I helped my friend Theresa paint a room on Saturday and I’m still discovering bits of pale green latex paint on the sides of my toes and the soles of my feet (just standing in the shower won’t really do a thorough job of washing it away). I will have to be extra vigilant with a foot brush tomorrow morning if I wish to wear sandals to work.

We took care of filling in the cracks and holes in the walls (it’s an old house), smoothed everything over, masked off the trim, and then painted it over with a nice fresh coat of sage green; the perfect project for my current state of mind.

Perhaps the heat was making us punchy or perhaps we develop the brains of teenage boys when we hang out sometimes (OK, often), but the double entendre flowed like wine, often unintentionally. Por ejemplo, “How much caulk does this hole need??” was one of our more stellar accomplishments and one that made my friend’s husband giggle with amusement at how dirty we girls can be.

What’s also funny and only mildly dirty is this clip from “Extras” (Ricky Gervais’ series). Oh, Daniel Radcliffe. How strange it is to hear you curse a bit like a sailor!

When I think of displacement, I think of the old yarn about Archimedes and the tub (or was it a pool?) of water. He sat down in the bathtub, noticed the water sloshing over and out of the bathtub, somehow measured that the amount of water displaced by his body was equal to the amount of his body in the tub. Then he ran naked into the streets yelling, “Eureka!” He’d discovered a way to measure volume through buoyancy and displacement. Whether or not the story is true is irrelevant. The principle is the point.

People who cook will sometimes use this same technique on the (thankfully rare) occasion that a recipe calls for vegetable shortening. Rather than trying to spoon out a 1/4 cup of Crisco globs into a measuring cup and level it off somehow, you pour 1 cup of water into your measuring container and then add enough Crisco to get the water line up to 1 and 1/4 cups of water. Measuring by displacement.

My point: once you remove whatever’s been taking up the space—Archimedes’ water-wrinkled ass, a quarter cup of slimy white Crisco, what-have-you—you’re still left with whatever you had in the first place, but there’s often some spillage or loss of the displaced material.

This brings me to distraction; distraction is a detour. A moment of, “Hey! What’s this over here? I need to check it out!” that pulls you away from whatever you were doing or thinking, regardless of whether you want it to or not, whether or not you’re enjoying what you’re doing. Distractions are often viewed as negative things, but I feel this is yet another case of “too much of a good thing.” Distractions in moderation and used when necessary and called for are good. Sometimes you need them to refocus on things at work or in life. If all you do, though, is mess around moving from distraction to distraction while at work, this is a problem.

Distractions are a huge part of my life: not at work, but when I get home. Essentially, my entire home life is one big intentional distraction. I have several hundred books, around a hundred DVDs and a 350+ long Netflix queue with four DVDs out at a time because, quite honestly, I need to fill the hours between coming home from work and going back to work with something. The average movie provides two hours of thought-free distraction during which I am almost certain not to cry or otherwise end up giving into depression or crappy negative thoughts. A book, while sometimes harder to focus on, depending on how crappy and negative the thoughts are, can offer significantly more hours based on page count, vocabulary and plot intricacy. Between 7pm and midnight? A movie and a book? Easy. Insomnia helps/doesn’t help, depending on how I view this situation on a given day. I like reading and I like movies, so it’s not the worst possible solution.

While some people complain about not having enough hours in the day, I really feel like I have far too much time on my hands. I would love to sleep more. But I usually can’t fall asleep. I could sleep later; I’d love to - but I have to get up and get on that train. I wake up in the middle of the night and waste an hour here and there listening to the radio or reading a book; sometimes I do work because I feel guilty “wasting” that time at 2 a.m. or 4 a.m. “Time is precious.”

Perhaps what I need to do is learn to displace my time rather than fill it with distractions. With distractions, the time is still there and totally unaffected; it simply has a thin veneer of something else going on above it. It’s not compressed or trickling over the edge. I may wander off for a moment, but it’s always there. Just waiting, tapping its foot and looking at a pocket-watch, I imagine. If I can displace it with some more engaging activities (though the tunnel vision right now is pretty severe and I can’t think of anything that doesn’t seem like a Herculean or Sisyphean task), perhaps a little bit will leak out here and there “Time flies when you’re having fun!”,”Where does the time go!”) and I will feel like I have far less time to use up every day.

That would be much less burdensome.

I saw The Simpsons movie. On Friday. With a friend I haven’t seen since late April since he’s been doing something productive with his non-work hours for the last few years and, um, going to law school. It’s actually nice to have a friend you catch up with every few months as opposed to every few days - it leaves plenty to talk about, and you tend to be more discerning about which news you actually share. The cream rises to the top and all that jazz.

Anyway, yes, I was one of the millions of people* who contributed their hard-earned ‘Merican moneys towards the $71 million which, I am almost certain, had some link (if only symbolic) to the deaths of Ingmar Bergman and Michelangelo Antonioni.

I don’t mean that in a bad way. I enjoy both Bergman and Groening. A little searching actually turns up a little connective tissue. In the sixth episode of The Simpsons entitled, “Moaning Lisa”, our friends at Wikipedia (where else) inform us that:

In the script, the opening scene with Lisa looking into the mirror is called “an Ingmar Bergman moment.”

(Both writers of that episode attended Harvard… not that it’s proof positive of anything, but certain schools have certain reputations and certain cultural references are attributed to a certain educational background…)

The reason I’m mentioning the movie at all now? Because Wil Wheaton summed it up perfectly in his review on his blog.

The best part of his review, however, is the “Drawback to seeing it in the theater” section. I thought the actions he described were limited to a certain segment of boorish northern NJ audiences, so I’m almost glad to hear that it’s not the case and that people are sort of oblivious and moronic all over the place. The audience in our theatre was just distractingly annoying–which is not the norm. I suppose it is something about feeling like you’re in your living room. Well said, Mr. Wheaton.

*My estimate is about 10.1 million people, if we use an average ticket price of $7 a ticket (the 2006 stat was $6.55 from the Natl. Assoc. of Theatre Owners).