Snap that thing thread, cont.

1 04 2013

There is one area in which I’ve never been good, will never be good, and. . . I don’t mind.

I’m talkin’ ’bout writing, specifically, deadline-oriented writing. I always wait until the latest possible moment to start something, and I always pull it off.

Always: there may have been times in which I didn’t, or turned out something so terrible that I might as well have burned past the due date, but excepting those few moments of freak out (paralysis in assembling an undergrad policy paper) or granted-ahead-of-time extension (grad human rights paper), I git ‘er done.

Now, latest possible moment doesn’t mean last possible minute. A research paper requires, duh, research, and the latest possible moment for a long and complicated piece might be, say, a week or two, while the lead time for a short and simple piece is a day or two. The point is that I’ll almost always have more time than a day or week or two, but will wait until I can feel the deadline before cracking open the word processor.

I have no control over when that feeling arrives. I’ve mentioned previously that I am not a particularly intuitive person and I don’t trust my gut, but this is not anything I’ve been to reason my way through. I can tell myself Get to work!, but unless that stress switch gets flipped by something beyond my comprehension, it ain’t happening.

And I’m fine with that.

That might be the one thing which distinguishes my writing procrastination from every other kind of procrastination: the stress is productive, creative, even. It’s not necessarily a pleasant experience—long days fixated on a required task are rarely pleasant—but I don’t hate it, either. Instead of anxiety scattering my mind, the pressure charges my concentration. I don’t lose focus—I gain it.

Like I said, I don’t know why or how this works for me, I just know that it does, and have been taking advantage of this. . . skill (?) for as long as I’ve had writing due.

~~~

. . . Which is another way of stating I’m up against a ghosting deadline, and may be a spectral presence on this blog for the next week.


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Je regrette rien

11 06 2012

I do not regret quitting the part-time admin position.

You know, the one that stressed me, that C. urged me to leave, the one for which it was a terrible time to leave, the one for which I gave a month’s notice of my leaving, the one, finally, I left?

That one.

I was still feeling a little bad as the job petered out by the end of May, and didn’t much think of it the beginning of June (starting summer research position, starting teaching), but this past weekend, I thought, Aaaaaahhhhhhhhhhh.

It was just. . . nice not to have to worry about the job, to feel that space in my head and my chest and just be able to breathe.

It’s not that there’s no stress in my current two jobs (well, okay, the research position is damn well near stress-free: the only tough part of that job is hauling my ass outta bed at 7:20 am, or whenever Soterios Johnson chimes in with the local headlines and weather), but it’s just regular.

No drama, no nooses, no vice grips: just the ordinary mix of crap and boredom and inquiry and provocation and restlessness and swearing and laughs.

Given my initial trepidation over leaving what could have been a long-term job, I’da thought I might just rethink my ducking out after having ducked out. Nope.

I may finally be learning to own up to my regrets—but this ain’t one of ’em.


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Movin’ on up

4 01 2009

Let the great apartment hunt of 2009 begin!

Yes, it’s official. I will ONCE AGAIN be moving. Lessee, that’ll be 1, 2, 3, 4, ah, my 5th move in 2 1/2 years. I’m about on the same schedule in NYC as my first years in GradCity.

I’m also almost twice as old and have more than twice as much shit. And I don’t have grad school friends who are willing to move me in exchange for 1) pizza and 2) a willingness to help them move. Which means movers. . . .

Sigh. Actually, I’m going to try something new, this time around. My last couple of attempts at both finding and moving into an apartment have been terrifically stressful—which made no sense to me, given how many (25? 30?) times I’ve moved. There’s nothing new to this: get boxes, pack boxes, find movers, move, unpack boxes. Simple.

But the last search left my stomach muscles bunched and the move itself led to a brain-crushing migraine that let up only slightly over the following few days. I would like to avoid that.

So this time around, I’m going to avoid all mention of the search and the move, treat it as just another set of tasks for the month. Hey, I don’t mention trips to the grocery store, do I? Making the bed? (Okay, so I bitch about grading and laundry and the cat box, but. . . pssshhhhht, let it go, all right? Allow me to pretend that I greet each day with equanimity—please?) Yes, I understand that talking things out can lessen the emotion around those things. I don’t understand how that works, but I know that, sometimes, it does.

But not always. My transition into my current apartment was difficult: however straightforward my roommate and I thought we had been with one another, it was clear that what each heard was not necessarily what each had said. This was upsetting to me, and I mentioned to a few people how unreasonable I thought she was being. Then I reconsidered: well, she probably thinks I’m being unreasonable, too. So I stopped discussing it, saying only that it wasn’t a good fit. The situation was tense enough; why feed it?

And then, at some point, things eased. Yes, behavioral changes on each of our parts were key, but I don’t know that I would have been prepared to accept those changes had I not stopped fulminating against her.

Similarly, in grad school: my adviser and I were not a good fit. Oh, at one point, I took too much pleasure in the thought of leaping over his desk and strangling him with his tie, but once I settled down, I turned my attention from him to the dissertation. He was polite, I was polite, and I got through my defense.

And the lesson is? I don’t have a damned lesson. Sometimes it helps to talk, sometimes it doesn’t. I couldn’t shut up about the last move, and had a miserable time, so this time, I’ll try the opposite.

In a few weeks, I’ll let you know how—if—it worked.


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