thinkythink

Enthusiasm inversly proportional to energy?

It's one of those days that I wake up thinking I want to go do a bunch of errands! and I'm excited about it! and I start the morning frantically trying to decide which one and oh! That is actually a pretty good sign that I am too tired to set foot near any of those errands. Target is a pretty disasterous place when I may be too tired to stick to my list or make decisions- which are things that happen when I am tired generally. For that matter, when I am too tired for those things, chances are I am going to get overwhelmed by the store environment itself. And the process of getting there which will likely involve deciding every two minutes that I do want to go to Target and not do one of the other six things in my head to do because wow! errands are exciting!

At least I (often) know the warning signs these days and I am not wandering aimlessly through a gigantic store sure to come home with not quite what I needed in the first place.

And you know, days like these are a lot shorter than I think they are anyways. I probably didn't have time to go anyways. 

(Not) Writing and Reading

I just got a book in the mail from my friend Steve. It is a book about reading poetry, and I haven't read it yet, but when I looked at it I wondered if it would be like reading the long letters he used to write when we were in high school. He would tend to write to me about things he had read or music he was listening to, and have a fairly long analysis of them. Now that's one part of his career- literary criticism (he is also a poet).

I used to write equally long letters back. I don't know what was in them anymore, because I wrote those letters with a pen, so I don't have them in my Sent box or some such. But I started to wonder - and wonder if he wondered- how his long letters segued neatly into his life's work, and mine clearly did not.

I wrote poetry and essays as a teenager, and seemingly endless volumes in journal form. And I read a lot. And at some point all of the writing turned in on myself; the journal writing didn't help me but instead expanded upon thoughts that were not comfortable to begin with. Perhaps my thoughts were about troubles, and certainly they were about trying to do things, imagining doing things, when I wasn't actually getting out of my head to do them.

At the same time, I stopped being able to read. I can read a lot and fast, if I  am interested in it. I don't even now what that means, really; I have to start reading something and see if it goes. Then I finish a book too fast and I'm sad it is gone. Otherwise, I read sentences over and over and forget what they say midstream. I don't know exactly when that started, though I know that by junior year of high school, I was doing poorly in classes where I had to read dry text books. I loved taking the essay test to get into AP US History, which seemed almost a perverse thing to love,  but then got taken out of it because I couldn't read the text.

At least now I understand I can't read under some circumstances, and I am not required to do so. Back then I would simply start panicking and feel horrible. Now I just put the book down. But now, I wonder what might have been if I knew what I know now; if I had teachers and family who could help engage me, knew to keep exercising and could take medication so I could read something I would love.

Back onboard the keyboard

Way back in October, which seems both like yesterday and like two years ago, I left myself a trail of breadcrumbs in this very blog. This helped me to feel like I wouldn't lose track of everything and myself while I was immersed in new baby-ness, and gives me a way to gently find my way back into my work. This is especially important when work is self-motivated, self-defined, and self-structured.

My second son was born mid-November, and I've been working again since the beginning of the year, gradually building things up. As we speak I am sitting in a coffeeshop with my baby in his stroller; I've got a window to do this while he naps. The window is there; the hints are there about what I wanted to work on. So I wanted to talk about a possible sticking point for getting started. It would be really easy for me to hesitate to write a post because I want it to be the right post. That would mean restarting on some coherent or consistent theme; explaining my absence; knowing what would come next; knowing that I will be able to post at regular intervals from here on out. In short, it would be super easy for me to delay writing because I want to plan everything about how I am going to write now and in the near future.

I think planning is a good idea, and I would love for this blog to be more streamlined or focused or goal-driven at some point. I would love to make sure I knew all the topics I had covered and that I would address a list of others. But planning is an activity distinct from the actual writing here. It is not always the easiest task for me, and more importantly, it is something that could totally stop me dead in my tracks. I think it is a relative of perfectionism: I can't say anything until I know that it is the thing I wanted to say at the time I wanted to say it on the blog. It may also be antithetical to the blog platform. Sometimes blogs work because they are spontaneous and conversational, rather than well-rehearsed and edited. Yet more to the point is that it is easy to stop ourselves from getting into motion by thinking about whether it is the right way to move.

I guess that's my own version of "just do it." It isn't about willpower and going for it in the sense it might be for others, where it is about pushing oneself forward, keeping all eyes on the destination. For me it is, as always (or usually), about letting go of thinking about the process and the destination, and starting to type.