Unsuspecting.  Guileless.  One of the greatest ironies about the idea of “unplugging” is that I have lost sleep over the last few nights thinking about what I was going to write next here.  And, as my mind often goes, other ideas creep in.  Packing for the trip to Seoul.  Cleaning the house.  Shining my shoes.  Getting my suit from the cleaner.  The sanity of my fiancée as she assembles her bouquet out of buttons (I’ll explain some other time).  I asked for this, though.  Anything but the grammatically dripping ghost of professional apprehension floating above the bed.  In spite of my email (still unchecked at ten in the morning) being full of sixteen student papers awaiting my discernment, in spite of the five and half hours of less than restful sleep, in spite of the inside of my eyelids that are coated with sandpaper, I am here.  Writing.

Although the format I’ve chosen for my writing classes (final drafts sent via email) forces me to be online, my job requires far less of me in terms of being “connected” than many other people out there.  Nonetheless, I find myself often fighting the urge to click over to my email or to check the headlines.  It is this short attention span that led me to believe I had a legitimate case of A.D.D.  In fact, about a year ago, I was going through this amusing spell of walking around the house having forgotten to zip up my fly.  While I exposed myself to no innocent adjummas (or corrupt ones, for that matter) and Nic may or may not have seen my junk before (we have messed around before, but I swear we haven’t had pre-marital sex.  Really.  Honestly…a-hem.), the real concern came from a time when I left the burner on after warming up some coffee.  I had been working on some editing for my novel (the fifth major revision) and was immersed in a bit of research on the ‘net or cruising for a synonym or two at my favorite website, but the untended open flame that was discovered by Nic an hour later was cause for concern.

So, off to the psychiatrist to take care of this absentmindedness.  In the following weeks, my performance at work soared.  And I needed it, often finding myself buried in the development of two courses, the creation of PowerPoints to explain to a group of novices about the necessity of subjects and verbs or the reading of thirty-five intermediate-level five-paragraph essays.  After about three weeks, my dude was about to bump up my dose of Metadate (a cousin to Ritalin) because my listless window-gazing had returned. But I wanted nothing to do with the increase.  So I attacked the other problem that was perhaps interrelated with my lack of attention span: early onset insomnia. 

It was this inability to shut off my brain (and Nic’s twitchy REM sleep) that often led to three hours tossing and turning, worrying about the grammar and writing lessons.  On top of the stimulant in the morning, my dude had me on a nightly dose of Xanax which, as I would later discover, is simply masking the problem.  I became addicted, losing my ability—however scant that ability was—to fall asleep without the Xanax (I also began waking up after four hours and would be unable to get back to sleep).  At the end of the spring semester, I waned myself off all forms of medication.  Eventually, though not to the level I wanted, I was sleeping better and was back at the writing (starting work in earnest on the second novel).

When I was a kid, I didn’t read much.  Incidentally, I didn’t watch more than an hour of TV a day.  I would much rather have been outside climbing a tree and fighting off the invading armies across the street or riding my bike to the arcade, pockets jangling with quarters pilfered from dad’s change box.  And as I got older, my last 4.0 GPA in second grade was but a distant memory, most subjects suffering from the inability to sit still for an hour.  Now, so far removed from those early days, I wonder what came first for me: the “A.D.D.” or the channel-surfing and net-staring habits of the generation in which I grew up.

In some of the reading I’ve done on nytimes.com lately about the internet and the gadgetry out there that is rapidly changing the way we interact with each other, the addiction to constant tweet/facebook/email/text message interfacing reduces our ability to concentrate on a particular task at hand.  The readings indicate that the resultant attention deficit disorder decreases our problem-solving ability because of the “multi-tasking” culture in which we live; we do not become immersed in a problem, but we rather skim along the surface of it, often with an endless series of two steps forward, one step back, trying to find where we left off with Task A before we left it to go to Tasks B and C.  The question arises, then: what do we make of the paradox between A.D.D. and multi-tasking?

