Whistle While You Loaf

Drawing by Charles Dana Gibson courtesy of A Polar Bear's Tale

I think the winter weather has turned my brain to ice. I’ve been sitting in my chair twirling round and round, browsing e-bay, checking my email for the thirty-forth time, and generally trying to shake loose the blog post that has been swimming around in my head to no avail. I was trying to write about patience, but, as it turns out, I simply do not have the patience to do so. There are some days where the muse doesn’t just hide she leaves the building to hang with Elvis and Jimmie Hendrix on their tropical isle. Can’t say as I blame her a tropical isle would be pretty darn nice right now.

Of course, what I should be doing right now is getting up a blog post with all haste, doing a final edit on the copy for the album cover, preparing for a meeting tomorrow, scouting venues, working on a new song, and just generally being a responsible and productive citizen. What I want to be doing is sitting in my comfy chair with a diet cherry coke watching DVRed episodes of RuPaul’s Drag Race and reading diversionary trash on my Kindle. What I am doing is practicing what my sister- in- law Heather calls Task Avoidance. Task Avoidance is the fine art of doing everything in the world except the task in front of me.


In its (and my) defense it can be very educational. In the last ten minutes alone I’ve learned that ultracrepidarian means to overstep one’s bounds, and that I have more than once committed oniochalasia which is buying as a means of mental relaxation. Mrs. Byrne’s Dictionary of Unusual, Obscure and Preposterous Words by Josefa Heifetz Byrne has been providing much diversion of late.


The Web, of course, is a Task Avoider’s dream. Did you know that there are blogs devoted solely to Apostrophe Catastrophes, Quotation Mark Abuse and the lost art of the letter? Click on these at your own risk, Task Avoiders go in, but they can’t get out. I could excuse the web troll for the recipe for Chicken Scaloppine over Broccoli Rabe as an effort to uphold my New Year’s goal of eating more vegetables (not to mention that the Broccoli Rabe looks at me mournfully each time I open the refrigerator door) but we know what I’m really doing. I will not even attempt to justify the Dulce De Leche Brownie recipe from David Lebowitz’s site.

I really should get back to work now, and yet the siren song of my phone’s Latin Phrases app is calling. I have to figure out how to work acta est fabula plaudite  into my act!