Shh... It's Lunch Time

See.. the Borg for some reason, rarely, if ever, takes a lunch break.  It is allowed - encouraged I'm sure - by the company, but I never seem to take one.

By the time I think about taking one, it's almost 3 PM, and it seems silly when the end of the day is so close.

But today.  At 1 PM, I walked away from my cube, took my personal laptop, started my timer for 30 minutes, and then started this.

There are a lot of reasons I don't go out for lunch.  The biggest one is probably that I'm an idiot.

The other reasons primarily stem from my ADD.  I'm usually too hyper focused on what I'm doing to break away.  My ADD drugs suppress my appetite (sometimes, not always, though), so I'm often not very hungry until.. let's say... 3 PM.

But the other reason has to do with laziness.  We're situated in an industrial park that has some heavy traffic to get to places to get food.  The company - in theory - sets 30 minutes for the lunch break.  I'm not an hourly employee anymore, so that applies less to me, but, it's difficult to leave the office, get in your car, go get lunch and pick it up, and be back in the office with more than five minutes remaining to eat.  We also don't have much of a lunch room, frankly.  I've escaped to a secret room today.

At some level these are all excuses.  I often feel like five more minutes on x, y or z will get me that much closer to the place of peace and harmony where I'm actually caught up at work.  HA!

But I want to work harder at trying to find balance.  Trying to have interests and occupations outside of work.  It's hard, though, after work because I come home exhausted.  So it's hard to then pull out the shiny new MacBook Air and pound out a blog post - or even an e-mail to a family member or friend.  I'm exhausted and all I want to do is veg.  And eat.  And spend time with my wife.

The problem with that scenario / equation, is that I am out of balance.  I don't seem to take time for me.

I could get up earlier in the morning, and carve out some time for myself - and I do that on occasion.  But it is really hard to leave my comfy bed and my snuggly wife to get up and do what? Exercise.. well.. that does sound like it might be important.. but unstructured time for just myself? I want to get up early for that?

All work and no play makes Borg a dull blogger.  Ha.  All work and no play makes Borg not a blogger at all.

Hence this sprint for a thirty minute break and a quick pointed rambling blog post to grease the writing wheels again.  Rambling, after all, is my style.  My art form.

Are you good about taking the breaks that are offered to you? About finding balance in your life? Enquiring Borgs want to know.

(oh, and P.S. could someone send an ambulance to my wife who will get notification when this posts and be shocked that her wife is blogging (again - although possibly only this once?).  She may experience cardiac arrest... )

(hitting "post" with a few minutes to spare to munch on a few nuts - wait, that sounds wrong)

Good enough...

Okay, so an hour ago I found out I have 48 hours until my "handoff" meeting. 

That seemed do-able.  Still does - don't know why I wrote in the past tense!

Put together a macro-punch list of what still needs to be done, and put together a schedule to try and get it done.  (Yoda on my shoulder (he's heavy, by the way) : NO! Try not! Do or do not! There is no try!)

And try and be reasonable and realistic and plan in breaks and other life events.  I cannot - and will not - spend the next forty-eight hours on this project.  (Forty-six now...)

I realize my biggest issue with this project is letting go, and recognizing when it is "good enough". 

"Good enough" is a really hard concept to accept.  There's always a tweak that can make it better.  Letting go, though, and recognizing that something or someone or some event or some whatever is good enough is really tough.  I want to be able to say I did my best, but "good enough" is rarely one's best.  So, I qualify and instead will say, "I did the best I could given the... " whatever comes next refers to limitations.  And even that, sometimes, is not true.  But I have to believe it, and I have to let go.

It is hard for me to realize, and easier for others to see for me, that sometimes my "good enough" is still much better than many people's "best"s and that is even more reason why I should be able to accept "good enough". 

You can see that I am still trying to convince myself. 

But this is an ongoing struggle on a much larger level.  It is a circular fight.  At some level, we have to give ourselves permission to be human, and to not be perfect, and to accept that we do, generally, do the best that we can given the circumstances.  We do this in parenting, we do this in our relationships with others, we do this at work, we do this in keeping commitments.  But sometimes we give ourselves too much permission to not bring our best to the table.  To not give our best.  To instead spread ourselves so thin, to create circumstances, where we have to accept "good enough". 

It is a double-edged sword "good enough".

