Boring

I'm finding it embarrassingly difficult these days to have non-baby-related thoughts. I have totally become a cliche. A while back, I even tried waiting to post until I had a thought about something else, and all that happened was that days passed until Pi emailed me to say "No posts. What gives?"

There are a number of reasons for this problem, the main one of which is that I don't have a lot else going on. Last week I arranged a public reading, which meant work requests and catering and publicity and coordinating arrival details. And I'm in charge of the reading panels for the current issue of our peer-reviewed journal, and the comments are all coming in this week to be collated and sent to the editor. Next week I'm evaluating a seminar for our department. But truly, even when those things take up some of my time, they don't get much of a mindshare apart from the actual execution.

And in the meantime, I have whole hosts of things to mull over that first came onto the scene while I was pregnant. At one point, I realized I had probably spent 40 hours researching strollers, and acknowledged that I was indeed becoming completely boring. Nobody else could possibly care about the outcome of this decision, and those 40 hours were obviously spent not thinking about anything of broader significance.

Or diapers. Cloth versus disposable, and which make and model of cloth? I settled on these and adore them, though the new ones look even better (a rare all-in-one, one-size-fits-all option, plus a fast-drying feature!!!), if heartstoppingly expensive. See, the !!! and "heartstopping" should show you how my world has contracted.

The one seed of hope I have found is that although I have become boring myself, I remain keenly interested in the baby-free doings of my friends . . .