Pearls: I’m a ‘one-track mind’ type

EDITORIAL MUG: Matt Pearl

I am the kind of man who definitely deserves from time to time to have people shake their heads in disbelief when I do the things I do.

I got busy working on whatever I was doing last Monday morning and I forgot to eat lunch.

You can ask my wife for verification, but this has been a theme in my working life. I get hyper-focused on a task and I somehow look at the clock and realized that I completely missed the lunch our.

On this particular day, I was planning to eat school lunch – our foodservice staff definitely prepared a special meal just for teacher in-service – and I forgot to eat it. One staff member told me she was leaving, and my reply was, ‘I thought you were hanging around until 12:30.’

It was 12:40 when I said this. Brilliant. Mr. Principal can’t even read a clock.

But this has been a lifelong struggle, honestly. When I was a kid, I would forget to take a video game break, then I would finally run to the bathroom in desperation, only to also discover I was running a Nintendo-induced fever. Yes, an actual thermometer-verified temperature of 100.8 because I was too obsessed with The Legend of Zelda to remember to hydrate and take care of myself.

My mother called it a ‘one-track mind.’ Nowadays, I read that my behavior was a symptom of undiagnosed Attention Deficit Disorder. Who knows? Maybe I should be receiving treatment for my task-obsessed brain.

I have always been a finish-it-in-one sitting kind of worker. In the history of this column, I have probably gotten up and taken a break mid-writing a grand total of three or four times. And any time I have written it in multiple keyboard sessions, I felt like those columns were the worst I had ever composed.

When I can’t pawn the mowing off on my wife or children, I mow everything at once. When I was studying for my Ed. S degree, I did all of my homework in a single Sunday evening grind. I’m in for all or nothing – because I know if I take a break, it’s pretty likely I’ll never finish the job, or that I’ll finish it poorly because my interest has waned so greatly.

Ok, maybe I am a little ADD.

My dad was just the same. He did things in ‘big chunks.’ I remember at the former newspaper office he had at the corner of Hwy. 48, Route Z and 169 Hwy. In King City, he would take a big trash can and sort through 18 months’ worth of clutter, scrap paper and Frappuccino bottles, discard and file things, and the office would look immaculate.

For about two days, anyway. Then the next 18-month cycle would show. But Dad has that same all-or-nothing quality to his work. Nobody could hammer out a Page 2 column for the paper faster than my father could, but (like me) he would nearly always write it in a single sitting.

And, incidentally, he would also forget to eat lunch from time to time if he got busy with his work. I think I’m caught in a bit of a genetic trap, folks.

But in a more practical way, being a little bit obsessive has aided me over the years. I’ve written hundreds of columns at this point – well over 1,000 of them if you count the sports columns I used to write in addition to the weekly editorials – and it’s been my favorite task over the past 15 years. Want to know why?

Because I’m an obsessive person whose brain can focus on the single task of rattling off 600 words per week about one main idea. And I don’t apologize for being a little offbeat, but I am hungry for dinner at 4:30 p.m.

I forgot to eat lunch, you see….

Matt Pearl owns and operates The Tri-County Ledger.