Distractions Everywhere

So it's an hour and a half after I got out of bed, and I'm just beginning to write.

Why?  Well, there was the first half-hour, pre-coffee, that I spoke of yesterday.  That, I generally just grant myself, as I'm usually barely capable of staring glassy-eyed at the computer for those thirty minutes.  Granted, sometimes I do wake up with some of my best (the plot to add to Professor Kinder's story) or worst (some weird thing about having to recycle through this deadly obstacle course maze where you didn't get to leave for good until you made it to the right end; otherwise you died and started over) ideas, and those I make a point of quickly writing down.  Mostly, though, I allow myself the first half hour of the day to be unproductive.

After that, I'm just being anti-productive if I'm not writing.  There have been days before when I've hammered out a thousand words in that hour before heading for work.  There are other days when I barely hit two or three words in the same time frame.

Those latter days are the ones I have to get away from.

What causes it?  Several things, of course.  There's always the Lure of Facebook.  I've gotten better about not playing my Facebook games in the morning, but there are other distractions contained within its shiny blue lair.  Pretty kitten pictures, for sure, but there also exist links to sites that my friends have found informative and want me to take a look at.

Now, I'm not bragging or anything, but I've got some pretty smart friends.  Yes, I have a few who have intelligences that lie outside the normal range of strengths, but most of the few I've known who seemed to make a living out of posting "the world is flat" and "Obama is a Martian" and "the United Nations is coming to take over America" type of stuff have either stopped doing it or, sadly, unfriended me after a few instances of me calling them on it. 

That said, I've learned a whole lot from the stuff that my friends have posted.  Yesterday, for example, a friend (sorry, can't recall which) linked to a video by C.G.P. Grey (www.cgpgrey.com).  I then spent the next several hours watching other videos on the same site, all done by a guy who's a teacher by trade and who writes/talks about geopolitical oddities in much the same voice Asimov used on physical strangenesses.

Man, I love that kind of stuff. 

That's why I spent close to half an hour this morning watching a couple of new ones and a few that I'd already seen from Grey's series of videos with my wife.  Must share the LOLs, after all.

So now, it's noon (yes, I waited till 10:30 to get out of bed, a decision that my poor bladder was cursing me for by that time) and I'm just now writing. 

This is why, I suppose, Franzen, according to an article I read about him, writes from a laptop that is incapable of connecting to the outside world.  What a beautiful idea that is, right?  Except that--how does he check spellings and definitions of words?  How does he check for synonyms?  I've gotten so used to the little additional strip of address bar in Firefox, into which I can type something like "synonym humorous" and, in mere seconds, see links to several sites, each in turn offering me many other words to use instead of humorous.

Anyway--back to writing I go.  Facebook, be gone!

(but wait till I finish posting this, k? thx bai)

- TOSK