Millennial Ambivalence: Deadlines

I’m someone who needs deadlines, and who for that reason finds the moment itself painful and anti-climactic. I feel acutely the truism that, “You don’t finish a project, you abandon it.” This month has been tremendously fruitful in expanding the reach of this work-in-progress into areas that have become important to me since the last bout of productivity, but at the cost of the work itself being almost uniformly undercooked. This is what Blog Month has always been about: imposing deadlines as a change of pace and M.O. I would like to have done better justice to the issues, but some justice now is better than never. This is the give and take that all creative and intellectual laborers face, whoever it is that they work for and in what capacity. Here, however, there is a socially constructed notion of maturity which I am willing to accept: as we age and our portfolios grow, there is less and less need merely to announce our presence and what we’re all about, and there is an ever greater need to hit the proverbial nail on the head with whatever our next product is to be. I wonder if seeing this issue through the lens of age, and by extension of generations, does not go a ways toward explaining so many conflicts between artworks as capturing essential ideas and artworks as contingent results of a process. The process currently on display here is for me a necessary kick in the pants, but it risks becoming just that with each passing year, so much so that I have started to view blogging more as rough drafting for more formal productions which take the time needed to reach their essential form. Let’s all look forward to that, but without holding our breath.