The Dance of Avoidance

Things you will do to avoid doing the thing(s) you must, must, must do, immediately, but dread doing:

- Go for a very long run outside, even though you really suck at that.
- Tweeze your eyebrows.
- Clean the kitchen.
- Write an essay about Jonathan Brandis, for no reason.
- Write an essay about weight loss, for no reason.
- Write an essay about an essay-writer you love, for no reason.
- Answer seven lingering emails to friends and family who probably don't give a shit about what you're rambling on about.
- Go to California. It's lovely there.
- Post a photo album of the California trip on Facebook, because you are just plain adept at wasting time.
- Write a blog post. Don't post it.
- Write a blog post. Don't post it.
- Ponder becoming a poet while sitting in your cubicle on a Friday afternoon. Laugh at self, loudly and with maniacal zest, when you really consider the insanity of paying over 30K to earn a piece of paper that legitimatizes you as...a fucking poet. WHERE, pray tell, is your very best beret?
- Decide - today! - that it's vitally important to start reading up on how to run properly, though you've been doing it for months now without instruction and have somehow survived.
- Clean your bedroom.
- Get lost, utterly lost, in the internet.
- Discover a new poet and read his work exhaustively online. Of course.
- Read a magazine.
- Eat two huge bowls of delicious chili, and some chocolate, and some potato chips, and some ice cream.
- Drink five cups of coffee, one cup of tea. Thus far. The night is young.
- Shower for longer than is reasonable.
- Organize your finances.
- Snuggle your dog.
- Snuggle yourself in blankets.
- Cry at least twice, over nothing. Confuse and worry everyone around you with your intensity, which you have tried your whole life to shed, but just cannot. Cannot! Reconsider being a poet, which is perhaps the only field in which that kind of intensity is acceptable. Buy that fucking beret, and definitely begin smoking French cigarettes immediately.
- Wonder if ethnic cigarettes are a real thing.
- Organize your clothes for work tomorrow, even though you have literally never in your life done that before, because you are not that girl.
- Go out for bagels. Twice.
- Write this list.
- Post it.