Archive of things to do with 'setback'

• 03.31.08 An early fall afternoon:

  From an elevation in the sandpit you commanded the playground. There was a train of boys running after a train of girls. It was shapes and activity. One girl seemed to stand still in the center of it. She held her eyes tight closed. He raised a sliver of bark above his head. It was his sword of justice.

  He fell upon the group shouting, holding his weapon, he flew down from the hill with air rushing past his scalp. He felt glee and power as he chased. Older boys shouted after him, he felt the sun. He was a good runner. With a sudden burst of speed he caught up with and tackled a boy. He heard cheers. The wind was rushing past and he was strong.

  
  Tags: setback, writing, learning, fiction, justice.
• 01.23.07 Piling up:

  I’m not being productive unless I’m feeling overwhelmed. Usually I don’t do much. Then I’ll have a burst of activity. Then the energy will run out, and I’ll find myself overcommitted. & then I retract from my commitments, rest, then feel ashamed of how little I do, and start the cycle over.

  
  Tags: self, blog, personality, work, setback, writing, project, composition, thinking, water, drained, simile, failure, rhythm.
• 01.02.07 Off on the right foot:

  Today I feel like my life is a series of setbacks and I pass the time in between them struggling to make up for lost ground. I took off from work today to fight a cold I felt approaching. Result: I feel worse, I spent an hour and a half walking outside in the rain, and I feel like if I see my office again I might have to scream. (I whimpered a couple times today thinking about it, but that was purely optional.)

  Maybe that doesn’t sound like much, but I don’t feel like drawing the full-detail picture that would indicate its place in the larger pattern I seem to see. Partially because I’m sure I would be ashamed of the inadequate result. In any case, I would never finish it. The cruelest hit I took today was logging into google documents, I saw that I had nothing showing in my active documents: I haven’t touched a single one of my projects for a whole month. Hoping to shame myself into getting back to work, I had the idiotic idea of talking about one of them in a public place.

  
  Tags: self, blog, personality, work, shame, change, setback, travel, writing, project, siberia, turkey.