Project Narcissist isn’t going the way it was supposed to. I haven’t been diligent about noting down everything that happens every day. In fact I took notes only once. Holding myself accountable to writing a weekly piece itself is something I was considering blowing off. Most of my time during the week was spent reading.
A new way of reading. I now note down the lead sentence of each paragraph and give it a number. All this effort is to better understand how writers structure their work. I have observed that paragraph leads are informative and make pieces coherent. The sequencing of the paragraphs also inform the mood. I love reading and decoding what makes things tick.
I find myself reading a lot about how to write better. It is just another way of testing the waters. A way to feel better about yourself. Oh I’m not writing but look at me I’m still working on my craft. How much of that theoretical hogwash is actually retained though. Writing is a skill and practicing is the only way to get better at it.
Procrastination has many forms. All this reading about writing is just another way of procrastinating. Fighting procrastination is an act of courage. A way of telling your mind that I’ll go beyond your calculations and make the leap. It’s a willingness to accept imperfection and the effort that it takes to get something done. A commitment to getting things done.
So I need to commit to the project. Nothing starts out as perfect. The idea is to improve with trial and error. Finished is better than perfect. All of these ideas sound nice, but it is such a pain to commit to anything. The mind starts playing tricks on you by drawing up a sophisticated calculus of value which means nothing in the larger context of what you want to do. With all this hedging and prefacing here’s a little sampler for what the week produced.
Real life is different for everyone. No two people do things the exact same way because they don’t come from the exact same circumstances. Two Uber drivers both got the booking for the same distance with exactly the same fare, but only one of them complained. The capitalists at the top are sucking them dry. They don’t have a unified voice. Gig workers don’t have unity precisely because it is gig work and there’s no shared experience among the people employed. Real life is different, for one it is a way of supplementary income, for the other it is the income. For me it is no big deal to give some money on top of the fare. For the receiver it can be everything.
Addendum: Couldn’t post this yesterday because my WiFi flipped out. No wordpress domains were reachable on the network. This is being posted via a mobile hotspot.
white ants 