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The above title captures my entire brain activity right now.

Just…{blank}

I can’t explain it. I really can’t. It isn’t that I don’t have plenty to do. I have a ridiculous amount to do. I have Christmas decorating and knitting to do, I have housework that has been neglected a tad too long, I have business-related tasks coming out my ears…but somehow, each day goes by and I find myself looking back over it and saying, “Tsk!”

I didn’t get this or that done. The laundry is still all over the coffee table in the playroom. The counter hasn’t been clear of dishes for a fortnight. My bedroom floor hasn’t been swept in weeks.

I mean, really. Pick a task, any task. Pick one! Do it! Finish it! Go-go-go!

But instead…{blank}…

Thus far this week, the only really constructive thing I managed to do was pick up fourteen cold-weather shirts for the kids at $2 apiece from local thrift stores. And three loads of laundry. None of which have been put away, which kind of makes them useless. I mean, if the kids can’t wear their clean clothes, what good is it to wash them?

It’s like having a bad cast of start-itis. I start to do things, but then veer off into something else (or nothing else) and it isn’t until I’m trying to get to sleep that the fact that I didn’t actually accomplish anything occurs to me.

Each night I go to bed vowing to do better tomorrow.

Tomorrow (I say confidently) will be better. Tomorrow, my children will not be allowed to forget to brush their teeth or hair. Tomorrow, I will put away all those clothes, and scrub that whatever it is off the front hall tiles. Tomorrow, I will not give up on everything by 12:30 and spend the rest of the day sulking.

Tomorrow, I will watch the training videos so that I can take the practice tests so I can take the real tests and be named a Microsoft Certified Professional. (Ooooh, aaaaah.) (Gag me, OK? Just gag me. My disdain for such things is rather long-standing, and yet lo, they are becoming the new if you have it, so what…if you don’t, WHY not question. Argh!)

Tomorrow, I will fix our ugly company website. Tomorrow, I will get around to researching liability insurance in case our code brings down the global banking system. Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow.

And here it is, yesterday’s tomorrow, and I’m just all…{blank}

I’m not sad or hopeless or actively avoiding work because I am lazy…I’m just a walking (or parked in front of the computer-ing) null space.

I’m dithering and thinking about maybe getting on with one thing or another, but the rubber just isn’t meeting the road, somehow.

And I suppose that blogging right now probably falls in the “dithering instead of getting on with things” category, huh?

Sigh.

OK. Fine. Training videos it is. But I reserve the right to make gagging noises, roll my eyes pointedly and snort frequently as they enthusiastically tell me how SQL Server 2005 is a powerful data management solution and that Microsoft engineering provides state of the art power to business intelligence.

And then there will be diagrams showing the Magic Circle of data input, storage, retrieval, mining, ‘meaningful reporting’ and so forth and so on. And probably some pictures showing hip young smiling people looking intelligent in carefully pressed shirts with more charts in the background showing profits are up-up-up and a caption about how Analysis Services makes it possible for hip young people in carefully pressed shirts to sit in meeting rooms smiling intelligently at each other with joy and enthusiasm because with the help of Reporting Services they have made a chart! GO TEAM!!!!!!!

(I’m sorry, was that sarcastic…?)

(It’s just that I hate training videos. And taking tests in things I know that I know, but now I have to know what they want me to know, and then there are ten ways to get the same answer and somehow my way is never the way they want me to do it and then they tell me my way is WRONG even though it isn’t wrong because hel-LO! Do we get the same result? YES WE DO. And my way is usually faster. So there. Nyah.)

(I swear, I’m not procrastinating. I’m just sayin’, is all.)

(Fine. Be that way. I’m going. Seriously. This is me, reaching for the training disk…extending my hand…toward the disk set…oh yes! It’s a set! A hideously long, twelve CD set of pictures and charts and sales pitches for Microsoft products training material.)

(I just suddenly remembered that I have something else I need to do right now. Something, uh, downstairs. Something else, which is downstairs, which needs doing right away…)