today

"L'homme est une entreprise qui a contre elle le temps, la nécessité, la fortune, et l'imbécile et toujours croissante primauté du nombre... Les hommes tueront l'homme."

Marguerite Yourcenar
L' Oeuvre au noir

a paso de cangrejo...

...is spanish for "at a crab's pace" or better said "walking like a crab". One needs not be an experienced seaman to grasp the meaning of this expression. It is employed -sometimes at excessive rates- to mock someone's procrastination when, instead of taking a leap forward, he prefers to beat around the bush, walking sideways, towards his scope, sometime even backwards away from it.

In my case, this might be perceived somehow reciprocally. Meaning that instead of myself I find that it is a number of goals I have set appear to be walking away from me. Even worse, in some cases, they tend to ostentatiously pass me by, at their crablike pace, walking sideways as they drift away. Over the last weeks I find the whole essence of time or actually its scantness to have reached some sort of
limit that is beyond me. Desperately as I try to divide my week's efforts among urgent duties, forgotten projects, self-improving assignments I always appear to be running against the clock. At the same time the simplest task of maintaining a marginal social life is all the more being reduced to e-mailing, facebook chatting and talking on the phone. Worse than that, I seem to be not getting any work done.

It might be that I am asking too much from myself (which is not very probable, given that I have more than three days off-work every week) or it might be that I am so tempted by the lack of a tight working schedule that I tend to slack off most of the time (much more likely although I remember far more constructive periods in terms of doing nothing). The fact is that a couple of papers remaining unpublished, another couple of projects remaining un-started, a series of meetings being postponed, combined with a trumpet rusting un-blown, a couple of stories undone and with the end of semester approaching dangerously, I find myself unable to fake the crab's pace anymore. I might rather picture me in the uncomfortable position of the one in the photo, squeezed inside a glass tube and so close to an inevitable stalemate.