Another One Bites the Dust

No, I'm not referencing a Queen song, or what Buffy can do with a good swing of a stake. I'm talking about another month mostly gone (and what's left of it scheduled in good and tight) and nothing to show for it.

I really wanted to do Nanowrimo this month. I didn't, because I had already planned to fill the month with other things I wanted to do and adding one more, particularly one of such grand commitment, would be pure insanity. And yet, I almost did it anyway, with the suspicion that all the things that I planned to get done instead of Nanowrimo, wouldn't get done regardless. And I was write....er, right. If I'd been struggling along with the Nano crowd, ignoring family and projects en masse, at least at the end of the month I'd have had 50,000 words to show for it. As it is, I barely have a few thousand words here on my blog. And my studio is cold and abandoned. None of my holiday gift making is even started. I have paperwork to mail. Receipts to find. Clothes to sort. My house is a mess. The garden hasn't been put away. There's a fresh layer of snow over the unraked leaves in the yard. Surfaces as yet unpainted. And there's still a box of tomatoes left to finish putting up.

It's not like I haven't gotten things done this month. I've done a lot. Some of it important. But none of it was what I set out to do, none of it was on my personal to-do list. It was on the family to-do list, the weather's to-do list, the We're Out of Toilet Paper's to-do list, or Life's Unexpected Events to-do list. But it wasn't on my list.

I feel like my time is constantly being broken up into small unusable pieces. Some days it's like I'm being pecked to death by chickens. Here's what Urban Dictionary has to say about that phrase -

1. like being pecked to death by chickens - a steady stream of small, seemingly inconsequential or minor nuisances, which build up over a prolonged period of time and which, eventually, take their toll and exact a heavy price.



And yet whenever I complain, either to others or just inside my head, I always come back to blaming myself for, depending on the day and my mood -

a) not appreciating the fact that my life is full with pretty wonderful things
b) not being organized enough
c) not being patient enough
d) not being able to say no
e) not really knowing what I want to do

Because surely, if I did know what I wanted to do, wouldn't I be doing it? Or, perhaps, what I want to be doing is what I am doing and not what I say I want to be doing, and so

f) not being honest with myself.

Sigh.