I am a stressed out person. Some say workaholic, others just say crazy, but amidst the parenting, working, parenting, working, working, working and working I seem to be doing lately, there's never time for anything else.

Or when there is, I'm so exhausted that I'm having trouble getting out of it what I'd like to.

For instance, this whole jogging business. Let's call a spade a spade: I started running because I was worried I was getting fat, and I thought this might help temper my expanding waistline. Any additional health benefits seemed great, sure, but I was driven by fear. The fact that I actually started to enjoy my nightly fitness vigil was both ancillary and a surprise.

But being busy is such a common complaint that mentioning it is a tired cliche -- it'd be news if somebody wasn't overworked and frazzled all the time.

So maybe problem is that there are other fears that can be far more immediate. Deadlines, forgetting to pack a snack for my daughter after daycare, rent, eating, showering (or, indeed, not showering) -- the list goes on, continuing more or less in that order. When the fears have subsided, when I've made headway on the pile of stuff, when I've finally found a moment to myself with my head clear and my spirits lifted, all I want to do is sit still, and do nothing.

I'm not sure what needs to change. Do I just have crappy time management skills? Plenty of people in the world take on more than this and do just fine. Or am I experiencing an extreme malfunction in the priority department? How old do I have to get (I'm 24) before my perspective starts to change -- just like everyone says it will -- and I start to regret not staying in better shape while I was younger?

In response: this week, a very unpractical experiment. I'll run when it strikes me. Like now, in the middle of writing this post, thinking about how much I wish I'd ran this week so I had something more interesting to write about.

OK, I'm leaving...

(And I'll be back next Tuesday with the results.)