3.01.2010

An Anecdote--Interruption of the Flow

So, I know I'm supposed to be writing the final review of the Twilight Saga, but it's taking a while so I thought I'd favor you with a humorous anecdote from life. Mine, specifically.

My creative processes need a little more discipline added to them. This fact was cemented in my mind after hour three of trying to write a short story due today last night. You, dear reader, may have some words about my grasp on the obvious, but I have to say: don't try to write a story the day before you have to hand it in. It's just a miserable experience.

Anyway I know that now.

Around ten all creative juices dried into acid. Around eleven the temptation to type "the last thing he saw was the barrel of a gun pointed at his head" was stronger than it ever has been in my life. Around twelve thirty I was done and disgusted (it's really quite extraordinary the amount of self-loathing one can muster during a creative endeavor. Just ask my sister).

Around one, I was dozing over the keyboard while trying to get the family printer to spit out twenty five copies. Cue noticing a huge typing error. Meagan cancels print job, fixes error, resumes printing. Cue black ink trickling to nil. Meagan cancels the print job, changes all text to blue instead of black, resumes printing. Cue printer printing at the speed of one page per five minutes.

You should be admiring my perseverance at this point--even though it had morphed into more of a one-track, zombie-like "Must get done....must get done..." compulsion. But eventually, the practical part of my mind concluded, "This is dumb." Meagan cancels print job for the final time, making satisfactory plans to print the rest out at school.

So of course, I need to bring a stapler to staple them all together before I hand them out, and logically I should check to make sure I have enough staplers because it would just be in keeping with the whole process if I got to school in the morning and discovered I was stuck with a stapleless stapler. Naturally this leads to prying open the forty-year-old stapler, and after finding satisfaction in the number of staples therein, wrestling the decrepit tool closed.

Protestingly it finally snapped shut, and the action was accompanied by a stranger sensation in my finger. Curiously, I glance down at the digit, only to be met with the sight of a staple in my finger.

Before you stop reading, dear reader, I will add that it didn't hook. A fortuitous circumstance. But I still found myself with an old metal staple dug a good half-inch into my finger at one-thirty in the morning. Through my fuzzy brain (that I'm pretty sure was trying to thrust me into an out-of-body experience), I stared at the skewered appendage blankly. Reason compelled me to remove it, which I did, and then immediately worked my frayed mind to think who I could talk to about the experience at this time of night.

How very telling.

After this, I put a band-aid on it, scraped up enough incredulity to spout some profanities (shameful of me; I'm glad everyone was asleep), and went to bed.

And this morning I typed up a completely different short story, that I despise slightly less, and am now minutes away from turning it in.

I'm not sure what's wrong with me, but something definitely is.