Consistency is all I ask / Give us this day our daily mask...

I am not a consistent person. This makes me a terrible gardener (plants like to be watered and pruned and fed on some kind of regular schedule), an absentminded pet owner (I need pets that are large and self-willed enough to bug me when they need something, lest I forget them) and an indifferent and occasionally catastrophic bill-payer and landlord.

The world loves consistent people. Consistent people excercise regularly, instead of going running once in a blue moon and then laying around for days with aches and pains. Consistent people do their work on an ongoing basis, rather than faffing about some days and doing extra-long hours others. Consistent people pay their bills on time, make their appointments on time, respond to correspondence on a reasonable timeline, and have gardens that do not die. I want to be a consistent person.

Instead, I am currently dragging myself by the figurative bootstraps out of a period of not-unprecedented-but-surely-unholy unproductiveness and attempting to bodily shove myself into regular, productive action. As with all self-improvement, it is painful and has only a limited amount of success. But goddamnit, I'm happier when I am consistent, so you'd think it wouldn't be so difficult to get there.

Knowing self, I predict a long, painful struggle to arrive at a place of reasonable effectiveness, a brief plateau, and then a gradual devolution to the norm, at which point the cycle will begin again. I try to comfort myself by arguing that the cycle gets shorter/less egregious each time. Sometimes I believe that that is true. Those are the better days.