Waking the Dragon.

Ugh. Sometimes doing things that I've put off is actually painful. I won't get into it too much, but today I did something that I've been meaning to do for about a year. The fact that I'm writing this on a very strong dose of Vicodin should make for an interesting blog post, lol! But . . .

Onward.

There are things in this world that should not be fought. Actual trolls, for instance. Have you ever seen one of those? Nasty bits of work, trolls. Dragons, on the other hand, can sometimes be brought down with logic. Of course, I'm being metaphorical. My swimming metaphor should probably be carried over to this entry, but I'm more in the mood for dragons, actually. Much sexier, don't you think? I'll get back to the swimming thing next blog, but for this, I'm fighting dragons, or, more correctly, a dragon. This one surrounds my house, in fact he lies around and throughout my house. During the school year, he manages to follow me to my classroom and horn his way into my bookshelves and cabinets, storage shelves and closet. I'd say he closely emulates an oil slick (ooooo! Metaphor within a metaphor, sweet!), in that he manages to spread a thin sheen of himself wherever I reside for any period of time. This is his weapon. Boring weapon, I know. It's not sexy like fire or ice weapons.

"Oooooh! Ahhhhh! Look at the . . . what the hell is that? Is that a glove collecting dust? I'm shaking in my boots. No, really."

So anyway, the slick-dragon follows me everywhere. I walk into a room, and he mysteriously adds something to a shelf or the back of a chair. You get the idea. It's the "horizontally challenged" aspect of my entropy.

Over the last week, aside from a trip to Elitches, I've been trying to think about what to do here. The excuse is that the house is much too big to keep clutter-free. That doesn't wash when you look at the little 3'x 5' surface of my desk, though. Well, you can't actually see the surface of my desk, you sort of have to assume that there's a desk there by extrapolation (everyone else in the area has a desk. This pile of papers and interesting artifacts is roughly desk shaped, ergo: there is a desk here.)

The point is that I can't really use that excuse around the house. The dragon is there, and I have to deal with him in his lair, right? Now, I'm really good at not waking the dragon. I will tip-toe around the house and head outside to pull weeds or fill the pond, then remember a thousand and one things that I need to do for errands (all of which are either legitimate or semi-legitimate), and before you know it, the entire day has gone by and I haven't touched the inside of the house. I can nod and say, "Yes, but look at those new flowers I planted, and those weeds really needed to be pulled, too."

That's not waking the dragon, though. That's letting him sleep. At school, it's much the same thing, except I have lessons to plan, and papers to not grade.

So what am I going to do differently? I dunno. Seriously. I can make all kinds of promises to myself, but in the end I won't carry them out. So I need something doable, that I can implement a little at a time. I don't want to wake the dragon entirely, just maybe get it to raise an eyelid and take vague notice of me before drifting back off to sleep, never realizing that he just got a little smaller. Yeah, that's what I want for now.