Progress checks considered harmful
Sometimes I feel as though time is stripey. I don’t move continuously through the day: instead, I have states that come and go. When evening comes and I start to write (I almost always write these posts in the evening, at least when I’m at my mother’s house, because it’s when my mother and step-father are asleep) I feel as though no time has passed at all since I last wrote a post. In some sense, all the time that passed between the last post and this one is swallowed up in the gap between </article> and <article>. A whole two days passed in an instant, and here I am, writing again.
What happened? I learned a bit about Javascript from this book, and read some essays by Fran Lebowitz from The Fran Lebowitz Reader. Boy does she have this gig nailed: write enough to get a speaking tour, then just speak. She didn’t just take a break from writing, she took a broke (thanks MC Debra). But as Fran says, “writing is hard and I’m lazy”. Both are true.
Night time comes sooner every day; before I even get started, it’s time to sleep again. But I can’t work when my mother and step-father are awake; knowing they’re asleep gives my brain space to spin up without interference. Or maybe it’s knowing that they aren’t going to come up and ask me what I’m doing. My step-father in particular has the excurciating habit of asking me “make any progress today?” as though there’s progress to be made. What progress? I’m moving just as fast as I can to keep from falling behind; moving forward is out of the question. I mean for god’s sake I couldn’t even get a button to work in Javascript today, and I only started looking at the language yesterday; I still don’t know PHP or Python (I can read Python pretty well, but I couldn’t write my way out of a paper bag using Python).
But as I said, time is stripey: I don’t move forward so much as sideways. Maybe it’s a cycle: large wheels turn slowly. And I still haven’t written my magnum opus. I think that it’s inherited: my father (no step) works pathologically. If his work is not perfect in his own estimation, he isn’t satisfied and is convinced that others won’t be either; and who knows the flaw of a work better than its author? As Ellen Ullman put it in either this book or this book, an idea starts out as a perfect gem in our mind: I have an insight and the whole problem is clear. How could it possibly be so simple? How can no one else have seen it? But as we start to work the idea out, to implement it, the perfection of the idea becomes compromised by shoddy reality and our own failings until the clarity and simplicity of our original concept is loss in a heap of mess. And depending on how functional the mess is and how many people are waiting, I either shelve it permanently or throw it to the judgement of others. And then it starts over, because I have to be working on something. “Are you making progress?” How can I? Days pass where nothing happens, then I pick up exactly where I left off as though no time at all had passed. Is that progress, or just barely hanging on?