I brought in Yoda above partly as a joke, but I think his comment addresses a broader issue.  Sometimes we need to just do.  There is no trying.  And sometimes, we need to change the circumstances that prevent us from doing.  In wanting to get the correct exact line, I googled it, and re-watched 44 seconds of the scene from which it comes.  In the scene from Empire Strikes Back where Yoda is instructing the young Jedi that he is what prevents himself from raising the X-wing fighter that has sunk into the morass,

"So certain are you? *sigh* Always with you what cannot be done.  Do you nothing that I say?" Luke tells him that moving stones around is one thing, that this huge thing is totally different. 

Yoda says, "No.  No different.  Only different in your mind. You must unlearn what you have learned."

And that's when Luke says he'll give it a try. 

What often keeps us from getting things done is ourselves.  Whether it is accepting actually good work as "good enough" or believing that the circumstances around us really prevent us from doing something the way we think it should or could be done. 

This is a rambling post, with some real potential in it for great thoughts.  But the current circumstance is that the time I allotted for a break is over.  So this will have to be "good enough" to provoke some thought from you and from me about how we approach getting done what we need to get done.  And how we let go of the things we have done. 

It's one big circle, and I am already dizzy thinking about it... ;)

 P.S.  Hit 5,000 hits last night.  Thanks all!  Keep reading! 

Are we really that lazy?

(I'll warn you.  This is a shower post.  It was brilliant.  Let's see where it stands now.)

Alternative subject: Really? How hard is it to type?

I don't like it when I'm reading something and it makes me think. 

Well, to be clear, I don't like it when I'm reading something and it makes me have to think about what the author is saying.

Wait.  Still not right.

I don't like it when I am reading something and I have to have the urban dictionary or a glossary or a texting acronym book to figure out WHAT the author is LITERALLY writing. 

I don't mind thinking ABOUT what the author is writing about, but I'd like to easily understand what that is by reading words I understand rather than try and decode their missives.

I deliberately chose NOT to become a decoder for the CIA. 

(Well, no, I didn't choose that.  Suggesting I "chose" it presumes that I had an opportunity to do so, and we'll never know about that... BUT, I'm sure if I CHOSE to be a CIA decoder, they would have made me an offer. Right? Right.)

I was reading a blog last night, and the blogger wrote about how she and her DH went and did something.  Now I don't know about you, but I don't know that many women who walk around with a designated hitter.  Because that's where MY mind goes to when I see the words "DH". 

Now, last night, I admit, I wasn't that confused.  It wasn't the first time that I'd seen "DH" or other derivations "XDH, DGF, XDGF", etc.  But it is still a new enough term for me that it interrupts my reading experience as I try to understand what it is that she wrote. 

So this morning, as I'm lathering up, I am wondering just how hard it is to type the words "dear husband".  Is it really so hard? 

Now I do have some understanding that we live in a world that limits our characters - texts, tweets, and at one time FB, and so we have to find ways to abbreviate.  And I know that abbreviations are NOT a new thing.  I can imagine, for example, (i.e., eg:) that the first folks who saw "etc" had to take a moment to think "Oh, etcetera!" 

Now, I admit that I feel when I write something like this that I must have become a curmudgeon when I wasn't looking.  I had to look twice in the mirror after I stepped out of the shower to confirm I am not a curmudgeon.  (I don't think I look like one?)

I am sophisticated enough to understand LOL, LMAO, etc. 

But I do find myself sometimes reading TFLN and having to reference the urban dictionary to understand it.  I still enjoy it.  But I feel old when I don't get it right away.

Part of the problem is that I am a skilled typer.  It takes me LONGER to reduce and abbreviate and think about the abbreviation than it does for me to type the full expression.  I have been typing for 75% of my life and began typing on a real typewriter.  I type faster than the average bear.  (Okay, well, that image probably doesn't help you understand how fast I type... since I don't think Yogi really does have the dexterity to type very quickly or very well)

And I am tech-savvy.  I have owned Blackberries, Palm Pilots, and iPhones.  I can type on those keyboards fairly quickly, too. 

I have had friends get frustrated in chatting with me online because they feel like they can't get a word in edge-wise.  By the time they finish writing "Yes, I did" I've moved on three or four more topics.  And then I don't know what their "Yes, I did" referred to, and I've really messed up the conversation. 

No wonder they abbreviate.