My job sends me all over the country. I’ve been to New Orleans more times than I can count, California (Anaheim, LA, and San Francisco), Baltimore, Philadelphia, Manhattan, Atlanta, Orlando, Oklahoma, Cleveland, Houston, Dallas, San Antonio, Las Vegas, upstate NY, Virginia, and Arizona. I just came back from two days in Washington, DC. And lest you think this is all glamor and business class and room service, here’s what a typical business trip looks like.

I catch the earliest flight that I can from Pittsburgh, which usually means catching the 4 am airport shuttle in the dark. Because Pittsburgh isn’t a hub airport anymore and my employer is cutting costs, I almost always have to transfer at least once, if not twice. To get to DC, I flew through Boston. When I arrived in the afternoon, I took a cab (and my luggage) to my first meeting of the day, which lasted until dinner time. I stumbled two blocks from my hotel, found something affordable to eat, and stumbled back to hit the sack, since by this point, I had been awake for 17 hours.

After 6 hours of sleep, I wake up, throw on a suit and run to the hotel Starbucks for a coffee. Corporate coffee is the devil, I know, but it’s convenient and it’s not even 6:30 am yet. Then I dash off to an all-day event where I am running at top speed from 6:45 am to 7:30 pm. If I’m lucky, like on this trip, I have thirty minutes to grab a sandwich at Subway.

My co-workers planned a dinner reservation at 8:30, but since I can barely hold polite conversation by this point, it’s back to the hotel to seek room service. The hotel does not have room service. I bundle up and slump over to a restaurant a few blocks away and collapse into a chair, praying for speedy service. Before the last course shows up, I’m shoving my credit card at the waitress and begging for mercy and sleep.

A quick phone call to the Lady, responding to twenty or thirty urgent work emails and I’m back in bed. I’m up again at dawn to pack my bags and dash off to the airport in a taxi and head back home.

I have friends who claim to be jealous of all of my travel, and I suppose when you see the locations it does sound fun. But in reality, I very rarely get to see the cities that I visit. Museums close at 5 and my meetings often run much later. If I’m at a convention or training, like next week, I’m in a chain hotel by the airport without a car.

Don’t get me wrong, in this economy I’m grateful to even have a job. And every so often, a meeting will get cancelled and get me a chance to see a little piece of the cities I’m visiting. And if I get to go somewhere warm in the winter, just glimpsing some sunshine as I run around is a blessing. But, more often, I see chain restaurants, chain hotels, and entirely too much of the Applebee’s at the airport.

I think that’s why I’m really looking forward to next month’s trip with my sisters to San Francisco and Napa. A real opportunity to stroll around and see things during the day! (And to get wine buzzed with my sisters…) Then in March, I’m hoping to make a long weekend trip to New Orleans (without meetings!) with the Lady, BC, and the gang.

I’d hate to think that I never got see the cities I’ve been to. So, I suppose I’ll have to make that happen on my own time.

I wrote a dirge to a tiny, dead computer person today. Ten lines with ten syllables each carefully and lovingly constructed. This is the level of my addiction to Oregon Trail: American Settler.

To be fair, she was the first of my settlers to die. I am a fairly good mayor for this tiny town living in my phone which insists that I pick crops and make splints for the population all day. In the week since my sister got me hooked, I have built forts and silos, grown cotton, and cured cholera. I have, only once, stayed awake for an extra thirty minutes to save a villager from typhoid. Ok, twice.

I am not a gamer. My Wii connects my TV to Netflix for me, but I don’t own a single game. However, I spend a large portion of my time at work on conference calls and web meetings which allows me to plant potatoes between tasks. Or to play another word in Words With Friends (eleanorstrousers, if you want to play). And of course, to tweet, check Facebook, or text. If you see me, my face will be staring at that tiny screen.

In the interest of being a little more active in the real world, I’m setting aside two phone free hours for the evening. If someone dies of typhoid, though, I’ll have only myself to blame.

Pittsburgh saw the first real snow of winter today. When I woke up, my street was covered with the slush of it and I had to drag my snow shovel out of the basement. Those of you who’ve been reading for a while know, winter is my least favorite time of year. I grew up in Atlanta. Snow is a strange, awful substance that I’m convinced is designed to ruin anything good in the world.

In honor of the snowfall, I pulled out some yarn scraps and whipped up this dish towel while I watched Quills on Netflix. A little sadism from the Marquis de Sade himself- he reminds me of Old Man Winter. I suppose I’ll settle in for the long, miserable slog. In the meantime, I’ll focus on these paper flowers I picked up in San Antonio and dream of spring.

