strange radiation: the pool of radiance archive
Adventures with an unreliable narrator.
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Feb 27 05: excuse my dust
It’s been a mostly quiet weekend, which was good, because the job has been nutso exhausting lately. We had another couple of performances with the NYC Ballet (of Chichester Psalms, now in repertory—more performances of that in April if you’re interested), but beyond that we’ve mostly lolled about the house. Paul made chocolate-chip cookies. We ate many of them. Bliss.
This evening I skipped the Oscars completely. I have no opinions on any of the performances being considered, which I missed one and all; going quickly down the complete list of nominees I see that I have seen maybe four of the films that have been mentioned in any category whatsoever, and those are all the kind of movies that get nods for things like art direction. What happened here? I used to be a big movie fiend. I seem to have lost the knack; or maybe it’s the $12 ticket price. Shocking. Anyway, instead I’ve been doing an early sortie into the Terrifying Project.
The Terrifying Project is yet another attempt to get the stuff under control. My desk is constantly under eight inches of random crap: manuscripts and CDs and bills that need paying and bills that need filing and mail that I haven’t even looked at and scraps of paper and CDs of photographs that I have to post to the swim team’s website and comic books and nonfunctioning wristwatches (there are three) and souvenirs of various travels; stories people have sent me and manuscripts I should collate and the Big Blue Folder from Viable Paradise (back in October) and Ziploc bags full of office supplies; unread magazines about swimming and mailing labels with little cartoon versions of me and Paul and a pair of broken goggles that I’m saving because I’d like to buy a pair just like them; rubber bands and a coaster and bottles of fountain-pen ink; a Daruma doll with two empty, staring eyespots. I look at all this and despair, and the despair means that I never try to tackle it—I just shove it out of the way when I need enough space to sign a check in or a place to put the mouse when I play computer pinball games. Similarly, the e-mail inbox has gotten totally out of control: when I get home from work I have just enough energy to answer anything that is plainly an emergency; everything else tends to get marked as unread so I know to come back to it, which I’ll never do, because tomorrow another twenty things will end up in the queue, and that’s why I now have over 700 mails marked “unread” in the primary inbox alone.
As I said, stuff. The stuff cloud is a slow death by smothering. I am unable to believe I’ll ever get it tamed, and that despairing certainty means that I never try. I just blanket the whole thing in an SEP field for another day. But somewhere under that field is the spark that I could be using for other things. Because I don’t see the manuscript that needs to be resubmitted, I don’t resubmit it. Because I don’t want to go into the big scary e-mail inbox, I never write to anybody anymore.
Tonight was a first step. Anything that I could identify as useless trash in under three seconds has been discarded. A vast quantity of what had been on my desk is now in the paper barrel. There’s still a lot to be done, of course: documents to file, books to shelve, lent-things to be returned to their owners, e-mail to sort. But it’s a start. I even found a manuscript of a story I banged out last spring which, upon re-reading, is actually as good as I remembered it being. It gave Paul the creeps when I waved it under his nose and forced him to read it, which is a good sign. Last summer I toyed with the idea of using it as the foundation for a longer work, but maybe I should leave it as it is.
In service of the bigger picture, I’ve also been reading a book called Getting Things Done, which seems to be mentioned around the net with some frequency these days. It’s one of those ‘get yourself organized and productive’ self-help books, only this one seems to work well enough that there are devoted hipsters maintaining whole websites devoted to the general theories contained therein, plus interesting ways to hack those theories to make them useful to your particular mode of living. I figure, what the hell. Anything’s better than what I got. I’ll report back as appropriate.
Finally: one of the big reasons I’m trying to get my act together is to get enough of the distractions off the table that I’ve got some energy I can divert to writing again. Because I really haven’t written anything substantive since, oh, October. The occasional idea, but the general vibe of oh jesus why do I even bother when it all ends up a scrap of paper in The Pile I think I’ll watch television instead has pretty much quashed anything further. And that part is already starting to work. I had a big epiphany during the pre-performance rehearsal last night—a plot thread that ties the first part of “Slow” to the later two parts, and gives me some new handles on what happens in those as-yet-unwritten later episodes. So that’s encouraging. Wish me luck. For now, though, I’m going to bed.
Commentary
Yay! Good for you. Spring cleaning helps spring to actually happen, in my book. I’ve been vivisecting my own version of the Pile; around here we call it Fester. Carole swears it has fangs and drips acid from its claws. I love checking in with your blog.
posted by Jamey, Feb 28 05 10:12 PM
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