![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
Waiting (I Hate Waiting)
Dec. 20th, 2019 04:14 pmDoes anyone else get in a weird headspace when they’re on a break from work? Like, after a few days of catching up on rest and TV and whatever, there’s a point where your brain is like, “Hi, hello, let’s go back to Thinking A Lot about Things.” Probably I’m not alone in this because I’m not the only anxious person in the world. I wish it were easier to channel that energy into something productive.
Here is a Metaphor. It might be very US-centric, so forgive me a little exposition. In the US, you can buy something called concentrate — like apple juice concentrate or lemonade concentrate. It’s basically a frozen cylinder of concentrated juice. It came in a can. You open the can, schlunk out the concentrate into a pitcher, add X cans of water, and mix, making juice or lemonade or whatever. You had to let the concentrate thaw. Thawed concentrate was the grossest sludge of high fructose nonsense. I’m pretty sure only people who were poor bought this instead of just regular bottles of juice because it was really easy to stretch the juice by adding more cans of water than called for. We had it a lot when I was a kid. ANYWAY, this isn’t a meditation on poverty. I just really need you to have this image in your mind, because my creativity lately is a solid chunk of Juice Concentrate. The ingredients are there, but they are not ready for consumption or indeed, not even ready for me to use as a base for anything. It’s sitting there in my brain, a heavy cylinder of slimy, frozen stuff. Sometimes I give in to the urge to, like, lick it, or I poke it with a wooden spoon, shave off a few spoonfuls of story, nothing useable, but I keep poking and scraping. If I am patient, I will be able to produce a nice pitcher of something. I mean, it won’t be fresh squeezed, but it will be drinkable. Probably.
I’m also in a bit of a holding pattern, career wise. I know my current post is Not Right, but I can’t just wait for it to get better. I have to Do Something, so today I started applying for posts at new schools. But I still have to wait. And like Inigo Montoya, I hate waiting.
Here is a Metaphor. It might be very US-centric, so forgive me a little exposition. In the US, you can buy something called concentrate — like apple juice concentrate or lemonade concentrate. It’s basically a frozen cylinder of concentrated juice. It came in a can. You open the can, schlunk out the concentrate into a pitcher, add X cans of water, and mix, making juice or lemonade or whatever. You had to let the concentrate thaw. Thawed concentrate was the grossest sludge of high fructose nonsense. I’m pretty sure only people who were poor bought this instead of just regular bottles of juice because it was really easy to stretch the juice by adding more cans of water than called for. We had it a lot when I was a kid. ANYWAY, this isn’t a meditation on poverty. I just really need you to have this image in your mind, because my creativity lately is a solid chunk of Juice Concentrate. The ingredients are there, but they are not ready for consumption or indeed, not even ready for me to use as a base for anything. It’s sitting there in my brain, a heavy cylinder of slimy, frozen stuff. Sometimes I give in to the urge to, like, lick it, or I poke it with a wooden spoon, shave off a few spoonfuls of story, nothing useable, but I keep poking and scraping. If I am patient, I will be able to produce a nice pitcher of something. I mean, it won’t be fresh squeezed, but it will be drinkable. Probably.
I’m also in a bit of a holding pattern, career wise. I know my current post is Not Right, but I can’t just wait for it to get better. I have to Do Something, so today I started applying for posts at new schools. But I still have to wait. And like Inigo Montoya, I hate waiting.
