful page starring my bae Captain Marvel. My second date I had to do early this week since I’m traveling soon, and I took myself to the St. Louis Art Museum. One of the neatest things about living here is that a lot of our museums are free. So you can just walk right in and go stare at a Beckman or a Van Gogh or an Anselm (we’ve got a lot of those). One of my favorite things is really the building itself: it was built for the 1904 World’s Fair, with new additions that are just as neat. My date involved examining the paintings for the strangest and best animals I could find.

The winner, hands down, was a squirrel in a painting by Louise Adeone Drölling. Runners up were Marc Chagall’s Temptation and Franz Marc’s Little Mountain Goats.

Next week my Artist Date will no doubt be something to do with Disney or Harry Potter. Still not 100% sold on the rest of The Artist’s Way, but it’s led to some fun exercises at least. And hey, I’ve returned to my blog after forever and a day, so maybe there’s something to this whole thing.

Finally, I want to give a shout out to one of the most wonderful human beings on the planet. It’s Shen’s birthday today and everybody should go wish her a happy birthday. She’s delightful and clever and immensely creative, and I want her to have the best day (well, evening, by the time I post this). Happy Birthday, Shen!!!!!

See you guys soon! Stay sexy!
Lexie