August 25, 2004

• Procrastination

  As I mentioned in the last 'blog entry, I have a tendency towards chronic procrastination. Not in the sense of putting things off, but in the sense of having no forward motion in my life.

  It's not true that I don't have forward motion; simply by sitting here breathing I have at least some forward motion. And yesterday I managed to knock a few items off my Master To-Do List Of Life. They weren't exciting or interesting things, just easily-accomplished ones.

  It always amazes me how much more freely I can move when I'm not weighed down by worrisome items from that list I mentioned. I've been trying to figure out if I weigh myself down simply so I can experience the freedom when they're lifted. I don't think that's the case; I think I choose to weigh myself down on things that are trivial, rather than the inevitable weight of larger issues.

  An example is that I had put off paying my utility bill for a few weeks past due. Not because I was out of money, but because I pinned the bill to the cork board and then neglected it. I'd wake up every morning thinking, "Gotta pay the bill..." (among other things). This is trivial. This is nothing. I should have paid it when it first came. In fact, when it first came, I thought, "I should pay this right now, while I'm thinking about it," and subsequently went back to reading emails.

  But when I imagine a world where I'm responsible that way, I wonder what other weights will sink in to fill the gaps. My experience is fundamentally neurotic, even though I have the ability to understand and filter out the parts of those neuroses that come from my broken neurology. The world, for me, is a membrane of potential threats that cocoons me like shrink-wrap. Not because that's what the world is, but because that's what my nervous system makes it look like.

  So I think that what's going on is this: If the threat is an unpaid utility bill, then I can focus on that and worry about whether I'll have water and garbage pickup. Rather than opening myself up to the generalized neurotic dread that sometimes descends over me like the aforementioned shrink-wrap.

  The point I wanted to make here, though, is that for the past couple of weeks I haven't slept well and haven't dreamed. But the night after paying the bill (at the neighborhood center, handing a debit card to an actual person so they could swipe it through a machine and everything) I had vivid dreams and only needed 6 hours sleep. I woke up dancing, and not just because I had to pee.

  • 1:23 pm
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