Jazz Fixes Nothing

Jazz here. (As the title might have already led you to believe.) I was on the phone last week with The One True Tami (blessed be Her name) talking for a very long time about really not very much at all, but it led me to some realizations. You shall now be burdened with this information.

First of all, I obsess over things. I'm also paranoid. (And I mean that in the medical sense, not in the Comedy Central, did that guy dip his chip in the nacho cheese twice sense. I once began testing various beverages in my house to find out if somebody - narrowed down to my wife or two of my best friends - was slowly trying to poison me.) The major problem with paranoids with a tendency toward obsession is that you eventually begin to obsess over being paranoid. But enough of that. I'll start boring you before too long if I stick with that line of thought. (OH MY GOD! Are they getting bored????)

Anyway... the point is that I've come to realize that I've spent a great deal of my half century on Earth veering off in different directions, all in the name of "refitting my priorities" or "sorting out what's important" or "dropping what doesn't work." All of those sound like fine and noble pursuits. The problem is that they don't translate very well into practice... at least not for me. I'm currently in the middle of a two week hiatus from pretty much "everything that doesn't directly pay me cash."

This break was allegedly to allow me to dive into and wrap up a couple of very important projects and reevaluate the various activities which have been clogging up my days to the point where I was getting stressed out. Many of those activities were not doing anything for my family life or my career. I enjoyed them for the most part, but only in small doses. Too much on my plate, even if it's all absolutely optional, was driving me to distraction.

So what did I wind up doing with all of this free time? I'm up to a level two farm in the 1990's vintage PlayStation One game, Monster Rancher. I've decided that I like the series "Scrubs" so much that I've ordered them all on Netflix and am watching the first season front to back. In short... I dropped the other things which were cluttering up my life and eating my time, and immediately found new, equally useless things to fill in the free hours.

What does a hiatus fix? At least for me... nothing. Not a damned thing. So, rather than dropping everything and spending days at a time in fruitless navel gazing, I really need to just do the things I need to do, then do some of the things I want to do, and if the latter builds up to the point where it becomes stressful, I need to say no to some of them.

Ok.. maybe I did fix something after all. I would explain this further, but I need to stop writing now before I become even more paranoid about something else. I have corn on the cob cooking on my grill right now. For all I know, one more paragraph and the whole freaking house will be engulfed in a deadly inferno.