As is right and proper for someone who pretends to be a writer – I enjoy words. At current, I am engaged in three games of phone scrabble – so far I’m holding my own against an onslaught of two letter words and meaningless archaisisms (which is not a word.) Also, for the first time this year I have three books ongoing at the same time.
This is rare and always has been. I am linearly minded, a serial connection of the worst variety. As competent as I sometimes pretend to be, I am unraveled by the necessity of doing each task in order and to completion before embarking upon the next. Objects and goals that are not so neatly delineated cause me a great deal of stress – how do I clean my apartment when I’ve yet to finish this website, how can I possible write this short story when that novel remains unfinished? It’s a terrible conundrum, this approach to life, and my only solution is to trick myself with false finales. Instead of finishing a novel, I finish chapters. Instead of finishing a website, I finish pages. Everything in steps, clean and distinct. In such a way, I pretend to work in pseudo-parallel, when in reality I’m as rigid and numerical as always.
The three books are – Moon is a Harsh Mistress, a famous Heinlein novel, the Outliers, about success and what it takes according to Malcolm Gladwell, and Never Eat Alone, a book about being a salesmen. It’s an eclectic mix, pretty standard fare for me, and I’m enthusiastic about getting some reading done this month.
Outside of those more important considerations, I manage to squeeze by. In my MBA classes, I’m doing decent though hardly exceptional. In my earliest years, I was very good at school but come high school, my motivation slipped. I did acceptably, even rather well, but not amazingly well and not as well as I might have. The problem then was simply a lack of desire – it all seemed rather pointless and I had better things to do. That may or may not have been true but why spent two hours getting an A+, when fifteen minutes was enough for an A-. The logic was there even if the prioritization was not.
In college, my motivation was restored and I responded thusly.
Now that I’m back in school, I’m faced with a similar trade-off between time, effort and, motivation. The eagerness is largely present – I enjoy business research. It’s actually very fascinating. Law, accounting, marketing, I find these subjects intrinsically worth the effort to understand, at least mostly so (Accounting is very dry), however I genuinely lack the time. I should not really be all that distraught – I’m on pace to get, at worst, a B in my classes but that is actually quite embarrassing. I could, or should, be able to easily get an A/A+ in any one of these classes if only I had the time to apply myself completely. That time does not exist and so I scramble through as well as I can. Again, I will pass everything and with room to spare, but there is untapped potential there, made frustrating because, though the motivation exists, the capacity to act on it does not. What I’ve described is, of course, life – my protests will and do fall on the ineffably deaf ears of existence at large.
This time I spend writing here is an unnecessary diversion that I could probably do without but it keeps me writing, a goal in itself. My novel is about 1/3rd finished and when I sit down I make great progress. It’s all slow going though – there’s just too much to get down and through and with. I can only really squeak out a few hours here and there mostly because I require a chunk of time to even really start. These entries are relatively short and also impromptu. I make no effort to edit them and I have no outline or plan when I start. Some come out better than others, but they all come out equally spontaneous. Chapter writing is the exact opposite – much more meticulous, much more editing. It’s the equivalent of spending those extra two hours getting the A+.
So far this weekend I’ve hiked and played tennis and eaten at a restaurant I’ve never been too. No genuine complaints, only a continual cry for more time. Maybe soon. There are plenty of plans in the works, just nothing worth writing about.
And so I return to my scrabble games. Three ongoing, all close enough to be interesting, and all easily played between breaths and breaks. It’s the one task I seem to be able to pick up and drop without hesitation. Perhaps I’ll scrabble my way to mental good health. First for everything, I’m sure. Also, adz is apparently a legitimate word.
