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August 3, 1998
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I think I have perfected the art of procrastination today. I managed to spend the entire day getting ready to work on the IDRI web page.I can't explain it exactly. Procrastination is to me the flip side of work addiction, sort of like bingeing and purging or something. I just glanced at my bookshelf. I used to have a whole stack of books on overcoming procrastination, but there are none there now. I gave away all my self-help books after the Natalie Goldberg workshop in 1995 as kind of a symbolic commitment to writing practice. Fat lot of good that did me. Now I don't write. I don't do writing practice. And I don't have a shelf of self-help books to turn to in my hour of need, er, umm, I mean procrastination. Reading books about overcoming procrastination is one of the best ways to avoid doing the work I'm procrastinating on. After all, I have to read up on how I should be doing it before I actually dare to do it. Joan-west called this morning to fine tune plans for her visit. She asked what I was doing and I honestly answered procrastinating. She offered several time worn techniques for getting started. I just never got started. I had to have coffee, eat breakfast, gather the materials, try for the millionth time to read the floppy from Istvan's PC so I wouldn't have to type in all the changes. The floppy drive is still broken. It did not magically heal itself when I replaced the bad memory. Too bad. I don't want to part with the computer for another week or 10 days or however long it takes for the folks I took it to before to get a chance to look at the damn thing. I can write floppies that I can read and read the ones I write. I just can't read anybody else's or write ones other people can read. Is this worth fixing? I have to figure out how to get those guys to e-mail me files (the free e-mail account they have won't do attachments and actually has a limit on the message length). Meanwhile, they're out of town and I need to get this thing done before NSF decides we are unworthy of their attention. So I just have to buckle down and do it. I've been procrastinating on my journal entries too. It just doesn't seem like fun to write them anymore. It feels too much like work. So much happened during the weeks the computer was broken, I'll never be able to catch up. And life just seems to go by so fast lately. It seems like yesterday it was raining for 11 days in May. Where did summer go? I drove over to Benson's the other day for one last cone of the fresh native red raspberry ice cream and it's gone already. I had ginger. It's not the same. The leaves are turning. I wasted another summer. |
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