Anatomy of a life lived entirely in little bits:
Wander about, never giving one thing your full attention. Do chores and assignments half-way (wash the laundry but fail to put it away. Make your tea and leave it on the counter all day) for maximum dilettantism.
Look out the window. Perhaps you are avoiding the work you have to do, or perhaps you are just looking.
Eat a handful of something (peanuts, dry cereal, strawberries). By all means do not eat an entire serving of anything--it interferes with the dabbling.
Listen to the same album on repeat (Tom Waits: Mule Variations) for hours.
Read at least three books at one time (The Wind In The Willows, Bird by Bird by Anne Lamott, and How to be Alone by Jonathan Franzen) and thus fail to fully absorb them. At at least one point in your life you will enter a library or bookstore and take home a book you have already read because of this terrible habit.
Become very thoughtful about the ways of life and develop personal theories while observing yard wildlife, thus:
I have been watching a squirrel mine seeds from the feeder. It has been at this task all morning. The way the squirrel gets its snack is rather ingenious: the feeder, a seed-filled tube within a metal cage, is designed to keep away marauding bands of squirrels and large bully birds like Blue Jays and Crows. The entire contraption hangs on a wire that extends down from a tree branch.
Our hero, the bushy little rodent, shinnies down the wire and climbs down the cage to hang upside-down from the cage by his back feet. From this position the little bugger can lick the saucer of the feeder to extract fallen seeds, hold them in his free front paws, and nibble them open.
I used to rap on the window when I caught this circus act in progress, because all who feed birds know that squirrels spoil the fun. I quickly tired of this stingy behavior, though: for one, I felt like the nasty neighbor-woman of my childhood who would knock reprovingly on her windowpane if we so much as set one toe in her yard; and two, it's really a very symbiotic relationship. The usually insatiable squirrel only gets the seeds that the overzealous birds drop onto the saucer and fail to retrieve, so it's really performing a vital clean-up task. Additionally, it doesn't stay there all day: it either runs out of available seeds or gets a headache from all of the blood pooling in its skull, because it leaves in a timely fashion and gives the chickadees and finches and titmice a chance to sup.
Spend an hour reading .blogs or browsing the new releases at your favorite online bookstore.
Posted by care at April 7, 2003 03:26 PM | TrackBack