Is it true what the experts say?  Are we so bored with our lives that we take to our gadgets and internet surfboards at the first twitch of tedium?  I can only speak for myself.  In fact, this may sound like an AA meeting, but I have a touch of the internet bug, my addiction became so bad over the last four years that the first and last thing I’d do in any given day would be to check my email and facebook.  Shameful, really.  The last time I woke up and read a book instead of my sparsely populated email inbox was longer ago than I care to admit. 

Admittedly, being so far away from home and those youngsters in my family has made a webcam indispensible.  Though I do not use it all the time, the occasional face to face chat with Ian about school and soccer, with Audrey about dance class and her birthday party, with Lexi about the gifts she got from Nic and I the other day and the card she sent us with a care package, to see how much little Ella resembles her father—all of this has helped solidify my status as best uncle ever.  Not only that, but I get the opportunity to see how those young’uns are shaping up.

To this point (11AM), I have yet to do anything online but post here.  In about an hour, I will finally get to my email to discover the first seventeen of the final 35 papers I will have to correct at Silla University.  But that’s aside from the point.  Am I really that bored with my life?  I’ve got some pretty amazing things going on for the next half year, the most immediate of which is marrying that woman I’m so crazy about.  We’re going on a weekday adventure to the US Embassy-Seoul to enjoy the generosity of people. However remote a monetary gift may seem in our situation, it is greatly appreciated: my parents, and both Nic’s and my unis have basically footed the bill for first class travel and accommodation, excellent food and shots of Patron.

So if it’s not boredom, what is it?  Laziness?  When it comes to attempting to write something new or read, say, The Brothers Karamozov, I think laziness is a watered-down and even misappropriated euphemism for fear.

It’s a stark day out.  Cold, clear, windy.  Those last two lines felt like Snoopy starting that novel he never finished.  And let me tell you: the last thing I thought I would mention in my first line here today is Snoopy.  I think I liked Peanuts because it had a dog who flew a plane and had a massive basement.  But that’s about it.  Those kids talked too much. 

Nic sleeps in today (fever) and I’ve gone quietly about my morning routine.  However, the silence that pervades this morning allowed me a little time to think about my usual routine.  Get some exercise, make breakfast, talk about the previous nights sleep quality and dreamscape with Nic, check my email and other such sites, check the weather, hop the shower, dress according to the weather and hit the road.  Nothing so wrong with that routine…except that is was missing one key element: writing. 

I’ve been writing now for seven minutes and the sound is only of the wind outside, the cars on the street and the tapping of my fingers on the keyboard.  And when I stop, the only thing that is noticeable is my thoughts spinning like a car spinning its wheels in a mud ditch.  There is this silence that is deafening, and the internal noise is me grasping and grappling with that next sentence.

I don’t much mind that grasping and grappling, knowing that something will come out of it.  It is a feeling I haven’t had in a while.  Though grasping and grappling may seem like words rife with negative connotation, I find that struggle, that desperation, that cacophony in my head much more appealing than the noise of having checked my email for one more annoying, overbearing message from my boss.  There is no “urgent” question raised in a three AM electromissive by a student about paragraph transitions.  There is no kindly and timely note to return to a family member or a friend.  All these do not exist because I have not yet gone online. 

Purity.  On this quiet morning before I head into the mayhem of rush hour traffic (incidentally, the last time I have to travel at the hour of gridlock here in this city), I find my head clear enough to keep typing, trying to fit as much as I can in this fifteen minutes.  I am over time now, and a flurry of action looms.  I need to pick up the rest of my routine and down another cup of coffee and zoom off to work.  But my moments here tapping have inspired the Zen needed to face the no-blinker lane changers, the frustration of language barrier when explaining why a adjective clause is restrictive or non-restrictive, the first round of bowling championships.  The dread over an idea come and gone without having put it down in writing.

