The holidays means a chance to get together with old friends. Because people come home to their family houses for Christmas I am getting a chance to see people whom I went to high school with. The two revelations: that work no longer ends because we are on vacation, and that we talk about our pets like they're our children.Yes, we sat around for hours discussing the cute and strange behaviors of our animals. Even the eating and/or pooping habits. Yep. Hours.
We've all gotten animals in the past year or so and we all brought them home for the holidays. My friends were even more hardcore than me and flew the animals home with them. That's dedication. I'm not certain I'd do that. Well ... I wouldn't be allowed because it's only one pet per passenger and I would have to choose between the cats, but that's neither here nor there.
We are all young pet-parents. The question becomes how much longer will we chat about pets before one or all of us becomes real parents and we chat for hours and hours about that. Kinda scary.
During this afternoon one of my friends kept checking her Blackberry. Even when on vacation she's at work. My friend who is in grad school kept thinking of all the research she's supposed to be doing during break. Vacation is no longer vacation. Then again, we are realizing that there is no longer "a good time" for anything in our lives. There is no longer a time when things will "lighten up." And therefore I think I've convinced both of them to do a NaNoWriMo writing challenge this coming January!
They both have novels they want to write and without hope of a "good time" to write it they know they might as well write it now. There is absolutely no time like the present.
I've changed my counter over on the sidebar from NaNoWriMo (a memoir project) over to January Novel Progress (fiction) because there is no time like the present to attempt really big goals ... and by "the present" I mean "after the holidays." For me it means there's no time like the time you're an unemployed grad student to write big wonderful novels. Seriously.
