Daily Archives: July 7, 2003

Drawing The Line

Nothing, nothing infuriates me more than people who can’t time-manage their way out of a paper bag. Especially when a good portion of that time involves my work as well, in some fashion.

After thirty-odd years, you would think that people would know how good/bad they are at these sort of things, and allot time accordingly. But no; people appear to turn cheerful blind eyes to this particular fault, or maybe they just don’t care.

I, however, do care. A lot. And when I do work to hit a deadline of some sort, and everyone else lags behind, I get damned angry. Why? Why do I care, when my work is done? Partially because I usually end up looking bad as well; partially because I sometimes end up having to take more time out of my schedule to solve the problem thusly created, occasionally forcing me to cancel something that had been planned; but mostly because I get sick and tired of watching people make the same mistake over and over and not learning from it.

Time management. It’s tied up in procrastination and the inability to understand that other people are depending on you. And maybe the whole concept of time passing, or being able to quantify time, or whatever.

Whatever it is, I’m tired of it. I’m tired of being yoked to other people in projects where people don’t understand that their work affects others. And I’m tired of snapping into being off-the-deep-end enraged about it after making an effort to be as understanding and as supportive as possible.

Writing Notes

Things I forgot to mention, which I ought to:

I wrote three-quarters of a short story on Friday, after my crisis. I’m usually in agreement with the whole “who says an artist needs to suffer in order to create?”, but lately it seems I need some sort of traumatic emotional upheaval in order to calmly sit down later on and whip something off. Word total for Friday: a very respectable 2,510.

Today, while the power was off (muttergrumblegrr) I researched and made lots of dialogue notes for that potential collaboration project. Out of the blue, I also wrote five and a half poems. (A half, because it’s not in its final draft yet.) Dedicated readers will remember my odd yearnings to be writing poetry this past spring (not that I had poems in mind, I just wanted to be engaged in the act of poetry writing). I find poetry very peaceful. Mind you, it’s also distilled emotion, which is like handling fire and ice at any time, and even more dangerous in my frustrated and fragile hands these days.

It’s even more special, because I started a new notebook. It’s Coptic-bound, with a Japanese print of a plum tree in blossom on it, and the pages are a dark ivory colour. I use my dip pen with black ink, too. Of course, it’s all to recopy the original pencil scribblings in my current notebook of ideas, complete with cross-outs and arrows indicating line rearrangements and so forth.

However — poetry. Goodness. I believe the last time I wrote poetry was around eleven years ago.

A Curse Upon Hydro And Blogger

Joy. Remember I was growling about how the power was supposed to be turned off last week, and it never was, so I wasted a whole day of work? Guess what happened this morning with no warning at all.

Blogger had a hiccup yesterday and ate not only the penultimate post on the Hogwarts quiz, but the long and involved post I did on Frida Kahlo as well.

So, to recap:

Apparently Defence Against the Dark Arts would be my best class if I attended Hogwarts. Hmm. I thought for sure it would be History of Magic.

July 6, 1907 was Frida Kahlo’s birthday, although she popularised her birthdate as July 7, 1910 to identify herself with the new Mexico born with the outbreak of the Mexican revolution.

Currently, my favourite work of Kahlo’s is her Self-Portrait, 1926; I find it quite Mona Lisa-like: mysterious, solemn, quirky, and each time that I see it I come to a different decision regarding what lies behind those eyes. Here she is.

Self-Portrait, 1926

(The original post was longer, and more articulate. Really.)