Doing Burnouts

I grew up in one of those small towns that tends to attract Wal-marts, trailers, and tornadoes. The kind of place where people leave a parking lot by peeling out. The kind of place where monster trucks and tractors were considered legitimate forms of transportation. The kind of place... I'm not really sure where I was going with this. I think the point I was trying to make is that there was no traffic.

Anyhoo, when I encountered stoplights I'd usually makes a series of turns, go around blocks and so forth so as to avoid just waiting them out. About 99% of the time this was slower than just sitting though the light, which I knew, but couldn't seem to make use of. Being in motion, even if it was pointless, was better than just waiting at the light. It made me feel like I was accomplishing something, even if in reality I was falling behind.

When I had various cubicle jobs I became an expert at appearing busy, in fact feeling busy, while accomplishing nothing. Email+crossword=lunch then I'd spread an hour's worth of work over various sports radio broadcasts until it was time to go home. The fact that this more or less matched the routines of those around me led me to believe that this was more or less, life. So I quit.

But on my own it might be worse. When I'm on a real deadline, I'm fairly square. And could there be any more real deadline than the two of you? But I'm afraid in recent weeks I'm doing a lot of traveling without moving. The internet is full of things that feel important (countless videos of people getting kicked in the nuts) and take up time, but don't really put me any further down the road. Email, news feeds, etc, not to mention all the little things I can distract myself in the house (when was the last time someone turned the mattresses?) make it rare that a day goes by where I say to myself, dude you just sat around and did nothing. Instead, I do a ton of meaningless things and then end the day wanting a do over. If I can be this unproductive with two cats I can't fathom the non work I could accomplish with two kids.

We've settled on an au pair for you two. She's from South Africa. English accents for everyone. She's going to get my office. I used to think that would be awful. How would I get anything done? Now I'm pretty sure it's for the best. I think I'm going to go low tech with my next office space. No internet and doors that lock from the outside.

Novel - see above
Dunking - week 6
French - looks like it's back on me