Pre-Work Post

I should be working on something else.  The ineluctable screen has snatched my attention away again, with easy access to information, quick changing graphics, and status updates!  Just relative status mind you, as I quit facebook (with associated costs and benefits), as in recent pay stub (up mildly after mild raise), gmail (my mom worrying about pre-marinating my chicken--we're going to see her this weekend, and she wants to prepare everything in advance so it goes smoothly, and she wants to do so eagerly!; associated spam about stock picks, and a comment about a book that's available (damnit, I haven't even finished the other one yet!)).  We eat with our eyes, short term and hungry, and we want to find consonance in those short term decisions, defend ourselves, so that we were right when we acted, period.  If there's a gap between what we implicitly settle on and the story/evidence we're confronted with, it isn't fun to deal with. We might seek points further back in time to find our consonance (sure, I said a hurtful statement to you, but before that, you were late and you know that I don't like it when people are late) or what have you.  As hard as it is to take responsibility and admit a mistake and not seek to find a way out of it, it helps alleviate pressure now. For instance: I fucked up and drank a lot of my 20s away.  Whoops.  But it doesn't mean that my life must now be controlled by booze, or that I'm decidedly one dimensional, either.  It also doesn't mean that I don't have to work at some things now.  And that sucks.  I don't like really hard work, even though I like the reward that it provides.  And I like hard work enough, in particular and specific moments, that I've convinced myself in the past that I'm a hard worker.  So it is hard when something about the world tells me that I'm not a hard worker.

But I'm not a terribly hard worker, particularly when I'm bored with something.  And I don't really think that we can be more than 6-hours-per-day productive, either.  We're distracted, and social, and it takes time to actually understand something to get going on it, and then, there are power plays to be had.  A lot of wasted time.  But wasted time is relative.   

I'm also not a terribly hard worker when something doesn't make sense to me.  The most skillful people that I've met, perhaps the smartest, say things the simplest.  They help me understand something very difficult step by step, and when I've gained an understanding, that new piece of evidence is no longer threatening--i.e. I no longer have to exert energy avoiding thinking about it, and how it doesn't jive with the other stories I told myself.