I am a world-class procrastinator.
You have only to look at the length of time between my blog entries to know that.
I am terrible at going to bed on time, and even worse at getting up. I set multiple alarms, one of them all the way across the room, but in the morning I very rationally get up and reset them for ten or fifteen more minutes of sleep, and then ten more, and every morning I run out of time and rush out the door with almost-dry hair and possibly mismatched shoes. I would love to be one of those people who gets up early, calmly irons a shirt and drinks a cup of tea while scanning the international headlines, effortlessly applies makeup, and saunters into work ten minutes early with a smug expression.
But I’m not one of those people.
I never have been. I was never great at doing my homework first thing after getting home from school (my main motivation to finish was my parents asking me, annoyingly, night after night, whether I had finished my homework yet, for the love of God). Honestly, that’s one reason I’ve hesitated about grad school—do I have the discipline to get my work done? Even now, I have nightmares in which I have a college research paper due the next day; and not only am I not finished, I haven’t even checked out the books yet. Which is not too far off the truth, in some cases.
I often end up having scrambled eggs or grilled cheese for dinner, because I can’t seem to focus early enough in the evening to make something that requires more than five minutes of cooking. (Don’t worry, I eat fresh fruits and vegetables too, but there are not a lot of fancy dishes prepared in my kitchen, at least during the week.)
Right now, in fact, there is a load of towels tumbling for the second time in my dryer. They were just washed and dried last night, but left in the dryer overnight, and I would ordinarily ignore them for a few days, but I need the dryer now for the clothes which have been waiting patiently for a week to be laundered. (Come to think of it, there’s also a bag of dirty dry cleaning which has been resting beside the door for a month. Does anyone know a good green dry cleaner in Beaverton?)
The Lives of Others, the highly acclaimed best foreign language film at the Oscars this year, has been languishing beside my TV for three-and-a-half months. (I love Netflix because there are no late fees—and because they have almost every movie ever made, and because I love getting those red envelopes in my mailbox, which never cease to feel like a present sent just for me—but it also indulges my natural laziness. If I won’t get charged more, I have no incentive to watch it now, therefore I will not watch it now.) It’s not even the German subtitles; I’ve kept English-language movies nearly as long.
When I check out a library book for three weeks, I don’t start reading it for the first two-and-a-half, and then I end up with fines because of course I want to finish it after it’s due.
There’s a perpetual pile of newspapers and unopened mail on my kitchen counter, bills, pizza coupons, yard cleaning services and political flyers and credit card offers and weekly magazines, all demanding my attention. I clear it all off in the occasional organizational frenzy, but the very next day it regenerates itself.
My general goal is to clean the house every other weekend. Guess how often that happens. Ha ha ha ha ha.
I’m a little embarrassed to admit it, but I saved all the Living sections (pardon me: now it’s “How We Live”) from the Oregonian while we were in Europe, because I like to read the comics every day. I read the front section, too, but not with as much zeal. It may seem unimportant, but for me it’s like talking to thirty different friends each day, and if I skip several weeks, I will miss things that happen to them. I might still get the big news, but I miss the small everyday happenings that make a friendship, so to speak.
I know it’s a little OCD, but I really wanted to read them all, even though I knew it would take me a while. So for the past six weeks, I’ve been trying to read at least one a day, sometimes several, and meanwhile I had to put each current day at the bottom of the stack, because I had to read them in order. (That’s the other thing: I don’t like to read or watch things out of order. If I watch a TV series, I have to start from the first episode and work my way forward. I hate having the ending of a movie ruined for me. Unless a book is really boring, I never skip ahead. I don’t know why, exactly, except that I like the surprise of discovery, and not knowing more than the author/creator intends me to know. Does that make me crazy?) So the stack has continued to get a little smaller every day, but it still stared reproachfully at me as I moved it from dining table to coffee table to floor to dining table again.
When I was out of work, I made myself a list of about ten projects. I think I might have accomplished two of them. In my own defense, though, that’s kind of a different issue, involving financial caution and mild depression. For instance, I need to have my piano tuned, and I was home all day for several months, but I didn’t want to spend the money on it; so now that I have a job, I have the money, but I have no time off to be home for it. Same thing with having the carpets cleaned.
Not to mention the recipe file I wanted to make, the paint I need to touch up in the living room and master bath, the closets to reorganize, the novel to write, etc.
This weekend, though, I really set myself to work:
- I watched The Lives of Others on Friday night, as well as Miss Pettigrew Lives for a Day (I’ve only had that one for six weeks) on Saturday, and returned them. Incidentally, I recommend them both.
- On Sunday, I read all the accumulated Living sections and recycled them. (Today I sat down for lunch and read today’s and only today’s comics. It was a great relief.)
- I finally cleaned the house, took out the recycling, washed the dishes, put clean sheets on my bed, finished all that at 11:00 Sunday night, and then couldn’t sleep because I’d been rushing around like a crazy person all day. (If I had started at 10 AM, or on Saturday, I would have been finished at a reasonable hour, but first I had to sit in my pajamas and read my stack of newspapers, and clean out my email, and go to the movies….)
One last disclaimer: I don’t want you to think I live in squalor, because I really don’t—there are no vermin in my kitchen, no piles of clothes on my bedroom floor, and no stacks of yellow newspaper surrounding all my furniture. But I am not good at going beyond the bare minimum required to prevent embarrassment at my mess, should I ever have to be rescued by firemen.
Oh, and a picture of the new haircut is forthcoming, as soon as I have a day in which I manage to both style it properly, and have someone to take a picture of it…. (And, I am also very proud to report that I created my own bullets in this post using HTML tags, which I took a level 1 class in last week. Aren't you impressed?)
But now I have to go get the damn towels out of the dryer, or I’ll just have to tumble them again later.
Talk to you soon. Probably.
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