Tag: procrastination

Insomnia or Procrastination?

~ Kate Yemelyanov ~ 1 Comment

I spent the better part of this weekend working on applying for a federal job in Michigan that would be awesome. I also spent some time working on an essay that I want(ed) to enter in a contest. I put the desire in tentative past tense because I believe I have missed the deadline for submitting (and presumably first completing) it. My work was leavened with a lot of pleasure reading (The Pale King, Year of Yes, and Reality Hunger), a fair amount of child transport, and an unconscionable amount of clicking back and forth between Facebook and Twitter as though something important were going to happen there.

It is now 2:30 AM on Monday. I have to be awake in four hours. I have given up on weaving phrases from the job announcement into narrative descriptions of my professional experience and abilities. I have not yet had the heart to find my copy of The New Philosopher to see if the deadline has been influenced by the Leap Year. I ought to go to sleep and yet I am awake. It is quiet and no one wants anything from me!

This is not the first time I’ve done this to myself in the past week. On Tuesday night I actually pulled an all-nighter, initially for the joy of being conscious and alone in a quiet living room (Dino Spouse having driven to South Carolina for an in-person farewell to Soldatik before the latter’s departure for Korea) and then out of professional frustration at the backlog of work I’ve been piling up. Wednesday did not work out terrifically well, though I did enjoy my afternoon nap after I fled the office early for fear of conking out at my desk.

Speaking of which, now I am ready to sleep.

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White Tennis Shoes

~ Kate Yemelyanov ~ Leave a comment

One of two things attributed to Ayn Rand that I don’t hate is her lecture on procrastination. (The other is Anthem.) The white tennis shoes in question belong to the former. Rand cleaned her white tennis shoes as an act of writerly procrastination; moi, I try to clean out the music on my iPod so that I can have non-distracting* music playing while I write, specifically while I write for the paying gig. Then I blog about not writing. An hour has passed** and no words have been added to the document, which I need to send out by lunchtime or so. Good job, self. Good job.

* Distracting music is apparently all music with words. Could someone please invent a tagging system in iTunes that allows me to sort songs into “distracting,” “non-distracting,” and “only suitable for staring wistfully into space”? The iTunes radio algorithm seems to work for this sort of, but that’s only helpful when I have wi-fi.

** A small part of that hour went into making oatmeal for Mouse, who woke me with a hug and “Oh, you’re so warm and you smell good!” I make no apologies for being distracted by flattery. Screwing with my iTunes library, on the other hand, is a sure path to Hell.