Where does the time go?

I walk around baffled these days. I am busy all of the time and yet, am accomplishing what feels like absolutely nothing. It's the banal trap of modern existence; I seem to be spending so much time not letting life pass me by, that it appears life is passing me by.

I found myself eating "dinner" (baby carrots and hummus) at 9:00 tonight in the Target parking lot and breathing deep. I'd been to The Home Depot about an hour before to buy Round II of mouse traps. Apparently, the mice in my house (newly discovered as of yesterday) laugh in the face of the Tomcat brand mousetraps carried at Target and all my neighborhood grocery stores. They licked every little bit of peanut butter off the traps and then scampered away carefree. They've set up camp around the trashcan under my kitchen sink. I am utterly horrified that I have to decide to either kill them or live with their tiny little poop and it turns out, murder is easier to bear than poop. So I stocked up on two new types of mousetraps, ran to the liquor store for tequila (it's Cinco de Mayo tomorrow), and then Target for Margarita mix, and before I knew it, it was 9:00 and I was eating dinner in my car.

I rushed home to make brownies for a co-worker's birthday and while those were in the oven, I mixed up another batch for book club, did a batch of laundry, attempted to clean my room, set up a plethora of mouse traps, took out one batch of brownies, drizzled it with an attractive topping, and put in the second batch. I tried to cut the first batch of brownies and found that they weren't really brownies, so much as they were warmed brownie dough that had already cooled and then been decorated. I couldn't even get a knife through them. It just sort of balled up the dough like freshly turned mud after a hard rain. I started playing with the dough, since there was no sense preserving these non-brownie brownies. I absolutely love to bake and a brownie mix is something I use only in extreme cases, like today, so I find it particularly entertaining that I managed to screw it up. But what really kills me, is how happy I just made a little family of mice who have probably already discovered a warm mess of brownie dough in my kitchen trash can that came down like chocolate manna from heaven.

The moral of this story (besides that perhaps I shouldn't feel bad for giving my mice a last meal (I hope it's their last meal)) is that I need to quit something. Why must I celebrate every random holiday, agree to host book club, be the person to make something for my co-worker's birthday, and still work out 5-6 days a week? That's right, there is absolutely NO reason. If all it takes me to see this is a $3.00 box of ruined brownies, I'll consider this a cheap lesson indeed. We'll see.