Today isn’t a good day for progress

The weather outside is getting warmer, so the ground is thawing, creating a muddy mess of any non-paved surface. The tires of my truck spin for a bit before gaining purchase and pulling me out of my driveway. The irony is, today I feel like that mud seeped into my life.

I don’t feel like I’m getting anything done today.

Sure, I got football jerseys ordered for the Western Plains High School Bobcats, of which I am now the head coach. And I paid my truck insurance premium, since Progressive was going to drop me due to nonpayment, even though I had never received a bill or any notification until I got the cancellation notice in the mail.

With those two things taken care of, and they are substantial, I should feel good about things. But I don’t.

I wanted to write a couple of good blog posts. Posts that actually had substance. Instead, I wrote this self-indulgent piece reflecting upon the not-so-stellar day I’m having. Weak, right?

Also, I needed to finish my graduate school application, but that didn’t happen. Granted, I need to ask the Fort Hays State University folks a questions, which I couldn’t do because today is Martin Luther King Jr. Day and they’re closed, but I can’t blame them. I could have written my personal statement that I need to complete, but I didn’t.

I also have a few design projects, two print and two web, that I could have worked on. But no. It’s not happening.

What about updating The Bobcat Nation? Maybe tonight . . .

The worst of it is, I’m sure there are more things I need to do that I didn’t get to, but I just can’t remember.

Maybe that’s part of my problem. I need to update my ever-evolving to-do list. Yeah. That’s what I’ll do.

I’m sure some of you might be reading this and thinking, “Instead of whining about what you aren’t doing, maybe you should be using this time to actually get something done.”

Those of you thinking that would be correct, but I just lack the motivation. And I think I know why.

Ordering those jerseys was damn-near overwhelming. I had never had to fill out a purchase order or anything like that. Combine that with the fact I was really worried I was going to fill something out wrong and ruin the entire order, I honestly had to quietly sit down and just force myself to relax in hopes that would remove the feeling of a metal band squeezing my chest and all the air from my lungs.

It did, and the school secretary, Mary Kraus, saved me by basically filling out the purchase order for me based upon the information I had scraped together.

With that behind me, though, I just feel mentally exhausted. How ridiculous, right?

Now I have no motivation, except to write this keyboard regurgitation of the thoughts racing through my head.

So where does that leave me?

It leaves me with more to do, but after getting all this off my chest, I am going to try and salvage what little of the day remains outside of tonight’s basketball practice.

How am I going to do that? I don’t know, for sure. For starters, though, I am going to look over my to-do list and update it.

When I wake up tomorrow, I hope some of this mud in my world is spun away. I want to get some stuff done.

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About toddvogts 833 Articles
Todd R. Vogts, Ph.D., is an assistant professor of media at Sterling College in Kansas. Previously, he taught yearbook, newspaper, newsmagazine, and online journalism in various Kansas high schools, and he ran a weekly newspaper in rural Kansas. He continues to freelance as a professional journalist from time to time. Also, Vogts is a member of the Society of Professional Journalists (SPJ), the Journalism Education Association (JEA), and the Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication (AEJMC), among others. He earned his Master Journalism Educator (MJE) certification from JEA in 2022. When he’s not teaching or writing, he runs his mobile disk jockey service and takes part in other entrepreneurial ventures. He can be reached at twitter.com/toddvogts or via his website at www.toddvogts.com.