Off My Game

I actually made it to choir practice last night. It wasn't always pretty and there was some throat clearing, but it felt so good. I also didn't have a bad time with the kids, possibly because I only had about half the usual class. They pleasantly surprised me a couple of times. Once, there was a song I was using to supposedly teach rhythm. We were supposed to clap with it. But it had a kind of calypso beat, and next thing I knew, the kids -- all on their own -- had formed a conga line around the room. So I went with it. For the art project, I passed out construction paper, heart stickers and markers/crayons and let them make Valentines. Half of them gave theirs to me, so now I have my yearly quota of Valentines. Nothing says love like red construction paper with heart stickers on it and "I love you" written in very careful letters in crayon.

In spite of feeling better (or maybe because of feeling better), I got off my game in writing this week. I've been easily distracted. And one of my distractions can kind of be blamed on Moon Moon.

This is one of those Internet things that for some odd reason has really tickled my fancy. Apparently, it started with a "what is your werewolf name" quiz on some paranormal romance site, with two columns of names like "Grey" and "Shadow," and you pick one from each column based on the first letter of your first name and the last letter of your last name. Unfortunately, they had "Moon" in both columns, and someone responded that their werewolf name was "Moon Moon," which sounded like the lamest werewolf ever (paraphrasing slightly, as the language was hardly politically correct).  So, someone came up with the saga of Moon Moon the wolf. And then people started coming up with more of these, finding funny photos of wolves or wolfish dogs and giving them captions relating to Moon Moon.

I'd seen some of these individually without knowing the backstory and found them mildly amusing. And then I saw a page compiling a bunch of them and found myself laughing until I was in pain and had tears running down my face. That was distracting because at random moments when I was trying to work or sleep, I'd think of one of these pictures and start laughing again. Days later, I can think "Moon Moon" and start grinning like an idiot. It may be even funnier in the context of those paranormal werewolf romance novels. I wonder what Moon Moon's human form would be like.

I might also be somewhat thrown off rhythm by spending the mornings watching figure skating. And there's the fact that I've been rebooting the book I've been working on, and a major mindset shift tends to set off procrastination.