absentmindedness & procrastination

Do absentmindedness and procrastination go hand-in-hand?

Soemtimes I think so because most of the time I am both.

I got a call on my cell phone yesterday. It was a local number with the 603 New Hampshire area code but not one I recognized. Generally, unless it's a person I know whose number is stored in my phone's memory or unless I'm expecting a call, I will not answer the phone and let it go to voicemail. I missed this call but returned a call back to the same number, asking where I was calling.

Turns out it was the photo department at Wal-Mart in Hudson looking for me because I had brought in a roll of film (actually one of those disposable cameras) for developing and forgot to pick it up. The date on the envelope when I brought it in was October 22, 2005, and they were getting ready to throw it out, since it had been almost three months ago that I brought it in. In fairness to me, that was a few days after I had been diagnosed with the kidney stone, at the ER and by the urologist/surgeon/torture master/evil grin guy. And I was in pain.

Good thing for me they didn't. The pictures were (in reverse order) my son M's 6th birthday party and many shots of V and M swimming in the pool here at the apartment. They took some of me, too. The first few pictures on the roll were taken at Logan Airport the night I was supposed to meet "the woman" from Russia. Eerie foreshadowing that both pictures came out waaay to dark to be of any use. Same as her, but I'm not bitter. Really. I'm over it.

Anyway they were nice pictures.

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I have a meeting tomorrow evening at 5 with the company that I hired to rework my resume & get me focused on the "career search." This is my second meeting with them since I went back there at the end of December. This is the meeting that was supposed to take place last week, in part becasue I was sick and in part because I didn't do the homework assignment. (I reallly was sick...still am to some degree)

So I did the homework assignment tonight, while still procrastinating as long as I could manage. Constant Rain helped me out with that with a nice IM conversation. Thanks Constant!

The "assignment" wasn't hard or really difficult. I just didn't want to do it because I hate looking for work, as I've said before, even when I'm still employed... But it's done now and that's a good thing. I probably could have finished it in 30 minutes or so. Procrastinators like to drag things out. Things that we want to put off/avoid, etc. are easy targets.

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Today's word was: aftertale, which means a postscript.

--Herbert Coleridge's Dictionary of the Oldest Words in the English Language, 1863

Kind of lame, I know but there is a cool story that follows:

Beginning of Britain's Penny Post
W. & R. Chambers' Book of Days (1864) trumpeted the commencement of mail service in England on this date in 1840 as "a memorable day in the history of civilization." Just a year after the Penny Post began, English clergyman Sydney Smithfelt compelled to admit in a letter, "Correspondences are like smallclothes before the invention of suspenders - it is impossible to keep them up." Eighty years before the inception of the Penny Post, lexicographer Samuel Johnson commented sternly: "A short letter to a distant friend is, in my opinion, an insult like that of a slight bow or cursory salutation - a proof of unwillingness to do much, even when there is a necessity of doing something." But as his life drew to a close, he seemed to have relaxed that stance. "An odd thought strikes me," he confided to his friend and biographer, James Boswell. "We shall receive no letters in the grave."

If only he could have forseen the sound bite or the short email we find so common today. Sometimes if it weren't for short messages, none would get sent at all, I'd bet. I know I wouldn't be sending them. Then again, they didn't have computers, internet, cable television, radios, or even telephones (invented in 1876, I believe), so folks must have had a lot more time to write nice long handwritten letters. So I appreciate being able to sit here at my desk and relay my ideas and thoughts to you at home, however short they might be - to wherever you might be.