Holiday

The office has been closed for four glorious days (almost unheard of in corporate America. I wish the Fourth of July fell on a Tuesday every year). A four-day weekend is the perfect time to pursue my never-ending quest for relaxation and simplicity, which is constantly encountering dead ends set up by a “busy-ness bug” that’s taken up residence in my brain. This bug loves to keep me on my feet, as well as to make my life as complicated as possible.

I had toyed with the idea of keeping my computer turned off all weekend, as a means to achieving a relaxed and peaceful state of mind. Enter said bug, the one I’d hoped had gone off on a little vacation to someone else’s brain. I won’t even bother to call my computer-off idea “unlikely,” as the bug began to stare longingly at my laptop. “Impossible” would be the operative word here. To appease it, I decided just to check my email. I rationalized that it wouldn’t take me long, because my coworkers wouldn’t be around, and if they were, they wouldn’t be expecting an immediate response from me. I could mull things over in a sort of relaxed way I normally don't do, before emailing them back. My subconscious did a superb job of hiding all thoughts of authors behind a black curtain. I completely forgot that they just might be using this holiday as a nice block of time for writing and might have questions for me.

The bug jumped up and down with glee as I logged on. Oh look, I finally had that annotated outline someone had been promising me. How could I resist taking a look at that? And how could I not respond to the person asking if I still needed an endorsement for an upcoming book? I’ve got five manuscripts due in on July 15th. Certainly, those authors deserve answers to all their questions.

Then, something wonderful happened. It was the equivalent of the bug hitting a windshield. I lost service to our web client. I couldn’t even connect to our alternate email site (granted, I didn’t try awfully long and hard). Time to turn off the computer, pick up a Toblerone bar, and start reading that mystery I grabbed at the library the other day.