i’m thinking this is just a fancy term for procrastination? you know, those moments when you have a list-of-things-to-do and you do something NOT on the list. to be honest, i ALWAYS add the things i ended up doing TO the list so that i can cross them off. there is something i find so very satisfying about crossing things off. even if i haven’t gotten to the crux of what i need to get done.
d says that i work in a circular manner. i suppose he’s right. but i swear it’s a woman-thing. we are spinning many plates at the same time, keeping them all in the air, and, although everything will eventually get done, we move from one thing to the next and then circle back. i know very few gals who – in an OCD kind of way – stay cemented to one task until its completion without punctuating it with others.
when The Girl and The Boy were little i was constantly moving from writing at the piano to reading books aloud to playing with matchbox cars to making business calls and back to the piano….many layers all at once. i remember having a phone conversation with one of the VPs of barnes and noble when they were placing one of my albums on the listening station wall. in the middle of this phone call, you could hear one of my children in toddlerhood – i will not mention which one – in the background, beckoning me from the bathroom, yelling, “i finished! i pooped!” the VP heard it too and he was gracious enough to tell me he would hold on. it’s a mom thing, right? those spinning plates.
we work differently, d and me. we are both productive, but i’m guessing he would oft label me productively avoidant. eh. he just doesn’t see how i accomplish that ever-growing-ever-crossed-off list in my head (or on paper, for that matter.) it’s amazing what i can accomplish when i am “supposed” to be accomplishing something else. i know you know what i mean! #allwillgetdone #whatdoesitallmeananyway?
read DAVID’S thoughts on PRODUCTIVE AVOIDANCE
they had me thinking about the songs coming from my sister’s room and the songs my big brother would play on his guitar. so it wasn’t a stretch to write a piece that was all about longing and reminiscing and memories, stories that were deeply set in my heart, times that had gone by. later on we orchestrated this piece for the album AS IT IS. i still associate it with the twin retro albums; the cello line gets me every time. it makes me want to take out all my photo albums and set up a white sheet in the living room to watch the carousels of 35mm slides my poppo called “film funnies”. longing. indeed.
reverse threading 