Pooped. Always pooped.

When you’ve got Things You Really Should Be Doing, there is no finer time to put bootees on a brown dog:

Sometimes I’m really good at using procrastination to light a fire under other things I’ve been meaning to be doing. It’s a way of legitimising the not-doing: I avoid doing the washing by cleaning the fish tank; I avoid fixing a mistake in my knitting by fixing a lesser mistake on a different project; I avoid working on a story that needs editing by taking a second job as a window licker. That sort of thing.

Today I’m procrastinating by following the dog around with my camera and calling it blog-worthy.

I know, you’ve got a whoooooole day to squander.  Plenty of time, right? You can cook, knit, do the sudoku, do the cryptic crossword, and still have heaps of time left over.  Plenty of time for writing/whatever thing you were going to do today.

Probably not.  I have this conversation with myself nearly every weekend.  I start working on a crossword over breakfast, and then the next thing I know it’s 12:30, I’ve done nothing but drink endless cups of tea and doodled in the margin of the paper. Time wanders away from me like a bored cat when the string it’s playing with goes limp, vague sense of disgust and all.  I’m of two minds about this: one is that, well, I subscribe pretty heavily to the belief that rest and idleness aren’t the same thing: that just because I haven’t written as much as I had planned (or knitted, or cooked, or whatever) doesn’t necessarily mean I’ve wasted time.  I think resting and moving slowly and quietly are really valuable things and good for the brain.  But on the other hand, I’ve got goals I want to get to, and I’m not going to get to them without concentrating on actually, y’know, doing shit.

My To Do lists are a bit stupid, too.  I inevitably cheat and pad them out with things I’ve either already done or really will do anyway, so that I can tick their boxes and feel smug that I have completed “make to do list” and “brush teeth”.  Plus, they get out of hand quick and then get too long and a bit overwhelming, so I end up losing them somewhere over the course of my day, and playing hours of Auditorium instead.  (Actually, just posting that link was risky: I nearly got sucked into playing it again. But man, what a fantastic game.)  I can’t be the only person who has this problem, because the net is chokkers with productivity “tools” and advice sites.  One of my favourites is now do this, which lets you put in a list of things to do, and then it flashes them up to you in your browser, one by one.  As you finish, you click “done” and it goes to the next one. The idea being, of course, that you focus on just one task at a time and chip away at it until it’s done.  (What a novel concept.)  But for me, this has the same problem of getting overwhelming: I quickly end up with a huuuuge list and feel uneasy about it and go off and do something else entirely.

Over on Zen Habits, the author Leo recommends choosing just three things in your day that you want to get done; your Most Important Tasks or MITs.  This is getting a little bit too, uh, “management” for me, but there’s a lot of value in the idea that you forcefully limit your To Do list to just a couple of things and concentrate on those.  My problem has always been that I end up spending an hour or so deciding which of the many things I’d like to do qualifies as a Most Important Thing.  Bam: time suck.

Just before starting this post: I put some bread on to rise, began roasting some vegetables for the soup I’m making, and got halfway through yesterday’s sudoku, which is now sitting next to me on the floor (normally I have some knitting with me as well).  I tell myself I’ll do some writing while the bread rises/vegetables roast, and that I’ll doodle on the sudoku (or knit a few stitches) “while I’m thinking”.  What kind of bullshit is that?  I am not a multitasker.  My Mumini is, to a spectacular degree, but I am not.  I have to do one thing at a time, and it’s probably best that I just accept that.  Actually, it’s strangely liberating to remind yourself that there is a hard limit to how much you can do in just one day, or just one weekend, and proceed at a more comfortable pace.

So, how am I going to get around to any of the things I want to get done? By stopping. I’m going to close the RSS feed reader; close my email program (I just spent ten minutes deleting old emails, what a waste of time); and just open up my text editor and write.  I’ll keep an eye on those roast vegetables, too, but mostly I’m just going to write.  I’m not going to try and knit, surf the web, do the sudoku or anything like that while writing: I’m just going to write.  This is a novel plan for me. (Hah! Write! Novel! Geddit? Ah, nevermind, you’ll figure it out.)

