|
|
10.08.02 ~ Making Time No excuses this time I have a problem writing. It's not that I don't have time. It's not that my life is so busy, so crammed with activity that I can't sit down and write an entry every few days. It's not that when I'm not writing I'm out serving some higher purpose. It's not that my time is so precious that I have to spend it on other things that are more worth while. It's not that I have anything at all better to do. I know this, you know this, we all know this because--let's face it--if any of these were the case, the entries that I did write would be a heckuva lot more interesting. No, the problem is simply this: I do not make time. People talk about this process of "making" time a lot, especially to me because I so often complain about my supposed lack of time. "Make time." It's kind of a cool phrase, really. I like the way it implies that one can actually manufacture more time than the 24 hours one is given each day. As if time were some kind of product that you could just produce more of if needed. It's something I've always wished I could do. In moments of extremely wishful thinking I imagine that if I just had enough time, I could accomplish all the things I think and talk about. Which is a lot of horsefeathers, really, because we all know that given unlimited time, I could think of unlimited reasons for doing diddly squat for eternity. I am just that good. No task is too great or too small for me to think of some way to put it off until later. Later. Another term I like, or at least I appear to like it quite a lot since I use it so ungodly much. Everything is going to happen later. Nothing I want to do ever actually gets done until it absolutely has to be. The things that have no deadline get assigned the dubious timeframe of "one of these days". One of these days I will memorize "Galadriel's Lament" from Fellowship of the Ring. There's no reason why I haven't yet. I've memorized "The Way Through the Woods" by Kipling, "The Lake Isle of Innisfree" by Yeats and "Get Drunk" by Baudelaire. I can recite the entire "Highwayman" by Noyes, and that poem is both longer and less dear to me than "Lament." I know I have the capacity to memorize "Lament" in a matter of two or three days time, all that remains is to pluck the volume from the shelf, open to the correct page...and begin. As an angsty Danish prince would say, "Ah, there's the rub." Beginning is just not my strong suit. I do not like beginning things, whether they are household chores or novels. It's the first penstroke, the first dirty dish, that's the more difficult, and after that, it's a breeze. Things never take any time at all once I've begun them. It usually takes twice as long for me to sit and ponder how I need to do something than it does to actually get up and do it. There's a story--or a part of one anyway--that's been stuck in my head for a while which contains a gentleman who is, for reasons utterly irrelevant to the current rant, immortal. He has been immortal for a very long time, and is currently rather jaded about the idea of time. During a conversation with the main character, he holds forth at some length on the concept of "enough time". His thoughts on the matter are abridged below: "People think that if they just had enough time they could accomplish anything. Ask anyone you like what they would do with immortality and you will get a long, gushy list of things that person wants to do but hasn't because they haven't got enough time. What they don't realize is that time's not the issue. When it comes to whether or not one is going to achieve great things or accomplish one's goals, it isn't a question of time. It's a question of desire. Anyone who wants something badly enough can and will attain it. If you can't accomplish something, you blame time, but really it is you who is to blame. Obviously if you did not accomplish it, you did not want to, or at least you did not want enough. Time is not an issue. Great things can be made in moments. Great nothings can take a lifetime." I've written his monologue out two or three times in different forms, and naturally I never took his advice--my own advice--to heart. It seems I do not hear myself when I talk. So from now on, new rule: Marie will stop thinking about doing things and do them. Marie will not fritter time pointlessly away any more, at least not willfully. Marie will not read the same web comics over and over just to avoid having to do anything else. Marie will actually do things every day, and most of all, Marie will stop complaining about how she doesn't have time for anything. +++++ The above was partially brought on by something Ursula said in this rant (about creativity and insanity, oddly enough). Somehow hearing it from someone else besides Bill and my parents for once got through to the withered, unused part of my brain that houses my willpower and a resounding "Make Time!!" echoed through the empty halls that once contained my motivation. So here I am, at the desk, writing on a Wednesday, and I don't even have to feel guilty for putting off chores in favor of writing because before I sat down I made dinner, cleaned the bathroom, did dishes, swept the kitchen floor and tidied up the clothing-strewn bedroom. How 'bout that? +++++ In other news, we went camping in Julian from Friday through Sunday. It was a lovely change of scene, and it did not even matter that we spent the entire afternoon Saturday doing homework because it was so nice to just be somewhere else for a change. The weather was perfect, I got a Friday off work, it was all good. Nothing remarkable happened, at least nothing really worth writing about, but that does not mean that it was not thoroughly enjoyable. It does, however, mean that this is all you will hear about it, as perfect weekends make for bad entry material. +++++ Fiction writing class proceeds apace. The most useful thing about it so far is that it has given me a taste of how a broad range of people react to different things in stories. Most of the class seems to get rather hung up on anything that looks like a vocabulary word, as I noted in the last entry. I am itching to tell them all to buy a dictionary. However, it is good to note, as I am growing to realize that the general populace may not even own a dictionary, much less are they actually willing to use one. +++++ Have reached Chapter 5 "A Conspiracy Unmasked" in Fellowship. It's been slow going because of all the reading I've had to do for class. I wish I had been able to read Fellowship to my family when I read the last two books of the trilogy to them. The first book has a great deal of excellent "hobbit talk". I am at odds with C. S. Lewis and Tolkien's other advisors, who told him that no one but he would be interested in listening to his hobbits chatter. I love hobbits, and would gladly read pages and pages of them chattering about "the small doings of their fathers, grandfathers and lesser relations." There is something so soothing to the soul about these sunny little people who can find so much to talk about in everyday life, even when they are sitting on the edge of ruin, as Gandalf says. I was listening to an old Def Lepard tape that Greg gave me a while ago, and for some reason the lyrics (which I have heard before, but which never made much of an impression until now) stuck in my head as being highly applicable to the One Ring. You
want to stop but you can't say no I may have mixed up a few words, but that's the chorus as I recall it. Obviously if it's a song by a band called Def Lepard, the odds are good that these lyrics refer not to the Ring or even to power in general, but to some substance or other of questionable legality which is likely procured in little zip-lock snack baggies. Throw in the fact that the title of the song is "White Light" and yeah, I'd say it's a fair shot that the song writer (and probably the rest of the band) had some issues with hallucinogens or something equally unhealthy. However, this snatch of the song just hit me as oddly reminiscent of how Frodo and Gollum both exhibit emotions concerning the Ring which appear to be at odds to one another: to paraphrase Gandalf again, they both hate and love the ring. So I was pondering the similarity between the ring and illegal drugs when I happened to leaf through my copy of J. R. R. Tolkien: Author of the Century by Shippey, and there, in the beginning of the chapter about the portrayal of evil, was the word "addictive." I read more and discovered something I had forgotten: Shippey compares the Ring to drugs and the Ringbearers to addicts at some length, drawing al the same parallels that I did. This made me happy and smug for the rest of the evening, and I spent at least five minutes after reading it convinced that I was a genius after all. Then the cynical part of my brain punctured my happy little moment by pointing out that I've read Author of the Century before, and probably would never have made the connection between the book and the song lyric in the first place if some part of my brain hadn't remembered Shippey's comparison. I am just no fun to live with. |
