So last week I had an epic, epic fight with the finishing demons. Like most epic demon fights, this mostly involved me feeling too tired and overwhelmed with work and other responsibilities to write on Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, or Saturday. Suddenly it was very important that I finish every script that I had been given to read, return every call, send friends long and involved emails — last Monday I got a fortune cookie that basically said that I needed to work on being a better friend. Also, another friend sent me a chain email about connecting with friends more, so I figured this was a sign from the universe to get back on the better friend bus. But now that I look back on it, I wonder if it wasn’t the procrastination demons in disguise. As I get older, I can look back on my life a little more frankly, and I realize that during the the times when I was at my most social, I got the least amount of dream work done. I’d go to my job, dates, brunches galore, attend every party I was invited too — and at the end of the day, I was still a starving artist with a crappy day job who wasn’t actually writing towards her goals. So now I’m rather boring. But I get stuff done. I miss my friends very much. But I get stuff done. I would love to have brunch with so-in-so in Santa Monica. But I get stuff done. And conveniently enough, I only feel massively guilty about not being as available as I used to be when I’m trying to finish something without a deadline. (A deadline is a writer’s best friend, but unfortunately we rarely get them on...

So I’m finding doing one thing at a time and giving that one thing my full attention to be really hard but really rewarding. I have to fight the urge to check my email when I’m on the phone or continue typing when a co-worker asks me a question or surf on my iPhone while watching TV. But I’ve also had many quality conversations with people this week, given better instruction and feedback to the people I work with, and watched less TV, b/c I actually have to pay attention to it. I actually decided to stop watching CSI: Miami last week, b/c it’s pretty much unbearable if you don’t have a computer or iPhone to distract you from the tired plotlines and their apathetic execution. However, I am running into a bit of an obstacle to paying quality attention to one thing at a time: other people, specifically multi-taskers. Last week I was in a meeting, in which the meeting leader kept stopping in the middle of sentences to answer calls and return important emails. Usually I don’t mind this. I check my own email or play on my iPhone until this person comes back to the matter at hand. But since I’m on the quality attention kick, I couldn’t help but pay a lot of attention . . . to the fact that this person was wasting a lot of my time, as well as the time of the other person in the meeting, who was dutifully sitting there, while the meeting leader answered calls and emailed to the point that the meeting literally took twice as much time as it needed to, b/c we kept on having to reset every time we were interrupted. It was infuriating. Unfortunately, I don’t think...

So, after discovering that though both of us desired kids, yet neither of us know how to change a diaper or even keep a baby alive in any way, shape or form, CH and I decided that it would probably be in our pending newborn’s best interest if we took some infant care classes. The first class was Baby CPR last Monday at this place called The Pump Station in Hollywood. Though I am eagar to keep Betty alive, I had somehow forgotten what a bad student I can be at times. Basically, I have the worst habit of falling asleep when I’m bored, which has gotten me in trouble since I was a kid. I’ve been chastised about this at my Lutheran elementary school, my public high school, my Massachusetts’ undergrad, my Chinese study abroad program (Beijing and Nanjing), and my Pittsburgh grad program — however having fallen asleep on everyone from Paul of Damascus to Mao Tse-Tung to Brecht, I can honestly say I have never been more bored than I was in Baby CPR. The problem with this class is the same one that I have with most non-fiction geared towards explaining something to you. For whatever reason, boring writers just love to say in tens of thousands of words, what could easily be explained in a few thou, and in some really extreme cases a few hundred. I call this the successful essay syndrome. Someone writes a well-received essay and gets a book deal, despite the fact that everything they needed to say was in the essay, so then they’re forced to stretch out the information into book form, when they’re really not interesting enough writers to pull off this feat. Anyway, Baby CPR was 2 1/2 hours, when it...