Monday, November 14, 2011

Guilty Pleasure

Page 475. 
Right now the section of Ulysses I am copying is easy breezy. Many of the sentences are very short. It looks almost like the format you'd see in a play, and therefore, unlike the previous section, I am moving pretty quickly. I am doing almost two pages a day...sometimes a little more. Of course I feel guilty. I feel like I should be doing three or four pages a day right now. I should be zipping right along, but I can't bring myself to work on this more than an hour and a half a day. 
If I could eliminate guilt and worry and anxiety I would have so much extra space inside of my head. 
Late this afternoon I finally wrote out a short note asking to be paid for artwork that had been sold last April. I wrote the note on my i pad last week. I let my husband and a friend look at the note and edit it, slashing it to half it's original size. My husband took away all the bits about me feeling badly, about making sure the person who owes me money knows I don't hold any ill will, knows that I am probably more concerned about his emotional state than my financial state. But when the note was stripped of all the sticky goo I let it stay that way. Short, sweet, business like. I need to put it in the mail tomorrow. It is already stamped and the person it is addressed to should have it by Wednesday.  I already feel guilty about adding to his financial burden, even though if he sold every drawing of mine he has at the gallery it would add up to less than three thousand dollars. Anyway, I did write the note and I am going to send it and guilt won't stop me, because I feel more angry than guilty. 
As for writing more, I feel like I am doing enough for now. Maybe when I am really close to the end I'll do more. Maybe not. Haruki Murikami wakes every morning at around 4:00 a.m. and works each day on writing for five or six hours. It makes me feel guilty for not waking to do the same. If I did that I would be done with gloves each day by nine or so, and I could use studio time to make drawings, instead of sacrificing one for the other. But at four in the morning I want to be asleep. And Murikami goes to bed at nine, which would never do in my house. I would never see my husband and barely see my son. And that would make me feel more guilty. 
Oh well. Maybe I can figure out a way to use all this guilt to spur me to action. 
In the mean time I continue along, getting things done, slowly, but most definitely surely.

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