Starting the cycle over

I think that it’s important to know what’s going on in the world and so when I started working from home I got in the habit of turning on CNN Headline News in the morning at just letting it go in the background while I went about my business.

It was great for awhile. I listened to political commentary from experts, watched the stock market generally tumble about, and got very familiar with the weather patterns of the continental US. Pretty soon I felt like my day hadn’t really begun until I saw Robin Meade’s smiling face.

The problem with HLN is that they pretty much just run the same 30 minutes worth of news all day long. It got to be common that by lunch time, I was turning the sound down and doing the monologues myself (usually in bad cartoon voices for my own amusement). By the middle of the afternoon, I would get tired of that and start flipping channels, usually ending up on Boy Meets World reruns.

Now, it’s worth mentioning that Boy Meets World is a really good show. If you haven’t seen it, you should. But, like most good shows, it has a way of sucking you in and stopping you from doing whatever it is that you should be doing. By the time 6pm rolled around, I was so engrossed in the antics of Corey and Topenga that I had completely stopped doing anything productive and was just sort of blankly staring at the TV.

The point is, my efforts to stay up-to-date on the news of the world and be an informed citizen had actually become an excuse to spend the afternoons not doing much of anything at all It had become a distraction.

I tend to have similar experiences with blogging. I start off with the intention of writing about important topics and big ideas, but over time it degrades into some type of self righteous documentation of what I did on a random Tuesday night. When that happens, I erase everything and take some time off. That’s what happened a few months ago. Now I’m back for awhile.

Oh yeah, I also turned off HLN and went back to newspapers.