SMP (Social Media Paralysis)

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I spent much of the day paralyzed by my social media choices. I couldn’t decide whether to blog, tweet, update my Facebook wall, tweak my LinkedIn profile, or stare in shame at my MySpace page…and so I did none of those things. I’m pretty sure that the world was not affected one way or another by my indecision.

Mondays are often like that, though. I don’t really dread Mondays; as a freelancer working from a home office, one day is pretty much like another. I have specific events and tasks to attend to, and some of them are day-specific (attending church on Sunday, for example, or grocery shopping on Monday) but I don’t tend to categorize days of the week along a spectrum of good/bad. Still, Mondays seem to be harder than other days in some respects.

I will admit that I always dread working out on Mondays. While we’re pretty active on the weekends, we usually take it easy on Sundays, unless the weather is just perfect for a bike ride (and it’s funny how often it isn’t). That one day off doesn’t sound like much, does it? But at my age, that’s still enough time for the joints to stiffen and the muscles to protest and – most of all – for the mind to convince itself that one more day off won’t matter…it will be a good thing, in fact, a recuperative interlude. But I also know myself well enough to understand that down that path lurks disaster.

So, instead of succumbing to all the social media temptations (let’s not discuss actual work, OK?), I climbed on the treadmill and slogged through four miles and felt sorry for myself the whole time. The good news (well, for me, anyway; maybe not for you, who had to read all of this) is that it gave me something to write about at the end of the day. So I suppose there was more than just physical benefit to the activity.

Today’s workout seemed even more grueling than usual, even for a Monday. It wasn’t until a couple of hours later that I remembered why: we donated blood on Saturday. I really was running on empty! (My wife validated that theory at lunch when she described what a miserable time she had during her workout. Of course, at 5:30 in the morning, there’s very little besides drinking coffee that doesn’t meet that description from my perspective.)