Five pages. That’s sort of a lot of pages when you’ve spent your whole night playing video games and the lateness of the hour starts to set in. A hurried mind does not readily issue forth eloquent phrases, and it’s a bit of a struggle to remember the point of it all when you’re writing for the sake of writing.
As before, as soon as I make writing an obligation, it stops being fun. I feel pressure to write something good. I feel pressure to have something to show for it at the end of my time. I have no doubt I could ramble on for five pages with little trouble. Plenty has occurred in my life that I could summarize ad nauseum, boring those that already know, and leaving questions for those that don’t. So I’m in a bit of a quandary.
I’ve looked up writing prompts. It’s funny to me that when I read a prompt and have no desire to write I occasionally have a fun idea, but when I’m looking for something to write, nothing seems to meet my standard. Am I sabotaging myself? Am I just too afraid of failure to start down a path? Is this an overarching metaphor for my life? Who’s to say? (Yes, it obviously is.)
I find it so much easier to commit to others than to commit to myself. If someone sets a goal for me, I will do everything I can to achieve it. If I set a goal for myself, it might get done eventually. I hate playing for a team, but I love working out with one. This is one reason tennis clinics were my favorite thing. The work put in was collective, but when it came time to compete, it was all one on one. This ethos is missing from handball. People work out on their own, they compete on their own. Frisbee workouts are great. The people are fun, and when we get together, most people are motivated to get in a good workout. But competing with a team… hasn’t been my thing. Don’t get me wrong, playing frisbee with my friends is great. The problem, of course, is my general lack of friends. I’m lucky my sister has friends, or I just wouldn’t have enough people on my side to every take to the field.
I like having our own house. No shared walls, not feeling obligated to play nice with fellow residents, and enough space to spread out have been some qualities I will miss when we move back to an apartment life. Then again, our current place has a bit too much space. And we are getting to the point where we have a bit too much stuff to go along with it. All of which has done little to stop me from acquiring more things. It will be interesting to see what happens to the stuff when it is compressed into half as many rooms. Will the pineapple decorations survive? Will necessity breed innovation as it does in times of war, as the fruit knicknacks battle it out with the gaming collectibles for priority shelf space? How many “life hacks” will be required to utilize our many unused possessions?
I never did write my grandmother to thank her for my Christmas and birthday presents. I still have an envelope with her address already written on it sitting on our kitchen table. I see it occasionally when I sit down for lunch, which happens a couple of times per week. However, we do not use the dining room table for dinner, preferring to sit in front of our occasionally-functional TV when we have the luxury of time. Lunch is a more efficient time. There is no dilly-dally built into the eating schedule. A strict regimen: 10 minutes to say hello and decide what to eat; 20 minutes to manufacture the food (3 if it’s leftovers, but usually 10 if the leftovers require supplementation in order to feed two people); 4 minutes to eat; 10 minutes to look at my phone while thinking how I should really just go back to the office early; 5 minutes to accomplish the things I said I would do over lunch and allocated 15 minutes for in my original plan for the day; 30 seconds to grab something based in chocolate as I head out the door. As you can see, the four minutes set aside for eating hardly lends itself to settling down in front of a TV. Usually it doesn’t even lend itself to sitting down at all. Eating while standing in the kitchen means I can rinse out my dishes immediately after finishing, saving time on cleanup later, and the time it takes to change rooms, pull out a chair, and fend off a cat rarely justifies itself. By the time I’ve walked into the next room, half my food has usually been consumed.
This is a page and a half in google docs. Hardly five pages, and hardly what I had in mind when I sat down to write. Then again, when I sat down to write, it came immediately to the forefront of my mind how self-conscious I am when writing when my screen can be seen. I know this makes no sense, since I’m going to put it on the internet without editing anyway, and yet I find my fingers frozen when the words they produce might be subjected to criticism (even internal criticism) before they become set in the stone that comes with hitting the publish button. Hopefully the next time I sit down, I have some characters. Or a setting. Or anything. But I am not optimistic. (Why start now?)
Thanks for reading!
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