I’m sitting in the multipurpose building at MOERA during a lull in the action. The action is Atlantic Hope, a humanitarian training exercise for emergency and disaster management students.

The scenario of Atlantic Hope is an earthquake in a second-world country on the brink of civil war. The setting includes tense relations between northern and southern factions, gunshots, and paramilitary forces.

I’m the moulage coordinator for the exercise, which means I manage and run the casualty simulation with the help of my husband. In other words, I turn volunteers into victims. Gunshot victims, victims of illness, impalement victims, victims with cuts and contusions and bruises. This takes a combination of theater makeup, homemade prosthetics and a bit of know how.

When I do moulage, I’m in the zone. Time flows, and I find I have put makeup on 20 people without really noticing it. Gunshot wounds are new to me, so they present a bit of challenge. The challenge is part of the experience.

The lull will be over soon and more people will come in to be made up. I am in my element.

My husband knows I’ve been cranky. Yesterday was a frustrating day as I prepped for Atlantic Hope, a humanitarian simulation to train students in Emergency and Disaster Management. My job in this simulation is Moulage Coordinator. I make the magic happen, if by magic you mean turning volunteers into casualties using stage makeup and props.

Prep for a major event like this includes making skin-colored gelatin for burn effects, inventorying impalement prosthetics and making new ones, making fake blood from liquid starch and food coloring. Yesterday’s prep, unlike most years, was disastrous. I couldn’t find the impalements. I couldn’t find the sponge applicators I use as a base for new impalements. I couldn’t find the makeup for making the skin-colored gelatin. I couldn’t find the red food coloring, and it turns out that we’d finished the last bottle (a quart) because fake blood takes a lot of food coloring, a cup per half gallon of starch. This made me very cranky.

I made do on making the impalements. I bought cheap makeup to set up the burn gelatin. Then, our event caterers had a 3/4 full bottle of red food color.

This morning, after packing the car, Richard came back from an early morning errand with “emergency coffee”, which was my favorite: flat white with chocolate malt powder.

That coffee just made everything better.

I think all will be okay.

I have been writing on Avatar of the Maker after a hiatus (with other projects) and I am glad I’m revisiting it. Writing is once again a flow activity!

I’ve talked about flow before, but I might as well talk about it again. Flow is a concept originating with Mihalyi Csikmentmihalyi, and it involves being so engrossed in an activity that time flies by, yet one’s perception is of timelessness. Flow happens when the activity is neither too challenging nor too easy, but at an optimal level of difficulty. To experience flow, one must have mastery over the activity and be able to grow while doing it.

Flow is one type of engagement, and engagement is one aspect of well-being, according to the PERMA model. So, literally, when I engage in successful writing, I feel better, more complete. When I do not achieve flow in my writing, I am grouchy and unfulfilled.

What are your flow activities?

I write this blog every other day, and I hope you enjoy it. My topics are a variety of musings, memories, and meaning. I write from the perspective of an almost-sixty-year-old writer, professor, and fellow human being. And one with a very insistent inner child. Not very sexy, I know.

I wonder what my readers are looking for when they read this blog. Should I pick one topic and write about that? Should I continue writing about what’s on my mind? Maybe I should write more about my books, or less. Do my wellness (mostly positive psychology) posts grab people? What about my melancholy tableaux?

If you’re reading this, let me know what you enjoy. What you want to see more of. Alternatively, let me know what you want to see less of. Because I want to be interesting on these pages, and I’m not an expert judge of myself (I’m convinced my lectures are interesting, after all.)

Let me know — what can I give you in this blog?

Sometimes I look at this blank screen and ask myself, “What have I not said yet?”

Everything, I realize. Everything in the world. There is so much I haven’t written about.

