Carbon Monoxide

It's a well known fact that carbon monoxide is colorless, tasteless and odorless, as well as deadly. This lack of features is precisely what makes it so dangerous... there is no way to sense the slow seeping of carbon monoxide without the modern technology of a CO detector (or, failing that, the proverbial coal mine canary.)

What you might not have known is that when a carbon monoxide detector goes off in your house, while you can't smell the carbon monoxide, you will immediately smell the scent of your own fear. What does it smell like? As the alarm rings in your ears, you would swear that the pungent odor of your fear is exactly like the odor carbon monoxide would have, if it had any at all.

What's in a Name? (Part 2)

Last week I was volunteering with a project called Lose the Training Wheels, as a bike spotter. Their were about 15 of us volunteers, working together for a week. We had about thirty minutes of downtime between sessions. Almost none of us knew each other at the start of the week, but we developed the sort of easy break-room relationships that come with any project like this. We'd chat about sports scores, or colleges, or how well our riders were learning. Sometimes, we'd kick around a soccer ball or shoot some hoops.

But that's not what this post is about. Here, I mean to ponder the following phenomenon.

There was another Matt in the group. A Matthew, rather than a Mattathias, but we were both going by Matt. This caused the standard confusion on the first day ("Matt, you'll be working with Nathan... Oh shoot, there are two Matts.) This is fairly common, but what happened next is interesting.

The other Matt, it was clear, felt an instant connection because of our shared name. For the rest of the week, when he came in, the first thing he'd do was greet me with a "How's it going, Matt?" and a wide grin. During breaks, he'd come over to talk. Besides the name and the interest in volunteering, we didn't have much in common, but that didn't seem to matter to him.

Matt was friendly with everyone, but obviously felt that there was significance to our fellow Matt-hood. I don't think I felt it nearly so strongly as he did, perhaps because being a Mattathias has always made me feel different from other Matts, especially Matthews.

So what is it then, that makes a shared name feel like a shared nature?

What time is it?

I have a life-long animosity for alarm clocks.

This first became apparent when I was in first grade, and had to be up in time to get to school by Eight AM (I had been in an afternoon kindergarten class, blissfully free until 12:30.) I ignored my alarm clock completely, making my mother come time and time again to call, wheedle, and threaten me out of bed. When words alone did not suffice, she moved on to diplomacy by other means: tickling, dragging, repeated threats of ice cubes (I cannot recall whether these threats ever became reality, but from the force they carried I think they must have, at least once.)

Things did not improve with middle school.

Why do I procrastinate? (Part 2)

I've noticed an interesting phenomenon in the past couple of years.

I spend a large amount of my time coming up with ideas for things to do. I have long lists of these things, of projects I want to work on and finish. I am fairly certain that I could work all day on these projects, and still have ideas left over.

And yet on an equally regular basis, I find myself telling myself that I have "nothing to do". Grasping for something to keep my attention, I will check my e-mail four to five times a day, check and re-check my favorite blogs, spend hours on facebook (I waste time off the internet as well, by staring at walls or sitting idle).

How do I reconcile the tremendous amount of things worth doing with my frequent claim that I have nothing to do? Clearly, I am lying to myself on a regular basis. But how do I break through this mental trap of idleness and keep myself engaged in things that matter?