20151106.0617

I am participating in neither No-Shave November nor NaNoWriMo this year. I did No-Shave November my first year living at Sherwood Cottage--relevant discussions are here, here, here, and elsewhere--and, while it did attract some attention, much of that attention ended up being of a form I do not appreciate. I have spent quite enough time being laughed at already; I do not need to add to it, and so I will not be doing it again for some time, if ever. NaNoWriMo takes up more time than I have to offer it; work continues, after all, and it has me working 80 or more hours most weeks. Trying to fit in time for another 50,000 words atop the many thousands I already write in a month does not seem like it will work well. (And, yes, I already write thousands in a month. I try for 500 a day in this webspace, I generate an average of 225 words of commentary on each of seventy-something student papers when I grade them, and my freelance jobs range from 5,000 words upwards--with me writing one to two a week during the semester and three to four a week when I am not teaching. Add those numbers to my research writing, and they become substantial. If I could get paid by the word more often...)

That I am not participating does not mean I condemn participation. I do not. Were matters different, I would participate in such endeavors. Were I thinner and of slighter build--and the two are not the same--I might do No-Shave November again. It seems to me to be a hipsterish thing to do, and hipsterism rewards the narrow across the shoulders and shallow of chest (as well as the flat of belly); I am none of those things, nor am I quiet enough, nor yet esoteric enough in my musical tastes. Were not so much of my time taken up with work, I would happily take the challenge of NaNoWriMo; I might well take such a challenge every month. But I have a household and a family to support, and so what time I might "make" for such endeavors is taken up with doing work for pay. Maslovian self-actualization demands that the lower tiers of the hierarchy be met, after all, and addressing them takes nearly as much time and energy as I have to offer. Admittedly, I could spend the twenty or so minutes I devote to this exercise on other enterprises, and it might do some good, but it would not be enough to address larger projects such as the November novel--not even with me typing at full speed, which I could not do in such a case.

I am not complaining about how things stand. If nothing else, I have ways to avoid boredom for years to come, and I appreciate that. (I may have shared the story of my last complaint about boredom. If I have not, I may yet share it.) But thinking back on things I have done and have wanted to do prompts assessment of what I am doing, and I think that a good thing.