blog as procrastination

i have several things i want to accomplish this evening.  i have an art project to start, a presentation to plan for, a blog post to write, laundry and dishes to do, a shirt to iron, eggless egg salad to make (i already drained the tofu), an episode of the walking dead to watch, and i need to get back on the working out wagon with the momentum from yesterday’s hike.  all of these things are possible to do if i’m strategic.  i could be starting to the laundry now so it’s running while the kiddo is still awake and i don’t end up staying up too late doing it.  i usually blog from bed when i’m lying down with spiderman waiting for him to go to sleep… and if i worked on my presentation now i could use all of my alone time painting cardboard circles, working out while i watch walking dead (while the paint dries), and whipping up the egg salad before bed.  the dishes… well, the dishes may wait for a visit from the imaginary and unreliable dish fairy.  and i don’t iron.
but i’m not going to be strategic.  i’m going to blog now which makes the lying down time fairly useless (i’ll just read or something–aka pinterest) and pushes everything else back a solid hour or so.  by the time i emerge from the bedroom later it will be dark and cold and my motivation won’t be at its highest.  i should be writing this down in the “conscious choice log” to see how it pans out.  i’ll do that in a minute (ha!).
all this because i just don’t feel like doing it any other way.  i want to blog now, and until i do, i’m not going to be able to focus much on anything else.  i tend to create in spontaneous bursts.  they can’t be planned for or otherwise anticipated.  luckily it happens frequently enough that i appear to be very productive… but yeah, some day this is probably going to catch up with me.
today’s post was going to be short (oops!) and to the point.  i didn’t think i had that much to say (yeah right).  i’m still doing the morning pages religiously… and i tried to have my first artist’s date on Saturday.  it didn’t go too well.
first, i tried to do too much.  just like i would with anything else… i planned to do two hours worth of stuff in a one hour window.  you’re not supposed to invite anyone else to participate on your artist’s date, but when Trixie asked if I wanted to go for a mani/pedi (and I really did) I thought I would just cut my date with myself to fit that into the window of time my mom had spiderman.  it took half of my available hour to drive to the place i wanted to go (and discover it was closed).  i thought i had hit the gold mine when i realized i had a gift card for the awesome coffee shop on the corner (that is across the street from a very shi shi art supply store)… but then…
second, i didn’t try hard enough.  for a date with anyone else i would have planned something fun, dressed up, put on makeup, done my hair, and if they wanted the vegan cupcake at the coffee shop i would have encouraged them to have it.  for myself, i went out unsure of what to do, dressed like someone’s mom, without any makeup, and with frizzy hair pulled back in a ponytail.  i bought myself a small cup of green tea, skipped the vegan cupcake (and i had a gift card for goodness sake!), and wandered around at the art supply store across the street (and then didn’t buy anything because it was all too expensive and i have a giant pile of trash at home waiting for me to make art out of it).
the tree branch
i noticed it was hard not to do things that i would classify as errands.  i also felt nervous most of the time… which seems ridiculous but was so true.
it was a crappy date.  if it was another person i probably wouldn’t want to see them again (who are we kidding…  i would go out with them again if they wanted to go out with me…).  the best part of it was finding a giant tree branch and bringing it home.  sometimes i feel like this blog is a public letter to potential life partners (warning: i don’t do dishes or iron, and sometimes i bring home large pieces of nature and leave them in the living room while i daydream about how to make art out of them).
i’m going to try again soon… maybe even tomorrow.  i really need to ask my inner artist what she would like to do on a date and then give her what she wants.  
if you were going to take yourself on a date what would you do?

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