the evils of procrastinating…

All week I’ve been lazy—such is the life of a procrastinator. I procrastinated on making the figure (Gabrielle) and I mustered super-human tenacity to get it done, was pleased, then collapsed. I wish I would stop doing that. I pour out the entirety of my creative juices all at once; then I’m good for nothing for several days. The thing is, I don’t have several days to spend doing nothing with so many shows coming up. I bought a book once about overcoming procrastination. I started it, but guess what? I never finished it.

There’s no use in going to a procrastination support group because no one would show up on time, or they would show up and not say anything until the last 15 minutes of the session. The only group that would be worse is one for people with paranoia. Can you imagine? They would all clam up and stare at each other, formulating terrible stories about who the other people were and why they were really there. It would be funny except for the fact my father suffers from severe paranoia. Living with a really angry, paranoid person is very scary.

Back to procrastination. I’m not a severe procrastinator, but it’s bad enough to be non-conducive to the things I want to accomplish. I go through cycles of tremendous effort and tremendous exhaustion. I think I’m addicted to the feeling of being totally immersed in something—to the extent that the world falls away and doesn’t exist. It’s just you and your project and the glory of intense concentration. The thing is, I can only maintain this level of intensity for a short period of time before crashing. Once the project is finished, I turn into an idiot-savant without the savant part. Then, I build up energy again and soon I start to make sense—and start to produce.

If I didn’t feel so guilty about the lulls in-between the productive times, I guess it wouldn’t be a big deal, but I envy people who just steadily peck away at things, joyfully checking off each little item from their to-do lists. If you analyze me in day-to-day behavior, I’m very inconsistent, but on a larger scale my actions are all consistent with my larger goals in life. So, I guess I erratically peck away at my to-do list. I know exactly where I’m going, but the journey to get there always seems to include a bit of chaos theory. It drives my poor husband crazy.