Excuses

“Excuses are like assholes, Taylor, everybody got one.”

Sgt. O’Neill, Platoon

I find myself suffering a bit of fatigue in my goal to write once a week for a year. So, I’m going to think about and write about that a bit this week and we’ll see if I satisfy my requirements that way.

I wrote last week but I completed it late and it just barely made my word count minimum. I wasn’t proud of it and the material was pretty boring, not particularly well thought nor insightful in any way. In my opinion it sucked a bit. Maybe more than a bit.

As a result, I violated one of my rules for this exercise:

• After the posts are up on the blog I will post a brief note on Facebook and Twitter

I guess I’ll have to make up for that by posting a link to both despite the fact that don’t care for the work I produced. It satisfied the minimal requirement for this exercise, but not much more.

I also find that I’m struggling a bit with what to write. Before I started this, I brainstormed a set of starter ideas to draw from and I’ve worked through most of those. I thought I’d write some short stories, but those aren’t easy, either.

One of the goals of this exercise was to tell stories to my kids either about me or their family or about them because I wanted to pass those stories down to them in a form that could be captured and persist more than just verbal retellings. The challenging part of that is if I choose to write something as part of this exercise, it has to be something I’m willing to make public and that actually limits me in some of the things I might and will eventually hopefully write about, either because it’s not something I would choose to share publicly because it’s not my story or because it is not an appropriate story to tell publicly on the Internet. So, I do have a list of things I would like to write about and add to this exercise, but they’re not currently written – because if they were, I might choose to alter my own rules and consider them written and thus complete, relieving me of the requirement to post them publicly.

Which brings me to the other thing which has impacted my writing. My work life is very full right now. My typical work weeks starts with getting up at 6am or so, getting ready for my day, getting out of the house, perhaps commuting with my wife and dropping her off downtown, spending the day at work, leaving to pick my wife back up and getting home. I choose to count my door-to-door time as “work time” which means from the time I leave my house till the time I return to my house which averages 11 hours per day. Two to two and a half hours of that is commuting and I don’t get paid for that, but it’s time not doing other things, so I consider that time lost to work. Additionally, I’m required to attend at least one weekly call that takes up at least an hour one evening a week. Also, the phase of the project we’re in right now is requiring more time and attention from now through the first part of November as we approach a major release. This increases the stress in my life. I end up checking up email somewhat compulsively – one of the pitfalls of having a smartphone that allows me to check my work email as easily as I check my personal email. So, my brain is in “work mode” a great deal of the time right now and that doesn’t leave me much time to think about much of anything else, which means I’m not spending time writing.

I know this is not in any way uncommon and I’m sure is something that anyone who wants to write but has to do other things for a living struggles with constantly. The difference, I expect, is that if someone is truly focused on improving that skill, they will make time to practice it consistently. In my case, I find myself tired, both mentally and physically, and that doesn’t lend itself well to sitting and writing. It does lend itself to passive, consuming activities like randomly surfing the web or watching television or playing a computer game. So, that’s my struggle. I’m just barely keeping on top of this commitment, I say as I’m writing this at 9:05pm on a Sunday evening and I wanted to post this by 9pm each Sunday. So, rather than barely keeping on top of this, in reality, I’m already late. Le Sigh.

It would be a fair question to ask where my weekends go. I certainly ask myself that same questions. Where do they go?

A certain amount is lost to simply catching up on my rest. I sleep in till 8am!. I might lay in bed even longer than that. I did take a 45 minute walk on Saturday, so there’s some time spent exercising and paying attention to my health, which is a good thing. But, the two things that probably take up the bulk of the remaining time are chores, the necessary evil that keeps our lives functioning with minimal investment during the work week, and spending time with my wife because I really like to do that. So, it’s fair to say that I split my weekend between what I have to do and what I want to do. And the occasional nap though I was robbed of that opportunity this weekend!

Okay, I did choose to go see an okay movie (“The Wolverine”) and we did go to our local County Fair. The former was definitely me time and the latter was definitely in the bucket of time spent with someone I really enjoy spending time with, so that is always good for refilling my battery.

As a result, I will go in to my work week tomorrow reasonably refreshed and ready to deal with all the interrupts and unexpected things which come up in the course of the week, especially during this phase of the release cycle.

If I’m lucky, this being summer, I’ll get to take a lunch or two and play volleyball with my friends. That always does me a lot of good and certainly is good for both my health and my general demeanor.

But, on the whole, the focus will be on spending those 11 hours a day or so thinking about work and doing what I can to add value to company and the group I work with. That’s my job, that’s what they pay me for and I want to do that job well. It’s what allows me to provide for my family and, increasingly, hopefully put away towards some day retiring before I’m too old or too senile to enjoy it!