Digressions from the swamp

Before I get started, I just was wondering why we call it "passing gas." Isn't the gas passing us? Unless it's short for "passing gas along to those in close proximity." Yes, long walks with the dog can lead to the mind wandering into strange places.

In the slightest of rebellions again people saying they're "too busy," I have been referring to myself as "swamped." It's not literally true, of course. I'm not even slightly damp, but swamped has evolved from referring to sinking ships to having too much to do and/or too little time available. Saying "too busy" seems to imply "busier than you," which is a needlessly competitive thought. It's actually kind of mathematical, now that I think about it. It's not just too much work or too little time; it's the ratio between them. If the ratio of time required and time available is greater than one, that's when stress starts to creep in.

If you think about it rationally (that's a math joke), there are two ways of dealing with this imbalance ('im' is a variant of 'in.' I'm not sure what's wrong with inbalance, but im is used before the letters b, p and m, while the variant ir goes before r-words and il before l-words. I'm sure you're all thrilled to know this). To cure the imbalance you need to either reduce the amount of stuff to do or increase the amount of time available.

There's no shortage of work that I'd rather not do, but there's more than enough of what I like doing to unbalance (wait, there's unbalance too? English is ridiculous) the ratio. My solution has generally been to try to increase the time available. Because I can't actually stretch a day, this necessarily involves less sleep. Not sure how that will work long-term, and the one time I tried to cut it shorter, (this involved a 5:45 AM CrossFit class on a day I had to be at school until 10 PM for back-to-school night, not such a good idea looking back) I didn't feel so good the next couple of days.

Nonetheless, I am going to push it to the limit because an extra hour awake every day adds up fast.