Listless, Pacing, Fed-Up, Frustrated, and Ready to Explode...
Okay, the title is bold and perhaps over-dramatizes my mood. But today is one of those days when I wish I had a little more variety, a little more meat, or a little more change in my daily routine - because right now, I am brimming with this anxious, nervous, unproductively trapped energy and I don't know how to constructively overcome it.
About a week ago, my left-eye (and not in a TLC kind of way) started twitching. This happens - especially when I am sleep deprived, reading too much, or spend too many hours staring at a computer screen. Rarely however, does this persist for a week or more. This causes me to think that there might be something more serious simmering under the surface.
Anyway - I need to vent and complain and irrationally laud my frustrations at any clean surface. I am at a terrible point in the semester - the point where I should be working on these papers that all come crashingly due in about two week, but I just can't bring myself to do it. My students have a huge assignment due and they've been flooding my office hours, my email in-box, and taking up a lot of time - and I am just persuasive speeched out. I spent the afternoon at home doing laundry and just pacing and trying, but failing to be productive. Lately, I feel claustrophic and constricted and I hate my apartment - I hate that I've outgrown it, that I have books piled everywhere, and that I don't have sufficient space to entertain. I hate it - but I don't have the inspiration or the nerve to look at a new place (although one might have falled into my lap this afternoon). I don't want to read Richard Neupert, I don't want to watch movies that I otherwise want to see (it's just a passing ADD-attention problem I think - not feeling like sitting down and just passively watching) so instead I just pissed away a day and a night... nothing to be proud of - and the worst part was that I didn't quite shake the rut, I suspect that I'll wake up at the crack of dawn to go to class tomorrow, my eye will be twitching, I won't feel any more contemplative academic, I won't start that Classical Film Theory paper, and my students won't have figured anything out on their own... what a fatalist I've become.
While I am physically gripped by this sense of restlessness, I just explored my emotional restless in a 10-page autobiographical screenplay modeled somewhat, after a Bridget Jones-type story. I based one character on myself and while I didn't exactly intend it this way, she's completely defensive, hides behind her work and professional successes, and remains utterly incapable of expressing what she wants (this is problematic because the first rule of screenwriting is to pick a character with a strong, evident goal - and well, I / my script-equivalent, don't seem to have one). It's weird sometimes how a character / words take shape on the page, and in this case, it's enlightening in a troublesome way.
I don't know what happened... but I've acquired a lot of emotional baggage.
I will say that I may have topped my all-time procrastinator behaviors today. I did two loads of wash, changed the filter in my Brita for the first time in like 6 years, and cleaned out my round-brush, which is a long gross process involving tweezers. God help me, no wonder my eye is twitching.
posted by lmjasinski at 10:24 PM
