Notes to Self – A Review
Note to Self: Pick up more green tea after work.
Note to Self: Write a blog about the band Atta Boy, or music.
Note to Self: Transfer poems from notebook to dump file then shred.
Note to Self: Without objection, I’m certainly conscientious.
Note to Self: Self, don’t do me like that. You know the worst thing you can be is in a hurry.
Note to Self: Blog for Friday- Sometimes, when I have a second, I’ll suddenly realize I need to do something, or I’ll have an idea for a story, a blog, a poem, or I’ll just think something that I like and so I’ll send a text to myself.
Most of these texts go unused. I still have not gotten more green tea, I have yet to write a blog on music since the one about Watsky, the poems are still in my notebook, and well. I guess I’m still conscientious, for the most part. I definitely fall prey to feeling the need to be in a hurry. Then I kind of just wonder… why? The weirdest part is, I’m only pressured by my own time, not anyone else’s. So, I’ll leave for work twenty-five minutes early, and I won’t think about why until I get on the train. Then when I get to work, I just kind of…do nothing? I guess. I mean. I do stuff, but it’s not anything I need to do, just stuff to fill time until work officially starts.
That’s only the case around 50% of the time and it’s my own fault that things are like this. See, part of the reason I am out of things to do, is because I like to prep the night before. Usually even to the extent of getting a clean coffee cup ready to go under my Keurig and having what I’m going to eat for breakfast ordered in an assembly-line-like fashion in the fridge. I plan, and I plan, and I plan, and then I give myself all sorts of leeway, in the form of time or little built-in efficiencies. A lot of that stems from my brain being wired the way it is. I have a certain respect for order that’s hardcoded in my neurosis.
Order, strangely enough, is the enemy of bureaucracy. It is friend only to the solitary. To those who know the order in which something is meant to be. In network, you can’t have true order. There are too many gears spinning at once, and all of those gears need to be oiled. But haven’t you heard? Too much grease can break down a machine.
Not to mention the factory defects, the slip-ups, the one in a million chance, the crossed wires, the missing teeth, and the sullen. You don’t have that problem with something you build. You have that problem with something that was built. Something that is being built. Something we built. Something they built.
But. Maybe that’s because I’m intimate with the order inside my own machine.
But at what point does order shift from a virtue to an obsession? The extreme examples are obvious. There’s a difference between wanting total self-control and total control. I think the most notable is when you impose your own control on someone else. When someone else has to live by your rules and arbitrary “efficiencies” that’s when you’ve crossed the line.
I’ve made that mistake before. I continue to make that mistake. But I do my best, to limit the effect of it and how often I do it.
Recently, I have found that I just have to fit my own micro-machine into the machine of the school, the company, and the city. It has forced me to find a way to keep my mechanics self-contained and behind glass. The inner workings do not need to be visible, but I’m getting in the habit of this safe exposure.
I don’t know how I prefer to live yet. For being so self-evaluative, I don’t spend much time evaluating my lifestyle. I spend most of my reflection time thinking about thinking. It leads to some of my blogs becoming this introspective spiral down a granular mixed metaphor, but that is how I think sometimes. I don’t enjoy writing them as much, but sometimes I need them for checking in.
Ultimately. I’m, without a doubt, moving forward. Every day leaves me feeling like I’m doing what I can, when I can. But I do have to remind myself of that from time to time. Which is easy enough, so long as I’m not in a hurry.
Thanks for reading. Happy Friday.
