Oops, I Did It Again: In Which I Confess That I'm a Blockhead

So, this week, in addition to having a baby to care for, laundry to do, a house to clean, and sickness, I also had writer's block. (For those of you who really wanted to know the inner happenings of my life. For the rest of you, sorry, but the solution seems obvious: don't read my blog if you don't want to know.)

See, the thing about my writing is that I've always written when I wanted to and not when I didn't want to. If I don't have something I want to say, I struggle with coming up with a topic and feel guilty the whole time I'm writing because I know that the attempt I'm giving is mediocre at best. My heart just isn't in it. To solve this, I don't usually talk when I don't have anything to say and I don't usually write when I don't have any ideas. It's both good and bad.

In high school I used it as a wonderful excuse. My English teacher: “Do NOT put this assignment off. You'll be sorry if you do.” Me: “It's cool. I'll just wait for inspiration to strike me and then I'll be done in half the time.” And it typically worked out okay (most often in the wee hours before the assignment was due), except that it reinforced my awful habit of procrastinating.

That's not what real writers do, that's the approach of someone who occasionally writes. I've been cheating my way through; this is the exact reason that I started a blog—I wanted something to hold me accountable and keep me writing, even when I didn't have the words bursting out of me.

I find it interesting that my lack of ideas coincides with my sister-in-law's offer to let us use her Netflix account. I thought I was doing all right. I mean, I haven't sat down to waste entire days watching entire shows (yet!). What I've found, though, is that increased TV time seems to be robbing me of more than just time. In moments when I would normally be pondering odd thoughts like “Where does the phrase 'I trust you implicitly come from? Is it possible to trust someone 'explicitly'?” (which questions, by the way, were resolved through a simple dictionary search), I'm instead wondering “On whose side is Mulder's informant, and will he be in the next episode of X-Files?” I'm still undecided, but it seems the only way to get to the bottom of this is to continue watching and see if I can come up with any ideas and prove my hypothesis wrong. Who knows? Maybe this question is unanswerable.