Day 46, 22 Feb: Stream of Conscious 2: Motivation

Norfolk Terrace, Day 46. [1:52] Stream of Conscious 2: Motivation

[resuming from Day 45’s exercise of timing this:] No! The timer from the last entry has run out! I guess I’ll just be asleep at 2. You see, if you don’t know me, I have this habit I have yet to break in my life and it’s a really bad one. Could be why I’m not as tall as I’d hoped. Sleep. Late hours naturally flow into my schedule like the wind, one thing hits and then all of a sudden the dead silence of the night without the clamour of other voices gives me a lucid clarity to my thoughts and creativity (okay, timer went off now. New time: 10 minutes). Do you realize that I’m writing in a stream of consciousness fashion? An internal monologue version of a blog entry. Structure has temporarily been derailed and thoughts flow freely as the computer whirs and hums to the sound of my tapping fingers on the keyboard.

            Today I scratched the morning idea since I overslept yet again. I’m becoming ever-aware that I don’t want to waste away mornings. They’re more precious than I once imagined. Besides, I don’t want to miss breakfast of two pieces of bread peanut buttered and banana-ed! Yes, two new verbs of glory just added to the lexicon of the English language. Boom. Now onto the day!

            I had to pull away from an early (i.e. before noon) start reading in the library and settle with the task yet to be done this week: laundry. I spent quite a bit of quid on a double load, thanks to having too many shirts and having to wash my sheets this time. I actually ran back to get the sheets. Yeah, I looked quite interesting running in jeans, converse, glasses, and all with periwinkle sheets in my arms. (For the record, I did not choose the periwinkle—there was no choice.)

            WhatToWriteWhatToWrite…yes! I finished the laundry, had lunch in my room after preparing it for eating in the library, and while eating, I got into a glorious trance of watching youtube videos of Ben Howard’s music. I felt ashamed that I had some of his songs and never listened to him. He actually came to the campus tonight, but strangely, I am proud of my regret at not going—I know another artist I like now and there wasn’t really a chance for me to go to a show sold out for a while.

            (5 minutes left on the timer!) I finally made into the library, went to the top floor in one of the very corners of the building where the wind whistles and planted myself down at a window desk that looks out at the ziggurat terraces below. It’s a beautiful view. I read a decent bit, forcing myself to read til page 150 and taking longer than desired to do so. I stopped at some point and listened to the Goo Goo Dolls album from 2007. Again I was embarrassed by not listening to it before. I couldn’t stop listening and I was one song shy of listening to the whole album by the time I got back to work.

            I picked up groceries and went for a run with Marie’s friend Lee (up for a few days from Brighton) and this run was wicked!, my eyes adjusted to the darkness better than I expected and so we ran without   turning on the torch (British term for “flashlight”) after the first minutes. I ate a microwaved meal, justifying it because I had to return to the library shortly.

            I turned out spending more time relaxing, searching “motivation” in youtube and coming out with this amazing video of (timer’s off! Two minutes) a man without legs or arms since he was born. Nick Vujicic (paused timer to look up his name) is actually an internationally known motivational speaker and he even has a music video in which he sings. I admitted a tear at some point. He tried to commit suicide by drowning early on, but realized he couldn’t do it. He had more to live for. His book title Life Without Limits seems to attest to his ever positive source of strength. This was the second, third really, time today that I succumbed to an unexpected distraction that benefitted me.

            Back to the library I entered into a high-speed reading mode faster than before and got to page 278 by 1:15 (started at 10). The timer’s off, the day’s done. If this is too long, another day. Night.

            Well, let me just say that there are times when I feel like self-discipline conforms one into a contrived half-complete ideal. Procrastination is the means of compensation when there is that gap between productivity and deadline. Yet there needs to be motivation underlying it all. Tonight in the library, book-weary as I felt, I ploughed through fields of lines, crops of words, to get ever closer to the harvest of the last page—when all the emotions and remembered scenes charged from the words have a complete storyline, archived into the mind.