mantra

My Inner Nag was having an energetic day today. The only way to keep her in line was to use what I call the STFU technique, as follows:

You should be writing right now.
Shut the fuck up.
No really, you should at least be doing that figure that you've been putting off for a month now--how big a deal can it be? You should have finished it ages ago.
Shut. the fuck. up.
Okay then, you should be worrying about this relationship, or that other one, or hey, how about that one over there. If they're not what you think they should be, that means you're a bad person.
STFU.
Wow, you're looking dowdy today.
Fuck you.
This all shouldn't be this hard. If you're finding it difficult to finish this dissertation, that means you're stupid and incompetent and clearly have no future in the only field in which you're qualified, and of course you have no qualifications to do anything else.
Did I mention "Fuck you"?

It's days like this when I want to invoke Palden Lhamo. She vowed to establish Buddhism in Sri Lanka, where she was the queen. When her husband wouldn't change his pagan/cannibalistic ways, she killed their son, ate his flesh, and took the king's best horse and rode to Siberia. Not a woman to be messed with. Today that's the level of fierceness I need just to keep putting one foot in front of the other.