I’m writing this on a laptop on my kitchen table. It’s a thick wooden table, like at least two inches thick. The table is a set, like a kitchen set, like it came with matching wooden chairs. It’s great. I didn’t have to pay for it. My Aunt Mary-Kate gave me all of her furniture when she got married and moved in with her husband. I’d probably be living a very Spartan existence if it weren’t for her donations. Anyway, I’m slouched in the chair. I have great posture when I’m standing up, but when I’m sitting down it’s terrible. This chair is a straight-backed wooden chair, and so I’m constantly squirming in it.

Whenever I’m writing, there’s this constant battle that I’m having with squirminess, squirming, moving around. I attribute a lot of the squirm to the Internet. It’s like, I can either sit completely still or I can sit and constantly be moving in my chair. If I’m sitting still, it’s usually because I’m on the Internet, trying to write, but not writing. I’m just clicking randomly from page to page. One link leads to another and the next thing I know two hours have passed and I have to get ready for work.

Or, I’ll be writing, focused on the page, only looking at my word processor, and I’m typing, like I’m doing right now, but my body will be all over the place. I can’t fight the squirm. It’s either my mind is squirming or my body is. So I’m typing right now, I’m like three paragraphs into this, whatever this is that I’m writing, I’ve already changed positions in my seat like eight times. Right now I’m slouched at an angle that would’ve gotten me sent to the principal’s office in grammar school. I had these ridiculous teachers that were always yelling about posture and doodling in my notebook and, you know what? What I wouldn’t love to just be able to go back in time and stand up to those teachers and just be like, “You know what!” Like with an exclamation point and everything. Because, listen, don’t tell me how to sit. I’m here to learn, this isn’t a Pilates class.

I got sidetracked again. This is an all-over-the-place kind of day. But I’m slouching, terrible, like my body is only making contact with the chair in two places. The tip of my lower back, like my tailbone, it’s at the very edge of the seat. And then my back makes a straight line, straight from that edge, all the way to the top of the back of the seat, where my shoulders are making contact. It’s like a triangle, the back of the seat and the seat, and then my back as the triangle’s hypotenuse. You see? I was paying attention in math class. Those teachers who thought that I had to be sitting up straight to remember a big word like hypotenuse, well, they were so wrong.

Because, for me, and I already said this like two paragraphs ago, but either my mind can be fidgety or my body can be fidgety. One of them has to be fidgeting at any given time. So my teachers were actually doing me a huge disservice by making me sit upright and sit still. Because with my body locked in such a fixed position, it’s only natural that my mind started jumping from thought fragment to thought fragment. And I’d start doodling, or humming songs in my head, or tapping my pencil, just soft enough so I could hear it but nobody else could.

My left leg is tapping super violently now. It’s so fast that I’m actually surprised at how fast and how steady the rhythm is. Rhythm, that just took me like four times to spell correctly. Eighth: that’s another word that always takes me four or five tries to get right. Sometimes I just refuse to use the autocorrect. Microsoft Word is all, “Rob, you didn’t spell that right, let me correct it for you.” And I’m like, “Fuck you Word, I don’t need your charity. I can spell things myself.” And it’s actually very distracting, because I get so caught up in spelling and getting angry at the word processor that I forget what I was writing about in the first place.

Oh yeah, tapping my leg. I’ve since shifted my position. Now I’m hunched over the computer, my back all the way back in the chair but my torso bent totally over the table. And my left leg is tucked under my right leg, which has taken over the tapping duties from my left. And it’s not happening with this right tapping leg, but when my left leg was tapping, it kept occasionally tapping too high, touching the underside of the kitchen table, and I felt that it was warm.

And I was thinking, no way, is this the computer? Because my laptop is always hot. I don’t know if it’s because we’re just getting over the hottest summer that I’ve ever been alive for, and so my computer has gotten hotter as the world around it has gotten hotter, but yeah, I’m rubbing my hands along the underside of the table and it’s definitely a hot spot right under where the computer is. Isn’t that crazy? This table is thick, like two inches of wood, like I said. This isn’t a Rob G. shitty furniture purchase, this is like an adult kitchen table, my aunt bought it. And this laptop is irradiating it through, all the way through. What about my wrists, typing away? They must be getting equally as hot. Isn’t that insane? And all of the blood is circulating through my wrists, and as the blood flows through my veins it gets irradiated by this laptop radiation, and then it goes back through the rest of my system, irradiating my heart, my glands, everything is just getting hotter and hotter. And then my cell phone is in my pocket, and that’s got to be irradiating everything also. This can’t be good. Everybody, we’re all going to be paying for this technology in one way or another in the future. And I never rest my laptop on my lap, but everyone else does, and that’s going to be another set of issues.

I just need a little break. I should just let my mind wander for a little bit, give my twitching body a rest. I’ll just go on reddit and look at some funny pictures. And then I’ll go on the Times web site and open up like eight articles in eight separate windows on my browser, and then I’ll read like the first three sentences of each article before I get so anxious to read the next article that I’ll X out that article and go to the next. So I always only wind up ever reading the last one, because by the time I get to that one, there are no other articles left to seduce my attention.

I keep looking for a way to wrap this blog post up, but it’s just not happening. I thought that last paragraph, it started with “I just need a little break,” I thought that would lead to some sort of a natural ending, but I just went off on another tangent. So I’m probably just going to have to end this abruptly, this whole mess of words, not going anywhere, just ending, right here, this sentence.