Essay: On not getting things done.

It has been awhile since I wrote an essay.  The average temperature was 45 degrees, whereas now it’s 60 degrees.* I haven’t written an essay since February and with each passing week it gets harder and harder to think of something to write about.

My brain feels flabby. This is not unlike the feeling I get when I attempt to do pushups after I “haven’t gotten around” to them for some time.  So it’s hard for me to think of things to write about and hard for me to sit down and write and just hard in general to get back on that horse/get back into the game/get on up/get to it.
And I love writing, so there really isn’t any reason I shouldn’t be writing.  It’s just that sometimes, when I get stopped, starting becomes harder again with every passing day.  I’d like to say this is a problem just with writing, but it happens again and again.  Currently, I’ve missed a few days** of my 15-minutes-per-day-of-weeding plan, and it is very hard to get back out there.
It seems when I don’t do a regular thing regularly that the “not doing” piles up larger and larger in my brain.  From the small slice of garden I can see right now, things haven’t much changed in a week and getting back out there wouldn’t be any big deal.  But in my mind I find it hard to break the “not doing” cycle and get back out there.
I’m not entirely sure why this happens to me, but I’ve got a few theories.***  One is that I have too many interests.  I stopped writing essays because the class I was taking started taking up more and more of my time.  But then I didn’t start again after the class was over because I was sewing a dress and that took up the time that was going to the class.  Aside from general household and body maintenance (cleaning, working for pay, exercising, meditating, keeping track of finances and cooking) here’s what I would love to be doing every day:  writing, gardening, sewing, playing and singing music, and reading.  A normal day means doing all of the things above in the parentheses and maybe one other thing from my love-to-be-doing-every-day list.  This means that once per week I get to do one
thing from that list.  It’s rather discouraging.
I would love to arrange things otherwise, but until a large chunk of my day doesn’t go toward working for pay, I have to grab the bits and pieces I can and integrate them the best I can.  Or, I could let go of most of those interests, which doesn’t seem like that much fun to me.  So sometimes things get left behind, sometimes things get dropped entirely.  Sometimes it just takes me longer to find my way back to things than I would like. But this is a good first step.
*This is a made-up fact.
** “a few days” is what I always use to describe the period I
haven’t been doing something periodical.
It can mean anything from a few days to a few months to a few seasons.
***My mind never shuts off, so thinking of theories doesn’t
ever stop.

They HAVE run their course.


Hey look!  The Oregonian wants to know if Ziggy and Family Circus have run their course.  Really?  Do you  need to ask?  In fact, while we are on the topic, here’s a list of  other daily comics that have run their course:
Hagar the Horrible
Blondie
Wizard of ID
Hi and Lois
Peanuts (sorry to say, but it’s true)
Garfield
Freshly Squeezed

Oregonian readers are blessed with two full pages of daily comics.  How about making them all comics of note, not warmed-over plots that have been recirculating for years.

Three sentence movie reviews: Safety Not Guranteed


In my mind, the best kind of movie is where a character, or characters, if you are lucky, go through some sort of transformation over the course of the movie.  Based on that criteria, this movie was fabulous: simple story, interesting and not unlikable characters, and kind of quirky. Overall, this movie was made of some simple parts, but they all came together so well that I greatly enjoyed myself, and was reminded that this is why I love to watch movies.*

Cost:  $1.00 from Videorama ($1.00 Thursdays!  How lucky am I?)
Where watched:  at home.

*Have you not heard of this movie?  Well, you should watch it because there is a reason it was the Laurelhurst Theater’s longest running movie of 2012.
Also:  the extras have a great story about how the text for the ad came about.