This is the danger of getting enough sleep — so many thoughts, so little time!

What shall I do today? (Assuming I don’t shelve everything and watch baseball with my mom — Phillies currently losing to the Yankees in spring training.)

I listened to Radiolab while eating breakfast (I’ll admit it, breakfast at 1 pm, because the premise of this post is that I got a good night’s sleep). The first act of today’s episode, Life’s Limit, was about programmed cell death. The interview subject, Leonard Hayflick, in describing how freezing cells stops the multiplication process and unfreezing them resumes the process but does not prolong the life of the cell — that is, the multiplication “counter” does not reset but resumes from where it left off — said, “[That] tells you that cells remember, they have a memory.” Which immediately brought to mind a book by Harry Willson, Cells and Souls Remember (Amador Publishers). And then I had to look up the book and find the audio file of the interview to isolate and record the quote and read a bit more about Leonard Hayflick’s work and get all this down on paper. And that required learning how to do a few things in Total Recorder, a sound editing program.

Now what?

I could continue promoting recent publications on social media. I’ve been putting that off because of work. I need to change my mindset for self-promotion — I need to be relaxed and patient and ready for conversation. I need to allow my curiosity free rein, and this is not conducive to meeting work deadlines. So I have not even updated my LinkedIn profile with my latest publications:

• A review of Selected Serbian Plays, Branko Mikasinovich and Dejan Stojanović, eds. (New Avenue Books, 2016), published in The Mercurian, vol. 6, no. 4, fall 2017 (page 205). (Or online here, but it reads better in PDF.)
• A recap of the After Hours Café, the American Translators Association Literary Division’s open mic-type event at the ATA annual conference, in the December 2017 issue of Source, the ATA Literary Division’s newsletter (page 26, with tips for readers on page 28).
• A translation of a short story by Ilija Đurović, “Dignitassssss,” in The St. Petersburg Review, vol. 8.
• A translation of another short story by Ilija Đurović, “Across the Clean Floor,” in the special microfiction feature in the winter 2018 issue of Asymptote.
• A subsequent interview about my translation of “Across the Clean Floor” published on the Asymptote blog.

I could continue translating the piece I hope to read at the American Literary Translators Association conference this fall. It’s the opening monolog of Kasandra. Klišeji. [Cassandra. Clichés.], a play by Ljubomir Đurković.

I could work on memorizing and translating the piece I hope to recite at Declamación, the open mic-type event at the ALTA conference (no reading allowed!). Sure, the conference is eight months away, but translating and memorizing (original and translation) is no small task when you’re starting from scratch.

I could open up any number of translations in progress, contact one or more of “my” authors to see what they’re up to and if they have anything new I should read…

Maybe pick up, open, start reading (imagine!) one of the many books I brought home from my trip abroad two summers ago… (or maybe I could actually write a blog post about that trip, as I promised in this short post written on my return).

What about catching up on posts in the ATA Business Practices forum or the Editorial Freelancers Association discussion list? Or starting a conversation about reviewing plays in one of the Facebook literary translators groups I follow? All these are interesting, enjoyable, educational, relationship-building, and time-consuming activities that are important to my professional development.

Volunteer obligations? I hesitate to list them for fear that my colleagues will be emboldened to remind me about what I said I would do and by when. (No links, move along, nothing to see here.)

Catch up on news? I just subscribed to the New York Times — but did I set aside time to read it? (And doesn’t this article from 2008 sound so quaint?)

And I dare not begin to list the business (admin, operation), household (from dishes to deck repair), and personal tasks waiting to be done on my to-do list (or piling up on my desk).

Well, if I can’t prioritize any of the above, I guess I could write something for my blog — that shouldn’t take much time (she says five hours later and yet to hit “publish”)…

Credit goes to Zelda Leah Gatuskin for coining the title phrase. You can see she’s not kidding by taking a gander at what-all she’s up to at Studio Z.