Unmotivated, my fat ass!

I’m getting used to reviews, both good and bad, so I couldn’t figure out why this one stuck in my craw with such jagged edges. The reviewer said that Cory, my heroine, was “dumpy and unmotivated,” and for some reason, it made me just want to reach through cyberspace and slap someone.

I mean Cory was taking fifteen units and working full time at a crappy job to finance her education. What more did this reviewer want? Was Cory ‘unmotivated’ because she wasn’t born into a fully funded education? Was she ‘unmotivated’ because she’d rather work on her papers than her social life? Just what about a working college student functioning on minimal sleep and a little bit of faith reeks of ‘unmotivation’?

I was playing with this in the same way you’d play with a sore tooth of a swollen finger joint (hey–look, it hurts when i do this… and this… and this… but not this!) when I had a flashback to a conversation I had with a student.

“So why don’t you ever straighten your hair?”

“Because I only get about four or five hours of sleep a night as it is. What am I supposed to give up so I have time to make my hair adhere to social standards I think are a waste of time?”

“Oh. So you’re lazy.”

Okay. So I guess I’m ‘unmotivated’. After three days of a lot of driving and one night at a class reunion, my foot was giving me seven sorts of hell, and I had to cry ‘uncle’. I spent yesterday with my foot up, watching reruns of ‘Castle’ (Yes, Julie, it’s an AWESOME FRICKIN’ SHOW!) and knitting Big T an ‘alpaca alpaca’ for his sweetie. (“She’s a friend mom. A close friend. Okay. A close friend I’ve been crushing on for two years, but she’s NOT my sweetie.” Little does he know that if I’m spending all day knitting a goofy looking stuffed animal out of alpaca yarn, she’d better be a ‘sweetie’ and not ‘a friend’.) I WANTED to be working on my editing, but I was motivated to, just this once, put my knitting and my family, and to some extent my health, on the forefront.

Does that make me ‘unmotivated’?

Today, I took my kid to the gym so I could have a water aerobics class (which helped my foot SO much–not totally recovered, but nowhere NEAR as shitty as it was) and then play with squish in the pool. I neglected my editing and my housecleaning, and then I came home and edited and neglected my kid and my house, and then everybody went to dance rehearsal and I spent a good three hours editing, and, well, the house is still a mess, and…

You know. Does that make me ‘unmotivated’?

I don’t FEEL unmotivated. My dragon is screaming at me to work on Jack and Teague–in fact, he’s sort of the EPITOME of some fucking motivation. Am I lazy because he’s riding my back with cruel claws, sending me wandering around the house in a cleaning-less fugue when I’m not feeding him plotbunnies and frothing at the mouth with his relentless drive to pour fiction out of my smelted crucible of a brain-pan?

I actually feel HIGHLY motivated.

In fact I seem to recall the same motivation when I was powering through my degree while working a full time food service job for nearly six years.

Yeah. My priorities may be skewed, but I’m starting to think that, yeah. This reviewer may have been talking out of the wrong orifice.

I’m thinking that maybe Cory understood motivation a lot more than this person did. I know I’m starting to dream about motivation as it changes the shape of my bones.