A Lapsed Wordsmith

With more free time on my hands than most times in my life, you’d think I’d be filling jump drives and external hard drives with all sorts of wonderful writing. This is hardly the case.

I’ve fallen into a bit of a slump when it comes to putting words to paper (not literally of course, because hey, who the hell WRITES anymore). I can’t even blame it on a lack of ideas. They’re floating around in my hand, vague as some of them may be. The issue stems from me not just sitting down and forcing myself to write.

So I’m going to start doing that more often. Both here and even in notebooks and my moleskine (yes, I’m now one of those jerks who carries around a moleskine so I can document all of my brilliant ideas).  I would say this post is less of a declaration of my intentions and more of a cheap way of ensuring that an entire month doesn’t pass without my putting something up here.

And now, some free-floating thoughts:

• I’ve been doing jury duty for the last week and it’s not nearly as tedious as I expected. Given my lack of a job, the pittance we receive is actually a raise for me. And even if I was still working in newspapers, it wouldn’t be much of a pay cut. I’m only sort of joking. What’s been most appealing about this whole thing is the interactions and observations of my fellow jurors and those dozens of folks I keep company with in the jury assembly room. Most of them look like they walked right off of the People of WalMart site, but that’s sort of the appeal. They’re so absurd in both appearance and behavior that I can’t help but find entertainment in most of it.
• I think I only have Facebook so I can interact with about a dozen people, post pithy status updates, creep on attractive girls, and complain about 90 percent of the people I’m “friends” with. Actually, scratch that. I think this describes most male Facebook users (and some saucy female ones).
• We have a week of April left and I still can’t leave the apartment without a jacket of some sort. I’d be pretty upset if I had invested any of my nonexistent income in spring clothing, because at this rate, we’re going to jump from the frigid grasp of winter to the ball-drenching humidity of a Midwest summer.