#madwriting

The title comes from a couple of female scientists on Twitter who… I’m not sure if they had writer’s block or needed inspiration to sit down and write or what—all I know is that they came up with the idea of “#madwriting”, which basically consists of a bunch of people sitting down and writing as much as they can in 30-minute bursts (and they’re very forgiving if you run past that time). In the past, I’d been okay just watching the Twitter updates, seeing the “And….. write!” tweets, etc. This time, I decided to join in, if for no other reason than to say I did it.

There are actually a few good reasons for me to participate. Given that a lot of the people doing this are trying to write papers or theses, I could have used the burst of speed and energy to work on a paper for school. Unfortunately, I don’t have a topic to write about—there was a long list and we were supposed to send the prof a note with our top three choices (plus an alternate or two… as many as we wanted, really). I made my list and sent it to him on Tuesday night. The problem is that I sent it to the wrong e-mail address.

Consequently, he never got the message and I still don’t know what the topic of my paper is. Shit.

But like I said, I wanted to participate. Plus this is a good way for me to not do the reading that’s sitting next to me. What’s one or two hundred pages between friends? A lot to do before Tuesday night, really, but who’s counting?

So since I can’t write about school, what have I got? I dunno, but along with the paper and thesis writers, there are bloggers out there who manage to come up with material for their 30-minute #madwriting session, so I damn well better be able to come up with something.

Hmmm… I suppose I could write about soccer today, but I imagine people are bored with reading about my epic struggles with playing and playing through injuries. I’m not sure why my shoulder is continuing to hurt, but I’ll be seeing a doctor or chiropractor or someone soon. I sent in a form to the insurance company indicating that I would have future expenses, so I imagine my body will be ready for treatment as soon as the insurance is.

But the weird part is that the shoulder bothering me isn’t the one I went to the doctor about—I strained the muscles in my neck and my left rotator cuff. You’d think that was the problem area. All the physical therapy has helped that side heal pretty well; the problem has been my right shoulder. There’s a thick muscle fiber in there that’s just a giant lump and doesn’t want to go away. Consequently, when I try to take long throw-ins, it protests. Loudly.

I made one or two that were fairly short during the game, which wasn’t a big deal. The first and the last… I put a lot of distance on those and came out right away. My shoulder was not pleased. After standing on the sideline for a couple minutes, it felt okay again, but I don’t want that to be a chronic issue. It’s bad enough that I occasionally twist my knee the wrong way and have to step off the field for a bit—I can’t have more parts of me breaking down.

Thankfully, my fingers are still doing okay, so I can sit here in bed with my feet propped up and laptop in my lap, typing away for no good reason with no specific goal in mind. Man, that pisses me off… I wish I’d gotten in touch with the prof earlier so I could be working on a paper.

Then again, this is kind of typical for me. Back at Kenyon as an undergrad, I’d get close to deadlines on papers and find any excuse I could to write someone other than my paper for class. Hell, that’s when I’d be most productive. “I’ve got a 10-page paper due tomorrow afternoon—time to write another essay about absolutely nothing!” Dunno why that’s the case. Maybe it’s because I didn’t like the work very much, didn’t have the focus needed to work on something that took brain power… riiiiight.

But right now, I have reading that I should be doing, so this isn’t that much of a transition. I suppose nowadays, I’d be more likely to surf around on YouTube or Facebook instead of writing—less brainpower required, more entertainment. I suppose that could be part of the issue. More immediate returns for writing fun stuff (it’s fun), whereas doing actual work isn’t as much fun. I don’t enjoy it as much. Especially when the book I’m reading is boring and putting me to sleep.

Why didn’t I get to bed until 5:00 in the morning? Paradigms. It could be intriguing at times, but when the author started making predictions about the future, that’s when I started to fade. When I’m lying down comfortably while trying to read, it becomes less of a “tired head bob” and more of a “tired book flop”. Eventually, I had to give up and start doing some work on here.

Yes, that’s right, I’m still working on the blog. Not so much anymore (see: this entry), but I still have plenty of entries that could use tags, especially in the “Beauty and the Geek” category. I want to break things up into seasons as opposed to just “Beauty and the Geek” and make the readers sift through everything to find stuff. That’s right, I’m doing it all for you.

So I spent time tagging as well as copying and pasting entries into Word files on my laptop. I started doing that many years ago, which came in handy when shawnbakken.com went down and I lost everything. I still had all the entries backed up on my hard drive, so while it took me a long time to finally get everything reposted (see: earlier this month), it got done. Same thing last night/this morning: copy and paste the content so I’d have it available offline. Tag, then write down the entry dates in a Notebook file (which stretches back to 2003). It doesn’t sound that bad until you consider I had to start midway through PerBloWriMo. Half of December plus all of this year… I think I went through 70 entries. Took a couple hours, fried a couple brain cells, didn’t require any reading from Paradigms. Awesome.

And that’s time. 30 minutes of… I might call it blatherings, but I thought “Musings” sounded like a better category title. Regardless, I haven’t the slightest idea of everything I wrote in here. Hopefully, at least some of it makes sense. If not… I could be in trouble for that paper due Tuesday night.