Two poles.

This day started out strong and then took a sharp decline downhill. Now I'm sitting in my office practicing active work avoidance and listening to Magnetic Fields and blogging. If the best way to snap yourself out of a funk is to surround yourself by happy people and happy thoughts, I am not really doing that. Magnetic Fields, I tell you! Wtf is wrong with me?

I am reflecting on guilt as motivator. This is the kind of blog post that I already know that only I will read beyond this point, but I'm okay with that. I will read it tomorrow and think, Damn, that's exactly what I meant to say! And then again in a few months and think, What a twerp! The other day I peppered some meeting notes with smartass comments far down the notes and then sent the notes out like that. People replied to the whole thread in order to clarify contentful points in my email but no one commented on the smartass part. It is stuff like that that leaves me thinking I should go back to impoverished essay-writing fulltime. At least I knew that no one was going to read the essays.

But so guilt as motivator. I am guilty of having guilt as a motivator. I can be manipulated into doing most anything if you make me feel guilty enough that I am not doing it. It's sort of tragic, really. People call this vestigial Catholicism. It's more like vestigial self-awareness.

Wtf is wrong with Stephin Merritt? No, really. In high school in moods like this I listened to The Cure. Kind of hackneyed -- and by the way, three separate times today, people used the word hackneyed in conversations that I participated in or observed, which is sort of statistically anomalous and probably accounts for my current choice of vocabulary -- but it worked. When I was 17. I was saying to Vince the other night that I don't feel that different from the way I felt when I was 17, and in fact right now, both in specific and as a sort of general state, I feel a lot closer in my mind to my 17-year-old self than I do to my eventual 40-year-old self even though in reality my life now has a lot more in common with what it will look like when I'm 40 than it has with what my life was like when I was 17. But obviously I'm different because The Cure is not just hackneyed, but because The Cure feels hackneyed. Although if I'm being honest it kind of felt that way then too.

Seriously, I'm telling you, there are like three readers who are going to get this far. They probably all listened to The Cure in high school. Think about it. This is true. If you're still reading, you know that this is true, because you know that it is true of you.

I am italicizing like I'm still in high school. Hackneyed.