Right now I’m sitting in a coffee shop pretending to be productive. Not Starbucks obviously because I need to keep at least some of my Austin cred. No, I'm sitting in The Coffee Bean and Tea Leaf. An establishment that I thought of until recently as being locally owned and operated. I stumbled across it in the Detroit Airport and realized there were probably hundreds of these god-forsaken things all across the country.. It was later brought up in conversation and I nervously scoffed at the idea of anyone buying an overpriced coffee from the evil vendor. “Oh, that place is like the new Starbucks,” I said. My heart almost gave out when I thought of the praise I would have given it if I hadn’t passed it on my way to find a Burger King I’d seen in the airport directory. These days favoring a food-chain is like wearing white after Labor Day.
I don’t have any paper so I’m substituting my daily planner as a notepad. This note is scrawled across the lines of Thursday, June 9th. Along the left margin are small numbers notifying me of the things I might need to get done today. Right now I’m dumbfounded and horrified at the thought of someone actually needing two full lines for every hour of the day. I bought this planner about six months ago thinking that it would magically make me more productive. After all, what’s a day if it hasn’t been planned? Like maybe if I could see all the things I had to get done it would make it more fun. Instead it did two things:
1) Overwhelmed me by placing all the obligations I had all week right in front of my face, (never more than two). and...
2) Saddened me when I found myself going weeks at a time without writing down a single thing. The latter brought me to write down absolutely anything I was going to do for the day just so I could feel more useful. “Tuesday, March 22nd. 8:00 AM: Read.” Read? Read what? Maybe catch up on the current events in the New York Times? Scour the insightful article on Yahoo!’s home page about what not to say on a first date? Who knows. I don’t even wake up that early. The sad(der) part of it all is that I couldn’t even check that off my to-do list. Eventually my enthusiasm for my daily planner waned into nonexistence and it got stuffed into the bottom of my backpack, never to be seen again. Besides, I prefer my days to be spontaneous.
It has taken me almost two weeks to finish writing this. I’m no longer sitting in a coffee shop debating whether or not I should ask the attractive girl sitting across from me for a piece of paper from her notepad. Now I'm sitting in my boxers at ten in the morning trying to decide if I want to take a shower now or go all day and take one at night. Because if I’m going to wait I should probably put some clothes on. But if I take one now then I should stay in my boxers because It would be too much work to dress and then undress and dress again. My life is full of difficult choices.
I realize now that professional writers probably don’t just write when they feel like it. They likely have some sort of daily routine of locking themselves away with a typewriter and a pot of coffee for hours on end. My daily routine is to think about how I should be writing something while I struggle out of bed sometime around ten. I then sort out my ideas in front of the boob tube. A few hours will go by and I’ll work through the conflict on the way to McDonalds. My midday nap is a great time for me to figure out a climax while late night drinking is when I perfect the falling action.
It’s very important that I become productive at some point in the near future. I just need to stop fooling around and get to it. Unfortunately, motivation eludes me at every turn. Or at least it would elude me if I actually tried to pursue it. Instead, every day motivation looks at me and makes a B-line for the exit while I sit in The Coffee Bean and Tea Leaf Spiderhouse and wave it goodbye.
