Planning.

Another weekend gone; they go way too fast this time of year. And a whole week to look forward to, starting tomorrow, of sitting at my desk and reading in the long and narrow gray rectangle.

One of my compensatory habits at work—especially early in the week—is to spend some thinking time on what I’m going to do once I get off work. Once it becomes five thirty P.M., I’ll already have had plans for the past nine hours about what I’m going to buy after work, where I’m going to do, and what I’m going to read and listen to or eat. Just to waste time, I write these things down on Postitnotes in pencil, in deliciously time-destroying cursive (which is not my native tongue).

I never actually do these things, or at least, I rarely do. I’m usually too tired, and the bike-ride that would have gotten me to the Salvation Army which seemed like it was going to be so fun earlier has become much more interesting and easy just as a bike ride that will get me home as fast as possible.

Most likely, I’ll follow through with a plan to go to Border’s—which is kind of on the way home—but I still have not gone to the tobacco shop to buy a fancy pipe, something I’ve been wanting to get because of the weather. I’ll pick up some neoconservative rag if the Weekly Standard isn’t on time that week (which it isn’t at all lately because they’re working so very, very hard to keep up with and account for Bush’s latest public incompetence), or I’ll buy a young adult novel, just to keep in practice with thinking in short sentences. Which I’m not doing so far tonight.

There are also extremely simple plans that I make during work that I for some reason cannot follow through with. For instance, everyone at work has a standard-issue gray-and-black desk with two drawers on the lower right, some slots on one side of the top part, and a clicky-opening cupboard on the left.

It is practically perfunctory to decorate the fucking thing, and it’s kind of understandable why: you have to sit for nine hours a day in front of it. Putting stuff on it—while a clichéd way to use a desk at a cubicle job—is kind of good for your own mental health.

On the other hand, I see cubicle-decoration as a stupid and pointless affectation: what are you trying to say by decorating a cubicle? Are you trying to assert your personality to a bunch of people whose opinions you (really, now) don’t care about? Or do you actually care about the opinions of those people so much that you have to have—as there are around work right now:

--a huge collection of petrified muffins
--many pictures and statues of cows
--pictures of (your greatest accomplishment!) your children?

Work is something I take seriously in that I want to do a good job at whatever it is I’m being paid to do, and somewhere to go regularly to think about the things that actually matter to me while being paid—so that I’ll have something interesting to do once I’m not at work. Sounds mutually exclusive, but it’s not. When I was on unemployment most of the last year, I got nothing done; I had no structure.

I have a small collection of postcards that I’ve made for various art shows over the years, and I’ve been meaning to collect them and bring them into work and tape them to my desk for the past month or so. Every day, I say to myself in cursive that when I get home tonight, the first thing I’m going to do is to gather those postcards together and just stick them in my bag for tomorrow. And every day, this does not happen.

What’s so hard about doing it? Nothing at all! Two of these postcards are sitting on my bed right now, and a couple more are within three feet of me. But I can’t, for some fucking mentally-ill reason, get myself to go through with shoving them into my bag and taking them to work. Even though I know that I’ll be happier if I do it.

Maybe I’m not doing it because by not doing it, I get to plan to do it for another day.