Something

So I'm sitting in Not My Usual Coffee Shop, trying, trying, trying to turn this draft of a draft of a chapter into an actual chapter draft. But I'm not doing that, obviously, because I'm typing this post. If, as I said in my last post, the discipline of grad school is the discipline of a thousand questions, today I'm answering a petulant, "Uhhhh, GO! AWAY!" in response to each of them. Resistance is futile, I know. A chapter will not go away. But lately, I'm reminding myself of my goddaughter, who, at three, will fight and fight and fight to stay awake and keep having fun, while all the while knowing, in her tiny, clever brain, that she will have to go to bed sooner or later. And while listening to her resist, I keep thinking, "But going to bed IS fun! Sleep? Is FUN. Please, god, let us all go to sleep."

She doesn't know yet that sleep is good fun she'll crave one day the way she craves chocolate (she learned that one early) or television now. It will all be reframed, and she won't resist going to bed the way she used to. Not really. I do, fairly regularly, have nights when I want to stay up and make cookies or watch one more episode of The Wire or play around on the internets far later than is reasonable, given the plan for the next morning. But just as often I have days during which I can only think of when I next get to crawl into bed. I have mornings when I fall onto my bed after my shower and feel the cool sheets start to swallow me, a tiny centimeter at a time. The desire to give in overwhelming.

As is the desire NOT to write this damn chapter. I need a reframing. I need, somehow, to remember that I like this. Not because I hate the work, right now, but because my dissertation is currently the party that I don't want to go to on a Friday night because my house is cozy and my dog good company and it's cold out and, besides, I don't know what to wear. It's the party that will be fun once I get there, I know it will be, but just seems so awful from afar.

And of course, when that's the case, the only thing to do is to get up and go to the party and let the rest take care of itself. Everything else is inertia, is laziness, is desire eating up my day, tiny little mouthfuls of seconds swallowed before I realize they were on my plate. Nothing to do, I suppose, but spit them out. Nothing to do but shut up and open the Word file. (There. Done.) and start typing something. Something. Something.