I am Veruca Salt.

I want the world
I want the whole world
I want to lock it all up in my pocket
It's my bar of chocolate
Give it to me
Now!

-Veruca Salt, in Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory

As I stated in a previous post, I have issues with delayed gratification. I want everything, and I want it yesterday. And this bothers me.

I was originally going to post this in my diet blog because I figured out that a lot of my food issues stem from the instant gratification compulsion, i.e. I don't have the patience to cook. But then I realized that so much else in my life, so much of what drives people - and myself - crazy about me is the fact that I'm simply too damn impatient. I hate waiting. This may be behind my chronic tardiness as well. If I'm late, I join the action in progress and don't have to wait around for it to start. It also has a lot to do with my housekeeping issues. I want my house to be clean, but I don't have the patience to clean it. I unwittingly sabotage relationships because I don't stop to savor the stages of development, and tend to come on way too strong way too soon. Despite my best intentions, I always screw it up. But yeah, I'm sure you get the idea.

So this week we started learning how to "throw" in ceramics class. For the record, I hate that fucking class. I'm not good at it, I'm not particularly interested in it, it's obnoxiously messy, and the teacher is a straight-up jerk sometimes. He does a marvelous job of making me feel really stupid, in fact. Anyway, the other day I was sitting at my wheel, fighting with a spinning lump of wet clay (and wearing a good deal of it as well) and all I wanted to do was turn it into a bowl. Just a bowl. Nothing fancy, nothing extreme, just a god damned bowl. Well, it's a lot harder than it looks, and I couldn't even get the stupid thing to stay on the wheel, let alone get it centered or shape it into anything that looked remotely like a bowl. In fact, at one point I looked at my creation and thought, "Wow, that's a really great rendition of a pile of dog poo."

This semester sucks.