12:45 a.m. - 2004-09-03
Three Weeks
One of the downsides of working in a library is that you constantly live three weeks in the future. All day long, you repeat the date three weeks away, leaving you approximately a week every month where your brain date and the actual date are in the same month. It is that brief period right now - books are due on September 24th today, which means I have another six days of my brain and the calendar getting along merrily before the October due dates start traumatizing me.
The good news is, I get my "Oh my God it's WHAT MONTH?" out of the way early, so that when I wrote the date yesterday it was slightly less traumatizing than usual. The bad news is, life sort of slips away from you when you're living a life three weeks in the future. I'm always getting ahead of myself, thinking in terms of what should be happening three weeks from now instead of what's happening now.
Three weeks from now, I will have been living on my own for nearly two months. Three weeks from now, my sister will have moved to Calgary. Three weeks from now, I will be immersed in the world of my new novel, planning in anticipation of impending November bringing NaNoWriMo with it once more. Three weeks from now I will have something on my walls. Three weeks from now I will be finished or finishing the second season of Buffy, drooling over Oz and sniffling over Angel and Buffy.
I will have written more of my current novel, solved the plot dilemmas I'm currently facing and bringing the story closer to the ever elusive conclusion. I will have figured out how to drain the potatoes a little better so they aren't a little runny when I mash them. I will have cooked more dinners, bought more food, done more laundry. I will have painted my toenails, shaved my legs, and fixed the cupboard under the sink that isn't closing properly.
But today, I'm working on just opening the word file that holds my novel and typing up the ten pages I wrote on the bus last week. I'm desperately trying to force myself to find the motivation I'm so good at talking other people into when it comes to NaNoWriMo and failing somewhat. I'm making runny mashed potatoes (ok, that was yesterday) and I'm missing the exact same spot on both my ankles. There are patches of old nail polish on my toes where I did a half-assed job of taking off the old stuff. My bedroom is draped with laundry, drying on clothes racks and hangers because I'm too cheap to use the dryer and left my laundry for two weeks.
Three weeks from now me is a little more organized, a little more on top of things. I think that's part of why I like living three weeks in the future. Three weeks from now me is unfettered by the realities of today. She's free to do everything she should be doing, getting up in time to go to the gym and going to bed at a sensible hour while getting lots of writing done in between. She's the better version of me, the me I wish I could be.
But three weeks from now me exists only on a date due slip. So instead, I plod through today, accomplishing less than I should, accepting the fact that I'm not quite managing to be three weeks from now me.
But maybe in three weeks, I'll manage it somehow. A lot can happen in three weeks.
