Rocking the Elliptical

It's been raining here a lot lately. Okay, it's the Pacific Northwest, and it's March, so, duh! But I'm not talking the gentle, constant mist punctuated with the occasional showery downpour. No. it's been gale-force knocking-power-out winds, sheets of deluge, cold to the point of ice pellets. It's so soggy outside my chickens are screaming for little umbrellas. The cat has given me the middle claw repeatedly when I've suggested she pop outside and kill a sparrow or two, just to get her out of her funk.

And, as you all know, I'm a soccer mom, so that means hypothermic toes and fingers on the sidelines.

It also means that my quest for balance, healthy exercise, the eating of salads and so forth? In the toilet. Except for that heart rate-boosting 45 minutes a day at the gym where I don my ridiculously over sized purple Plattan headphones, and take my Spotify-fueled iPhone to the Elliptical. (Okay, I just realized that there are four words in that last sentence that didn't exist 10 years ago. Scary.)

Here's the problem though. I listen to the same damn music all the time and I'm getting really bored. I'm reaching out, guys. I need a new playlist! Can y'all give me your top workout songs? Extra credit if you have like max heart rate ones AND mellow cool down ones. I know, I'm asking a lot...

murdoch, google+, spotify, borders

Now that I have your attention. Christ. I thought summer was supposed to be mellow and drifty. Whimsical, even. So far July has been a shitstorm of information to process, opine on, and carry out. Especially if you're in, ahem, communications. Who would have thought that the time suck of Facebook would seem like a pinch of sand in the hourglass of social networking?

Back, say, twenty-two years ago, when I rented an electric typewriter and hefted it up to my sixth floor walk-up, slammed it down on the kitchen table and extension-corded it to an outlet in the next room whilst my babies crawled and toddled about at my feet, I thought to myself, "I can't wait until my life is free of all these distractions!"

Ha!

The physical demands of single-parenting two kids under three pales in comparison to the monkey mind default of today's information-obsessed routine. I'm in that weird quagmire of having finished a manuscript (my book is out to editors) and beginning the next (which I've started, but am loath to venture too far into until the publishing world opines on book one). I am ripe for distraction. I have a hard time carrying a concept to its rightful conclusion before being shanghaied by the next bolus of must know abouts.

The result is, I'm walking around feeling largely scatter-brained. I do my work with Tweetdeck shrieking at me in the upper right of my screen. I stop what I'm doing every time I hear the ding of a new Outlook email. No sooner do I wrap my mind around a project, it seems it's time to troubleshoot the latest Facebook conundrum in behalf of my clients.

My days are fragmented by minutiae like never before. I am completely divorced from falling into the dream of story and I just realized that it's making me cranky and anxious and fear-driven. What am I afraid of? Not having enough people in my Google+ circles? Missing out on a Groupon deal?

Clearly, I need to recalibrate. Anyone have any fail-safe ideas on how to do that? Any of you writers/artists out there come up with a way to carve out some time for depth?