I cannot seem to just sit and watch t.v. anymore these days.

I have always been a multi-tasker. I rarely have ever simply sat and watched television without having some other activity or task going on alongside it. Used to be, though, that I'd wait for commercials to work on whatever was the side project. I mean, how long are t.v. segments? 15 minutes, max? Surely anyone with an intelligence level above that of a seagull should be able to focus on one thing, and one thing only, for that amount of time.

And yet I find my mind wandering after only a few minutes of any given t.v. show. It's not a reflection on the quality of the shows, or my interest in them. It's not just random crap I turned on because there was nothing else on. This is stuff I went out of my way to DVR; stuff I list amongst my favorite t.v. shows.

Now, if I could, as mentioned previously, keep the extracurricular activity to commercial breaks it wouldn't be a problem. But I'm now continuing to do them during the show. And since it's difficult to devote 100% of your attention to two things at the same time, I'm missing parts of the show. A lot of times I end up backing them up to hear something I missed, only to get distracted and miss exactly the same part again. Other times I'll pause the show and end up leaving it paused for an hour while I do something online.

I do wonder how much of it is inability to focus and how much of it is computer addiction. Because, most of the time, the thing I forsake my show for is going online -- hence how I manage to fade out and miss what they're saying on t.v. (It's difficult to get so into folding clothes, for example, that you don't hear what's going on around you.) I have been spending a bit too much time online lately. I guess it's better than my go-to boredom activity of last year (eating) but, still. It's really inexcusable that I am continuing to hang around my online haunts even after I'm caught up, waiting for posts to pop up, when I should be closing the computer and finding something else to do.

I think I should probably make an effort to spend a specific amount of time every night in offline pursuits, be it t.v. or working around the house or reading. Not that t.v. watching is so important I should be making an effort to do it, you understand; it's that my inability to focus on it is a symptom of my being too hung up on something else. I find myself missing it, thinking, "I should just get off the computer and lie down on the couch and really watch some shows" and then I sit here like one of that room full of monkeys that will eventually write the works of Shakespeare.

Yep....it's time for an intervention.