Why *Am* I So Damn Busy All the Time?

Ok, my friend Trey poses a valid and interesting question that is also near impossible to answer without sitting down together for a long relaxing evening of rambling conversation over a couple glasses of wine (or relaxant of your choice): "why exactly are you guys as busy as you are? Why can't you just relax?" (Ok, I'm paraphrasing.) Well, I'll take a stab at it, even though relaxing evenings of conversation aren't available to me right now.

I'll be the first to admit that I have a busy problem. ("Hi, I'm Julie, and I have a busy problem.") In other words, my activities and interests expand to fill all my available time. And in my own defense, I'm just a curious, extroverted person. Life, in all its weird and intricate permutations, interests me. I want to go new places, try/see/hear/touch/eat/experience new things. People interest me--I sometimes describe myself as a people collector. I love talking and spending time with a wide variety of people. So I have a lot of things I want to do and people I want to hang out with. These things recharge me, for the most part (though sometimes the sheer volume gets to me, and I wind up whining about it even though I did it to myself). Combine this with a pretty good genetically passed down ability to multitask and logistic, and well, you get someone who tries to cram something into every available moment.

And let's face it, I'm married to someone who is, if it's even possible, even more this way than I am. So the two of us together are like a crazy sparky feedback loop of busy, a lot of the time. And even though you'd think that having children would slow us down some (and it has, honest), it also produces a somewhat opposite desire to continue living a life outside of or at least not wholly defined by parenthood (blasphemy, I know). So we both *want* to do more than we can ever have time for, and sometimes we succeed (and sometimes we don't). Josh copes with this by not sleeping; I cope with it by venting here in my blog (and in conversation). This blogspace is not only my playground, it's my venting space, true to blogging's journal-ing roots. I definitely do deal with stress or problems by talking about them, and blogging is a lot like talking, only it's half talking to myself and half talking to the few people I know are reading this blog.

As I get older and wiser and both my body and my muse try to teach me (in an increasingly strident way) something about the importance of fallow time, I have learned to slow down when necessary. I just don't whine about those slow bits on my blog. Those slow days, where I *don't* do anything beyond what I have to, where I *do* go to bed on time, take my vitamins and give myself a frikkin' break, are bad blogging, frankly. Boring, in fact. So that's a long winded way of explaining why my blog sounds like a big whingefest sometimes. I may get overwhelmed from time to time (and rightfully so, since frankly even if I wasn't trying to "have a life", being a working parent is still damn tough), but I wouldn't have it any other way.

And now it's time to go off and do other busy busy things. :)