And here we go again.
Note – I’m not talking about how it’s been another week of horror and heartbreak; at this point in 2020 that should go without saying. (Ginsburg’s trainer doing push-ups in her honor as she lay in state in the Rotunda is the moment that broke me.) No, this is another lament that one of the less-heralded side effects of living through an ongoing apocalypse not having enough time to do anything.
Even when you have a three day weekend.
Today is Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement in the Jewish calendar, and I have it off from work. Not to sound flippant, but since I’m not Jewish myself (and living through half a year of the quarantimes should be sufficient atonement for anything bad I’ve done), I’ve been looking forward to having three days of uninterrupted time to draft a playscript, in the hopes of submitting for a competition whose deadline is November 18. You can get a lot done in three days, right?
Certainly, just not what I was planning to do.
I’m still Co-Creative Director for Tuesdays at Nine (it’s our thirtieth anniversary baby, season), and much of Saturday was taken up in finalizing the writers and actors for our next virtual reading. Combine that with some necessary errands (I still have to live, after all), and much of the day was already gone. So was my mental ability to focus, so rather than write something new I spent the remainder of the day submitting existing scripts to various opportunities (which are still available to find on the internet, our current circumstances notwithstanding). All in all a highly productive day in which I still managed not to do anything I’d planned to do.
Sunday, I participated in a Zoom reading in the afternoon, and had other obligations in the evening. In the morning, I wrote the blog post you’re reading now, because try as I might I can’t get the darn things to write themselves. So again, another productive day that didn’t bring me anywhere closer to my goal of having a useable draft in less than two months.
So, if I’m going to get any meaningful writing done – if I want to be able to say that I didn’t squander the opportunity of a three day weekend in the midst of my schedule that’s somehow still frenzied even though I’m in quarantine – I’ll need to do all of it today. Like a college student who’s spent too much time partying, I’ll need to pull an all nighter to get my work done. The difference being of course, that I’ve procrastinated by trying to endure a global pandemic, rather than doing keg stands.
I guess that’s why I write posts like these – to remind myself (and you, Constant Reader) that we shouldn’t feel guilty about this. I mean, there’s plenty to feel guilty about in terms of how we got to this situation in the first place, and plenty of work to get out of it. But I think we can forgive ourselves if we don’t do quite as much of that work in any given day as we were hoping to. Things have been rather busy lately.