"Look at Those Celing Tiles" by Logan S

      Look at it this way. I am sitting here thinking about what I should write about for my featured story. I am not the most creative, so clearly anything related to creativity was out of question. I looked at the essay for a second, but really philosophy is so difficult to get across that I felt like my entire paper would be completely and utterly redundant. Then my attention turns to the personal narrative, and I realize that is the one. I mean how hard can it be to recollect something from my past and pour out the entire story in words onto this page. I greatly underestimated this task, either everything I have done in my life up to this point was too boring or not really important enough. And anything that seemed even the least bit interesting was lost in my memory somewhere. That isn’t to say that I forgot my entire life up to this point, but honestly, can you tell me that any one person can remember everything from their birth through seventeen years and some odd months later? Obviously it is completely impossible. So I continue to sit here staring blankly at my gray colored walls and then I see my television remote, and my phone, and my video game console, virtually everything but the computer screen and keyboard I am supposed to be typing on. Then I realize that this was the perfect thing to write about. Distractibility, I swear it’s a word, I looked it up. It didn’t really seem that hard to describe, at least up until the point that I started writing about it for this assignment. Now I know that was a long introduction, but that is basically exactly what was going through my mind while I sat trying to type this up. So here it goes, distractibility, everyone has it, I mean think about it, anytime that you sit and try to focus on something. Honestly that was probably too hard to think of because you can’t even focus on this right now. If anyone has made it this far I am honestly really impressed. (I didn’t really expect this to be so much like a “Facebook rant,” but it honestly seems a lot like it.) To continue, every time I personally am required to focus on something, it seems, quite frankly, nonviable. I can’t just sit down, look at an essay prompt and begin writing without something, and I really mean anything, catching my attention and pulling me away from the very task I was trying to focus on. “I wonder how many ceiling tiles there are in this room, wait, I need to finish this essay.” “Dang this paper is fancy, feel it, it’s like silk paper.” “Do they make silk paper, I don’t even know, what is silk anyway?” The point is there is always something that causes a lapse in a person’s attention, and for me it’s anything. Now if I described these “issues” I have to a doctor, they would probably prescribe me some drug that they deem reliable and applicable to the “symptoms” I am having. But being distracted isn’t a disease, I mean I just said we all have it, and unless this is some sort of “real life ‘Walking Dead’” situation, we are probably fine. This comes to the issue that too many people nowadays are prescribed medication to calm some nonexistent medical condition that in reality is just the common case of distractibility. Now I am not saying that people don’t have genuine medical conditions like obsessive compulsive disorder, or anxiety, or attention hyper deficit disorder, but in this case it most definitely isn’t that serious. (As I sit here thinking “please don’t be offended.”) Really, everything I am writing here might as well be a controversial blog post that the red side agrees with and the blue side disagrees with. (I wasn’t going to use realistic political or social terminology for the sides, because until I post this, I really don’t know how each side is going to react.) Back to distractibility, see I am even distracting myself from the point I was trying to make. In all my hypocrisy, I basically just see this as a realistic issue that is taken way too seriously. Whether or not I actually get that distracted, or realistically think about irrelevant objects and ideas while writing an important essay, does not matter. Because all that matters here is that it happens to everyone, and it could be this bad for some people and less for others. And if you want to say that you are never distracted and you are focused all the time, you are probably lying to yourself. So to wrap up, distractibility, it is both a real word, and a real concept. Everything about it is true and if you don’t believe me, you are probably wrong. Also don’t be offended by the fact that I use the word “you” so much, I mean if I was going to write a “bloglike” submission, I should go all out. Final sentence, I promise, more of a disclaimer though, if you managed to finish the entirety of this “post”, don’t judge me, or anyone who may feel the same, it could be completely fake and I just exaggerated completely to make people feel better about themselves, or I actually wrote an entirely honest definition of distractibility and how it is applicable to my own life. Either way (darn it, I meant for that to be the last sentence, well I end where I end now) I think we should lighten up and realize that it’s part of the journey as a human being, mistakes are made, and we are distracted from what is important, but in the end we always get what we need done. Oh, by the way, 54……..ceiling tiles I mean.