Trouble = fun (Lauren Bjorkman)

I applaud those who blogged before me about their soul-fulfilling, body-tuning, and heart-stirring pursuits. You are amazing. Seriously. My hobby might be considered less wholesome. *lowers head in shame* Still it's the key to my awesomesauce writing life.

When I was a kid, my dad often said, “Lauren! Your head is in the clouds. Wake up!” Or when he was REALLY mad he'd say, “Get your head out of your BUTT!” He wanted me to BE HERE NOW. And get my chores done, damn it. But I liked daydreaming more than washing dishes. And sometimes--while I daydreamed--the dishes miraculously washed themselves.

[Note: head-up-butt image pending]

One time my sister caught me kneeling in the stateroom of our sailboat in front of a bucket of soapy water. My job was to wash the floor. Instead, I'd piled bubbles onto the sponge and was singing Ode-to-SpongeCake, a song of my own composition.

Of course BE HERE NOW has practical applications. In my boat days, I fell asleep at the tiller once, risking all our lives. Luckily the boat didn’t get wrecked on a reef and we lived to tell the tale. (To be fair, I was barely ten.) These days I  limit my daydreaming to times filled with less dangerous activities. Sometimes I forget this principle while working out plot points, though, and drive into a ditch to the wrong place.

All kidding aside, I have a few self-improvement-type hobbies. I knit and hike and take out my aggression on the enormous weeds that grow around my house garden. Sometimes I stretch my hamstrings. But while I’m stretching my hamstrings, I daydream.