Cafés and deadlines.

The air conditioning in my favorite café is broken, so I've had to set up in my fallback café, where I usually sit in the front. But there's a little back area. I almost never sit here, but it beckons me today, maybe because I have some work to do and there, that table by the back garden window: didn't I once sit there and write an op-ed in three hours to meet a deadline? That's my magic table. Well, it was. I'm not getting that much done. I think it's not so much the table as the deadline. Right now, the deadlines aren't close enough. I see them approaching. I'm uneasy -- enough to push myself a bit. But I've been through this too many times. Right now, I'm at the stage where I think this is how I always feel when the deadline is at this distance. I always think I've got to get to work, and I always dawdle and wheel-spin. The deadline needs to be closer. I may as well laze and luxuriate.