Homework Blues

Kinda frustrated with not putting up a new post in a while. Unfortunately, procrastination plays a major part in my homework routine so I'm still playing catch up. Mercifully, the term is almost over. 

I want to get a few more things up and out of my notebooks and online. These are the fragments that lost steam after the allure of a good opening line wore off. They are the evidence of me needing a better system. 

I think it's that I get caught up in time. Of course we write in time. We draw, we play, we work, we live in time. There is no getting around it. But for any creative pursuit, you need to let yourself slip out of time, or at least that's when I'm at my most productive. I need to let the process breathe, to grow the words on the page. If I'm lucky, I'll get caught up in it, find it taking me somewhere that I hadn't planned but that is exactly where I need to be. In my experience, it's almost impossible to get into this kind flow when you're worried about how many more minutes until you have to get back to the office, or that you really should go pick up the dry cleaning before the place closes on a Saturday.

I know, I know, written like a true procrastinator, right? Time waits for no man or woman, and here I am waiting for it to make an exception for little old me. I let it become my excuse because there is some truth to it-- there's a lot to do in a day. There's work and schoolwork and if it's not that, there will always be random ongoing chores. 

But I think time expands to a certain degree, depending on what you demand of it. Think about it--on certain days time seems to go on forever because you have just one more thing to do. No, it's not limitless but there is enough of it, more or less, if you need it. If you push yourself to take it. (But after a weekend of writing papers, I'm kinda tired just thinking about this...)

There's got to be a better way for me to outsmart myself, my procrastination, and let myself feel that timelessness in the moments I do have. There's got to be a way to create some mental space, not so far from where my head has to be to get me through the day, but a place that I can easily slip in and out of. So that when I get the chance, I take it. 

Know, accept...strategize? One of my profs said that when he was in grad school, one of the things that helped him develop a more regular creative output was to break it down into something so small as to be utterly attainable on a daily basis. Five hundred words a day. I think I can do that, even with a nasty amount of homework still breathing down my neck for the next month or so. I'll try to keep migrating sketches from my notebooks here in the meantime, but I'm hoping it won't be too long until I'm slapping my usual five paragraphs up here daily (or close to it)...