Baking Poetry

I baked cookies this afternoon while I was avoiding making myself work on organizing this mess of miscellaneous poems left over from college projects and the little bit (oh, such a very little bit) of stuff I'm managed to eke out in the two decades since. 

I hate baking. 

I keep digging around in this pile of poems, hoping that they'll magically turn into a finely crafted angel food cake with spun sugar fairies on top, but the more I stir, the more they feel like a chipped mixing bowl from your hoarding aunt's kitchen full of broken pieces of Happy Meal toys and headless Barbies waiting on the curb for even the homeless guy who collects scrap to buy cigarettes to pass over. 

Between shuffling pans of cookies, it occurred to me that I should take apart the bindings on the two college poetry projects I did, in order to "de-sanctify" them and make them a little more willing to be rehashed and re-edited, but then I got all sentimental about my poetry prof's notes all over them and I couldn't make myself do it. 

Then, I thought, oh, I should just re-type them into a new manuscript where I can fiddle with them and edit them while leaving the the original papers in their silly sentimental format, so I opened Scrivener to start that, then realized that it's been so long since I worked with Scrivener on starting a new document (my book. My poor, lonely, unfinished mess of a book) that I wasn't sure how to go about setting up a new project.  I was about to go Googling to figure out how best to set up Scrivener for a poetry manuscript when I realized what I was really doing was baking cookies, or, er, "baking cookies" and what I should really do is get to work on that stupid manuscript even if I have to write it in Google Documents come here and 'fess up about ridiculous I'm being about all of this so you all can laugh at me. 

Now it's four-thirty in the afternoon, and tomorrow's a really busy day that won't allow any writing time at all, and I've basically nothing to show for my afternoon of work, okay, okay, "work" except a few self-deprecating lines in my journal, four rhyming phrases completely unrelated to each other, and this blog post.  

At least supper's done.  If you can call cookies "supper."