There Will Be Blog

The first six weeks of this year were absolutely wretched for me -- kicked off the new year with a massive storm and an extended power outage that left me and my family holed up in a noisy, frozen hotel room for the weekend, while all three of us were battling the flu, then a matching set of nasty ear infections, all without enough PTO to call in sick to work.

(I get sick maybe once a year for a couple of days, and have no patience with even that, so I was about ready to drive an icepick through my second infected ear by the end of it all. One week is longer than any person should have to feel like shit, not be able to taste food, and not feel like sex. Six weeks is ridiculous. It throws me completely off my game.)

So since the last couple weeks have actually been pretty good, it's as if I've forgotten my usual routines, plus having a few medium-sized early-spring weekend projects on the honey-do list, plus having become one of the many folks with newly minted degrees who now have to try to get a much better job in a bad market, in that window before the student loan payments kick in. Hello, American dream; wake me up when it's over.

The thing is, I feel like writing, I just don't feel like sitting down and initiating the process of writing, if that makes sense. A good chunk of what I've thrown down lately has actually been the product of brief spates of cyberloafing at work. What's really dumb about this is that I have cobbled together another epic jeremiad, just needs a quick finish and editing, about two weeks ago. But then Thanksralph came in and set everyone's panties in a wad, and that collective reaction made me rethink some of my premises and observations on the theme of change and whether people really want it -- or would even recognize it as such.

All this is a roundabout way of saying that I should be back scratching some itches over the weekend.