A day that will live in infamy: the day I get off my ass (or back on my ass, as the case may be) and get back to the writing, the writing that so desperately is a part of me, that is so elemental to my basic functioning, that helps me organize (or at least vomit a little bit of) my thoughts before I open my big yap in a social setting and embarrass myself.

So, as my last semester in South Korea winds down at the bureaucratically handicapped institution at which I work (or is it more PC to say bureaucratically challenged? Or bureaucratically idiotic?), I have yet another 15 weeks essentially unaccounted for as a writer. A writing teacher is only that: a writing teacher (or so the case may be for this literary never-was-but-still-dilusionally-thinks-he-can-be). A writing teacher in an ESL setting is constantly trying to anticipate incessant questions and head them off with a preemptory PowerPoint or an additional grammar practice worksheet. And he becomes wrapped (or warped) in the burgeoning thoughts and rhetoric and developing grammar and faulty sentence structures of his students. 2AM and I could be still awake (or am I dreaming?), wondering if I’ve taught effectively enough to be quizzing the grammatically destitute on parts of speech. Oh, for the nights when waking up from dead sleep revealed a brilliant twist in plot or turn of phrase hanging in the air above my bed! But, alas! It’s the dreaded gerund dripping with a fetid goulash of verb use and noun form!

After more than sixty weeks of developing three new writing curriculums essentially on my own, I look back and realize that most of my own writing (aside from four or five quality short shorts) has actually been editing my 170,000 word, seven-year old ever to-be-published novel. This is what I call “mining,” an effort to take something out of the unpolished writing of the past as with much of the second half of my first manuscript. The best I can hope is, perhaps, that people won’t be able to notice (except if they read it here) that I have merely polished a piece of shit. Maybe the method of “mining” should be renamed to “turd-polishing.” But, being the wordsmith that I purport to be, I should give it a more positive spin: “shit-sculpting.” Not only does the alliterative quality have a ring to it, it also fits the idea that when faced with a writer’s block of wood (or shit, as the case may be), I can eventually make something out of it, crap or not. It’s a stretch, but the title of this “blog” might be “Writer’s Block,” a two-month series of warm-ups before each writing day begins.

I’m not sure if I’ll ever have Norman Mailer’s Herculean prowess for 3,000 to 4,000 words a day, or if I’ll be able to balance a successful career (to say nothing of marriage and family) and my own writing like Dave Eggers. But, by putting this mumbojumbo of mine out in cyberspace for my run up to the Asian trail in February, at least it will hold me accountable, if only to myself. My diminutive fan base (though I’m unsure if any vertically challenged read my consistently inconsistent “blog”) for “Time and Circumstance” has surely diminished in number (if not stature) because of my spotty consistency as a blogger (why do I hate that word so much?). Here, though, I will renew my efforts to fill in the gaps in Nepal training (a theme I let slide into disuse back in September, overrun by student papers and other such excuses). Also, I will include updates for writing projects, to say nothing of the preparation to uproot once again, the 24th or 25th time since 1995 I will have moved).

This time, I move nowhere but toward the unexpected (Nic’s applications are finished for grad school and we could end up in any corner of the homeland: western New York state; Lubbock, TX; Bowling Green, OH; Milwaukee, WI; Pullman, WA). For the next two months, I will try to daily chronicle the preparations for becoming a contemporary gypsy with my new wife, three changes of clothes, a pen, and some paper. And nothing else. I here declare my flirtation with the idea of three months totally unplugged from the evil distractions of the internet.

A writer writes. An observer observes. A hermit meditates and subsists. A fearful writer comes up with excuses not to write. Come February, this modern nomad will observe the trails, temples and mountainsides of SE Asia and Nepal, subsisting on the meditations in writing missives (although one-sided because I will have no P.O. box on the Annapurna Circuit) to people back home. Sloppy penmanship and all, snail mail may be the way to maintain my focus to re-learn the discipline that I preach to my writing students.