I am ready for Christmas in the sense that I've bought all the gifts I needed to buy and I've mailed all the cards I needed to mail. But not ready in any other sense. I am ready for a short vacation and a change of scene. That will be nice. But when I come back I'm going to have a lot to do.
Normally at Christmas time I write a profound little article about how wonderful Christmas is and what it means to me. This year my thoughts on Christmas are completely jumbled. All I can think about are my own inadequacies. There are things I want to do in life that I have not done. Christmas serves to remind me that I am getting no younger. This is the first year that I have not exactly felt joy at Christmas. I also do not feel like expounding on my favorite Christmas stories -- A Christmas Carol, the nativity story, It's a Wonderful Life. Stories are my thing, as my devoted readers probably noticed a long time ago. This Christmas season I just don't feel like writing about them.
I don't want to sit here and be all self pitying either. The fact is, I am my own worst enemy. I am the reason I have not done everything I want to do. I know, I had a sinus infection and am now sitting here with a terrible tension headache. That's a pretty good excuse. It's not really the problem, however. The problem is that I quit motivating myself on a long term basis after I left college. I'll have moments of inspiration. For example, the month of November when I wrote 80k words of a novel. I still can hardly believe I did that. Look at me now, I've quit taking the time to edit my new novel already. In fact, I'm mad at all my characters and really mad at my writing style.
I don't think I'm being hard on myself when I say that I am not doing enough. I need to focus on math so I can take the GRE in the spring or summer. I need to get my apartment in order. I need to spend more time at the gym. There's just a lot I need to do.
But talking about it does little good . . . Writing myself a grand little schedule on my lovely, new palm pilot does little good. I mean, if I'm not going to follow the schedule what does it matter to write it all out? It's just a momentary appeasement for that guilty conscience. The only way I'm going to change these problems is if I start doing stuff and refuse to quit. No "and's, but's or tomorrow's" allowed. Here I go.
By the way, Merry Christmas!
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1 comment:
The beauty of this blog is that your self-improvement doesn't depend on your reader's comments. You know who you are and you know who you want to be, and all of those fictional identifications of self are compendiums of your actions. As long as you're writing, you can call yourself a writer, and as long as your loving your fellow man you can call yourself a child of God.
Merry Christmas!
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