14 June 2011

Procrastination

Somehow, my small break became a very long hiatus indeed. But, no matter – here I am now, back and promising not to ignore my Scrapbook any further.

I won’t go into the details of everything I’ve been up to. It’s like that awkward phone conversation with a half-forgotten friend after a long silence; there is simply too much to say, and so there is nothing to say at all.

And, somehow, it also became nearly Summer. To mark the event (driven home by last week's heat wave in New York), I went to Brighton Beach.

It's not surprising that this turned out to be such a long bout of silence on my part. Without the framework of deadlines, even loose, self-appointed ones, things easily fall by the wayside. After all, what's one more day without writing? These are the pleasures of Procrastination, my friends, that unwelcome house guest so familiar to so many of us.

I am a big procrastinator, but I am also generally productive. The magical ingredient is, of course, a concrete motivator. This is usually external: a paper deadline or the start of a rehearsal period. Breaking up the work usually requires a personal commitment to self-imposed micro-accomplishment, however, and I my track record is uneven in this department. A paper is generally relegated to an all-night typing binge, for instance, but I can't get away with this when it comes to memorizing music. I have a long history of cramming for tests, but there are too many factors to control when it comes to performance - movement, harmony, text and character conjured in real time - for me to trust a haphazard memory bank.

Ah! To live on the edge! Charley Chase rides a bike, via Rides a Bike.

Yet things do seem to pile up; I am not perfect, after all. Currently, I'm finishing the process of learning a fair heap of music for a quickly approaching summer program with a certain amount of panic. (As anyone who's had a conversation with me in the past month will tell you.) Therein lies the ugly side of simultaneous predilection toward achievement and procrastination!

Our hero, tired of practicing and memorizing.

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