Bedtime

Well, I did not do ANY work on the conference paper today. I'm kind of pissed off at myself for that, but I had maintenance dudes in and out of my apartment all afternoon, and I did laundry, and I cleaned my bedroom, and so yeah, I did accomplish things, but not the main thing that I MUST accomplish. This is ok, though, as I did think about the paper, and I do think that I know where it's going. I just need to do some solid work on it tomorrow, or otherwise I'm screwed. Actually, I may be screwed anyway, but I'm choosing to believe that working on the paper is something that must be done tomorrow and that it will have positive benefits.

I wrote in my journal for the first time in a couple of weeks tonight... That was interesting. You know, I've never been a daily journal-writer. I'll go a couple of weeks, and then write until my hand hurts, and then nothing, and then maybe 4 or 5 days in a row, and then a break of a month. I suppose the reason that I've been able to keep journals since adolescence is precisely because I don't make rules about having to write every day or whatever. But it's interesting writing in the journal as compared with the kind of writing that I do here. The journal, well, the reader for whom I write is me. I reread old journals, I refer to things in old journals in current entries, I assume that "the reader" knows every detail about every part of my life so there are lots of gaps and skips, few transitions, and much maudlin and meandering musing. Not that I was maudlin tonight - not at all - just thinking. You know, I've been doing a lot of thinking lately - and it occurs to me that most of the time I *don't* actually do all that much thinking. This may seem crazy, given my profession, given what I write here, but about my own life... yeah, not so much with the thinking. I kind of go from thing to thing and I might think about discrete things that I have to accomplish or to deal with, but I don't do a whole lot of connecting the dots between those things - I don't do a lot of productive reflecting, I suppose. Now, this isn't to say that I don't love to have a good pity-party for myself, but that's not actually *thinking* about one's life. That's emoting, and whining. But lately I've been spending a lot of time *thinking* - about my career, about what I want in my life other than the career, about choices I've made and choices that lie in front of me. And I'm not really coming to any sort of answer or something, but yeah.... I've been actually trying to think things through and to connect some dots. Historical dots, present tense dots, future dots.

But so I'm kind of exhausted from all of that, and so I took a shower, and now I'm off to read some Judith Krantz (Am rereading the Scruples books - on Scruples II now) which is the absolute best cure for too much thinking. Ah, love the Krantz. The books are terribly cheesy and formulaic, but I've been hooked since I saw the mini-series of I'll Take Manhattan starring Valerie Bertinelli as Maxi Amberville (and Julianne Moore as her best friend, and Francesca Annis as her mother) when I was 12 and then went on to read the book the following summer. Ah, the Krantz. Porn for nerdy girls on the brink of womanhood. (And apparently escapist bedtime reading for actual women who think too much.)