Dear Diary: Du calme
For a few hours, in the middle of the day, I felt that I was on top of things. I knew that this feeling had to be a delusion, because you don’t go from twenty thousand leagues beneath the sea to high on the hog in one day. But I felt collected, for the first time in six or eight weeks. Delusion or not, it felt awfully good.
The delusion was not utter. I have indeed been catching up, and, what’s more, remembering from day to day what’s on. The delusive part came from a rearrangement of my schedule. Hitherto, I’ve begun the day in a panic about the next day’s Daily Office. On very good days, the entry would be taken care of by noon or one, but on bad days I’d still be slaving at three. I noticed, moreover, that I’d get pickier and pickier as the day wore on. This is not to say that my standards became more demanding. I’d simply get cranky about not having finished the entry already.
So I tried something new. I made choosing the eight Daily Office links the first business of the day, and the second business of the day anything else in the world except writing up the links. (Violating this still wobbly rule yesterday got me in what threatened to be big trouble.) Today, I chose the links before eleven, and came back to write them up at six.
In the mean time, I accomplished very little on the site front. I re-read Sam Shepherd’s story — that’s all I did. I didn’t even sketch a page of comment about it. To be sure, the second reading opened the story up so wide that I was afraid of falling in. There was a great deal (and I’m not talking about “detail”) that I had forgotten from reading the story for the first time, two days ago.
On the home front, though, I knocked off a bunch of jobs. Polishing the silver on the sideboard was a recurring job. Washing the Blue Italian china that had spent a month out on the balcony was not. Shortly before seven, a young colleague of Ms NOLA’s stopped by to wrap up most of it and take it away. Outwardly, I was very easygoing: “Don’t take a thing that you don’t think you can use.” Afterward, I stared hard at the items left behind, as if that would induce the beneficiary to change his mind and beg to take them away as well.
I looked everywhere for my MOO cards — the mini business cards that I’ve grown surprisingly fond of; I thought that I would tire of them. They have a portion of the Portico entry screen on the obverse, and a few lines of URL and whatnot on the reverse. They’re not tiny, but they are small: seven centimeters by just under three. Somewhere in the apartment there is a box that ought to hold about seventy of them, from my second order, last December. But I can’t find it in any of the usual places. So I ordered another two hundred. If you’d like a few, send me your snail mail.
Ms NOLA’s colleague seemed to be very impressed when I showed him the site. (I was not surprised that Ms NOLA herself hadn’t shown it to him — they’re very busy at her publishing house.) He said that he knew a few people who might find it interesting. In my experience, The Daily Blague and, even more, Portico are sites that people like to discover for themselves. To people to whom the sites have been recommended, I’m afraid that they look like homework.
When you think about it, my daily life is all homework, and I love it. I just hate to fall too far behind the assignments.