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109: The Tyranny of Projects

I've been referring to creative projects as "objects of tyranny" a lot this week as a reaction to their sudden presence on my tickler list. It's funny how we are never busy when we've got nothing to do, but as soon as one little creative outing pushes its way through the door, others -- lemming-like -- follow. And, if you are eager to please (or just plain eager to have these sorts of endeavors in your life), you tend to not say "No!" Projects, then. More than can fit in a breadbox. You start (well, I do) spending more time planning and trying to figure out how you're going to accomplish everything and less time actually doing, wondering why there is never enough time to finish everything that is on your plate.

Tyranny, I tell you.

Anyway, the first of the year is always that time when we take stock of things, when we figure out what went wrong last time and what we can do to make it work this time. That's the delightful thing about recreating the world every year: you can fix mistakes. The cycle of renewal is more than just a rebirth of the world from sleep and death; it's another opportunity to Get It Right. Like Bill Murray in Groundhog Day. January 1 is our cultural symbol to try again; it's the one day where we get to absolve ourselves of all the stupid shit we did last year and reset the clock for another year. Maybe this one will be different. Maybe this time we won't fuck things up.

I promised last year to not eat another maple bar. I think I survived two months on that promise. It made for a nice bit in something I wrote, but my words were stronger than my willpower. Funny, that: we can always talk better than we can walk. One of those delightful functions of language: words are cheap and easy.

So, no cheap and easy words about finishing the BOOK OF LIES. It's not an albatross -- "names are albatrosses" -- yet, but it is a project that gets shoved off the plate fairly easily for other more alluring things. The allure of the shiny things is that they have quick turn-around times and the ratio of effort to completion is much smaller.

I am, after all, a whore for the quick and dirty adulation. Who isn't? Who doesn't like hearing nice words right on the tail of finishing a project. Ah, yes, the tyranny of language. Words are cheap and easy.

Welcome to 2005. We are all slaves to language, our chains nothing more than the linked letters of our discourse.

Posted by Teppo at January 7, 2005 07:44 AM

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