Yak Shaving

Catchy title, eh? I've been doing a lot of thinking about yak shaving. Thinking about yak shaving is, in itself, yak shaving. What am I talking about? Funny you should ask.

You need to do something, in this example, write. But before you can write, you realize that you need to clean off your desk. So you make piles of paper. Now you need a place to put the piles.

You can put the piles on the chair!!!

But, the chair is broken. So you fix the chair in order to have a place to put the piles of paper that were on your desk, which needed to be cleaned off before you could write.

In fixing the chair, you realize that the fabric on the seat is torn!!

So you go shopping for new fabric to re-cover the chair which you have just fixed in order to have a place on which to put the piles of paper that were on the desk which you had to clear off in order to write.

When you take off the old fabric you realize that the stuffing is really shot, and the best chair stuffing is made from yak fur.

So you find yourself in the zoo, shaving a yak, in order to have stuffing with which to reupholster the chair that you needed to re-cover in order to have a place to put the piles of paper that you cleaned of your desk in order to write.

Yak shaving is the term used by my critique group to describe the behavior that includes (but is by no means limited to) circling the desk but not being able to land on the keyboard.

Thank you for reading. I don't know what you were supposed to be doing, but you have just shaved a yak....as did I.

More later.