I’ll come clean with you guys: I can’t post my next review as I haven’t taken the pictures of the beer yet. All of the words are on the page, poised and edited and ready, but the shiny eye-candy necessary to meet my arbitrarily high standards does not yet exist.
I could have taken them last night, but I just wasn’t feeling it. My motivation was buried under a pile of emotional laundry and I hadn’t even finished folding the last load of guilt and apathy. My ethos is still sitting in the washing machine, getting moldy and developing that unmistakable ” two-week old wet clothes funk.”
As I’ve gotten older (I’d like to say matured but that’d clearly be a lie) I’ve found that my productivity comes in erratic waves. I’ll be motivated to write prodigiously for weeks on end, then hit a wall where words seem foreign and unclean. I’ll commit to a job around the house and burn all of my energy to do it in one fell swoop, crashing harder than a rookie Nascar driver when I’m finished.
My productivity is schizophrenic. It can’t focus to save its life.
I feel like my brain is a cat chasing a laser pointer; running like a little furry maniac after a red dot that I’m never able to catch. I’ll chase the dot down hallways, up walls, undernearth furniture, even into places I probably shouldn’t go.
All I can see is the dot. The dot is all that matters.
Until I get tired. Then the dot is just annoying. It’s still there, dancing around on the carpet, manipulated by some unseen giant who takes sadistic pleasure in watching the chase. But I can’t be bothered to chase. Screw the giant. I know it will still be there, taunting me, reminding me that I’ve got things to do.
But for now, I’m out of breath. And I think I’m mentally torturing my cats.
I get to a point where I actually develop reverse productivity. I feel like I should undo the work I’ve already done. It doesn’t make any sense, I know, but I think it all the same. Any work I do is below my standards, and on days like today, the delete key gets hammered to the point of abuse.
I almost deleted this post.
So here I sit with a crap-ton of stuff to do, but very little desire, energy, or creativity to do it. I know I’ll get it done eventually, but I get all boring and existential, wondering why guilt is simultaneously my most powerful enemy and most trusted ally.
There’s the dot again. I suppose I should go chase it.
Envy.
Literature and Libation 