Figures, doesn't it?

So now that I have very little free time, of course I have all these ideas on things to write - stories, poems, essays - and to draw. And I want to do things like take up yoga and go hiking at least once a week, if not three or four times.

I don't mean that these are just things that I think would be nice to do - they're always that. I mean now that I can't, I have this horrid little itch to do them, all of them, right now. I find myself dreaming up wonderous short stories that I'm just sure would become best sellers if I could only take the time to put them to paper. I see images behind my eyes that would boggle and enchant art critics world-wide. I feel the need to stretch, slowly, lazily, calmy.

I am almost restless with pent-up sudden motivation.

Before school I had idle time on my hads. Saturdays were often spent sitting at the computer playing Sacred, sprawled on the couch reading a book or sleeping. Evenings passed relatively slowly, spurred only slightly by the necessity to have eaten dinner by seven so that I could take my allergy pill at nine. Harry often sat scaled nd green on my arm or shoulder to watch Animal Planet with the boy and I.

Now, once home, it's right back behind a computer again and reading, reading, reading. Studying. Learning. And hours later when I'm yawning so much my eyes are watering so that I can no longer see the screen, it's into bed till work tomorrow. I may still be able to salvage Saturdays, or at least part of the day, but even that lazy day is beginning to look like it will be spent learning and proving that I'm learning well with endless writing assignments.

Not that I mind writing, of course. It's just not the kind of writing I want to be doing right now.

Rather than discussing issues of international sovereignty, employment, resources, ethics and gross domestic product, I want t write about people.

I have an idea for the diary of an old, old vampire - an elderly grey haired lady reminiscing on the past and looking somewhat apprehensively towards the future as she begins to realize that even after several thousand years of 'life,' she's dying.

I want to draw leviathans - frothy mouthed Moby Dicks overnturning whaling ships, showing the twisted scars of old, tiny harpoons on their underbellies. I want to detail the barnacles, and leave afew things to be seen slowly: the mermaid-thing peekign over the edge of a blood-foamed wave, the single albatross feather drifting slowly down onthe scene from above - a harbinger of the doom the leviathan returns to the crew.

I want to rework old poems taht had great starts but sloppy endings. "Old spider-webby skull-white moon/Bobs low on black horizon, smiling/Like Death's head greeting the saints/Who forgot to pray/After/Questioning faith ..."

It figures, of course. Where was this motivation two weeks ago, two months ago? Where was it when I was bored and so sat doing nothing for an hour or so, only to get up because sitting there was boring?

Where was this motivation when I had the time to act on it?

Sigh.