distractions.

Most days, I bring one or two pieces of fruit to work with me. Usually an apple or an orange. You know, I try to be healthy and fruit is good. Here’s the thing: I almost never eat the fruit. I like the idea of eating the fruit, but when it comes down to it, when it’s 3pm and the sun is beating through my window and the fluorescent lights are buzzing and I have the slightest headache just behind my eyes - well I’d rather run across the street and get a burrito filled with cheese and a cookie the size of my head. Just the thought of other face-sized food options turns me off to the lowly apple sitting in my bag on the floor.

Someone who loves me has kindly deemed this my purse fruit.

So I’ll just own up to it: it’s not uncommon for me to carry one sad apple back and forth to work all week and never eat it until one day, in the midst of hunger crisis, I’ll fish the bruised mushy thing out of my bag and eat it. It happens.

Today I discovered the trick to getting myself to eat the fruit.

This morning, I lay in bed thinking about a “thing.” This is how I refer, in my mind, to the very early beginning stages of something that I might eventually try to write about. So I started writing on this “thing” early this morning, got real excited to write more and then....

I remembered that I needed to carefully peel and eat the two oranges in my bag.

I seriously hope this happens to someone else too. Otherwise I am the only one with this insanely neurotic relationship towards writing which means that often, when I am most excited about what I want to write, I’m most gullible to my own attempts to distract myself. I’m just happy that, overall, my attempts to distract myself result in healthy life habits like mopping the kitchen and eating oranges. That’s something.

I started this blog without intending to publicize it or attract readers. In fact, I only told a small handful of friends that I was writing here, not even half a dozen. But piece by piece I’ve been connecting with folks somehow. I realized this weekend that maybe there are actual people stopping by here to read. If you’re one of those actual people (as opposed to Newt Gingrich’s Twitter followers, who are not actual people) - please feel free to say hello! Reading and writing are lonely ways to pass the time and it’s nice to hear a voice now and again.