Much ado about nothing

Posted 8/21/12

Yeah, it’s been pretty quiet around here for the last two weeks. Even though I was seriously looking forward to a little downtime, it didn’t take long for me to go stir crazy spending so much of …

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Much ado about nothing

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Yeah, it’s been pretty quiet around here for the last two weeks. Even though I was seriously looking forward to a little downtime, it didn’t take long for me to go stir crazy spending so much of it at home during the break from my hectic schedule that falls between Christmas and New Year’s. Oh, sure, I had big plans: clean out some closets, put the holiday decorations away, send out some “thank yous” and scrub the house from top to bottom before breaking down and making some resolutions. So far, I’ve accomplished none of this, but I did manage to unplug the dog’s pink, metallic tree. Consumed by social media, I’ve spent the last week tweeting and posting, while eating cookies and talking on the phone to anyone who would listen, simultaneously channel-surfing and watching videos on my tablet.

Since conventional wisdom suggests that New Year’s resolutions don’t work, I sought corroboration online, rather than “waste my energy” making them, and wasted a few minutes reading about them instead. Beyond lazy, I merely scanned the article I found online (www.psychologytoday.com) that claimed, “We don’t change simply because we resolve to. The reason resolutions don’t work, is that we have unconscious resolutions not to change.” Huh? Already bored, I devoted a few more precious moments of my time to the issue. “For every conscious thought to lose weight, save money, finish that project or control your temper, there are unconscious commitments to keep things exactly the way they are.”

“Works for me,” I whispered to the dog, while reaching for another bon-bon and muting the TV. I remembered that if I was to “keep things exactly the way they are,” my yearly bid to win the Publishers Clearing House Sweepstakes was at hand. It had arrived online this year, making it even simpler than ever before. Or so I thought. Positive that 2016 was going to be “my year,” I leafed through Architectural Digest’s issue dedicated to tropical getaways, in order to be ready at a moment’s notice to fly off to a warm and dreamy destination once my winning entry had been selected. Having only skimmed the rules, I was under the impression that PCH would be knocking at my door before the first of the year, but as the email alerts from them began flooding my inbox, the deadline extended once or twice.

Almost immediately, I was sorry that I hadn’t left things “exactly the way they are” and simply sent in my sweepstakes entry by mail, “unconsciously committed” to lose, but still making my annual feeble attempt. These days the Publishers have seen fit to not only encourage online entries, but also to badger, harass and (IMHO) intimidate on a near-constant basis, inundating me with a barrage of alerts to further steps which “must be taken” in order to ensure that my contest entry remain valid, or “risk forfeiting to someone else in your zip code.” Wow, man. With no fewer than six (seriously!) prompts from them every single mind-numbing day during my holiday break, I was (at first) amused by the variety of “games” and “letters of intent” that were being churned out, which quickly led to annoyance, seriously cutting into the time I had set aside for the cleaning (I mean napping) and list-making (I mean snacking), all of which seemed to be slipping through my fingers as quickly as my desire to accomplish anything noteworthy over my last few remaining days of downtime.

“For this final (yeah, right) winner selection process,” one of my daily ransom notes reads, “if your winning number is not registered (again!) by the deadline (which they have changed for the umpteenth time) “your five-thousand dollars a week for life will be awarded to someone else in New York.”

Seething, I began to delete, resigned to the fact that the contest had found cruel and unusual ways to make winning even more difficult than ever before, as if the possibility of doing so in the past was in my favor. To add insult to injury, winter finally arrived, and as I winced, the thermometer dipped to five teensy degrees, causing me to wish that my cold-weather coat was as nice as the dog’s.

Vacillating, I’m currently seesawing between responding to my jailer’s (I mean PCH’s) never-ending requests to do any number of things to keep my entry in the loop, and hurling epithets into the frigid air, cursing the day I was born. But knowing that sled races, poetry readings and ice fishing contests are on the horizon gives me solace, since any minute now, I’ll be complaining that I’m too, too busy to worry about February’s horror show: Valentine’s Day.

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