Hello, readers. Are you still out there?
It’s the middle of December, and I haven’t written here in a long, long while. I was busy during November, as you may recall, attempting NaNoWriMo, trying to write as many words as I could on one story in 30 days. I succeeded, in a way, and then stopped writing. Maybe I tired myself out?
And now I’m back. Today is the first day of the rest of my blogging. Who knows what tomorrow will bring? Today, though, today I’m writing whatever comes to mind. I can do this.
It’s Sunday night, and I’m anxious about work tomorrow. I have a lot of stuff I need to get done before the end of the year, and the time crunch is primarily my fault, so I’m mentally beating myself up about it. One piece of me wants just to run away, and another, more serious piece, feels a sense of responsibility to at least show up and try to get it done, and the battle rages in my head.
And while the battle continues, my body sits here in front of the computer or wandering from room to room, with the pressure to do something, anything, warring with the pressure to run and hide, and as a result, I do nothing but feel guilty not doing it.
I guess this is what anxiety feels like? I don’t like it, no, I do not.
I just keep… not doing stuff.
I have done things this weekend. I finally topped up the automatic transmission fluid in my car, for example. My gas mileage has been getting worse, and when I’m driving uphill, the transmission does not shift until very very late, and when that’s happened before it was because my transmission fluid was low. I had bought a quart of it a week ago, but I just never got around to checking and topping it up until Saturday. Saturday, I checked—the dipstick was bone dry, bad bad bad—so I dumped the whole bottle in there, and the rest of the weekend it’s been shifting as it should.
I had bought a shirt from Target back when I was trying to piece together an Old Luke Skywalker costume, but then I bought a full costume, and it arrived and was great, so instead of just eating the cost of that Target shirt I took it back to Target last night.
I’m in a Secret Santa gift exchange with an online group I’m part of, and I had most of the gift purchased, but I wanted to add something local (my giftee is on the East Coast.) Today, in the spirit of getting things done, I went to a little shop in Sellwood and bought a cool artists’ rendition of my favorite street in Sellwood and a book about Portland to include in the gift. Now I have to package it up and mail it out.
And, as you can see, I visited the glorious Bins (a.k.a. The Goodwill Outlet in Sellwood) and, while looking for cheap boots I could wear as part of my Old Luke costume, found the perfect toy lightsaber! Such a serendipitous find. I can’t believe it.
…that’s it, that’s all I can think of for Getting Things Done this weekend. There’s paperwork I could do, and of course packaging up that gift for shipping, and laundry, and probably lots of other things. I can feel the anxiety returning to my brain.
Wait, I can add one other thing: I just wrote a 500+ word post for my blog, something I haven’t done in weeks. Whoo-hoo! That also counts. Hello, readers, I have missed talking to you. Thank you for sticking around!