Fig. 1: Artist's depiction

I have always used doing the washing as a procrastination tool: I hate that I do it, since I don’t like washing and I don’t think washing every single weekend is necessary or even useful, on the whole, but there you go.  I sit down, an empty block of time on my hands, and open up the file I’m supposed to be working on — and then, ooh, what do you know? I really must go and do the washing!  I hate it, and I’ve struggled to neutralise it, even when I can see it coming.  I won’t even ask for help, even if there’s heaps of washing to be done and the help would be readily and cheerfully provided.  Instead, I just stomp around, resenting the washing machine and its relentless consumption of my weekends and free time.  Which is hardly fair.  My washing machine is no monster, despite me calling it one all the time. It’s just me, being stupid and failing to prioritise properly.  If you were to ask me “which is the more important job for the day: getting all the washing finished or writing up that short story you’re thinking of?” I would say short story, but I would do the washing.  And then I’d get pissy about the state of affairs I had manufactured, wherein I run out of weekend and do not get any story written, short or otherwise.

And then the feminist guilt would get me.  I’d ask myself if all my fiery suffragette predecessors had risked social ostracisation, jailtime or worse just so I could spend my weekends washing work clothes, answer “no”, and get pissy with myself for failing them as well as myself.  Oy, the drama. The most frustrating part of it all was that I knew what I was doing — I could see the pattern in my head, I could see what I was doing wrong, but it was just so heavily entrenched in me to do washing every weekend, that my responsibility to it should be a higher priority than any ambition or creative pursuit, that I struggled to push it away.

I had a revelation while travelling in New Zealand. I had lots, actually, but this is the most relevant one right now.  When I couldn’t remember if I had worn something in my suitcase or not: if I can’t tell the difference by smell, no-one else can either.  While I am not employing this principle to the same degree in my daily life as I did while travelling, it did make me stop and think. My clothes mostly don’t get that grubby, unless I’m exercising (and I change for that) or unless I actually slop something on myself (granted, this happens frequently).  On the whole though, I can get a few wears out of everything without anybody noticing or sticky-taping signs to the back of my chair or anything. So I’m doing less washing, because I’m wearing things more times before I wash ‘em.  No biggy. It’s working a treat and my weekends rock a whole lot more. I’m astonished at how much more free time I have, and this is reconciling me to how much of my precious, short, finite time the washing machine has already eaten.  It’s crazy.

And if you think it’s gross, you just stand closer and tell me.

So, what is? I came up with a list to start with.

• Enjoying what you eat and drink.  Is there anything worse than choking down some bilge because it’s convenient? I accept that there are times we have to eat crappy, crappy food and drink crappy, crappy fluids because someone we care about (or are desperately trying to suck up to) has prepared it for us — pretending you’re crazy about pad thai when all you really crave at a cellular level is Froot Loops (or vice versa) is no mean feat, but we’ve all been there and it’s totally worth it if it means preserving the feelings of someone we love.  But scarfing down weird processed crap in the name of ease-of-preparation?  No sir.  Not for me. Good food and drink is too important
• Flossing and sunscreen.  Undeniably important.
• Animals and plants. Specifically, ones that intersect with your own life. I think there’s a pretty strong impulse in most people in this regard: that’s why we have pets and potplants, even if it’s just some poor struggling succulent on the windowsill. For me, the itch gets scratched through running in the park and around the lake, bushwalking and looking for platypuses, visiting my cats (who still live with the rest of my family) and a beloved brown canine menace that I cohabitate with and who has a love-hate relationship with my clarinet.  Without these, without access to animals and plants (and birds and interesting bugs and snails) I don’t know what would happen to my brain. Something gross.
• Finding your own voice. I can’t emphasise this enough. Working out which of the conflicting hunches, suspicions, prejudices, assumptions and “facts” in your head are yours and which are memories of things other people have said (and which you’ve adopted) is one of the most fundamentally important things anybody can learn.  Realising that you disagree with what someone else has asserted is really important: even more important is learning that that’s completely okay and does no damage to your relationship with that person.  I think it’s really easy to accidentally adopt the viewpoints or assumptions presented to you by people you look up to, even if you look up to them for reasons completely unrelated to those viewpoints or assumptions. And when you learn that: holy cow, stand back, because you’ve just found your own voice and it’s got shit to say.
• A good scarf in winter. Does a lot more for warmth than you’d think.
• Yoga in the morning. Wine in the evening.
• Something to work on. I tend to think of Freud as one-third brilliant and two-thirds offensively barmy, but I do agree with this idea, often attributed to him: “Love and work are the cornerstones of our humanness”.  I think that love and work are two key steps to happiness and health.  A goal to work on, combined with an environment of love (for others and for yourself), may not guarantee happiness, but I think it’s a strong start.

