Perils of procrastination
20 February 2011 08:32 AM Categories: Quotidian existence
"I want to give this day the finger," I told my husband as we climbed back into the car after our lunch (Greek food with beer, the beer making me sleepy and melancholy). More rain, pillowcases worth, immersed the car as we drove to the Seymour Marine Discovery Center at Long Marine Lab, a research center associated with UC-Santa Cruz, where we looked at creatures who live in water, leopard sharks, monkey-faced eels, hermit crabs, and sea stars.
This is what I should be doing: writing a profile of a family friend for my creative nonfiction class. The profile is due at midnight tonight. I've written about 500 words, mainly background, and I have to take what little information I have and make it into something else. I've known about this assignment for weeks. It hung (it hangs!) over my head, this prospect of having to identify someone, figure out what to ask them, and then characterize them in an article. And now I'm in a hotel room, writing on my blog, looking at Facebook, talking to my son about the evolution of whales and where the turtle king lives. I'm exhausted from too little sleep, from silent upheaval.
In college I often got up at 4 a.m. the day a paper was due and wrote wrote wrote. I was a philosophy major, so in many cases supporting my arguments wasn’t difficult. I don’t remember having many problems with the writing (I do remember the morning I accidentally deleted a religion paper on my typewriter/wordprocessor and then recreated it in a few hours). But this is difficult, my brain is slower, there is the distraction and tension about the process and I'm not in my usual writing spot.
Not much to be done about it. I’m in Santa Cruz because it’s a long weekend and we’re celebrating my husband’s birthday. I’ll just have to push through, get as much as I can this morning and finish up by midnight.
So let me tell you about Father A., a friend of my husband’s from college, the man who was searching for something for years. He started life as Robert, bopped around the world until his early thirties, and then became a Serbian Orthodox monk. I spent an hour talking with him, but should have spent two, have never heard back on my follow-up questions. Instead, I have a very detailed story of his conversion, years in the making, I have my husband’s stories of the college years, and I have an ability to bullshit for a while. Still, it’s not going to be very good.
WIsh me luck.
Image by Alanna@VanIsle.
blog comments powered by Disqus