March 25, 2003

N.B.: This is my second post for today, making up for missing a day a few weeks ago.

I am faced with a cruel dilemma.

I have an insane amount of work to do in virtually no time at all. I have a cabaret show of my songs opening in less than two weeks, and I still have all of the patter and two songs to write and rehearse. Also, I am presenting a paper at a conference at Columbia University on Friday. Don’t ask me how this happened; it’s a mystery to me. The conference is about writing and social justice, and the session I’m scheduled for is about writing outside the academy (which means writing if you don’t have a Ph.D. but people want to read/hear/see what you write, as opposed to writing if you have a Ph.D. but nobody wants to read what you write except other people with Ph.D.s, who don’t actually want to read it either but they have to). And of course not a word of that is written.

So my cruel dilemma is: do I go to sleep at a normal hour tonight and fall even further behind, bringing more stress into my life and risking failure at the conference and the cabaret, or do I consume large quantities of chocolate and caffeinated soda, thereby enabling myself to stay up late writing but also ensuring that I get fat?

God, it’s so hard to be me.