I don’t know where all this gets us.  I think these things are important, very important, but I’d be interested to hear challenges or contradictions.  I’d also like to throw the question open to all and sundry, to the birds in the hedges and the twits in the street: what do you think is important?

Well, faithful chums, M and I are off for a month to New Zealand. I can’t wait. We depart tomorrow morning, so consider this your official warning that this here blog is going to take a one-month hiatus while I prowl around the wilds of NZ, getting my boots muddy and sampling much of their fine wine. The finest wines available to humanity!

Hasta la vista, babies: I’ll see you come February.

I love NaNoWriMo: I think it is an awesome idea, and fun and exciting for writers of all walks.  It reminds me why I love writing, that exciting moment where the story’s force becomes apparent and it just sweeps you along as its tool for articulation — that kind of writing is exhilarating and so much fun.  But November, well, this November, has been a pretty insane time for me. Unexpectedly so. (Pause to recall that last November was bookended by the death of a relative in the early days and Salmonella poisoning in the last days.) I’m a legislative editor by day (I fight crime in my lunchbreaks) and November is the last chance that legislation will get for the year, because our Parliament rises in December and doesn’t sit again until February.  So there’s a big push on to get plenty of papers up to Parliament, and I’m inescapably caught up in that.  And it has made it a bit challenging to find the energy during the day, or once I get home, to burp up the required 1667 words every day.

And on top of that, I have other stuff on too.  Social things, family things, knitterly things (*waves hand vaguely*).  You wouldn’t believe the backlog of cryptic crosswords I have to get through.  Not to mention the reading I haven’t been doing.  Who’s going to finish reading the complete collection of Agatha Christie’s Quin & Satterthwaite mysteries if not me, hmm?  And how am I supposed to do that while writing NaNoWriMo?  That’s just silly.

Look, I know the whole point of NaNo is that it’s a challenge.  It’s tough to find the time in your daily life to pursue your dreams and goals, especially when you’re not getting paid for them and ’specially especially when you know that nothing is going to achieve them but to sit down and do the butt-in-chair work yourself.    That’s why people do NaNo: it is a semi-official, earmarked block of time with a deadline and a goal and a bit of fun to it.  You can say to family and friends “I know I’m a bit ratty and peculiar at the moment, but it’s cool: I’m doing NaNo this month, remember?” and everyone can relax and attribute your new-found need to eat nothing but Jatz straight from the box to that.  It’s just that I am not finding it in me to meet this challenge this year.  I’m way behind.  Really, really really behind.

At the time of writing, it is November 24.  Late in the day on November 24.  Even given some sort of illicit stimulant, I could probably only hope to make around 4,000 words today, leaving just 6 days to make up the rest.  Current word count: 22,000 (and I’m rounding up).  I need another 28,000 words to finish. That’s exhausting.  And I’m not going to push for it.  My value as a person and my ambition as a writer are both firmly intact if I fail to write 50,000 words by November 30.  Even if I made that mythological 4,000 today, I’d still need to make up 24,000 over the next 6 days, which is about 4,000 per day.

(Actually, now I break that down and write it out loud, that sounds almost feasible.  Stop it stop it stop it.)

Everyone loves bagels. Well, I do.  I freaking can’t get enough of them at the moment.  I’m having them at breakfast, then taking them to work and toasting more for lunch. I keep wanting to give them away to people and make them admit to me how fantastic they are.  On Saturday I put a batch of slow-rising sourdough bagels on to rise.  They, uh, didn’t.

The dough itself was quite good: strong and springy without feeling too dense or lifeless.  But the magic wasn’t there, the sourdough starter simply went back to sleep in the fridge (I assume) and the final baked items were, uh, sturdy.  (Not pictured.)

