Impatience

If ever there were an emotion ready tailored for you, its shoulders allowed for, its waist pinched in, it's right-off-the-rack fit assured, that emotion is impatience.  It is a certainty for you that things do not come soon enough, don't last long enough.  Even though it has been a good five years since you were summoned for jury duty, that call has come too soon and you can't wait to have it behind you.

Have you covered the entire spectrum, hinted at the impatience to get through with all unpleasant things, the absolute lack of respect for the way the universe is playing out its drama?  Not to your direction, it isn't, thus you do the next best thing to overrule your impatience, you write, you make things up or,if you are of a mind, down.

What after all is story but a bundle of events concocted to show a disparate group of individuals, most of whom you invented on the spot, having cast them before you got to learn their quirkiness, their own insistence on behavior even more quirky and notional than individuals you know in reality.  You borrow here and there from persons you know in reality, but these individuals you create are not content.  As Pinocchio wished to become a real boy, your characters wish to become real persons which means you either have to put up with them or send them packing.

The same obtains with your stories, wanting to--needing to seem real in order to give you the energy to continue your task of rearranging what you consider to be the dramatic furniture to be more to your liking.  The source of the energy, in fact the cause of the energy is impatience.

Well and good that you believe you are optimistic, that you talk yourself out of black moods and funks, often by reminding yourself that it was you who got yourself into these black moods and funks in the first place.  Thus you are impatient with yourself, first for the invention of the scenarios of gloom and disaster, then the counterweight of the need to invent happier turns of event, plans that will send you forth as you were sent forth to school as a younger person, secure in the knowledge that there was at least one substantial sandwich in your lunch bag and one more idiosyncratic sandwich such as peanut butter and jam or smoked salmon, or one of your more favored yet,slabs of cold meatloaf.  Even such lunch bags could not get you through the horrors of junior high school with complete insouciance.  Realities of the sort that is junior high school must sometimes be endured until they are over, increasing your inner roil of impatience.

It pleases you to be so focused on a new project that you are impatient to get to it, each day in its presence much reminding you of the early stages of romance in the works, the times where you are finding out things about the project and it is finding out things about you, which comes down to the calculus of how much of you are you going to put into it this time, how much are you going to share, and how vulnerable will this make you.

One thing you have learned that is worth keeping:  Do not take up with a project for the sake of something to do, nor however impatient you might be while waiting for the project to come along, take one from a sense of desperation.  You will know her when you you find her beginning to return your steady eye contact.  She will have the power to break your heart.  And you will be impatient to know her better, trying with all your skills to resist showing off for her.

Trying.