Sunday, January 7, 2001

Dear Kate,

I think I've discovered a pattern. It's no shocker, really. I have a tendency to either start things and not finish them, or I have the idea to start something but never really complete the whole project in my head, so I don't start the project at all.

What's worse? To start something and not finish it? Or to not start something because you think you can't finish it?

Everything has to be perfect, for me, I think. I have to stop thinking that way. Like the Who Is Perchy portion my Web site, for example. Was I waiting till I felt the material was autobiographical, New York Times bestseller-material before I wrote and finished it?

And what about the editorial stylebook at work that I inherited with my job? I think it sucks. And yet I haven't handed anyone my revisions unless I've had to (new hires, for example), because I feel like it's incomplete. It still sucks.

And what about all the half-written entries for here? They aren't up because I haven't finished them. If haven't come to any stark conclusions, what's the point?

I now figure that I'm doing myself a disservice by not starting things at all, because what if it's really something in the end?

As for the things I do start and don't finish...I speak that way too, huh? I start a sentence....then pause....then modify the subject slightly....then start a new sentence....pause again...and say, "I don't know."

I don't know.

I think I've exercised my right not to finish something if I don't want to. Maybe I've been trying to make a point: I have a college degree, dammit. I don't have to finish any assignments that I don't want to.

And now that I've had that degree for nearly ten years, maybe it's time I start more things and finish more things just because it's so much more satisfying then incompletion.

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