An Experiment in Scotch

Haven’t been writ­ing much of late, not here, not else­where and part of that is lack of desire and part of it is lack of energy. The new job con­tin­ues and I’m down to feel­ing like the vil­lage idiot 3 out of 5 days instead of 5 out of 5. That’s an improve­ment but not one fast enough.

I never came up with any New Year’s res­o­lu­tions but I have decided to do something(s) for Lent. Now mind you, I’m not Chris­t­ian and I’m cer­tainly not reli­gious and God for­bid (pun intended) that I ever give some­thing up that I like. How­ever, I see Lent work­ing two ways. You can think of it as an exer­cise in self-denial or you can see it as the arti­fi­cial impo­si­tion of dis­ci­pline upon an undis­ci­plined life. I’m going with the lat­ter. I’ve never been long on dis­ci­pline and so Lent seems like a good time to blame on God what I can’t man­age myself.

To those ends, I’m doing two things for Lent. I thought about giv­ing up drink­ing but let’s be real­is­tic here, shall we? Instead, I’m giv­ing up surf­ing the inter­net with one excep­tion: I will still look at Google Finance because in the event of a pos­si­ble stock melt down, I want to know about it. This is not to say I’m not going to ever be on the web, it’s pretty much required for my job, I’ll still do email and if you send me a link, I’ll read it. But I’m not going to look at my news aggre­ga­tor, I’m not going to come home after work and see what “News” I missed, I’ll still write on here and I won’t look at ESPN.

The sec­ond thing I’m doing doesn’t involve giv­ing up any­thing but instead deals with tak­ing some­thing on. I’m com­mit­ting to med­i­tat­ing 20 min­utes a day for 40 days start­ing Wednes­day. This won’t be easy but it will be inter­est­ing to see if I can do it.

So those are my “I’m not a Chris­t­ian and I’m not much on giv­ing things up any­way” Lent plans. You got any? Want to join in?

That’s all for the ran­dom update. Next time, maybe I’ll talk about our new house­hold addi­tion, Ms. Vin­cent Van Gogh.