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August 28, 2004
unfinished business
Okay. I know the name of this site is Exciting Confessions, which would lead one to believe that I might actually have… ahem… something exciting to say once in a while, no? But here’s the deal. All I’ve got to confess right now, my deep, dark secret, is this: I have a hell of a time following through with things.
No, I really mean it. This is becoming ridiculous. So far today, I have started, gotten distracted from, and quit doing the following activities, in roughly chronological order:
(1) writing in my journal (meaning I meant to write my usual three pages and only made it to one);
(2) reading the cover story of the New York Times Magazine (whatever; David Brooks is annoying anyway);
(3) making my hair flippy with a curling iron (so right now the left side of my hair flips out and the right side is kinda… not so flippy. Little bit odd looking, but I’m not planning on leaving the house, so no big, right?);
(4) scraping the white paint off of my chest of drawers with a razor blade to reveal the lovely, Anthropologie-esque weathered yellow paint underneath (so, um, yes, the carpet around the chest of drawers looks like a dandruff bomb exploded on it);
(5) pinning pictures cut from old magazines and science textbooks and Chinese newspapers up to the wall of the upstairs hallway, as a cool collage-style wall covering (three square feet of wall completed, aaaand… I’m spent);
(6) washing the dishes;
(7) picking the tiny white flowers off of the basil plants in the garden (okay, in my defense, the basil plants are fully shrub-size at this point in the summer –I could probably hide behind these guys and not be seen – but still. What would it have taken, another two minutes, for me to just have gone ahead and picked off all the freaking little flowers?);
(8) scrubbing the tub (eh, who wants to finish that anyway?);
(9) hanging white roman shades in the office (I brought the shades up from the basement and spent 15 minutes detangling their pull cords from the labyrinth-like knot they’d formed, but failed to actually then hang them);
(10) knitting a gray sash-like thing;
(11) creating a new logo for my website (not entirely my fault… I can’t for the life of me figure out how to get the programs on Patrick’s computer to recognize the cool new fonts I downloaded. I’ve done this on other computers successfully… what’s the deal?)
So the question arises: why do I do this? Why do I obsessively start new projects before I’ve finished other ones? Why can’t I follow through with anything? I’m beginning to think it’s a pathology. That I’m addicted to the creative surge that comes from starting a project and envisioning all the ways it could turn out, but that once I get my fix, I crash – and like a junkie, I’ve gotta search out my next score.
I keep trying to find the one perfect project that will keep me focused, keep me excited, keep me going from start straight through to finish. And I can sometimes. I’ve knitted whole hats in a day; I’ve worked on my website late into the night; I’ve filled page after page with writing. So maybe this is just a phase, something that will pass on its own. Meanwhile, I’ll keep starting projects, and I’ll do damage control for the unfinished ones – vacuum up those paint chips, finish the dishes, clean up my messes.
And I mean, I’m posting this entry. Do you see the irony of completing an entry about being unable to complete things? Heh.
Posted by sarah at August 28, 2004 06:22 PM
