Sunday Morning Random Thoughts–My Tangential Approach to Life Edition

Although I’ve never been formally diagnosed, I have a strong suspicion that I suffer from ADD. (Yes, here is where I should go, “Oh, look! A squirrel!” and go running off in another direction.) I can’t do any one thing without it breaking down into a half dozen other things. It’s not just the typical distractedness most people experience, where I have to check my email, my text messages, my Facebook every five minutes. It’s something a little deeper than that. For instance, I’m reading six or seven books concurrently. Not a big deal, you say? Guess again. My concurrently may be a little more literal than you think. I sometimes put down one book after a page or two just to pick up the other book and read a page or two there. Something in my brain triggers and I have a sudden urge to see what’s going on in the other book. It’s the literary equivalent of channel surfing. Any task I begin has the potential to spur a half dozen other tasks, which for some reason must begin immediately. Those tasks in turn can each often lead to another half dozen new tasks that must also begin immediately. If you were to reduce me to a mathematical model, I’m a human fractal.

Recently, I’ve taken on the task of really cleaning up/out my home. This is less a spring cleaning than it is a mid-life cleansing. I’m not saying everything must go, but my daughter has had to twice walk back to the house after I carried the chair she was sitting in to the curb on trash day. Each time I’ve had the urge to carry her back to the curb. While the process of such a cleaning can be difficult for all the typical reasons—sentimental value attached to objects, the idea something may come in handy again someday, the fear an unidentifiable object is a vital piece to something else—I also have to deal with my tangential approach to life. Here is a typical sequence of digressions: I awake on a Saturday morning and put my damn shoes on (topic for another post) and decide on a large project. Today I am going to clear out that corner in the living room where I have been piling miscellaneous objects for which I can’t seem to find a proper home. As I’m sorting through the various objects I find both my toolbox and the file box where I keep recent bills, pay statements, etc. They are both covered in dust, so I decide to carry them to the kitchen and wipe them off. Now that they are clean I figure I should sort through the bills on my desk and file them in the now clean file box. While I’m at it, I can round up the various screwdrivers and wrenches that are scattered around the house and toss them in the toolbox. As I’m working on my desk and organizing the bills I plan to file in the box I wiped off after finding it in the corner of the room I started to clean, I realize I’ve got five or six books cluttering up the desk. So I decide to put the books on my bookshelf in my bedroom. My bookshelf is a mess. As I’m working on my bookshelf to make room for the books I found on my desk where I was organizing the bills I plan to file in the box I wiped off after finding it in the corner of the room I started to clean, I find a stack of CDs I never returned to the CD rack . The CD rack is disorganized. As I start to organize the CD rack so I can put away the CDs I found on the bookshelf where I plan to put the books I found on my desk where I planned to file my bills in the box I wiped off after finding it in the corner of the room I started to clean, I discover a coffee mug and a wine glass. I decide to carry those down to the kitchen. There I find my toolbox and remember I wanted to collect the various screwdrivers and wrenches that are scattered around the house. . .