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The
Dayrunner Blues
I’m
trying to be optimistic, but it probably doesn’t bode well
for my future orderliness that I just bought a 2004 calendar
a week and a half ago. With this kind of sloppy planning,
2005 is almost sure to be a washout, as well—organizationally
speaking. I have gone so far as to make a note in the December
pages of the new Day Planner to remind me to purchase another
one before the New Year, and I may make good on that. But
even if I got to Office Max in time, it’s no sure bet that
I’ll put the thing to good use—I just don’t seem to understand
the technology of keeping it all together.
My confusion about the utensils of order cannot be chalked
up to any lack of trying: Name a brand of paper-based personal
organizer and I’ve likely owned it—from Mead to Franklin Planner.
I even dabbled in digital for a while, attempting to work
with both a PDA and the various life-tidying functions of
Outlook Express. All for naught. I remained as dizzy and disorderly
as ever, just grouchier and more defensive about computer-related
issues. (The mere presence of a PC seemed a tacit accusation,
and acquaintances facile with the intricacies of more-involved
processes—like downloading the White Stripes cover of “Jolene”
without reducing one’s hard-drive to smoking slag or permanently
setting one’s home page to a West Indian amputee porn site—were
subject to random outbursts of my childish scorn and envious
derision. The smug geeks, with their KaZaa and their firewalls
and their “just right click, smut hound” wisecracks.) I just
couldn’t seem to get it right. So, my house was littered with
the faux-leather-bound husks of my elaborate month-at-a-glance
failures, and the PDA was donated to a physician’s-assistant
friend of mine—who will pay me back, I’m assured, with any
sample anti-anxiety meds and/or high-grade tranqs that come
his way.
But I’m just not Buddhist enough to give up altogether, to
live comfortably in a perpetual now. I mean, even if my boss
and daycare provider could be convinced to have more flexible
definitions of “on time” or “noonish,” and could let go of
such concepts of “job responsibilities” and “late fees,” I’d
still be animated by this—perhaps, curiously American—notion
of self-improvement. I’d still have a task-
oriented sense of self. I’d still look at myself insecurely
as a project, something to be tinkered with, modified going
forward. I’d still want to take steps now to whip the future
into shape. And, hence, I’d still scour the aisles of book-
and office-supply stores looking for the proper tools. (I
long ago stopped scoffing at the notion of Self-Help, and
would gladly shell out the $22.95, or whatever, for a copy
of You, for Dummies. Perhaps it would give me some
insight on why I’ve not yet cracked the spine of The Complete
Idiot’s Guide to Overcoming Procrastination, which I bought
two years ago.)
Maybe it’s a Sisyphean job. It’s certainly got dark potential.
Though the Horatio Alger-style rags-to-riches story is an
enormously popular trope for Americans of even passively Calvinist
stripe, it’s interesting to note that The Great Gatsby—still
regarded the quintessential Great American Novel by many—shades
that theme of personal betterment in a less-rosy hue: After
Gatsby’s death, the narrator meets that self-invented man’s
father, who shows him a rigorous schedule kept by the young
Gatsby, a disciplined regimen of self-improving techniques
and exercises. Gatsby’s indefatigable drive toward an envisioned
perfect self made him rich and celebrated, but led nevertheless
to a pathetic and petty demise. A far cry from the unqualified
success of, say, Alger’s Mark the Match Boy or Paul
the Peddlar or Lucius the Lucky, Lucky Bootblack,
Favored of God or whatever.
So, there’s a part of me that wants to turn up my nose at
any starry-eyed better-living scheme and free myself from
the perceived obligation to improve in any way at all. Fuck
it, you know? Love me, love my dog. But the thing is, I know
people who are good at it.
A friend of mine not only uses her personal organizer with
great success in a day-to-day kind of way—I’m not listing
her accomplishments here because it just makes me feel bad
about myself—but also in a big-picture way. Each year with
each new calendar (which she names, but that’s a different
story), she assigns herself a new life-
improving goal; for ease of recollection—and maybe also to
prevent taking herself too seriously—she formulates it as
a rhyming motivational motto. Like “Be more free in 2003,”
or something like that. It sounds a little bonkers, I know,
but she gets it done. She’s repaired relationships, bolstered
friendships, and checked self-destructive or just undesired
behaviors. And she’s no
crystal-gazing, Goddess-blessing, incense-burning, past-life-regressing,
gong-ringing nincompoop. She’s very much in the world, and
very much in her life. It’s both baffling and inspiring. As
incredulous as I am, it’s hard to argue with success.
So I’m vacillating between my native cynicism and a shaky
hope that such proactive schemes can actually work. I’m trying
to accept that though such routines might not make me a particularly
good person, one might make me a better person, and I’m trying
not to phrase it in any way that seems like it would be most
at home scrawled in calligraphy over a beach scene laminated
on a cross-section of driftwood. I’m trying to negotiate with
Order and Discipline and Foresight. I’m trying to befriend
my daily planner and take it into my confidence, to share
my aspirations with it, to partner with it. I’m trying to
ally myself with the Day Runner.
The alarm clock, however, I will continue to regard with great
wariness.
—John
Rodat
jrodat@metroland.net
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