Battery Life

I'm so ashamed.  I did it.  I couldn't help it.  I fell off whatever wagon I was trying to ride this week by working in brief, daily sessions, counting carbs, trying everything I could not to fall back into my old patterns of working.  I binged.  Not, thank goodness, on carbs (although there was that third Atkins bar of the day at about 11pm, but I was still only at 25 carbs for the day even then).  And, okay, not on writing, although maybe I should have.  But on television.  Okay, technically, internet-streamed episodes of television on my iPad.  Eleven of them (not counting the one that I watched earlier in the afternoon).   Full confession?  I was up till 2 am watching eleven episodes of New Girl.†  I would have kept going, but the battery on my iPad gave out.

And now, predictably enough, I feel like sh*t.  It would have been better if I had just tried to write that stupid sermon in one go.  I don't know why I thought I could learn to write any other way.  And now I'm too tired to write anything coherent.  So much for fluency, eh?‡

†This is the Fox page for the show, but don't click the link if you're allergic to ads.  Just saying.
‡Which actually means that I am right on schedule in Prof. Boice's program, at pp. 115-18, where he and his students learn about "Writing Dysfluencies Considered as Self-Defeating Behaviors," no. 2 of which on Roy Baumeister's list, appropriately enough, is "substance abuse (because it replaces immediate pressures with pleasant sensations and with lowered self-awareness)."  And, in the end, makes you feel like sh*t.  I'm not sure I really needed to be told their conclusion: "Self-defeating behaviors [like staying up all night watching sitcoms rather than simply going to sleep] are much broader than writing problems; they even suggest that many of our writing difficulties derive from more general problems of life style."  No kidding.  You could've fooled me there.

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