The grass isn’t always greener.

As I have for several mornings over the last few weeks, I was sitting on my ass in the jury room waiting to see if my number would be called.  I passed the time reading (I’m on my third and fourth books in the past two weeks), trying not to bash my skull in, and occasionally bullshitting with fellow jurors.  Not so much of the latter, but a little bit.

I also occasionally just glanced around at humanity, as I sometimes do.

This morning, sitting in front of me and to my right (I’ve been trying to sit on the back row.  I don’t like people staring at my back when I can help it…especially since I may or may not have missed a spot while shaving my head on any given day) was a woman.  Okay, so it was roughly 50-50 that it would be a woman, granted.   But in a given jury pool, a lot of the people you see are people who aren’t busy enough or smart enough to escape jury duty.  And yes, I fall into the latter category, I guess.  Anyway, this young lady happened to be one of VERY few people in the room who were even marginally attractive.

So maybe I gave more of a glance in this young lady’s direction than, say, any one of the 65% of the room who were at, near, or above retirement age.  What I saw, however, almost caused me to laugh.  First, I noticed she was going over a detailed workout chart that was obviously prepared for her by a personal trainer, and was making possible revisions to it with a pen.  No big deal; I’ve done the same thing myself (sans personal trainer, of course).  It just struck me as amusing because one of the other jurors below retirement age, and who clearly although erroneously believed HERself marginally attractive or better, had loudly made it clear on one of the early days that she was a personal trainer herself.  So in that context I was just amused.

However, when she put away the workout regimen, she put it away in a binder full of tabs.  And flipped to another tab and pulled out a printed email, with her name as the sender:  a To-Do list.  She reviewed it, made comments, and refiled it.  And flipped to another, handwritten to-do list and made careful notations.  And refiled it, and perused other carefully written and catalogued materials after that.

Long before she got to the New-Age-psuedo-Christian-schlock book that she started reading, I was manfully trying to keep a straight face.  You see, my wife has a nice case of ADD.  Which doesn’t mean that she doesn’t make lists or try to organize with the best of intentions, it just means that the lists aren’t so neat or catalogued, only one or two things get crossed off before moving on to something else, the damn list itself gets lost amongst other stuff, etc.

Seeing this lady with her carefully kept binder and her carefully measured columns and her meticulously handwritten notes to her carefully meticulous self just couldn’t have represented a farther cry from my wife’s spontaneity.  Or her blooming creativity if you want to flower it up, or her scattershot randomness if you want to water it down.  All I know is that I took a good hard look at that binder and laughed to myself, thanking the lucky stars for my poor ADD-addled wife.

—–

My tour of jury duty is almost over, so hopefully things will get back to normal in a bit around here.  I’ll probably go through and slim down the How to Ask A Girl Out  series.  I reread it in some spare time earlier this week and thought it might be a little too long and too repetitive; and I got some honest (and somewhat blunt) criticism to that effect earlier this week from someone whose opinion I respect.  So that’s two votes for tightening it up.

I’ve also had another blog thought swimming in my scatterbrained little noggin lately, so I’ll try to get to that as well.

In the meantime, sit back, relax, and let your thoughts run free.  Catch you on the flip side.