Do you hear that racket?

There is as cacophony in my head. Drums pounding to the rhythm of my heart, stress pumping through my veins to the beat of the blinking cursor on my blank page. With each thuh-thump, a new series of words courses: tuition payments, gas prices, career success, summer schedules, editors' deadlines, essay topics, tweets, blog posts...the list goes on and on. I am feeling a sense of overload. How can I feel so...busy...when it seems as though nothing's getting done?

I was driving between my office and the park for boot camp yesterday when suddenly the racket got so loud it distracted me from my own thoughts. What the...? Then a fat, brown, winged bug hit my windshield and bounced off. Half a dozen more were zooming past the row of traffic ahead of me.

Then I realized that buzzing cadence in my head had gone external - the cicadas in the county are louder than my own humming stress.

I was cutting the lawn last weekend when I felt a hundred pairs of eyes on me. Bug eyes. They were all over my cedar fence. I don't know if they are always this brown color, or if they camouflage themselves, but I couldn't see them at all until I was pushing the lawn mower right up against the fence. It was like a cheap horror flick!

But I digress, at least those damn bugs'll be gone in another two weeks. Then I'll be left with the pulsing rhythm of my own deadlines. And maybe that's a good thing. It drives me to get things done, and to sit up and take notice when things aren't getting accomplished.

Time to focus on finishing up those three essays in my "WIP" (work in progress) folder...