Today, I made a poem. This making things business is going well. I also invented something that I call Hot & Cold Dip (take about 1/2 cup of low-fat sour cream and stir in 3 or 4 tsp. of Frank’s Red Hot sauce, or more if you’re me and like it spicy). I used it to dip some grilled chicken tenders and sweet potato fries. The Lady and I have teamed up to try Weight Watchers online this year, to keep from buying two new wardrobes full of muumuus in 2012. We each dropped over 3 pounds the first week, but then Christmas happened and well….. let’s just say that we needed to start over.

I love the New Year, a new opportunity to pretend that just once, we’ll actually get it right this time around. A time to make lists, which is one of my favorite things.

A friend of mine posted this Woody Guthrie list of resolutions from 1942 to Facebook.

I could stand to keep these in mind myself. Tomorrow, I’m clinging to #19 “Keep Hoping Machine Running” when I go to drop off a writing sample for a fellowship that I’d really like to have. And since it’s back to work after a 10 day vacation and the first day for that early alarm, I’d better hop on #33 and “wake up and fight.”

Hope your 2012 is full of new beginnings and unbroken resolutions thus far!

In 2012, in order to maintain my creative sanity, I’m hoping to make something every day. Today, I made a traditional lucky dinner: pork, sauerkraut, black eyed peas, collard greens, and buttermilk cornbread in my giant iron skillet. It’s a start.

I’d love to credit whichever blogger suggested the idea, but I’ve forgotten. My to-be-read pile is actually an entire shelf, plus three shelf-high stacks beside it. I love to buy books. I receive them as gifts. I collect them as souvenirs when I travel. I never feel guilty about it. Buying books is good for authors. Reading is good for my brain. While I will toss a shirt when it gets too worn, my books will be pried out of my cold dead hands.

But all that choice is overwhelming. I never know which one to start next. The blog post I read suggested a new strategy. Picking ten books. Reading them in order. Then picking the next ten books. One volume at a time, the books move from the overflow shelf onto the shelf of books I’ve read and enjoyed enough to keep. The others go into the book swap/ donate pile under the china cabinet.

To beat the rush for New Year’s resolutions, I’ve got my first ten piled up and ready to start. I’m attempting to stick with the plan, knowing full well I’ll have new temptations after Christmas.

1. Zelda by Nancy Milford: I’ve heard so many great reviews of this biography of Mrs. Fitzgerald.

2. Inferno (A Poet’s Novel) by Eileen Myles: I cheated a bit and flipped through the first few pages. Such rich language!

3. Collected Poems 1909- 1962 by T.S. Eliot: Eliot has been a favorite of mine since middle school. My mom treated me to this lovely hardcover as an early birthday gift.

4. The Journals of Sylvia Plath: I picked up a vintage copy at a rare books store with a huge poetry section. The unabridged version has since been released, but I feel like Ms. Plath deserves a little polite privacy.

5. Art and Madness: A Memoir of Lust Without Reason by Anne Roiphe: I mysteriously received a review copy from the publisher without requesting one. I started it and then got distracted by too many other books around, but was enjoying it. The Lady’s mother mentioned wanting to read it when I finished, so I have an incentive to wrap this one up.

6. The Last Madam: a Life in the New Orleans Underworld by Christine Wiltz: a souvenir of my last trip to New Orleans, purchased at the adorable Maple Street Book Shop.

7. The Creative Habit: Learn It and Use It For Life by Twyla Tharp: adding more “making” to my days is on my 2012 agenda. I’ve been a little more office drone than maker lately.

8. Tell My Horse: Voodoo and Life in Haiti and Jamaica by Zora Neale Hurston: I will read anything about voodoo. Anything. Somehow I have missed this non-fiction classic.

9. Touch by Alexi Zentner: I bought this the day it came out and have been looking forward to it ever since, wistfully, while it lingered mid-shelf.

10. The Poetry Home Repair Manual by Ted Kooser: (reread) This little book was so chock full of useful pointers that I couldn’t absorb them all on the first read-through. I like to pick it up every few months as my pocket writing course.

I’m not promising that the list won’t get re-arranged after the Christmas gifts roll in or if any urgent review copies come around, but for now that to-be-read pile seems so much more manageable.

This time of year, full of gift lists, and resolutions, and year-in-review pieces, and making a list and checking it twice, makes it all the more clear to me. I’d noticed a slight slip in my constant drive to add one more bullet-point to the resume. I haven’t sent anything out to be considered for publication in months. I’m not scrimping and saving for any major trip or project. I’m not editing a manuscript, shooting for a promotion, trying to take up a new hobby, or signed up for Weight Watchers.

