Tonight I was doing my rather intricate monthly bagging of pills – I've been doing it for years. It is a possibly somewhat over-meticulous response to, on the one hand, the intricate demands of HIV medications and the many supplements I take; and, on the other, my tendency to lose track of everyday actions unless they are carefully prepared.
Thirty large plastic bags, thirty small plastic bags (of the types used by drug dealers – when I lived in Los Angeles four years ago, I discovered a gold mine in a head shop on Westwood Boulevard – I had to have them order extra bags for me, and bought several years' worth – who knows what they thought I was doing). All laid out in rows on my Parsons coffee table, which has accompanied me in my (involuntary) travels from the other side of the world. From that point it is necessary to be careful – no sneezing, no knocking the table; I set out numerous pills, one by one, next to the bags, then funnel them all into the bag. The funnel was a helpful innovation from my dear Hong Kong roommate, the sweet but rather helpless one – it was his idea to cut off the top of a large water bottle and use it as a funnel.
The whole boring process takes about three hours; I generally do it in front of the television... the rather silly and deflating punchline of tonight's three-hour, tedious but slightly comforting task, was to realize that I had done a month's worth before that was on a different shelf of the refrigerator. So I didn't need to do this... and I won't have to touch it again until around the end of September, soon after school has restarted.
After two days trying to analyze and shift the ground between mere maintenance and productivity, having to do this again is slightly frustrating, but – on the other hand, I guess it is necessary. Any innovations in writing will of course have to fit into daily needs, no matter what. It shouldn't be difficult, but it does mean that what I experience as the conflict between will and laziness gets reconfigured as the conflict between valuable and tedious activities....
Or perhaps this all only seems intricate from the inside. From the outside it must seem so simple....
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