Prioritize

I was saying to a friend how scheduling used to be very easy for me. First, there was nothing to schedule apart from eating, sleeping and work, because no one offered me anything to do. That changed when I began to be invited to a monthly event. That went on the calendar, never to be threatened by a conflict or crowded by anything happening on another day of the week. I would look forward to it all month while watching dvds alone or working with people who I only saw outside of work if there was a wrap party. It was when I met my current roommate and moved in that things began to change.

I now have a bewilderingly large and wide-spread community of friends, acqaintances and well-wishers from whom I receive invitations for activities ranging from the improv and acting stuff that largely defines it to events as far afield as church and exercise. For a time, there was one thing to do most nights, and I did it. Empty nights I spent resting, reflecting, and doing the solo activities which had been reduced from their previous exclusive hold on my time. There are still nights like that, and there have to be, so long as they're the exception.

The trouble now is those other nights- the busy ones. They are not helped by my dependence on public transportation. It works, but is often insufficient for traveling to several locations in succession during the course of a day. At any rate, I now regularly have open to me numerous options. Mostly, I can accept as many as I can manage, quietly decline the rest, and there are no problems. Sometimes, though, when my presence is specifically and directly requested at two things, I have a very hard time refusing one friend in favor of another.

What happens is that two events progress along like trains on parallel tracks, and I, with one foot aboard each, grow more and more anxious as they approach a junction where collision is imminent. At the last moment, I awkwardly jump aboard one and feel as if I'm dooming the other to calamity or stagnation. The whole thing makes it much easier to understand the crises which regularly marked Jack Tripper's life on 'Three's Company'.