Just the things off the top of my head I haven’t talked about:

• I have a phobia about rabies, which is known as hydrophobiaphobia. No kidding.
• I have always wanted to become a carpenter or something else useful. A college professor might not be too handy if the zombies take over.
• I have cavorted with lion cubs. It was amazing.
• I got hit by a car. I’m okay now, but I have a metal bar in my left leg from knee to ankle. At airports, I get treated like a potential terrorist.
• I have written several novels, but I don’t know what to do with them.
• I wish I could run. It would be handy (e.g. zombies).
• I can fall asleep sitting up (and just did).
• I write although I can’t visualize.

These are small topics, but they lead to bigger ones. And there are other topics lurking as well. I’ll have to remember this when I feel I am without words.

What do you have to write about? I imagine a lot.

I have a bit of the blues right now. Everything seems so stagnant right now — the weather is grey, there’s at least another month of Winter, there are no surprises (hopefully only the good ones, knock on wood) in my life, and nothing I am doing is very fruitful.

Perhaps it’s just the season. Spring hasn’t arrived, and the juncos outnumber the robins in the yard. The snow melts into squelchy mud and nothing is green.

Perhaps it’s just karma right now. I have spent so much of my life fulfilling Big Audacious Goals (although never at the “becoming famous” level because that’s not where I want to be) that maybe I should see my goals fail.

Maybe it’s just chance, or being an old dog in a new world, or a lack of sunlight bringing me down.

But I’m down, and I want something exciting to happen, because that always gets me out of the blues.

Today, I taught my personal adjustment students about love. No, not the deeper, profound experience of love. But I taught them that Valentine’s Day celebrates only one type of the seven types of love that the ancient Greeks celebrated.

So, those types of love:

• Agape – love of humanity.
• Storge – love of family
• Philia — love of friends
• Pragma – love which endures.
• Philautia – self love
• Ludus – flirtatious/playful love
• Eros – romantic and erotic love.

Valentine’s Day only seems to celebrate eros, and it does so in a big, splashy, commercialized way. 

I want people to reclaim the other types of love for Valentine’s Day and go out and celebrate them. Galentine’s Day is a good start, for those female friends who want to celebrate each other. But we should be celebrating our families, our friends, our flirtations, the world. Wouldn’t the world be better for that?

If you liked this blog post, please drop me a note at lleachie@gmail.com or @lleachsteffens on Twitter.

Right now I’m listening to psychedelic 60s music (an Apple Music playlist), trying to see if it inspires me to write. So far, it’s not inspiring me to write, but I’m contemplating laying down and grooving to it. I’m too involved in the music and where it wants to take me (even without substances) to write about my much more mundane world. I’ll go back to this later when I want to trance out and see what happens. For now, Pink Floyd’s Interstellar Overdrive is on as I write.

I’m picky about my music to write to. I need music that will help me concentrate and relax at the same time. The music must be interesting but not too involving. Luckily, composers have written and refined music with these characteristics through the ages. Erik Satie was the father of ambient music, which he called “furniture music”. Look him up; the music is perfect background music. While we’re talking about history and forefathers, look up Brian Eno’s Music for Airports to experience ambient fully realized.

Today there’s a music classification with a focus on just the sort of combination of interest and detachment called study music. There’s several playlists on Apple Music curated for study music, a combination of chillhop (downbeat hip hop), Lo-Fi, ambient, jazz, classical and other music that paints an atmosphere like a curtain around me. It’s perfect for someone like me who can’t concentrate in a quiet room and who did my best studying before school, sitting in the hallway and being stepped over. (Yes, I was that oblivious and that annoying.)

So, sitting in my living room, I will write under the influence of study music.

Tomorrow is my first day of meetings. Vacation is over. This means that I need to change my plan to write because I won’t have as much time to fulfill it now that I’m back at work. Right now it’s taking 2 hours to write 1000 words (which is slow for me; I really need to get inspired by this story!) So the SMART goal looks more like this:

I will write 1000 words of creative works a day (novel, short story) in the afternoon/evening.

Place will vary: home in living room, home upstairs, Starbucks.

Using the usual tools: laptop, Scrivener, ProWritingAid, iPad and DuetPro for double screen at Starbucks.

There’s my new SMART goal.