Tuesday 23 November 2021

Day 72: Nanny McPh*$%

72 days......that's 2.4 months. How much is a respectable amount to have written in 2.4 months? How much was I planning to have written in 2.4 months?  You know the expression, 'When life gives you lemons, make lemonade'? Well the fact is that making any kind of juice is a lot like writing.........you get through a whole pile of raw material, put in a load of work, and get a tiny dribble of juice plus a ton of waste for your efforts. It's not clear its even worth it, especially when juice in a carton is so cheap! 

The truth is writing takes enormous amounts of will power, to keep going even though my brain works hard to get me to do just about anything else......fold laundry, read news, drink gin, lie face down on the floor. Yesterday I actually had a great writing day - nailed 3,000 words, good ones too. I built up to it with a disciplined regime of regular note-making over the weekend, to make sure my thoughts didn't get too stale and scattered while i was distracted with weekend stuff. I did loads of chores the day before so i wouldn't have any urgent stuff to distract me first thing. I got an early night, with zero booze and some exercise so my had would be in peak-racehorse condition.  Then I got up, did the porridge, collected the socks, ended the arguments and herded the children/guitars/gym kits to school. And I came home and started writing. It felt easy. I even scored the phrase 'it's just not cricket' at the end of a paragraph, which was inordinately pleasing.

By pick-up time at 3.15 I was feeling kinda burnt-out and vacant, but I gave myself an easy time by stopping off at Maccy Ds on the way to gymnastics, and then having a but more screen time than usual. Then I did it all over again, got the kids settled and went in for an early night. Tuesdays they do after-school club, so I get a longer work day and wanted to make the most of it.

But my head was too busy to get to sleep right away. Then the little one started up coughing. So today began bleary eyed. I got one kid packed off to school only. The little one is sufficiently sick to stay home, but not sick enough to give me an easy ride. Turns out it's going to be a snack-bitch, glitter-force, arguing-over-everything kind of day. and somehow I've got to wrestle a covid-test up her nose. She's halfway through Nanny McPhee at a hard-negotiated volume of 10, and I'm revising my day's writing goals from 2000 words down to one blog post and try not to commit fillicide.

If I'm honest though it's not all her fault. I mean, the keeping me awake all night didn't help, but experience tells me that even without the coughing, my brain would have been reluctant to play ball today. I can work myself up to a big effort like yesterday, but it uses up will power, and there just isn't an infinite supply of the stuff. It takes time to replenish it. Unless the deadline is close enough that you just power through, in the same way one's body might start digesting its own muscles towards the end of a marathon. But you can't do that too often. Sometime I think its worse if you try to spread it out across regular bite-sized sessions, because every time you do one, you condition your body further. Each essay marked makes the next essay *more* difficult, just as each time a rat gets shocked when it stands in one place its resolve to avoid standing in that place strengthens. 

And a good chunk of the effort is about just getting going each time. I think of it as like juggling. Before I can get going, I've got to get my thoughts in order, which is like tossing balls up one by one, and getting into a comfortable rhythm with each one before I add the next. Any time I get interrupted, take a break, the balls all fall to the floor, and I gotta start over. So I much prefer to work in long chunks when I can, so I know that the effort of getting the balls into the air will be worth it. You can waste many many hours/days/weeks just tossing balls up into the air without ever getting to the next part.

Well this bitchin' brain-dump has to end sometime, so why don't I try to finish up positive. Since the last post, three weeks ago, I've examined a PhD, given a talk, examined a set of dissertations, drafted some funding application ideas, attended a bunch of talks, done a bunch of supervision, written a bunch of references, ran a bunch of miles and I dunno, probably a ton of other stuff I've forgotten about.  Oh and I applied for promotion! That was pretty time-consuming, but if I get it I'll finally catch up with the salary I was on 5 years ago : o

And......the book is coming along. I didn't finish chapter 5 yet. Or chapter 8. But I made progress on both. I'm taking part in a debate run by our undergraduate philosophy society tonight, so I'd better think about that for a bit today. I also need to read some transfer documents before thursday. And if i can fob the girl off with sweets for a bit I want to start organising my ideas about holobionts, for chapter 8.  But first, I'm going to go lie face down on the floor for a few minutes to gather enough energy to get a stick up my daughter's nose. If anyone calls, tell them I'm busy writing.

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