what to do . . .

I have almost an entire day to myself. What should I do? Here are some ideas:

• Renew some of the conversations on this blog that I've let fall by the wayside.
  
• Catch up on blog reading (which involves backtracking over many days across multiple blogs in order to establish a sufficient sense of context).
  
• Finish posting about Vegas, particularly about NASCAR and a truly awful experience at a children's hospital.
  
• Find a cozy coffeeshop on this rainy day and crack open some of the monolithic poetry books which, sadly, have been doing nothing but gathering dust. (E.g., Maxmimus Poems, Zukofsky's A).
  
• Write until my fingers bleed.
  
• Go through poems I've written over the past year or so and figure out which ones I want to submit to where.
  
• Gather some field recordings for raw material for sound art pieces.
  
• Write apologetic letters to long-distance friends and family I've neglected to contact in months or even years.
  
• Call up some local friends I haven't seen in months.
  
• Break out the super-8 camera and make the experimental film I've been wanting to make for quite a long time.
  
• Fall into paralytic despair over the amount of things I want to do vs the amount of time I have to do them.
  
• Sleep.
  
• Listen to music & mope about the apartment.
  
• Clean up this disaster of an apartment.
  
• Learn more about the music programming language I've been working with lately.
  
• Do some maintenance loads of laundry.
  
• Aimlessly surf the net.
  

What will I actually do? Probably a combination of falling into despair, laundry, catching up on blogs, aimless internet surfing, and a little bit of programming. My excuse? Too tried to really do anything else -- at least to do it well. Odd that programming appears in that list. There's something weirdly pleasant and relaxing about it.

May I take this moment to whine about what a huge chuck of my life work occupies? I've got it pretty good overall, but there is nevertheless something fundamentally unjust about the radical disconnect between what's required of us to make a living and what actually matters to us.

Part of the problem, I think, is that I haven't learned to do things in small chunks. When I work on something, I want to devote all of my time & attention to it -- but that's just not practical.

Multitasking. I hate that overused corporate word (almost as much as I hate "thinking outside the box" which has, by the way, amusingly degenerated in the company I work for to "thinking out of the box", inverting the meaning of the original), but the notion does make some sense . . .