Nothing.

In some ways, it’s a relief. Nothing nagging in the back of my head that absolutely must be done before I can be content. But, the other side of that coin is a fear. A worry that without anything I’m desperately scraping after, that I may just stagnate, lose all momentum, stop finding adventures altogether.

Instead, I have wishes. I wish I had a washer and dryer in my apartment. I wish I could afford a new laptop. I wish I had a full book manuscript, ready to be sent out to agents and editors. I wish I could drop those ten (ok, fifteen) pounds that come with being in a happy relationship and big home-cooked meals every night. I wish I didn’t smoke as much. I wish I was outside more often.

The thing about wishes is that they come with no plan. I haven’t called anyone about the washer/ dryer hook-ups. I haven’t saved a penny or made a budget for the laptop. I haven’t been writing a few hours every day to get a manuscript together. I don’t work out or eat more vegetables. I’m smoking more. I stay on the couch.

An acquaintance of mine won a fellowship for her poetry and has been assigning herself “homework” of sorts. To read x amount of books. To finish her artist’s statement by x date. To create a spreadsheet, to apply for a fellowship, to write every day.  And in only six months, she has accomplished an amazing amount- given readings in several states, been a finalist in a book contest, and won more fellowships for the future.

As the year wraps up, another birthday approaches (the big 3-5, no less), and winter comes in, driving me housebound, it’s time for me to give myself some homework. Otherwise, I’m just sitting around making wishes.

But the thing is? I hated it. At work, I felt sneaky trying to cram in four pages around conference calls and distracted that I might get caught. At home, I felt like I needed to declare hours away from friends, roommates, or partners to “be a writer”. And to get huffy if that writer zone was infringed upon by the slightest noise, question, or once- to my great shame- when I was offered a cup of coffee. It didn’t matter what I wrote, as long as I met my daily word quotient, and when my brain got bored, my characters would get attacked by robots, all die, etc. only to be resurrected back in the sensitive literary novel the next day.

I was writing, but I wasn’t creating anything. For me, it was the difference between riding a stationary bike in a gym and biking through the countryside. No view, no sensations, just putting down words to get to that magic number every day.

I know plenty of writers who claim their success is based on forcing themselves to meet a word count every day. And lord knows, writing is a nebulous enough thing without anyone decreeing one way that it should be done.

But in my case, I not only never met the word count goal for the month, I never liked a single thing that I wrote with that word count hovering over my head.

So this year, I’m not doing it. Instead, I’m setting a goal to do some writing every day. A poem. A journal entry. A blog post (wouldn’t that be grand!). To keep myself writing. But if it’s one good sentence, instead of four pages, I won’t punish myself and get all those voices in my head going about whether I am a “real writer,” “lazy writer,” etc.

To those of you about NaNo, I salute you. It’s just not for me, anymore.

If you asked me, in my heart of hearts, for my defining characteristic, I would always reply lazy. I could always do more. I could write more. I could help more. I could call my mother more (oh, the guilt). I could get myself organized and sit down once a week to write dozens of blog posts and tweets in advance so that during the week I can focus on my paying job where I could do more. And then when that miracle happens, I could spend hours each night cleaning my house until it sparkles and is always ready for company. Then I’d cook meals for the week and freeze them so I could serve vegetables and photo ready food every night. I’d lay out my clothes for the week and my outfits would match and never be wrinkled. I’d always have greeting cards and wrapped gifts for every occasion neatly stacked where I could find them. My spare bedroom would not contain multiple bins of papers marked “to be sorted”.

This is how all of you live, right?

Because when I get down to it, my secret fear is that everyone else has the secrets to adult living all locked up. They are perpetually together and caught up on their lists and don’t have anything they’ve let linger for months (years?) waiting to be completed. And that makes me wonder, even now that I’m past thirty, whether I will ever be an adult, the way the adults seemed to be when I was a kid.

So, I try to imagine myself from a child’s perspective. Height-wise, at 5’0″, I’m not passing for grown-up. My work and weekend clothes aren’t kid’s clothes, but the Converse sneakers that go with both might confuse a kid. I live alone- pretty impressive. I can stay out as late as I want and watch as much TV as I want (though I don’t have many channels). There is no food that resembles real food in my fridge now (at which point the imaginary child asks if my mom forgot to buy me some snacks). My clothes are in piles on the couch, in the spare bedroom, and near the hamper (mom is going to be so mad).

I’m not quite there. And maybe I never will be. Are you?