The dotted line

A Sunday can feel really long when you wake up before 9.  That that is an observation I can make is probably a sign that I should go to church more often.

I have completely moved out of my old room, and into Girlfriend's (former, bigger) room.  Because my mess has now turned inside-out, my new room is more crowded than my old room ever was.  Even so, I imagine I will sort it out eventually, mostly.  Maybe I should make a rule of some sort, such as: whenever I have to look for something, I clean up what I had to look through?  Do I have time for that?

A few things have come together recently to get me thinking about personal contracts.  One, most recently, was an article about "decision fatigue" claiming that studies are indicating that the ability to decide to do stuff is a finite resource, like the ability to lift heavy things or stay awake.  It's certainly tempting to think that I, myself, am particularly susceptible to this, inasmuch as I keep finding myself lacking the mental energy to change what I'm doing.  It's intensely frustrating that writing, while exciting, is an expenditure of mental energy.  But maybe this is a bit of self indulgence.  Ultimately, whether we call them character flaws or find new, fancier terms for them, these are things we need to get around or else not be the people we want to be.

Stumbling on The Freelancer's Survival Guide, by Kristine Kathryn Rusch, was another thing.  For a few days this past week, reading that book free on her blog was my preferred form of procrastination.  I'm not qualified to assess her advice (although she sounds authoritative, and I'd like to be able to recommend this book), and I'm still digesting what I've read, but it got me into the mindset of imagining myself writing for a living, and what kind of lifestyle it would take to actually make that work.

She also included a lot of cautionary tales about contracts which, along with my regular work, got me thinking about precise language and how to write good and bad contracts.  Not that that is my area of expertise competence.

Then there's the likelihood of moving, and the possibility that I will do so without a job like the one I have.  Let's be honest--I'm imagining myself moving after Girlfriend even without a job on the other side, even if I shouldn't be thinking like that at all.  But if I were to write full-time, or even part-time, I'd need to get to a point where 1,000 words isn't very good for a Monday.

One thing Rusch asked is what gets you out of bed and to work in the morning?  I'm not sure I'm answering the question in the spirit in which it was asked, but I thought about it: routine, expectations, inertia.  It got me thinking that if I wrote myself a job description, perhaps I could hold myself to it.  Could I import what's helpful in my real job to a self-employment situation?  Those helpful things, as I see it, are: a commitment to work (not just be present) for a fixed amount of time, and a clear hierarchy of priorities.  I don't spend much energy deciding what projects to work on, because that's hardly negotiable.  I don't spend any energy deciding to go to work (and extremely rarely have the energy to decide not to go to work).  These are the things I started working out language to describe, in hopes of setting up a useful status quo.

I might have drawn something up that day when I got home, if it didn't start to sound very self-indulgent of me, and like a distraction from actual writing I could do.  So I didn't, and surprisingly enough, I don't think I got too much of anything else done instead.  So the idea came back.

Maybe today is the day after all.  More to the point, perhaps, maybe I was thinking about this wrong.  I don't have to define my responsibilities when I don't have a job.  (In fact, I should probably set the terms of what to do if I am unemployed while I am employed, and still remember what a workday feels like.)  I could--and maybe need to--define my responsibilities concerning my free time.

When I started writing this post, I didn't think I would do that today, but at this point I'm considering it.  When I stopped writing "Nenle and Death" for now, I thought I was done writing, but maybe I was just done with that.  By the same token, I didn't expect to have the energy to write anything after this post, but now it doesn't sound so hard.  Also, there's a lot of day left.

2,160 miles at the equator

Where to start?  I'm not in the best of moods these past few days, and since I haven't been posting about things of major personal significance, I might have to start at the beginning, wherever that is.

Of secondary importance is this: the cold which I complained of in my last post is still here, though finally being subdued.  A visit to the doctor last Monday and subsequent blood work revealed that this is, in fact, no mere cold, but the dreaded mononucleosis.  I had gone to the doctor hoping to discover I had strep throat, as I have had many times in the past, and which can be killed with antibiotics.  But there is nothing to do about mono except treat the sore throat (which is finally going away) and stick it out.  Also, to my chagrin, I need to take still more time off from jujutsu, lest I risk rupturing my spleen.  So I am told.  It is a small risk of a big problem.  But at any rate the mono itself has provided an interesting undertone to what's actually been going on.

What's actually been going on is that Girlfriend, who I love, has moved to Washington D.C. to pursue a teaching position.  This happened relatively suddenly; the offer came about a month ago, and while we had both understood that she would move if that sort of opportunity came up, it still left only a month to actually get used to the idea.  Really, I didn't get used to the idea, either--that's what I'm doing now.  So as of Friday evening, my girlfriend and I are separated by a distance roughly equal to the diameter of the moon.

This is probably the beginning of the end of my time in Seattle.  It is probably the homestretch before that future period that I have been thinking of as actual adulthood.  At 26, I might be overdue.

The past few days have not been productive.  I figured I'd give myself a couple of those.  But now it's time to get things together, at least on some axes.  Over the next few days I want to produce a final draft of another short story, tentatively titled "Nenle and Death," which should come in 50 to 100% longer than "Burned at the Stake."  This story has actually been percolating as long as four years--I wrote the earliest draft on a plane in what I believe was 2007.

It's about loss and separation.  I'll put that out there to preempt psychoanalysis when people actually see the story.  So, no, it's not really a coincidence that I'm deciding to finish it now (in preference of a shorter story I am at a similar stage with, about dragonslaying).