I wrote the previous two installments of this series at WiFi-less coffeehouses. I’m writing this one in my kitchen. I still don’t have a permanent writing station installed here in New MISC Towers. (Anybody wanna go on an Ikea run sometime soon?)

One of my many platonic female friends suggested I turn my bedroom into an office and sleep in the living room, so I’d have a fully exclusive workspace. In this reasoning, I’d “commute” across the doorway, close the door, and thus be mentally prepared to fully concentrate on the tasks at hand.

Unfortunately, it doesn’t work that way for me, for one reason.

For this friend, the computer is a work machine, period. She doesn’t even log onto her Comcast email, unless someone first sends her an email message and then phones her to remind her to read it.

Me? I live at this thing.

And it was far too easy, during my depths-O-depression, to slack off from real work (of either the potentially-for-money kind or the for-art-n’-expression kind), and just idle myself with other ‘puter-based pursuits.

I never got into the PC gaming universe. But I did spend hours upon days simply reading other people’s blogs and websites, or staring at “tasteful” nudie pix (hardcore doesn’t arouse me), or fiddling with my Mac OS desktop appearance settings.

If I’d been deskbound but truly work-motivated, I’d have spent at least some of those hours teaching myself programming or Photoshop image manipulation, or revamping this website (something I’ve been meaning to do since at least 2003).

Other people would call this condition “Internet addiction.” I prefer to see it as simply a symptom of my overall run-down-ness, which has thankfully lifted.

But my ongoing recovery still leaves me with the need to discipline my mind, to set myself down to a single task and remain with it until it’s done, ignoring all potential distractions.

The only thing is, I’ve never worked that way before.