The First Real Day

Today is the first REAL day of the new year. Weekends and holidays don't count. Mondays count! I leapt out of bed this morning and now can say that I have my life completely organized at last: doctors appts made for me and the boys, dentist appts made for me and the boys, library books returned, a check deposited, syllabi photocopied all set to hand out a week from today when the semester begins at CU, clean house, beds changed, laundry in the dryer, a memo of detailed comments typed up to give my first children's book writing mentee when we meet tomorrow morning, and a good hour of revisions on my chapter book (the one I've been working on for the past few months, the one whose two last chapters I'm about to share with my writing group tonight). Oh, and Weight Watchers begun again - lovely steamed cauliflower for lunch, with a little bit of shredded apple and curry powder. And a long twilight walk with my friend Rowan. If I were this productive every day, I would be conquering the world. The world would already be conquered.

But of course I'm not this productive every day. I wonder why I'm not, when this feels so good, this sustained, focused attention to my to-do list, making the list, crossing things off my list. Part of it is that today's heroic accomplishments were actually fairly simple, despite my crowing in the previous paragraph: making a dentist appointment isn't the kind of thing you have to force yourself to do, the kind of thing you agonize over in fear that you might screw it up. Ditto for changing the beds. Eating the cauliflower is more challenging, or at least there were many days that went by between my buying it and my eating it so I must have found it at least somewhat overwhelming. Even the book revisions: candor compels me to say that I made only the very easy changes: correcting typos, deleting sentences that my writing group didn't like. I didn't actually ADD any sentences.

But still. Tomorrow I WILL add some sentences. Or at least add some words to some sentences. And meet with my mentee. And eat some more cauliflower. My prediction is that it will be another good day.