The Art of Accomplishing Nothing

Of the many skills that a woman of my age has had the opportunity to acquire, accomplishing nothing seems to be the one that comes most naturally to me. Now I'm not talking about sitting around knitting or reading for hours, because in my mind inches knit or pages turned are a tangible accomplishment. Nor am I talking about the time spent playing Candyland or reading with children because I've learned to recognized the long term value of these less tangible accomplishments.

No, I'm talking about whole days in which I'm quite certain nothing has happened. The nights when I lay in bed, considering my day and all I can come up with is checked bloglines, sent an e-mail, and did a load of laundry. Where did the day go? I am clearly a master time-waster. The worst part is... I hate wasting time.

Given a whole day to knit or read, it's inevitable that I'll get nothing done. I know that a lot of people are more productive when the pressure's on... whether it be laundry blocking entrance to the bathroom, a stack of bills to pay before you can even find you desk, or a list of to-dos so long that can only be tackled with a hope and a prayer. On these days, not only do I get it all done, I usually manage to play a few games, knit a few inches, and read a chapter or two. It's the other days that kill me.

I especially excel at wasting time on the Internet, but am equally capable of investing hours of my time in other useless, futile tasks as well... although I'm not exactly sure what they are.

So here I sit... The Brothers Karamazov await, look how nicely it lays open for me, and knitting abounds. And me... what am I doing? Looking at cyber sock yarn. Useless.

This whole week has been like that, day after day. Now admittedly, I have been under the weather so I imagine that taking my temperature has taken up a unacceptable amount of my time. Giving up on my temp, I finally moved on to the symptom checker at Web MD. After clicking on all the little body parts and identifying all of my varied symptoms (and believe me, you would be surprised at how many symptoms you have if you actually look at all the options). It presented me with my list of possible diagnoses. First on the list was Sinusitis (not a surprise). Second on the list... perimenopause. Hmph... and I didn't even click on "uncontrollable verbal outbursts" since I figured that was a topic for another day.

So what has all this taught me? Not only do I waste time... I'm getting old.

Yeah... can't say it's been a great week. Glad tomorrow begins a new one.