I have a multi-photo picture frame sitting on top of my books and under the shelf above them. It is littered with "potential" photos. Right now my idea is to put photos of cousins, neices and nephews that I don't normally get to see. But I don't have the right sized photos for each frame, so I have to go through pictures online, order prints, all these things that require energy and effort and time...
Maybe I will just decide to cut up my poster of the Periodic Table of Elements and put my favorite elements in the frame instead. To save time.
Then there is the home movie project. I started this last semester. I bought (um, sort of bought...I returned it to Walmart when I was done...shame) a DVD recorder and turned all my family's home movies into digital media. I feel like watching these movies has been an important part of my self-discovery and taking time to heal from buried and undealt-with grief over my dad's death 12 yrs ago. The newest phase of this project is taking what I have digitized and recoding it as files that youtube can read, so I can share the videos with my family over the wonderful world wide web (wwww). This, however, takes....oh God....so much time. Do I ever want a career in video production?
Littered across my desk are small fragments of paper - notecards, stickies, torn leaflets - with some half-finished thought or idea scribbled on them, sometimes in bullet points, and sometimes just messily scrawled. I also have a gmail account that I created specifically for emailing myself ideas when I get them. There are 227 unread emails, and 565 in the inbox.
On the workbench behind me sits a stack of books I pulled out to press some flowers dry, and now the dried flowers are sitting there as well. I haven't decided what to do with them yet.
A stack of CD's sits on top of my computer tower, waiting for me to import them to my itunes library.
Little stringlets of beads inhabit various corners of my desk drawers or on the space where I do my makeup in the morning (next to my jewelry box - that makes some organizational sense, right?)
I just brought the sewing machine I purchased last semester (Craigslist - 15 bucks!) out from under the dark and dusty corner of the bottom of the stairwell and set it in my room, to remind myself that it exists, and that the sewing projects I have sloshing around in my head need to be worked on if they are ever going to come into existence.
Worked on. Man. Work work work...
Everything that's creative, everything that means something to us artistically, takes damn hard work.
I love writing. But man, it is damn hard work.
I have to remind myself that I'm in school, and the stupid papers I have to write when I would rather be sleeping or eating or playing with my plants (yes, my plants are my little friends/children...though all they ever do is complain and ask for more water and sunlight, and they don't really give much back) are doing something within me that is so much more important than the finished product of any home project: they are creating my character. Perseverance. Focus. Diligence. No great thing has ever been done without sacrificing some other thing that could have been done in its place...
I'll get all my little crafts and arts and photos and videos and whatnot done...in time. For now, I've got to not forget the real project: me.
A great book to read which inspired me a good deal with thoughts like these is The War of Art by Steven Pressfield.
2 comments:
This is a wonderful piece. Thanks for taking the time to write it, Amanda! I identify with it more than I'd like to admit. =0)))) I feel like all the little projects in my life have been on hold since the first week in December. But, in it's place, has been the project of myself. And this is good, this is ok.
You rock.
-M
I start so many projects that never get finished. I am the queen of inspiration and also the queen of never following through. I want to read the "war of art" book now.
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