The simple version I gave on discussion earlier tonight regarding my progress and pain on and from my GWB piece (to remind you, I am at a stage where I take a very small screwdriver and drive thousands of very small screws into a relatively very large piece of wood):
I haven’t been working a little bit on putting screws in, say, 25 every night all week which would make steady progress without tearing up my hands, because I’ve been depressed and unable to get anything done.
I spent the last two days (off and on, but day and night) working on driving hundreds of screws and tearing up my hands (imagine blisters on blisters under the not-quite-yet-healed blisters from last weekend) because I am depressed.
I took a break, I went to the library (two books on advanced math, one on diet as it relates to depression (a special request, shipped from another library and delivered in the morning), and one book of fiction – Nick Hornby’s latest, though I haven’t read his older ones yet) and bought new athletic shoes and band-aids, and then to the grocery store where I managed to not buy any alcohol or candy or ice cream, but did come home with fruits AND vegetables, bread and tortillas, milk and yogurt, coffee and diet soda, and only one small package of the cheapest cookies and one bag of tortilla chips.
Oh, and two big containers of antacids, one because there was less than a dose in the cupboard here, one because there were none at all in the car.
I already have a container at work, and it may need a replacement soon.
…
So now here I am, another night&day of weekend left, and my hands are basically blistered to the point where I can either stop working on screws for a couple of days, type this sort of self-pitying rot, work on my video game, or heck, just sleep, OR I can go back to working until my blisters burt and/or begin to bleed, maybe take pain killers to work through the problem, see if I really don’t have enough screws (I think I may have underestimated by as much as 1000 screws), maybe get the whole thing done well before my bizarre and sudden personal deadline of the very next First Friday.
Next friday.
I want to have good, clear photos of it and something written that I can hand out to see if I can interest someone in showing it, even just informally, probably just for First Friday next month. It’s sortof a goal of mine to get my art shown to an actual art crowd at least once. For some reason the timeline for it has shifted from some vague date in 2006 to AS SOON AS HUMANLY POSSIBLE, with specific focus on the only real piece I’ve begun in over a year, this GWB piece. The fact that “the end is in sight” on a piece I’ve already got multiple hundreds of hours’ work invested in, over the course of the last … seventeen months or so … may be a factor. There’s probably another … 12 or … since I’m so often wrong with estimating time for this project, 24 hours of screwing it up remaining, then maybe two or three hours (really 4 or 6, right?) of obsessive touch-ups of paint that chipped, flaked, leaked, spread, or otherwise didn’t do what I wanted it to do because of something I didn’t get quite right when I was drilling the board or sanding the board or making the stencil or peeling the stencil or spraying the paint or somewhere else along the line… which I may skip altogether, since I can’t really hand-paint to look like spray paint and I can’t re-spray-paint without re-making the stencil, only new and improved… but which I may just do an hour or two of touch-ups to certain types of screw-ups on pure-black-areas.
Hrm. One of my blisters is already recovering. Maybe I’ll do that working-too-hard and causing irreparable damage thing, after all… Get a head start on getting this whole piece done.
