Monday 19th November 2007
Avoidance
I think the most important thing for this evening is just to get typing, and worry about the content later. It’s not particularly obvious to me just how long 350 words is as an essay, nor how long it would take to write seven of them; the last time I wrote a word-counted work was my final year project, back in 2003. So you could say I am slightly out of practice. It’s also better to get into the swing of things without having to concentrate on what is being said – something that I can do with touch typing. But rearranging the desk is something I’m doing, and hard to tell whether it’s of value – arranging it may make me more comfortable (and better the distraction occurring whilst the content is irrelevant), or it may actually just be a way of satisfying my avoidance tendencies. Ho hum.
What’s clear is that my room is far from tidy; my desk is no exception. So far moving a couple of books off my desk reminds me that there is an enormous pile on the floor beside me, which is getting in the way. Perhaps these would be better off under the desk, but there lies half a tent, the other half of which lies under my sleeping bag on the other side of the room, there to remind me that it could really do with a wash some time. There’s a laundrette at the end of the road – my dislike of laundrettes not withstanding, it’s still best to wash sleeping bags in a large drum rather than squeezing them into a domestic washer. But to do that as a distraction would be foolish – the lightning has added to the misery of a November day of cold rain, and wandering down the road is too obviously not working. Popping down stairs to return three books to the shelves is a convenient distraction and helps reduce the pile – and I’ll add a reluctance to aggravate my wrist pains (thankfully absent for a few months now) as a lame add-on excuse for a break.
A successful mission, and not even a chiding from my flatmates (who are both very aware of my avoidance techniques, my having been caught in an especially lame fashion earlier hanging around in the kitchen with my hands in my pockets).
Flash – the gap around my blinds is lit up, white against the warm light I’m working by, the thunder rumbles, and a few seconds later the rain pelts against the windows harder. I’ll open the blinds in case I can spot a fork straight on.
More desk tidying, to get my folder against the wood. I don’t use my desk at home for working much – it’s a giant place to leave mail, some opened, some not, until I get round to dealing with it. A staging post for bills to be filed, and envelopes to be recycled. But I’m not going to work on them now – again, to obvious, and avoidance doesn’t necessarily mean doing something else, just not doing what you’re trying to do. So the pile is straightened and moved over to the drawers, and set as a task for later in the week. I’ve been letting the state of the room slide for a while now – too many weekends away, too few things to practice avoidance on.
The lights are off, and the blinds open, but the rain has slackened and the clouds are low. The chances of a good lightning spot are low, and there’s only been the two flashes so far.
Ten o’clock approaches, and I’m up early again tomorrow. Time for a word check. 623 words. Ha, easy, I’ll be done in no time.
Tomorrow.
Ah… I thought you were actually doing some work up there. I find the style of this post quite interesting. You start off rambling and then try to get some nice atmospheric prose into the mix. You should probably have run it against a grammar and spell checker first though. And I’m not sure “rain pelts against the windows harder” is the nicest way to phrase that… I’d have gone with “rain pelts harder against the windows”. Alternatively you could have been much more poetic like “the hard rain pelts against the window with an increased urgency” thus implying that rain has some sort of motive.
In case you haven’t figured it out by now, I’m trying to write a comment which is at least a comparable length to your post. I feel that if you get to waste so much of my time by making me read through that, then the least I get to do is to waste some of yours by making you read my comment. Either way, it seems a better use of my time doing this then what I’m currently being paid to do while freezing my fingers off because the silly building manager of my office is too incompetent to actually get the heating fixed. We told him it was broken in February… they couldn’t fix it then because they needed the heating to be off… so they get most of the way through summer and then decide it can’t be fixed till it comes back on again. Now it has become a “Big Job” and thus will take months.
OK, I think that’s enough — except to ask whether anyone was impressed by the 42 word sentence in the above paragraph which manages a whole 40 of those without a comma?
Comment by Dave — 23/11/2007 @ 11:07 am
It wasn’t going to be a post in the first place, but I thought after going to all that trouble I may as well do something with it.
Damn you for making me read your comment, that was devious. But it’s hardly comparable in either length, or atmosphere. Where’s the chattering teeth? The thin film of frost, sparklingly backlit by your TFT? The shivering rats?
It’s nice and cosy in my office. I hope this knowledge helps you feel better.
Comment by Andy — 23/11/2007 @ 11:19 am
If “the hard rain pelts against the window with an increased urgency” is poetic, Dave, then I despair…
Comment by B — 21/12/2007 @ 2:27 pm
So it invokes an emotion in you… then the poetry has done it’s job
My English teacher was very insistant that poetry didn’t have to be pretty, but then she probably wasn’t very good at it.
Comment by Dave — 25/12/2007 @ 1:22 am