Nightly recitation of Shakespeare

Every night before I go to bed, I tell myself, "Tomorrow is a new day that you can get right. Tomorrow is a new start that you can do the right things." Somehow, I always stay the same. Isn't there a Bruce Springsteen song that says "One step up and two steps back"? I feel that way. My friend says "trending upward" is always the correct direction, but I feel static.

I went to Kentucky to see my family last weekend, and I can't get over what a jerk I was. I griped and whined and kvetched about every microscopic detail of my life all weekend. How dull is that? When she got tired of my groaning, my grandmother gave me some excellent advice, "Sometimes, at night, when I'm going to bed, I go over the things I need to do tomorrow. And then when I wake up, I spent so much time thinking about it, I feel like I already did it. It's already over with so I don't have to take care of it anymore." That must be exactly where I am right now.

"Tomorrow is a new day to get things right. Tomorrow I won't whine to anyone. Tomorrow I'll get on the exercise bike again for the first
time in a week. Tomorrow I'll do physical therapy exercises even though I don't feel like it. Tomorrow I won't eat half the Hershey bar waiting in my desk." And then tomorrow's newness is over, and it's bed time again, and I begin the recitation, "Tomorrow is a new day that you can get right."

In college, there was one course where I didn't excel and I wasn't teacher's pet: Voice and Diction. I know that's hard to imagine now since the only vowel I haven't midwesternized is "i." Maybe that's no coincidence, considering I can't seem to get the drawl out of the rest of my "I" too.

In Voice and Diction, we practiced Macbeth, "Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow." We were given an in-class assignment to stress different syllables and use voice to fade or increase intensity. No other instruction, but to try reading that quote out loud. So I said, "tomorrow, and toMORROW, AND TOMORROW!" ending on gritted teeth like an angry Hamlet. The teacher skipped my interpretation and picked the girl sitting next to me, who read it like a slowly drifting leaf, settling on the ground at the end, despairing, resigned, the opposite of gritted teeth. The soliloquy goes:

"Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow,
Creeps in this petty pace from day to day,
To the last syllable of recorded time;
And all our yesterdays have lighted fools
The way to dusty death."

I still grit my teeth against dusty death, grinding into "Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow." I still refuse to accept creeping at a petty pace, even if trending upward takes me two steps back to get one step up. At bedtime, I still hope that tomorrow is the day I finally get enough things right.