Procrastination

I slowed down on my progress yesterday, mostly because there's a character who's not working the way I want him to work, and that makes the scenes with him not work quite right. He seems so clear in my head, but that isn't making it to the page. This is important because if I do it right, he'll be the source of much of the humor in the book, and I suspect he'll also be a lot of what the fangirls would get excited about. I have a kind of model for this character from somewhere else (and what's weird is that I already had this character worked out and had written much of the book before the "model" character showed up, so I didn't base my character on this other character. Instead it was more a case of, "Hey, that's my guy! Now I can study him and think of things he can do and ways I can describe his mannerisms!"). I figured out last night, though, that there are some distinct differences, so my "model" isn't quite as good as I thought it was.

And now it's shameful confession time. I have to admit that I am a world-champion procrastinator. It's not just about delaying getting to work. It's about just about everything. An item usually lives on my to-do list for days or even weeks before I take care of it. A lot of the time, the only reason something gets done is that there's an externally imposed deadline. Even things that shouldn't be unpleasant and that will benefit me when they're done get put off.

For instance, dealing with my cable service. Ever since September of last year, my cable convertor box has been glitchy. Every so often, the picture will break up, then go black, and then come back. Occasionally, when it comes back it will be all distorted, like it's stretched from side to side. Sometimes, it's already distorted when I turn the TV on. At first I thought the picture loss was a problem with the cable signal, and for a while I thought the distortion was because the stations were trying to avoid letterboxing and were blowing up the widescreen picture to full-screen. Then I discovered that none of these things happened when I bypassed the cable box. I've also had problems accessing some of the OnDemand stuff, but I can't test whether that's coming from the server or the box.

And yet, I've done nothing about it, all this time. I kept putting off calling the cable company, and then I found that I could take the box to one of their offices and trade it for a new one instead of calling and playing "wait for the cable guy." I live between two of their offices, each about a ten-minute drive. One of their offices is practically on my way home from physical therapy. But I just kept putting it off and putting it off. Today, though, on my way home I went to swap out the box. I was thinking I could get an HD box, since Kurt's dad from Glee tells us at least three times an hour that TimeWarner is better than other options because HD is no extra charge, but it turns out that because I get my cable service through my homeowners association, there is an extra fee to get an HD box. I figured that it wasn't worth the extra money, since in a little more than a year it would pay for a Blu-Ray player, and then I could watch the things I care about in HD.

So now, nine months later, I've finally done something about a technical problem that was driving me nuts. I'm still letting the box set itself up, so I don't know if this will resolve the glitch.

I think one reason behind some of my procrastination is that I have grand future plans, and I figure that I shouldn't bother doing something now that will be re-done or undone later. That's why I let my house get so messy earlier this year. I had this grand plan to do a major unclutter and sort project, so why put things away in what would end up being the wrong place when I was going to redo it all anyway? With the cable box, I'd been thinking about maybe one day getting the box with a DVR and stop messing with tapes, but my financial situation isn't such that I want to take on additional monthly expenses now. I was waiting until something happened to make that more feasible, and why bother swapping out the box now when I'd be getting something different later? I have to convince myself that being happy now is just as important as that mythical "someday."

As for everything else, I have no idea why I put off stupid little things. I guess I just get into "don't want to deal with it" mode and have to be forced out of it.