365 days of being a writer: day 295

Time is taking so long to pass.

Every day, the traffic--which I am becoming increasingly unable to handle--wears me down before I even get to my cube. My coworker starts in with whatever petty political brouhaha is going to obfuscate our priorities before I even sit down. And then I spend eight hours highlighting text and changing it from normal to heading 1 and back again. Sometimes I turn Word documents in to PDF fillable forms. This involves a lot of repetitive clicking and the typing over and over and over of "Address Line 1," "City," "State," and "Zip."

I try to stay focused on the copying and pasting and saving as. I try to look interested when someone wants to tell me all about this one show they saw last night. There is a certain amount of goofing off allowed in an office, but only if it is goofing off with others. Shared fate.

Today, a copy of the Bellingham Review showed up. I think I paid for a year's subscription --last year-- when I entered a contest. In it was a beautiful, brief essay about birds. It brought out a sort of desperate feeling, like an emotional rash. I wanted it to be something related to what I write, at least. But it was gorgeous in a more delicate way than what I've been writing. So, rather than bolstering me up with the idea of Look! People are publishing bird stories! It said, This is the bird story you can't write.

But, I tried to soldier on. I opened up my latest bird essay to assess. As predicted, the copying, the pasting, the slow then far too fast drivers, the talk show recaps, the ones who don't signal before drifting across three lanes, the table of contents that refused to forget an errant tab, the closed door meeting over when CONFIDENTIAL should be used and when CLIENT CONFIDENTIAL, the story about picking peaches out in the yard (that was it), the guy on my ass all the way down 19th, the woman going too slow after that... and I got nothing, unsurprisingly. That could change tomorrow, but for today, a few fixed typos. An axed paragraph. A reworded sentence. Quoth the raven, nothingmore.

How do people with lives write? How do you still the bullshit out there so you can get to writing in here?