Not quite a one-liner Wednesday–Squirrel!

A friend of mine told me a story about how he went to the park to run and ended up just sitting in the car watching squirrels. The story was a lot funnier the way he told it, and it reminded me of the dogs in the movie UP. Squirrels became our code word for anything distracting, any threat to our train of thought, any obstacle that might get between us and completing a goal, a task, a sentence, or even a thought. The other day at a department store, the boys and I became very engrossed in picking out Halloween decor even though I had gone into the store to buy new dress pants for work. Suddenly, G is wearing a Santa hat with Yoda ears and they are talking about picking out their annual Christmas ornaments and I’m all, “whoa, whoa…we are getting off track here.” G said very seriously, “there are a LOT of squirrels in this store.”

My big problem is there seem to be a growing number of squirrels in my life. Are squirrels like rabbits in that they multiply rapidly? I should look that up. SEE?! This is how my brain works lately. I’ll sit down to do one thing and then before I know it my train of thought has thoroughly derailed and there are many, many casualties.

Amongst the casualties has been my writing. I cannot focus long enough to take a thought, flesh it out, and complete a series of meaningful sentences to convey whatever it is that I want to communicate. It’s common for me to have many different ideas for blog posts or character development or stories, but it is unusual for me not to at least write something about any one of those things. But these days, I am just left with a swirling mass of noise in my head and nothing to show for it.

My dreams have been super vivid and complex, no doubt as a result of all of these unresolved thoughts trying to make sense of themselves in my subconscious. But do I wake up and write them down? Nooooooo. I immediately allow myself to become bombarded with squirrel after squirrel. The other day I found myself fully dressed for work, cleaning the bathroom after the boys had left for school, about 20 minutes after I should have left for my own commute.

Today I spent an hour at work just following up on emails and tasks I should have completed weeks ago. There is a joke at work about certain people who become distracted by shiny objects. Except I’m not laughing about it any more. I have become that person.

I have at least ten browser windows open on my computer at any given time for any given browser. Working in the digital space means I often have several browsers open at any given time and different applications too. It’s a wonder I can find anything. Ever.

I’m sure it’s the society we live in. The information age. So many distractions arising from being über connected all the time. I always prided myself on not falling victim to it and yet, here I am. I called bullshit on multi-tasking a while back. And I meant it. We aren’t meant to do more than one thing at a time. Without mindfulness, everything is half-assed. I want to do everything with my full ass. My problem is I can’t get my whole ass to just sit and complete the task at hand. I can’t even decide on which task to complete!

I’ve got two main things I think about a LOT of the time.

1. My son’s health. He had a CAT scan on his belly today and did amazing. Still waiting for the results. This in and of itself, his health and this mystery condition he has which rears its ugly head only when I’ve finally let my guard down and believe maybe he has “grown out of it” trigger at least a dozen thoughts, if not more, a day.
2. The boys’ schooling. Here’s a typical train of thought: Did they do their homework? Oh shit, I didn’t do the fundraiser. Well, I paid my PTA dues. Should I go to the PTA meeting? When is that? When is the next fundraiser? Oh my goodness, I have to do the fundraiser for church too. And cub scouts. And baseball. Baseball tryouts are coming up. I need to sign C up for karate. Wish I had been able to find a place for him to go to tennis. Geez, no wonder they can’t concentrate on their homework there is too much other stuff going on. G really needs to practice his violin. When do their after school activities start? How are they going to do it all? How am I going to do it all?

The rest of the time my brain is like: Did you do that work thing? Maybe you should bring up that great idea you had in the shower (I have all my best ideas in the shower. By the time my hair is dry, I’ve forgotten most of them). Don’t forget to get the car to the airport for your business trip. Yikes, I hope my mom can handle the boys when I’m gone. When am I ever going to find time to see my friends.  When will I finally join a gym? How will I get there? How can I pay for it? I should be spending that money fixing up the house. I need to find a waterproof cover for the couch so the cat won’t ruin another piece of furniture with his pee. I should write a story about that damn cat. Should I do NaNoWriMo this year? Can I actually finish my novel? When am I going to work on my new business plan? Changes are happening at work, this would be a good time. But I’m so tired. I don’t even write on my blog. Oh geez, I really need to go write on my blog. I’m going to lose readers. No one reads this anyway. I should just go relax and catch up on my reading. Although I did that free trial of HBONow. I should really be watching more TV to get the most out of it. Dammit I never called Verizon to get a new remote after I washed mine in the laundry. Now I can’t watch any shows with parental controls on them….

And on and on and on.

I need to turn it off.

My vacation at the end of the summer was great. I stayed away from the computer and TV and phone and everything else. I spent every day in nature with the boys and then sat by the fire reading and listening to music every night. It was heaven. There were a lot of geese. But no squirrels.

It’s time to set up some squirrel baffles and figure out how to get back to a one-track mind. At least for a few hours at a time. I’d love to hear what other people do to keep those squirrels at bay.

Unfortunately, they can be so damn engaging.