the to-do list: truth and consequences

Things I've been wanting to do, but haven't done:

1. Start cranking out a new line of Christmas cards for 2004.

2. Keep working on my ms for The San-shin's Tiger, a children's book (largely shit-free) I began brainstorming back around late 2002/early 2003.

3. Assemble and edit religion-related material from this blog to make a book I hope to sell through my CafePress store.

4. Start a story blog for my goddaughter (selfish reason: to help me practice writing in a children's story mode).

5. Start work on a book that uses scatology (cartoons and essays) to describe some basic Buddhist concepts. I'm thinking of making this book 108 chapters to correspond to the 108-bead Buddhist rosary.

6. Work on a paper that surveys and critiques various theories of religious pluralism, then offers an alternative proposal-- the "groundless pluralism" I've been talking about on this blog.

7. Slogging my fat ass over to the local hapkidojang and taking hapkido classes.

8. Taking long walks during my free time.

9. Tutoring on weekends to make extra money.

10. Catching up on sleep.

So far, none of the above is coming to pass. I wake up around 5:20AM, teach until 11AM or so, eat lunch, blog a bit, fall asleep (if at all possible), leave for my afternoon shift around 5:25PM, work until 10PM, eat dinner around 11:30PM, surf/blog a while, and get to sleep around 1:00AM. Shitty way to live. It's sucking all the creativity out of me (what little there was, anyway).

Blogging is itself part of the problem. The blog keeps me sane, but it also cuts in on crucial sleep time.

I'd like to be able to teach for money on weekends, but I work two Saturdays a month and cherish my Sundays. On my free Saturdays, I find I'm usually too tired to do anything meaningful. I also teach French every Sunday for about three hours, and that's for free. Hélas.

I'm beginning to think I may have to abandon the blog, but this won't be so I can pursue all the items on my to-do list: if I nix the blog, it'll be purely for the sake of item 10. Sleep.

They say that, if you need an alarm clock to wake up, you're sleep-deprived. By that reckoning, I've been sleep-deprived for months. Something's gotta give. If I give up the blog and start up the 3-hour walking routine I've been wanting to do, I can exercise and get about two hours' sleep in the afternoons, between shifts. The downside is that, with the blog being about the only thing between me and raving lunacy, there's a good chance my inner life will drop off like a leprous limb. That, friends, would suck. I have no intention of becoming a mere cog in a machine, a drone shuffling through his routine from day to day, like so many of the sleepy Koreans I see around me. There has to be more to life than this.

Hmmmm. I suppose a compromise solution is possible: I could blog only on weekends. Is this realistic, given the other projects I'd like to do? I don't know. Will have to mull this over. All I know is that I've been tired since I began this job in July, and I've got dark circles under my eyes every damn day now. Pathetic.


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