Monday, May 29, 2006

Sweat

One hard thing about writing work is that there is scant evidence of that work. Egg will go to his job at 9, and, if I were to write all day, when he came home at 6, nothing would have changed. Even the kilobyte count of my harddrive would be more impacted by downloading a song than the filespace of eight hours worth of writing.
Also, when there's more obvious work to be done, it's hard to make writing the number one priority.
So, instead of writing much this week I mowed the lawn, packed the living room and front room, moved the furniture out of said rooms, swept the driveway, weeded and mulched the flower beds, swept the porch, cleaned the garage (to make room for moved furniture) and repacked a bunch of book boxes.
Impactful and somewhat satisfying (plus, such heavy lifting alleviates the non-running guilt). I also cooked twice and cleaned the kitchen at least twice. This work can be seen immediately, if someone were to look.
But, no one's really watching. I suppose, like writing, the joy of it is in the doing rather than in the recognition for having done it. I look around and I admit that I want the credit, that I want someone to notice--wow, what a great system--the to go boxes on a platform, the thrift-store boxes to the side--or, wow, you started that beastly lawn mower yourself?
Unlike Dorthothy Parker, I love writing; I am happy to have mown the lawn.

2 comments:

Dr. Write said...

the mown lawn. (you can see where this is going).
I don't want to hear about you packing boxes. It reminds me that you're moving, and I'm doing a pretty good job of living in denial. So just talk about all that writing you're not doing. What are you not writing? I'm not writing a lot.

Trista said...

Totally lame that you're leaving.

When are you going?

Is there a playdate in the future?