Is That a Turtle on Rihanna's Butt?

This morning, I sat down at my desk for the first time in weeks. May is a blur. There was Mom2.0 and then Listen To Your Mother and then Luisa left for Portugal and school is ending so the kids have all the end of the year things. At some point, my desk became a mess. It was covered in scratch paper with notes and passwords and unopened copies of The Missouri Review (I was recently rejected there) and Minecraft coordinates (I've been meaning to leave a cake in the tree house of one of the new moms who joined our server) and a check I need to deposit and a thing of Tums and a stack of cassette tapes I still need to listen to and receipts to enter into a spreadsheet. The chaos of my desk has been daunting and the best way to deal with that was to avoid the desk. Obviously. But today, I sat down and started cleaning my desk and then I looked at iTunes to research a post I'm writing for another site and things were going so well and then I found myself watching every Rihanna video ever made on YouTube. I was mesmerized by her green coat in Bitch Better Have My Money and spent more time than I should admit wishing that I could pull off such an outfit. Then, I eventually ran across Where Have You Been and became fascinated with Rihanna's ass. Though I'm sure I'm not the first to make such a statement, I am probably the only one to wonder aloud (and on social media) if there was a turtle on her ass in the first part of the video. I watched it several times in order to determine if it's a turtle or a tail or a strange armadillo-like bikini bottom. See for yourself and weigh in:

https://youtu.be/HBxt_v0WF6Y

The more videos I watched and the more I talked about the videos I watched and the cleaner my desk became, the more I felt like writing! My brain was alive with the sound of music and images of green coats and turtles on butts! And that's when I realized that this is my writing process. It's messy and seems completely counterintuitive and counterproductive and every other kind of counter their is but it's mine.

I've been writing in bed lately and it hasn't been working. Bed is for things like Netflix and Candy Crush. Yes, that's what lesbians do in bed in case anyone asks you. Clearly, my "process" requires that I sit at my desk and ponder music videos. It gets ye olde synapses firing. So, my turtle-free butt is in my chair and I am at my desk and I am ready to roll.