Purely Research

I do work hard in my office at church.

Promise.

But you’d never know it to look at my browsing history on my computer.

Why, just the other day, after checking the weather (more spring snow predicted for Philly!!! Panic time!!!) and the news headlines (too depressing to recount), I checked out the following:

Kate Middleton’s new maternity coat (just because)

Top 10 things to do in Lombok (Evan is trekking around the world. He just finished a hike through the Borneo jungles and is headed for the beach in Lombok, Indonesia. I’m all primed if he needs advice on which temples to visit.)

Secret to Cleaning Gunky Kitchen Cabinets! (vegetable oil and baking soda! Must try!)

Fifth Ave. Apartment Sold for Record $77.5 million (and here my two Brooklyn based daughters are always looking for cool places to live! They just missed out!)

Rachael Ray’s Spicy Lamb Sliders with Harissa (dinner this week. Extra Google search for what the heck harissa is).

Holy Week, The Cross, and Children (ah! At last! A web article that relates to my job!)


9 Ways to Make a Good Living as a Writer (aaand I’m off track again!)

Waxed Paper Stained Glass Butterfly Craft (for church! For church! Back to it!)

Kris Jenner, Momzilla (not exactly a Woman of the Bible, so…)

And so on. The World Wide Web is both paradise and pitfall for an ADHD sufferer. I never would have taken the time to go to the library and look all this stuff up, back in the day, so I got a lot of actual homework done in school. I would probably be a straight D student now (unless I could do a senior project on “Kris Jenner, Momzilla”). I try to only peek a couple of times per day. But one view leads to the next, and suddenly an hour has passed and I’m still rating Lombok temples. I like to think I’m a good researcher, thoroughly investigating all sources when a topic piques my interest.  It’s a shame that most of my interest-piquing topics have little relevance to my daily life.

It’s worse now that I have an iPhone. I can waste my time even when I’m NOT at my laptop, looking up this and that random thing. And it seems the rest of my family are no slouches in this department either. At the dinner table, it’s a race to see who can whip out their phone fastest to determine Meryl Streep’s Oscar nominations. We used to rely on our brains to recall these facts. No need now! As long as there’s wifi we can know it all in a trice!

The Pandora’s box that is the internet has been opened, and there’s no going back. So I need some more self-discipline. Next time someone asks the name of Stephen King’s first book, or for directions to the mall, I will actually stop and think.  And probably get it wrong, but at least I’ll have done it on my own!