In the midst of a less stressful living scenario, I have begun to work on personal faults. I would never attempt something at the scale of Benjamin Franklin by making a spreadsheet of weekly virtues up to 13. If he followed a virtue successfully that week, he kept doing it—or tried again but each week he successively added a new virtue. But what did he get out of it? According to his Autobiography, he successfully accomplished the performance of virtue when he failed at one, which he did at his thirteenth: humility.
And that was a roundabout way of saying that my “tracking-faults” project is much simpler, since I’m really only dealing with one (from which others, namely anxiety, stem): time management. Somehow, especially when the weekend rolls around, I grow giddy at the very notion of possibility, of the freedom to harness the vastness of time and the limits of the imagination to conceive of activities to do. At the same time, I’d underestimate the work needed to get done as well. Come Sunday mid-afternoon and the honeymoon phase with the weekend is dead over. The work just piles on.
I’ve simply tried being more aware of how I use my time. Yesterday I planned how I could get to bed by midnight—and I almost succeeded but for stupid creative inspiration to write another poem (2 hours to finish and refine it to my liking, for now) and then lose time just after midnight failing for 10-15 minutes to get the pictures on the blog beside text. Overall, I’m still trying. None of this oh-shit-I-have-200-pages-of-Emma-for-seminar-Thursday-and-it’s-Wednesday-afternoon…library day! Nah. No more.
Oh, sorry this has been quite the rambling: today was simple. Romanticism seminar on Blake, café conversations with Stef and James, a solid gym workout with Vinnie, and a much-need hour conversation with Katya (yes, I miss her). The seminar had its perks for picking up the topic of intertextuality between Blake’s poems and the engraved images that the original poems were written in, yet a two-hour seminar still feels too long to me. The café conversations were quite funny; you know, the whole middle-school-drama stories and what?-Americans-call-that-that? (So apparently, a flashlight is a “torch” for the British; but really? An electric torch? And a “hoover” is…a vacuum. I rest my case.)
Oh but the best interchange went something like this: [Me:] So you killed your goldfish [after it fell out of its bowl]?! [Stef:] I wasn’t going to touch it! On the way back to my flat, I stopped to take a few pictures from the elevated walkway, as seen scattered about on this entry. The first two are of the edge of Norfolk Terrace. The third image is of a main academic building, the ARTS building. It's miles, sorry kilometres, long.
The afternoon brought about a good lifting session with Vinnie. I’m not so intimidated by kilograms like the first day. I took a scenic route back to the flat—just a run to stretch out—and boom! I’ve been at this computer for a few hours, and the skype-to-Katya’s-mobile worked like a charm.
Yes, this is the point where I have to stop, since I decided to work on time management and write this entry at 19:39. Now the problem with writing a daily blog before the end of the day is what happens next? And my simple answer has to be TBD. (I’ll do one of those “seven hours later” things probably. Logging off.)
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