kfitz

Must. Write. Again.

‘Djever have one of those days where you find yourself expending energy trying to make everybody happy and only succeed in pissing everybody off?

Yeah, me neither.

A colleague of mine who’s been reading around in here noted the other day that Planned Obsolescence has of late become much more about my personal life (not personal personal, but, you know, personal) than about work; I’m not blogging my thoughts about books, about academia, about writing, even about television anymore. And I’ve been wondering since what that’s all about. Part of it is that the personal has been where the action is, of late–the condo obsession and the marathon training have taken over what little available brainspace I have. The rest, alas, is not taken up by deep thoughts of a bloggable nature; instead, it’s committee meetings and student crises, program reviews and visiting writers, this memo and that memo and the million and one stupid details of my administrative life that are constantly threatening to fly completely out of control.

The result of this overflow of nonsense is that I’m not watching any television, I’m not reading (except in the sense of desperate cramming-in of text in order to remember what it is I’m teaching), and I’m certainly not writing. And the result of that is an increasingly boring blog and an article that is becoming more and more overdue by the day. So overdue, in fact, that (as another colleague pointed out is her own tendency with the missed deadline) it now must be a work of genius in order to justify its lateness, and so it grows later and later and later.

I have to get back to work. To writing. I have to find ways to prioritize that time, in the same way that I’ve managed to prioritize my running–by doing it first, by keeping it relatively contained, by refusing to schedule anything else during that time. I need one inviolable hour every morning, one hour at home, before I go to the office, with no email, and no blogs, and nothing else but me and this damned article. One hour a day, and it’ll eventually get done.

The trying-to-make-everybody-happy problem, I’m not sure I can solve so easily. At least not without a licensed therapist. But the writing, I ought to be able to control. At least better than I am now.

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