I don't wanna miss a thing

There are times when I feel totally ashamed of myself.  There are other times, when I feel a kind of meta-shame - a nagging feeling that I should be filled with shame, yet I'm incapable of doing so.  Or I'm actually proud of what I'm doing.  Perhaps this actually evinces proof of growing maturity - that I can be pleased with what I do without worrying about what other people think of me, or of conforming to notions of proper behaviour should be.

But it's hard to hold to that view when the thing you should be ashamed of is listening to 'Don't Want To Miss A Thing' by Aerosmith.  Or rather, an American Idol cover version of that song.  On Youtube.  Played through the tinny speakers of my msi Wind netbook.  Which, coincidentally, provides the perfect sonic simulation of a crappy transistor radio, which is somehow the perfect way to enjoy this over-the-top, middle-of-the-road, straight-down-the-line guff.  Music it's hardly worth mixing cliches over, let alone metaphors.

But it's hardly my fault.  Before you criticise me, you read The Corner, and then tell me I don't need cheering up with the highest saturated fat comfort food for the soul that Steven Tyler could devise.
It's cold in Hong Kong today, properly cold.  Unseasonably cold.  And not ha-ha-very-funny-twelve-degrees-Celsius-what-do-you-call-this cold.  Out at Ngong Ping, near the airport, it's reportedly only three degrees.

Three degrees?  That's a pop group, not a temperature for Hong Kong.  It is ridiculous.  And inside the air conditioning is running now, because it's March and the damn thing won't be turned off again until December, with the result that by ten in the morning I'm wearing gloves while I'm typing, and by midday I've almost collapsed from hypothermia, and the only thing keeping me going is a cup of hot something-or-other from Starbucks.

My friend Laura was ill today, so I went round to her place with a care package from Marks & Spencer, then went home to work on The Great Old Game.  I wrote around 700 words and then wasted some time tidying up paragraphs and formatting.  Having written most of it on my Blackberry in tram-journey sized portions, I had no access to a tab key, and some of those paragraphs now look horrendous.  I still need to write my Iraq-set introduction to it all, but in order to do that I need to read more Andy McNab first.  And I'd really like an excursion to Shanghai to get into the plot somewhere.

Ah yes.  A plot.  There's more than a few loose ends to tie up before I feel it's really got a plot.  Then I can pass a first draft to a few people to review, and then hack it apart again.  Or maybe they get the second or third draft.  Or maybe I keep it in a drawer and never look at it again.

Ha.  No, I defy defeatism.  I may not have touched this throughout February, but March is going to be the month that I make a second draft on this thing.

It's a bit odd to be writing about writing, rather than writing, but at least it gets the creative juices flowing.  I've also decided, in a spirit of further time-wastery, to pick one of the top trending topics from Twitter every day for a week, and write something about that.  Oh, how my life becomes ever more recursed.  But then I like recursion.  One of the things I like about recursion is how you get to repeat things that you like.  And I like recursion.  One of the things I like ...

Sorry.  It's been a long yet uneventful day.  Maybe I did want to miss a thing after all.