Say those seemingly innocuous syllables — “Schedule C” — to a self-employed American artist, and I can nearly guarantee a shudder or a groan in response. At least a heavy sigh. You might also hear some well-meaning but completely unbelievable assertions of a schedule. To be stuck to. Until it’s finished.
I was so deep into my resistance to tax preparation earlier this week, that a whole flurry of activity erupted – activity that might at any other time be laudable. I made a SoulCollage card about it — called (surprise, surprise!): Procrastination. How often does the subject one hopes to depict get expressed in the very act of creating it?
“Procrastination”
As I cut and paste these images, it became oh-so-clear how procrastination verges into denial and feeds on addiction. Think of those Venn diagrams they taught us like it was ever-so-critical in third grade and then never mentioned again.
Three equal-sized circles overlapping with their neighbors on the side, and with all three, in the middle. Ah – there’s the rampant TV-watching, butting up to the refusal to look at the calendar, intersecting with the activity that is NOT preparing Schedule C.
You see, when the time starts to get critical – which it is not yet, but will be soon — any activity that is NOT PREPARING SCHEDULE C, is procrastination — no matter how wonderful that activity otherwise would be. In my college years, I became famous for rearranging the furniture the moment it became crunch-time for a lengthy paper – and not just my bedroom, but the entire apartment (unlike overeating or watching endless hours of bad TV, at least rearranging furniture has the side-benefit of stress relief… if you saw me, you would know why this is especially true for me, standing at 5′ 1″ — and, honestly, outside of pianos, I’ve never met a piece of furniture I couldn’t shove to a new position all by myself).
This year, this week, I’ve been cleaning out drawers. Not just a puttering straightening of a few objects — but rather a ruthless re-sorting that invariably involves the entire house (and LOTS OF TIME). It’s almost felt virtuous. But we know better. Procrastination possesses all manner of craft.
Cleaning up in the overwhelming mess of basement-studio, this little scene got arranged. How bad can that be?
Piecing up some scraps from “Ghost House” with remnants from the barn quilts, getting halfway toward a delightful crib blanket. Again, can this so bad? I even worked on the massive Global Warming quilt, completing one lower quadrant — good, right?!
No, no and no!! Until the expenses are logged into excel and the receipts tidied and all the bank statements ordered and gone through, I will not legitimately be working on ANYTHING. It will all be procrastination in disguise!
Given how enthusiastically I embrace TV nowadays, it sometimes amazes me to look back and recall how little I watched growing up, or in college. But one show I enjoyed was “Kung Fu”. When I added the silk image of a young person doing T’ai Chi to this cloth, the piece’s title suddenly and irrevocably became: Young Grasshopper.
The scan of the boy came from a collage, which eventually became a SoulCollage card. I just checked my Flickr set and it isn’t there — another reminder of the stack of cards waiting to be photographed.
More snow. And pounding rain last night. Some of the heaviest slush I have ever lifted (heating pad, here we come!) Because it was slush below and frozen on top, I had to chop it first with the half-moon edge-trimming tool. The good news? No water coming into the house ANYWHERE.
