Time is scary?

It's sort of hard to explain what I mean, but I think that a lot of my difficulty in Doing Stuff comes out of a fear of becoming so absorbed that I lose self-awareness or awareness of time. Of course this fear is not without merit.

It makes me nervous to watch a movie. This is funny because I watch so much TV, and in marathons. But I usually watch TV on my computer, so I know exactly when it will end. Also, TV shows are usually pretty much the same length--about 20 minutes, about 30 minutes, about 40 minutes, or about 60 minutes, depending whether they're on pay television or not. Watching a 72-minute movie is actually scarier than watching 2 episodes of Mad Men, which takes 80 minutes. My dad got annoyed at me last year because we were watching a movie and about halfway through I picked up my computer and started doing my Internet things (you know, email, livejournal, etc.). He said that if I didn't want to watch the movie we should stop and finish it later. But it wasn't like that, exactly. I needed the computer to ground myself in time.

I suffer from an urge to multitask when I am doing something that might remove me from time. I used to just think it was a sensory thing, and I still think that might be part of it. It's very important for me to have something to eat at movies and even at plays (for some reason plays aren't quite as intimidating to me as movies in the theater). I also tend to feel that I should have something to eat while I'm doing work. This probably accounts for certain things being my favorite foods and not others (a particular rhyming concoction comes to mind). I like foods that last a long time and are easy to eat while doing something else.

What is work? Work is whatever a body is forced to do. Okay, not really. Work is whatever my body thinks it's being forced to do. For example, since I was a kid I have wanted to be a fiction writer, so my body thinks it's being forced to write fiction, so I don't write fiction very much because it makes me nervous, and I have an idea that I need to set myself up with a big supply of food in a comfortable place or I won't be able to write fiction. The only reason this blog exists is because I started writing in it as a way to procrastinate. If I ever get too excited about this blog (whereas now, I just look on it with a huge amount of affection because it is the most calming place to waste my time, but it's not entirely unproductive because some people read it and sometimes I'm writing about important things), I'll probably start writing a lot more fiction.

I produce a ton of music because music doesn't feel like work yet.

Latin is work.

But anyway, back to the losing time thing. When I was six I entered kindergarten and turned into a monster. Everyone thought that I had probably been molested because I sat curled up in a corner reading the same books over and over, and hit anyone who tried to make me do schoolwork. (I went to a Montessori school so I was able to get away with this for an astonishingly long time.) Clearly I was lost. The first time I recall noticing myself being lost was when I was reading a Narnia book in the bathroom and I looked up and saw that the sun was setting. I was existentially heartbroken and terrified and came crying to my dad, "I read in the bathroom until sunset!"

I guess this is possibly why I don't read books; maybe they make me feel scared in the same way. Anyway, the reason I started thinking about this is that it's winter term, which means I'm supposed to be working on a project I made up myself, on my own. My project is reading De Caelo et Ejus Mirabilibus et De Inferno by Emanuel Swedenborg. It seems like a really cool book but in the four days that I've had it, I've only read two pages. This is embarrassing. Today--as I had been planning to do every day since I got the book--I finally trundled myself off to the library where I sat in the empty and unlooked after library cafe in the booth next to the vending machines. I bought some M&Ms to be my multitask. But I ate the M&Ms while writing in my notebook about how I like ASD culture better than queer culture. I thought about some more snacks and drinks that I could buy from the machines, but decided for the time being to just start reading the book.

I read. And read some more. I read twice as many pages as I read in the first four days, in two hours. I kept thinking I should stop. Or, I kept thinking I should want to go on one of the library computers and check my email, or that I should want to buy some Doritos. But I didn't want to that much. I just kept reading. I kept feeling vaguely anxious about what I was doing. I kept feeling like I shouldn't be liking it, because it was work; how could I stand it, without something to guide me through it, like a bowl of cheese and peas? Or an episode of Firefly going in the background, like I used when I was interning at the school and had to keep myself in time while I was getting dressed and making breakfast? But after a while, under the anxiety, I realized how happy I was and how much I was enjoying myself.

I don't know what to make of any of this. I love trains. My ideal life would be one where I had to commute to a job, maybe an hour each way, on a really comfortable train, like a Metro North. I love trains because when you're on a train you're stuck inside someone else's schedule and you can't get lost. Trains are the easiest places to write and read.