Reflections during the storm

I've made my money. I've done my time. For the first weekday since Black Friday I haven't worked.

I'm not stressed about being able to pay for college. I'm not stressed about the 12 inches of snow that are accumulating on my static car. I'm not stressed that Forbes recently rated Cleveland the "seventh most stressful city" with the "fourth fewest sunny days."

There's no sun, but it's a great day. It's a day dedicated to reflection and productivity.

One such reflection is how easy it is to get caught up in the daily grind. Most days this past month I did nothing after work except kick my feet up and veg with my mouth slightly open sometimes slightly drooling while my brain deteriorated inside my skull.

It's hard to pull yourself from that kind of rut. My lifeline was installing Adobe Creative Suite 4 (my Christmas gift to myself). It dissolved, in one evening, the blockage of creativity that mindless labor built in these last 30 days.

The single-most frustration with having a job where it's go-go-go is that your mind may be in overdrive because there's little thought that needs to go into the work, but there's no outlet for that creativity until you get home and by that time it's too late and you always seem to just be too tired. I always carried a notebook and pen with me, but rarely wrote in it. Instead, I kept a mental list. Such items on my continual mental list were:

1. Work on my resume Web site
2. Draw out a blueprint to build coffee table out of logs and/or scrap lumber
3. Draw out a sketch for building my desk
4. Write in the blog
5. Read "Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance"
6. Choose photos to print and frame for my new apartment
7. Go visit Chris, my brother
8. Go visit one of a dozen friends I haven't seen because I didn't feel like it

I sit here and realize most of all that many people will never escape this rut. My one cousin works two full-time jobs - one for support, one to pay off college loans. It seems everyone I know around here is either laid off, umemployed or working to pay off never-ending debt.

Is it a sign of the times or a sign of a culture?