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Writer's pictureAndy Ross

60,000 Dots on the Wall




When I sat down at my desk in the waning days of February and looked at my calendar for March, I audibly gasped. Not one of those sharp, sudden gasps. A slow, gentle one as it began to dawn on me just how busy the month was going to be. I knew March was gonna have some busy days, but I wasn’t prepared to be overwhelmed by all those little dots in boxes on the wall.


Some of those boxes are on an actual wall calendar, while all of them are on my handy-dandy digital assistant. I think maturity is truly realizing how valuable the calendar app on your phone is. I have it all down there. I used to not jot many things down on a physical calendar, I have truly awful handwriting and sometimes a note written in haste would later need an entire team of experts called in to decipher it.


But now I reach for the handy dandy phone and I type something down or I dictate it into the voice assistant. It’s one reason why there are so many dots on my calendar, appointments, reminders, events, the usual. Yet, March was more appointments and events than simple reminders. That’s why facing the cacophony of multicolored dots on my screen caused an audible gasp.


With that gasp came the sensation of being overwhelmed. I’m someone who likes to get tasks done and be done with them as quickly as possible. But looking at this month I couldn’t help but wonder “how on earth will I get any of this done?” None of this helps, as instead of relaxing and realizing that “Rome wasn’t built in a day and neither do all these things happen in the same day” I just stand there in a state of panic and debate if I should just begin ingesting coffee instead of drinking it.


There’s a particular piece of music that plays along with my panic fugues. It’s a piece of music that induces terror and dread far better than any other in my mind. It’s the music cue from the Sonic The Hedgehog game that plays during an underwater level when Sonic is about to run out of air and drown. Look the sound cue up online if you’ve never heard it, but it’s perfect for the passing moment of terror I felt.


Then you relax and realized that you have survived every time you’ve had a full calendar and it hasn’t sent you into a state of madness—yet. It’s the yet that worries me. I know I can accomplish all these things, I just worry about being in a state of husked out, shriveled, burn out by the time the month is over.


We shall endeavor and endure to accomplish these things without burnout. But I do admit, it does leave with me one question. Does anyone know if you can still get a hold of Surge soda? See you next week.



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