On Being Methodical

House-painting, cow-skinning, and college applications.

I’ve had a twitch in my left eye for several days now. The Internet says it is caused by some unhealthy combination of stress, poor sleep, and caffeine. Unfortunately those are the defining elements of my life at the moment. I’ve tried sleeping a little more and weaning off the coffee. But that optic nerve keeps jumping around…

I’ve also been looking at things very intently this week. My attention to detail has strained my already-overtaxed eyeballs.

For one, I’ve been squinting at my computer screen for hours at a time trying to finish college application essays, looking for little errors and things to change; patiently filling out tedious forms, checking each school off one-by-one on a spreadsheet I uncharacteristically devised.

And I’ve spent the past week repainting this house, the oldest on campus. It predates the school’s founding over one hundred years ago. Like a ship, it’s on a slight slant from the warping of century-old floorboards, and the back porch is sinking into the loose sandy sediment.

Washing the walls, taping up, cutting in, painting in quadrants, letting it dry, doing the trim. And when we ran out of tape, doing the sharp lines connecting the baseboard to the wall by hand, with a steady hand and a small paintbrush. Time-consuming, but effective.

At a steer slaughter on the ranch this weekend, I was given my favorite job of skinning. Wielding the skinning knife, like a miniature machete, I gently but firmly and surely pulled the hide taut away from the meat, slashing the skin carefully away, parallel to the flesh, stroke by stroke revealing the subcutaneous fat, filled with tiny air bubbles which crackle when touched and the tiny capillaries which burst when sliced, leaving the thin, sashimi-like strip of muscle between the hide and the fat.

But if you stare at something for too long, you become a little blind. You have to stop, blink. Otherwise the world will be awash in a fuzzy overstimulated fata morgana and all your methodicalness will be lost.

In front of the laptop for so long, I can lose the plot of a college essay. So intent on the line between the baseboard and the wall, I can flub the paint stroke. Brow furrowed in concentration over the steaming dead cow, I can slip and cut my hand (not that I did, don’t worry).

Being methodical is doing things in the right order, going slowly but not being overcautious. The danger is when you focus so intently your eyes feel ready to leap from your skull. Maybe next week, when I’m on a break from school, my dancing eyelid will settle down. I’ll close my eyes, sleep more than half the night. I’ll take my blinders off and look out panoramically.