Big White Sheet O' Paper


Wherein Our Heroine Ponders Emptiness.
Space.... the final frontier. Not outer space, not inner space, but white space - a blank sheet of paper.

What is it about an unblemished sheet of paper that makes our minds go blank in hopeless mimicry? It's the same for paper's cousin - a blank screen with a blinking cursor. That blinking cursor in the upper left corner seems to amplify the blankness, to crank up the need to get something down now. As the wordless minutes tick by, it almost seems to flash more quickly, as if it is tapping a toe and looking at its watch in fidgety irritation. "I've got stuff I could be doing, you know. I don't have to wait for you," it seems to say.

So, what do we do? Sometimes we just start blathering, only to delete everything and end up contemplating the emptiness again. Sometimes we fidget, rearranging things on our desks or lining up our paper clips. Me - when I'm procrastinating, usually I have to do something productive. When I was in my first year of law school, my apartment was generally spotless, as cleaning seemed to be marginally virtuous enough to give me a temporary get-out-of-jail-free card from my unwritten papers.

But sooner or later, we all have to return to the blank page and fill it. Otherwise, we'll fail the course, Grandma won't get thanked, or our resumé will remain unwritten. Somehow, we have come back to that nightmare expanse and filled it - all of us have done it. And yet, most of us continue to dread its empty whiteness. It seems to be an almost impossible trick to figure out what tips the bucket of your mind so it spills its contents out on the page, rather than remaining stubbornly closed.

Me - well, I have a deadline and few restrictions on what I can write. So I free-associate and end up writing variations on nothing. Lucky you, hapless Reader.
Posted: Friday - July 23, 2004 at 08:35 AM         | |

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