among other small beauties

a Monday. the first Monday of winter break, post-finals-week.

everything seems quite disorganized. I should be writing, revising, Librivoxing. my to-do list is a frayed tangle, pulling me in a dozen unproductive directions.

I should be writing. drafting a proposal for this and thinking of ideas to submit to an edited collection, prepping course materials for next semester's class-- English 203: Introduction to Research for Professional Writing. I have articles to finish for submission to this journal and maybe that journal.

and I should be finding time to listen to sections of this audiobook and this backlog of podcast episodes. I want to be reading and recording sections of this collection about libraries, and then the narrator's liens for this play, and eventually all of this (except probably not the footnotes).

and then when am I going to stretch out in a warm, quiet room to read or finishing reading Les Miserables, which I got for Christmas at least two Christmases ago, and The Myth of Sisyphus, which I'm still in the middle of, and How We Think: Digital Media and Contemporary Technogenesis?

when when when?

I'm feeling paralyzed by it all, and hence this frenzied blogpost. a selfish little piece of writing that I can get done in half an hour or so, and not stress very much about.

earlier today, browsing the pretty social media land of snapshots that is Instagram, I scrolled onto this simple, homey little image from knitting expert Bonnie Sennott. seeing it-- this beautifully neat, orderly, hand-made piece of art, part of a series she's been working on all year, stitch by stitch, day by day--made me so out-of-nowhere happy. I was so deeply sloshingly at-sea happy for a moment, to glimpse that careful, beautiful thing from inside my tangle of unorganized, unmotivated, unfinishedness.

my tangles of writing and reading and listening will take some time and some dancing with entropy. I'll get somewhere with it all, little by little, day by day.