Signing up for the latest swap on one of my Yahoo! groups was a mistake, I figured, but I went ahead and did it anyway.  I was right.  It was a round-robin, on a strict deadline, and I do not do terribly well with strict deadlines at the best of times. Right now, with my Muse on hiatus, a creative round-robin was doomed to not go well and it didn’t. No creativity, no motivation, procrastination on the mailings (I really do loathe going to the post office), and no real explanation for any of it — just mental and psychological inability to do anything, or to even talk about it to anyone. So I was dropped from the swap, got my book mailed back to me, and finally got the book I still had into the mail (without any contribution from me, sadly).

Naturally I feel like a total shit, to the point where I have avoided emails and group digests because they just worsened the spiral. I really need to not participate in swaps and round-robins until I can get my procrastination and avoidance behaviors straightened out.  Next time I’ll  listen to the little voice in my head that says, “yes, it sounds cool, but remember, you usually manage to screw these things up despite your best intentions,” and stay out so I don’t piss people off. Just another lesson I’m kind of slow learning, eh?

I had a day off from school today thanks to the MLK holiday. I could have spent pretty much the whole day lampworking, but kept putting off even turning on the kiln and concentrator.

• First there was laundry,
• Then the routine computer work (you know, emails, and blog feeds, and monitoring the forum)
• Then working on updating my curriculum vitae, which I have to turn in before Friday for post-tenure review
• Then studying the template files for The Glass Haven to try to figure out how to place ads there.
• Add in a little reading here and there.

By evening I still wasn’t in the mood to torch, but I told myself to go in there and at least use up the twistie left over from the weekend. So I did, then played around with making a basic crunch bead (not as easy in boro as in soft glass), and made a few more twisties for later in the week. Not a particularly productive session, but at least I melted a little glass and eventually hit a bit of a groove.

Then, ironically, as I was doing my last-of-the-day check of the emails and feeds, I found that Leo Babauta of Zen Habits had talked about resistance, my resistance and his, to getting things done:

7 Powerful Steps to Overcoming Resistance and Actually Getting Stuff Done

Uh huh.  Number seven.  “Just start.”