Let it out. Let it alllllll out.

I’m a big slacker. I’m a huge slacker. I’m a huge, immobilized, paralyzed by fear and anxiety and possibility of failure slacker. I have no discipline, I fall asleep two minutes into reading a book or article, I can’t revise my own work, I panic when I sit down to write new work. My skin crawls and jerks and twitches at the thought of doing anything necessary or obligatory, whether it’s writing a check for the gas bill or answering the phone or writing my twenty-five page critical paper. I have huge guilt about all of the above which perpetuates the cycle. And I think I should have applied to cooking school instead of a graduate program in creative writing.

Now that THAT’s out of the way, let’s move on.

Last night at my meditation course, the teacher talked about what makes a good meditation sitting. “Don’t think that having wandering thoughts for most of your sitting means it’s a bad session, ” she said in her careful, even tone, then emphasized, “that couldn’t be further from the truth.” If we sit for 25 minutes and have 2 minutes of concentration, that’s good, because hey, two minutes of concentration! “Don’t make what’s unimportant, important.” Don't put all the attention on the mind wandering and then minimize the value of the goal, the concentration. I’m trying to apply this lesson to other things in my life. Don’t make the negative unimportant stuff more important than it is. But I had to get some of it off my chest first.

So I’m off to do my 2 minutes of writing my critical paper.

In Other News^TM, Henry James is GAY!?! Ok, maybe not gay in the social construct identity way, but he was enamored with several young men when he himself was an older gentleman. (I don’t mean this in the NAMBLA pedophilia way – I’m talking about guys in their 20s while he was in his 50s-60s.)