On getting your life together
Jan 16
I have so much fucking shit to do this year.
(I’m writing these words as the regrets strike me; please pardon whatever form they take.)
I work Tuesdays through Saturdays, but most of employed America works Mondays through Fridays. Consequently, no one gives a shit about Mondays, and neither do I, save for the fact that people’s expectations of me are even lower than they are later in the week.
Today, a Monday, I spent about 45 minutes lying in bed, trying to decide whether I wanted to play SKYWARD SWORD, SKYRIM or any other of the dozens of last year’s games I’ve yet to finish. I love many of them to pieces, but my backlog has reached critical mass. Where once I was merely anxious to make a choice, I now don’t want to play anything. If I can’t enjoy it all at once, why do any of it? Et cetera.
That doesn’t mean I won’t keep buying things. For as shitty as I am at playing games, I am really good at buying them. Games I won’t finish, food I’ll allow to rot, books I’ll never start, highbrow magazines whose typography I’ll admire but whose contents I’ll almost certainly ignore.
I’m the reason people write stories about “the new poor.” Insufficiently educated, unambitious, not especially marketable, completely undisciplined, one hardship away from financial ruin. I’m employed at a newsroom I love, and I’m compensated well there, but I habitually test the upper limits of my editorial paygrade. If anything goes wrong — and I mean anything, in an occupational environment where The New York Times writes up a cutthroat like this guy as “something of a darling among media thinkers” — I’ll be well and truly screwed.
Back in bed, at the end of those 45 minutes, I laughed. Loudly. Here lies a man, hung over, not quite single but largely incapable of honest intimacy, worming about in dirty track pants and a wifebeater on a mattress whose bedskirt sits in the dryer for the second time in two weeks, such was the amount of hilarious sex had on it. He has $17 in his checking account, no savings to speak of, two dogs on whom he spends hundreds of dollars per month, a nearly empty gas tank that he refills $10 at a time, groceries bought on credit, and nearly 28 years behind him.
I laughed again, even more loudly, as I noticed my hand sneaking surreptitiously south, as hands are wont to do. Fucking hands, right? I put a stop to it, got up, dressed myself and met my boyfriend for lunch. Came home, started vomiting these paragraphs, and here we are. Anything to put off folding three loads of freshly laundered clothes, which is going to take, like, a fucking hour.
The situation is pretty grim when you catalogue it all like that, but I rationalize everything this way: I’m pretty healthy, I buy organic and eat well, I lift or run daily, I possess some conversational competence, and when my back’s against the wall (or when I finally realize that it has been, for months or more), I overperform. I’ll rise to the occasion if someone orders me to.
And I’m not one of those people, thank fuck.
But. But but but. Those people — those odious, inhuman motherfuckers — are making it work. They are succeeding and behaving the way adults must. They are probably even making money that they do not spend immediately, which seems dumb.
I grade myself on a developmental curve wherever I can (growing up gay, dorky, foreign and frightened sets a person back a few years), but I’ve pushed that excuse as far as I can take it. The grim truth is that I’m fucking inert, and I have some breathtaking impulse-control problems. More than depression or romantic incompatibility or any of the other first-world issues I’m sorting out, my trouble with laziness is the bug I hope to squash in 2012.
I’m talking existential laziness. Not just to-do-or-not-to-do, but to-wake-up-or-not-to-wake-up. To-get-gas-or-to-put-it-off-until-tomorrow. To-buy-potatoes-or-to-skip-them-this-week-because-they’re-in-the-produce-aisle-and-that’s-on-the-other-side-of-the-goddamn-store.
First step: Do that fucking laundry. Second step: Thieves’ Guild.
Happy 2012!
I’m shocked that there isn’t another comment here. Either people are missing out on some awesome writing here, or they’re too intimidated to comment. This is some of the best writing I’ve read in a while. You and Pat are not getting the proper exposure–this is paid-worthy stuff. Though, maybe that’s why it’s so good, and that’s how you guys want it. That lack of pressure and deadline.
Your honesty, word choice, and accessible writing style are refreshing. I think this is something our generation (27 years here) has problems with. Certainly not all of us, but many of us. An existential comatose. Or paralysis. Grow up being told we can do amazing things by baby boomer post-hippies, and we eat it up with our consolation trophies and free pizza whether we win or lose the soccer game. Now that we’re supposedly “doing amazing things,” or supposed to, we freak the fuck out wondering if this is actually what we were meant to do–if we’re meeting our potential. Because we believed that we were special, and geniuses. What do? Hell if I know. Probably sit in bed, masturbate, and think about what game to play for 45 minutes. Sounds about right.
Please keep writing.
I almost hit the trash button when I read your first sentence, Bob, because it’s the sort of predatory congratulating you’d expect from a spambot. But to know that it was sincere this time was incredibly gratifying. Thanks, man!
You’re dead-on about our approach to writing here, though Pat is doing everything in his (surprisingly considerable) power to bag big interviews and boost our profile. We write and record whatever we want whenever we want, and it’s become — for me at least — a really useful way to vent and unwind and be me. I’ve flirted with and ultimately resisted efforts to integrate our blog with something bigger, because the editorial freedom we have now is just too awesome to mess with.