Bad Habits

• Putting off doing awesome things now, in the hope that I’ll be able to do them when I’m an old biddy. I have this basically mad mindset which states that while I’m young and doing reasonably ok in life, I need to workworkworkwork to make sure that I have the savings and resources so that when I’m an old, old lady, I can do all the fun things WHICH I COULD BE DOING NOW.  It is, essentially, insane.
• Not warming up or cooling down properly before and after exercise.
• All the cake… ah but the cake is so good… and I am getting better… but also the cake….
• Bobbing up and down like a lifejacket when doing escrima.  (It’s unhelpful.  There’s a power-direction thing there….)
• Slouching.  Tall people slouch.  I am tall.  I slouch a lot.
• Very long showers.  Ooooh they’re so warm.  And again, I’m doing better – I’ve got the 4-minute water-saving timer thing and I am really trying….
• Assuming that I know what the other guy is already going to say and interrupting rudely.  Yeah.  It’s just bad.  I’m fighting it, honestly, but sometimes it’s hard.  Not least because sometimes people take forever to say the blazingly obvious and when they get there, after you’ve waited patiently just in case it’s not the banal nonsense you suspect it will be, the temptation to bang your head against the wall at the life you’ve just wasted does come upon.  See also: production meetings.
• Putting shit off.  Guys, everyone does this.  And I’m a lot better than most.  But seriously, there are certain things I’d quite like to do more of (I’m particularly bad at selling myself, turns out) and the second I think about doing it seven other vitally important jobs always spring to mind…
• Judging writers in advance.  Not in terms of their books!  Just because… you know… writers.  I’ve met so many writers, and at least 15% of the are awesome, kind, intelligent, wonderful human beings.  It’s just the remaining 85% that leaves you wondering what kind of career choice this was.  Unfortunately having met the 85%, I’m now perhaps a bit too quick to assume, when I meet the awesome-sauce McDudes, that they in fact, aren’t.
• Assuming that the value of my work equates to the hours I put into it, rather than the actual quality and quantity of work I produce.  To put it another way – if I work 60 hours and don’t have much to show for it, I’ll probably still feel better about myself than if I work 20 hours in a week and produce a novel at the end.  See also: insanity.
• Body image shit.  Hell, everyone’s got this one too, and hell, again I suspect I’m not as bad as many. But like most women in this culture, I sometimes catch a reflection of myself in the mirror and find myself thinking ‘Jesus, is that what I look like?’  Plus side: I don’t do loony diets or loony exercise and know, reasonably speaking, that I’m probably in decent health.  But still, that snap judgment thing?  It’s there.  It’s still there….
• An inability to spend money.  I mean, don’t get me wrong: I am happy to spend on Sensible Life Things like investing in a home to live in, or a pension for when I am an old biddy and living the life that frankly, I should be striving for now.  But I have to pay myself a set amount of pocket money a month to permit myself to actually spend on silly things.  This continues to fall into the category of being pretty much insane.
• Telling my editor that I love and respect and honour her and think she’s the best (all of which happens to be true) before explaining that the note she’s just given me for the book we’re working on has basically made my eyes bleed.  There’s a happy professional half-way house to be found, I think…  (Caveat: I genuinely do do my edits, and to the best of my ability.  It’s just that sometimes they hurt, and as a publisher’s daughter with 15 years in this gig, I have a nasty habit of not just wanting to cut through bullshit, but wanting to catapult the bullshit over the castle wall having set fire to it first.  Which isn’t always… um… good.)
• Occasional suspicion of my theatre directors.  Most of the time this isn’t the case – most of the directors I work with I inherently trust and respect and will happily listen to and appreciate their ideas and see how their thoughts make what I do better and try to achieve something cohesive and awesome with them.  But every now and then you’ll get a director who, perhaps in rehearsals, perhaps at a meeting, says something a little bit… hum… and from that moment forth I go a bit on guard and when approached in tech may not hear a good idea, may just hear the ‘alert, alert, alert!’ claxon sounding in my ears.  Which isn’t ideal, really….

But!

There are also plenty of bad habits I don’t have!  I don’t smoke, don’t kill puppies and children, do try as much as I can to phone my Gran, do keep meticulous records of all my monies for the taxman, clean the flat once a week (there came a point after too many nights of waking up post-tech to discover I couldn’t find the door), am pretty punctual, and generally strive to live a conscientious life as much as I can.

Perhaps more to the point, as old age sneaks upon me (this is the year of turning 30, after all) I no longer look at my bad habits and view them as moral vices or a failure of my own self-worth.  They’re just quirks, like pretty much everything else, and while it’d be nice to get some of them sorted, none are going to break the bank or end the world, and I’m ok with.  I’m ok with being me, I think.