Counting and Keeping Track

I aim for four blog entries per week and usually make three though, with the new semester and its new routine, I’m searching for moments to make even that work.

I am to exercise three times a week and often make it.

I have even--gulp--joined WeightWatchers and find myself counting “points” and “core foods” and swapping 30 minutes of pilates for a glass of wine.

So why can’t I make my goal of 20 pages of Dalloway a day?

Keeping track of things, setting short-term weekly goals that get reset every Monday morning works for me. In graduate school, I was still not fully in the computer age. I was keeping a shoeb0x-sized card file with short thumbnail summaries of every article and book I read for my dissertation. In order to keep track of my progress--in order to give myself a feeling of progress--I made little progress cards with a chart listing the work that, in an ideal week, a dissertator would accomplish:

• seven pages written
• one book read & noted
• three articles read and noted

Each Sunday night, I would think back on my week, assess my progress, and then, vow to make my goal next time. I don’t think I ever did as much work as I thought I ideally should, but I did finish the dissertation.

It turns out, I think, that I am just on the edge of being a textual editor. I find the process really interesting in the abstract but I don’t quite have the discipline to carry out the tiresome work of collating editions.

And, with that, I must turn to page 183 of the 1928 Modern Library edition of Mrs. Dalloway and see how it differs--if it differs--from the first English edition. Comma by comma; line by line.

Perhaps I should, Bridget Jones style, start blog entries with the summary of the day’s accomplishments: ”18 pp. MD, v.g.; one slice pie, v.b.; 30 minutes pilates, g.; blog entry, g…