Fatty Anxious Front
I scrawled a little caricature of Mark Rothko at lunch from the cover photo on this book that I'm reading:
I should punch it up a little more, exaggerate a few things (that forehead!) even more and fix some silly errors that disrupt the quick charm of the thing. I should also make myself post more of my new work online.
Today I'm burbling with anxious, fatty thoughts. Where an anxious mood can often keep the mind lean and jittering with a kind of ready-for-anything paranoia, it that mood stays too long it balloons into a nervous lethargy. I still have the restless bobbing of my right leg, but I'm not compelled to do anything. Perhaps it's more accurate to say that this particular mental weather front just makes it difficult to complete things, to follow through.
My simple trick to get myself back to work is to work on one thing -- only one thing -- for just five minutes. Usually those five minutes inspire five more and there's progress. But this fatty thought mood I'm carrying has me huffing and puffing by the second minute. By the fifth minute, my mind's exhausted and feeling worse off than when I was just lethargic. These ballooned anxious moods are still restless, but with consumption, not production. They laze about, grazing on distraction and reveling in the guilt from getting nothing done.
Even writing this, I can't keep myself from flipping to different windows, checking e-mail, reading RSS feeds and responding to instant messages. I know those are just distractions, but there's nothing else I can motivate myself to do and when my mind is this way, I coddle myself and tend to these petty wants.
But it's just a mental front. Like the weather, it'll pass. Maybe better habits while working would keep these things at bay. Maybe any system of habit must make some allowances for bad days and slack days or collapse. A good diet should give you skip days, you know? I can't really tell right now.
I haven't run in like a week and a half. The good news is that before I hurt my back, the act of regular exercise was habitual enough that its absence is still palpable. The bad news is that I'm at a kind of edge where I know if I go another few days I won't notice that absence anymore at all. Then the next time I try, I'll be starting from scratch again.
All that said, I've drawn every day since I said I should start doing just that as kind of an early New Year's resolution.
I should punch it up a little more, exaggerate a few things (that forehead!) even more and fix some silly errors that disrupt the quick charm of the thing. I should also make myself post more of my new work online.
Today I'm burbling with anxious, fatty thoughts. Where an anxious mood can often keep the mind lean and jittering with a kind of ready-for-anything paranoia, it that mood stays too long it balloons into a nervous lethargy. I still have the restless bobbing of my right leg, but I'm not compelled to do anything. Perhaps it's more accurate to say that this particular mental weather front just makes it difficult to complete things, to follow through.
My simple trick to get myself back to work is to work on one thing -- only one thing -- for just five minutes. Usually those five minutes inspire five more and there's progress. But this fatty thought mood I'm carrying has me huffing and puffing by the second minute. By the fifth minute, my mind's exhausted and feeling worse off than when I was just lethargic. These ballooned anxious moods are still restless, but with consumption, not production. They laze about, grazing on distraction and reveling in the guilt from getting nothing done.
Even writing this, I can't keep myself from flipping to different windows, checking e-mail, reading RSS feeds and responding to instant messages. I know those are just distractions, but there's nothing else I can motivate myself to do and when my mind is this way, I coddle myself and tend to these petty wants.
But it's just a mental front. Like the weather, it'll pass. Maybe better habits while working would keep these things at bay. Maybe any system of habit must make some allowances for bad days and slack days or collapse. A good diet should give you skip days, you know? I can't really tell right now.
I haven't run in like a week and a half. The good news is that before I hurt my back, the act of regular exercise was habitual enough that its absence is still palpable. The bad news is that I'm at a kind of edge where I know if I go another few days I won't notice that absence anymore at all. Then the next time I try, I'll be starting from scratch again.
All that said, I've drawn every day since I said I should start doing just that as kind of an early New Year's resolution.