Cross link with the Jack of All forums thread. Bear in mind this is my first attempt at a rant, so I welcome constructive criticism.
I might also use this as a contribution to CDGASM
Hello, how are you? Glad you found me, because I've been looking around for you. Not that that has been particularly difficult. I'm not trying to trump up my seeking skills or anything. It's just, well, you generally follow a pattern. It's ok, we all fall into it. I've been pretty guilty of it myself. Probably why it took me so long to find you. I'm a bit of a procrastinator, and I figure that I would do it tomorrow. Then I figured that everyday is tomorrow to someday once.
Back to your pattern. It's natural to slog around to wherever you're going. Your morning commute, you get lost into your thoughts, not really taking stock of all the stuff that's going on around you. Funny how that works. The first time you take a route you don't pay attention to what's going on around you because you're trying to memorize the route. When you've memorized the route, you don't pay attention to what's going on around you because it has become routine.
Holy crap you're at work already, and you don't even really remember how you got there. Well now, you're at work and you really don't pay attention to what's going on around you because you're busy doing your job, just like you did yesterday. Ok, maybe you're surfing the net when the boss isn't looking, but that's not really paying attention. That's taking in little snippets of info, some of it likely junk, and you're not really going to remember it anyway, because you've already clicked on the next link.
You take in the basic idea of what's going on in the world with a little side of apathy and just forget about it, like you never read it in the first place. You made a mistake on that email you're about to send the boss. You should probably fix it. Nevermind that, it's time to go home. You're still not really paying attention to what's going on around you. You're busy thinking about what happened at work today when you weren't surfing the net.
Wait were you surfing the net? You read something of vague interest, what was that? Nevermind, you're home now. You should start thinking about dinner. Hey! Dinner's ready, eat it before it gets cold. Pretty good, huh? Cilantro is a nice touch. Not that you're really paying attention to it anyway. You've gone through the motions of making yourself a really awesome dinner, and you're not even really appreciating your own work.
And it's quite a remarkable recipe! You finished eating dinner, but you really don't even realize it.
The food was gone and you don't feel hungry. Time for TV. Yeah, this show's pretty funny, as is the next one. News is on. Some bad stuff happened somewhere not here.
That's terrible. You don't really know where they're talking about are you? It's a couple of towns over actually.
There's interesting stuff going on nearby. You've already forgotten about it. Time for bed, you have to get up early for work tomorrow. Something's nagging you though and you're having some trouble sleeping. You don't really know what happened today. It just kinda happened. You don't really know how it was. You're still alive, but that's all. It dawns on
you that I [switch to first person from here] haven't paid attention or noticed anything today. That's as good a start as any. Problem is that tomorrow morning I run the risk of mulling over that fact so much that I'm still not going to see all the interesting stuff that's going on around me. Maybe the day after will work out better. Did I mention I was a procrastinator?
Or kill me.