These were supposed to accompany us to Sydney on Sunday afternoon, so when it became apparent that I had baked up a batch of bad-gels (GET IT?), I quickly and grumblingly threw another lot of dough into the breadmaker and whipped up a second batch, using my standard recipe (3 cups of bread flour, 1/4 cup of sugar, pinch of salt, 7g  dried yeast and enough warm water to bring it all together), in a matter of hours.  I’m seriously proud of myself for getting that second batch together in such a short space of time (I think they took about two and a half hours, all up), and they were damned good:

Mmmm, bagelicious.

Still hunting for ways to distract yourself from NaNo?I recommend some frenzied baking and a jaunt to another city for a while.  It did wonders for slowing my word count progress.

Beans!  Delicious, recently-roasted Alan’s Blend from Coffee for Connoisseurs, waiting to be ground.  I’ve ordered from there a few times and I heartily reccommend the Espresso Cioccolato.  What has this to do with NaNo, you ask?  Well, if you asked, then I think you may need to look into your heart and find out how committed you really are to NaNo. How, I insist on knowing, are you maintaining the energy to keep charging on with those thousands of words?  What do you do when you desperately need a break, but honestly can’t go to the toilet one more time?

I wasn’t much of a coffee drinker until a couple of years ago, and then M began roasting his own beans and I learned that all those times I had told people I didn’t like coffee, I just meant I didn’t like crap coffee.  I like really good coffee, which is surprisingly hard to come by in Canberra.  Or maybe I’m just not looking hard enough.  A cup of coffee every morning with breakfast is not essential, but it’s certainly very nice.

I broke my camera this week.  The lovely big LCD screen on the back of it isn’t working properly.  Far from this putting me off photographing things, the added level of mystery this has given my photography is encouraging me to take way more shots than I otherwise would.  And I still love that macro setting:

Can’t you just smell it? Wouldn’t a cup go down smoothly right about now? And then you would have so much energy for banging on with NaNo!

Walk the dog until she’s exhausted (lightweight):

and then dress her up in your latest baby knits:

1. Baking banana bread!

I love making banana bread (well, it’s really a cake — there’s nothing bready about it, not even the shape, but “banana bread” just rolls off the tongue, so let’s go with that): I used to work as a cook in a childcare centre, and I made banana muffins about once a week, and developed a feel for how extra-simple cake mixes go together.  I tend to make banana bread by feel alone. It’s one of the few baking recipes that I do this way, and it makes me feel like a tremendous clever clogs.

Cream the butter and sugar, add eggs and spices and vanilla, mash your banana in, etc. etc.  I’m not going to write out the whole thing here: the internet is positively groaning with recipes for banana bread.

Suffice to say, delicious:

Fluffy, moist, not too crumbly, delicious. I am pleased.  Made the house smell good.

2. Making some chai syrup!

Okay, I acknowledge that this photo could be damn well anything — simmering monkey goulash to feed my ravenous carinvorous rhinocerous or something. But it’s not: it’s chai syrup and you’ll just have to take my word for it. Steeped black tea, brought to a rolling boil with cinnamon, cloves, bay leaves, honey and ginger in it and then boiled until it reduces down to a thick syrup.  For six teabags and about a litre of hot water, I probably have about a quarter of a cup of syrup, rich and intense and completely delicious in hot soy milk.  Love it. This too made the house smell good.

3. Making bagels!  I did not photograph this process, because, while beautiful and poetic to me, I recognise its limited potential for photographic fascination for others (especially at my inept hands). I often think it would be lovely to be able to use photography to convey the subtle, exciting glow of rising dough; to really show the firm, silky texture of a good dough — a dough that will be springy, robust, and rise magnificently.  I can’t quite take a photo yet that really shows how smooth and rounded the bagels become while they undertake their second rising on the warm spot on top of the fishtank, where they become discrete little bagels-to-be, plump and smooth, light and firm, and ready to be boiled in water before being eggwashed and baked.  Damn, I make mighty fine bagels.  They’re fantastic. I wish I had one right now, but the kitchen’s waaaaay over there.

4. Have you forgotten about NaNoWriMo yet? I totally have.  I’ll be over here, stuffing myself with banana bread, chai and bagels with banana bread and chai on them and not writing a thing.