The Whooshing Sound

For my birthday, my good friend gave me this t-shirt:

startlingly appropriate

As a frequenter of the same website, I remember seeing this shirt while I was supposedly studying for the last finals I’ll supposedly ever take. At the time, I almost descended on the “Add to Cart” button in a frenzy because it was obviously speaking to me and MEANT specifically for me – how else would it just so happen to pronounce exactly what I was doing as I was doing it (my brand of procrastination manifested in taco-truck runs and Jackass marathons). Luckily, my dwindling bank account numbers convinced me to restrain my twitching fingers on the track pad. When I received the shirt, I thought, DAMNIT this would have been so much more APPROPRIATE three weeks ago, when I WAS procrastinating. Then I had the sad realization that, out of the many things I planned to do directly after getting out of school, two weeks later, I had done exactly none.

The first and perhaps most pressing concern is a means of income.This has been the most confusing issue in my life, really for the last five years, but much more centrally in the last 14 days. Having decided to eschew graduate school, and get straight to the work, I hadn’t really decided whether I wanted to start climbing the ladder or just get a job to pay the bills. Being stuck between these two very different paths, I was (am?) rather paralyzed with indecision. My plans to GET A JOB included a long list of self-pronounced deadlines, including update resume, apply at this-and-that, create a profile on so-and-so job site, but without knowing what I want to do, ALL of these things become troublesome. I’ve applied to a few places, looked into temp agencies, and talked to the people I intern with about what I could do, but I haven’t really settled on one thing. I suppose now it’s a matter of what happens first.

The other major thing I intended to do was start writing everyday. You’d think, with the many, many hours of free time I now have, that this would have been a relatively easy thing to accomplish. It seems this is not the case. It may have been a mistake to buy a used copy of Force Unleashed for my Wii, and then decide to check out what all the hubbub about Community, Breaking Bad, and Mad Men was. Luckily, I’ve only managed to look into Community so far, and as a relatively new show with a short format, I was able to break away from the obsessive marathoning fairly quickly. (In my defense, how in the HELL am I supposed to not get addicted to this???)

Even when writing about writing regularly, I get distracted. By Community – it really is an awesome show, if you haven’t seen it yet, you should definitely check it out…

But writing! Everyday.  A little bit. This is my goal, and this is my first day of making that happen, absolutely. Hopefully, the potential eyes that will be reading will shame me into keeping to it.

The last major thing I wanted to do in the last few weeks was a major clean on my room. Since I’m done with school, I had a lot to throw out. That, I definitely did do. Here’s how I succeeded:

 

the surface of this desk has not seen the light of day for weeks, months - even years

 

Here’s how I didn’t:

 

squalor - I KNOW WHERE EVERYTHING IS IN THIS SEEMING CHAOS

Small successes.

I love deadlines. I like the whooshing sound they make as they fly by.

-Douglas Adams

Posted by novellyderivative on April 5, 2011

https://novellyderivative.wordpress.com/2011/04/05/whooshing-sound/