I am 100 percent convinced that the world's greatest geniuses ARE the world's greatest geniused because they do manage to get some of this quiet time. No interruptions. Men understand. We're often at our peak, so to speak, at this time. Women, I don't know. If I ever get to interview Condaleeza Rice and she tells me, I'll let you know.
These mental giants, like Einstein, had no interruptions when they took care of the most important matters. These matters allowed them to concentrate on stuff that led to things like E=MC2 on the chalkboard the next morning.
How many people can you point to who made a world-shifting difference in the way we view the cosmos?
Ok, how many of these had children?
I'm not saying they were not married, that can actually help, but no kids.
You know what I'm talking about. What's the smallest room in your house? Men, where’s the place where you do your most important thinking?
The bathroom.
If you have kids and try to go to the bathroom, that room suddenly becomes THE MOST IMPORTANT PLACE IN THE UNIVERSE.
If you can have 3 kids, a spouse and 12 bathrooms with one of those bathrooms being behind a working coal furnace in a sub-basement with one 15 watt bulb in the middle of the bathroom and NO lights between the basement door and the bathroom. You try to sneak back there for some peace to think and euphemism, and all of a sudden everyone is going to become a professional spelunker (that's a cave explorer) and come down there with miner's headlights and cameras in hopes of making the next available edition of National Geographic by discovering heretofore unknown territory.
Any other time you couldn't get a kid down there if you filled the bathroom with video games, movie tickets to the next Twilight episode and a ton of peanut M&Ms.
All of a sudden everyone in the house has to brush their teeth, hair, clip toenails, scrape mildew off the shower walls, check the plumbing under the sink, look for a lost library book, get help with homework, check someone's blood pressure, make sure there's no expired medicine in the cabinet, file IRS form 1040, compose a symphony, apply for college, fill out the mortgage paperwork they couldn't complete in the bank's drive-through lane, order pizza for supper, hand you the phone to speak to the President of the United States and of course let me not leave out, stand there impatiently with crossed legs saying "HURRY UP ALREADY!" never mind the fact the bathroom was empty for four solid hours prior to your entrance and there is another COMPLETELY EMPTY bathroom elsewhere in the house. Now that you are enthroned, so to speak, everyone in the house suddenly has to euphemism when you are.
Must be something in the air.
And speaking of something in the air, it doesn't matter if the wallpaper is peeling, the light bulb exploded, the fan resigned in protest and roaches crawl out of the cabinets waving white flags carrying United Nations-endorsed treaties with a promise to move to Minnesota, you could, in fact, be sitting there with a gas mask and spare oxygen tanks and everyone is still going to come in. I don't know about your house, but at mine no one says a word. Not a thing.
Maybe they're afraid of being evicted, or worse yet, getting one of those "So? Whatta ya expect after all?" stares.
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