It’s about at this point in the #500wordsaday project that I wonder why I don’t stick with this every day of my non-writing-challenge life.
I could get so much writing done.
Just do it, I think, just bang out some words after work, replace “watching The Daily Show” with “typing nonsense into a Word Doc,” and you can keep it up.
Because cognitively, I know this is a matter of swapping out activities, and not trying to bend the fabric of time.
Daylight Savings Time has always made more sense in my body. I don’t mean the process of setting clocks forward. I mean, this version of time with more light in the evening makes the world feel better to me.
The first time I had to change a clock was when I moved to Chicago after college and I thought it was the stupidest thing.
“How do you know when to do it?” I asked.
“It’s on the calendar,” everyone said. Everyone had done this before, every year of everyone’s life.
“What happens if you miss it? Why doesn't it happen at midnight?” This was before smartphones and I had lots of questions.
My hometown rode a weird little line downstate on which we jumped back and forth between time zones instead of changing times.
What time is “The Daily Show” on? In December, 11 PM. In June, 10 PM.
It might be for this reason that I hate moving my clock back in the fall. It feels unnecessary and dumb. But it also feels claustrophobic and dark.
It’s not night yet, it’s actually 4 PM.
In Spring, (or you know, Arctic Pre-Summer as we have currently,) even though we lose an hour, it still feels to me like a return to normal. Some space in the day before it sharply goes cold in the night.
Writing 500 words isn’t the part that I have trouble fitting in throughout the course of a day. It’s that I don’t use it to replace things like “one 30 minute TV program.”
In the 12 days since we started this round, I have replaced the following in order to keep up:
~ cleaning my room, which includes but is not limited to: unpacking my suitcase from DC, putting clean laundry away, and throwing shoes back in the closet even though I trip over them every time I walk in the room
~ cooking real food on top of the stove instead of toasting fake bread in the oven
~ going to bed before 3 AM
~ general errands like the post office, the bank, the grocery store, the shower
I could totally keep this up after day 30. But I also look forward to being a functional human who is slightly less of a mess. At some point I will figure out how to do both.
It really is a matter of shuffling the pieces inside a strict constraint. It’s the strict constraint part that trips me up. I would much prefer to break the rules and start my own time zone.