Gripery

I’m done with the grading, but I’m still eating and griping.

Here is my motto for the month of kerfuffledom: “Good is the enemy of fabulosity.”

The previous motto, the one I tried to live by for years, was “Perfect is the enemy of good.” This means just get it done, get it out the door, it doesn’t have to be deathless and beautiful, it just has to be adequate and finished. Because ten adequate and finished things add up to more than one deathless and beautiful thing stalled on the desk.

But now I think I need a motto upgrade. Because good was winning out, but good was not good enough. Here I am well into the month of many deadlines, taking care of things as briskly and efficiently as I can. I’m halfway through the (interminable, gruesome, grimace-inducing, teeth-gnashingly boring) study guide, halfway through the book proposal, and halfway through the grant proposal. Alarmingly, I haven’t started the twelve encyclopedia entries or the conference paper. Everything is due fairly imminently.

But things are ticking over. There’s no high hysteria. And still I am tearing my hair out, beating my head against the metaphorical wall, and making lamentational motions in the direction of heaven. I always thought that if I got on top of my deadlines, the bliss of empowered smugness would carry me away. So why I am neither smug nor blissful? And why am I gulping down a little too much chocolate cake, to the point where friends and relatives are probably planning an intervention? (“You show up in public with icing on your face ... you missed little Timmy’s play because you were at Safeway stocking up on HoHos ... come along with us and check into this nice facility ...”) And that’s not to mention a kind of compulsive attachment to Graham Greene novels, which means I’m staying up far too late reading about people in oppressive exotic locales carefully not saying things to each other.

Anyway, long story short, it turns out it’s not just THAT you get things done on time; it’s also WHAT you get done on time. Meeting deadlines is necessary but not sufficient. Since I never really met any deadlines before this new enlightened stage of life, this was not obvious to me.

I just wanted to mention here that my housemate just came in, between this paragraph and the last, and asked if I wanted to watch the Mystery Science Theatre version of “Monster-A-Go-Go” with him. And I said no. Because I have to finish the study guide tonight. This is a prime example! This is “Good is the enemy of fabulosity” in action! The study guide is the good. “Monster-A-Go-Go” is fabulosity! And guess which one I locked myself into!

So there’s the upshot and the moral. When you choose projects, make sure they’re not only excellent, profitable things that you’re passionate about, but also make sure that you would rather do them than watch “Monster-A-Go-Go.” (I am not accepting the answer that you would rather have a root canal than watch “Monster-A-Go-Go.” Trust me, you would rather have a root canal than write this study guide. And halfway through, you would spit all the wads of cotton out of your mouth and rip the paper bib off your neck and say, “I change my mind! Bring me Joel and the ’Bots!”)

I thought these projects would be fun. They’re not unfun, as projects go. But they can’t compete with *actual* fun. I *have* done a couple of work projects in the past month that would win out over MST3K any day. Why am I not doing ONLY fabulous things? Why did I ever agree to things that were good but unfabulous? What was I thinking?

Back to the study guide. I can hear the theme music starting upstairs. Remind me of this next time I get some crazy urge to do something just because I can meet the deadline.