This weekend, on a dog-free morning, I edited an episode of my podcast that my co-host and I recorded in late March. Late March, as you know, was 150 years ago, in another world using another calendar. I don’t need to tell you what has happened to time since March, you know because you have the same bruise from this that I do. We are all pressing on it, anytime Before Times are discussed.
I really enjoyed listening to that podcast. I didn’t even edit it very much. There is a long stretch where my dog barks annoyingly due to my own stupidity (I let him look out the window). I left the barking in because it’s my podcast and while the bar was never super high, it is very low now. It is on the ground.
I read a tweet last week that said the reason we all (well, a lot of us) feel insane right now is because there is no tomorrow, only endless today. This may or may not be part of the reason I bought a notepad off an Instagram ad (shut up) in hopes of forcing myself to sit down every morning and try to organize my thoughts around a few concrete items: the meetings I have to attend, the tasks I absolutely must do.
Right now I find myself procrastinating a lot, and I think it’s because there’s an endless swath of “later” in which to accomplish things. I don’t have to finish anything before going out to dinner, before going on vacation, before anything at all. I can fold laundry later, finish my paint-by-number later, work on my quilt later, start that freelance article later. This is why the podcast episode fell so egregiously through the cracks: I can do it later. Four and a half months later!
Working from home is theoretically governed by business hours, but I know I’m not the only person who has opened my laptop after 10 pm, sometimes because of some pressing project but sometimes just because there is nothing else to do. I can only watch so much TV or drink so much wine. “It would take a lot of that to kill you,” as my husband’s late grandfather would have said, but actually it probably doesn’t take that much binge-watching and wine-swilling to kill you, or at least make you feel pretty bad.
This week is a good example of the elasticity of time: it’s Thursday already?? somehow and that seems ridiculous. It was Monday just yesterday and also, I thought time was supposed to fly when you are having fun.