Does that baby come with a side of time?

Last night I found myself in a dire situation.

I was out of clean underwear.

To put this complex issue in the correct framework, you need to consider the source. I am not the kind of guy who has just five or ten pairs of underwear, or who has one massive heap of undone laundry. No. My underwear drawer is multitudinous, and my laundry is sorted into six equally-laundered segments.

I might run out of fitness clothes, fashionable colored bandanas, or pink button down shirts, but even with my general aversion to folding and stowing clean clothing, it ought to be an utter impossibility that I ever run through underpants unless I have a recurring gnome problem.

Yet, there I was, unable to fight the downward drift of my eyelids with a load of laundry just beginning, not knowing what fabric would cover my backside in the morning.

Never fear, friends and people who have sat next to me on the subway today, for I did not go commando. No. E, knowing my distress, woke up before me and moved a small quantity of underwear into the dryer to rush them to a state of readiness. For that and many other reasons she is awesome.

However, my point here is not that I need more underwear (trust me, I don’t) or that E is awesome (we’ve known that here at CK for over a decade now).

No, my point is: baby.

Allow me to expand.

There are barely enough hours in the day as it is. I work and sleep and create and perform and mow a little of the lawn every time the trimmer battery recharges and occasionally mainline a new series from Netflix in half-season increments. Yes, I could excise that brief bit of media-consuming brain-deadness, but otherwise I am always looking for a few more hours in the day to read, blog, exercise, balance my budget, finish mixing our EP, or – yes – launder undergarments.

That’s okay, though. I have kept all the plates spinning and all the progress happening for years now.

Then there’s this idea of a baby. I’m still coming to terms with it and how it’s going to be here in five-ish weeks. I got over the “The baby is real” phase, the “How will we afford this baby?” phase, and even the “Where exactly is this baby going to go?” phase. What I am having trouble with is, “When am I going to pay attention to this baby?” – or, more accurately, “When am I going to do all of the things that make me me and also keep my in clean underwear?”.  Because, if the baby requires, say, thirty minutes of attention per day, that is going to result in way less songs rehearsed or words written, you know?

(Disclosure: I am pretty sure it is going to take more than thirty minutes a day to keep the baby alive, let alone make it a super-genius congressperson or UN ambassador with a theatre background and a degree in engineering.)

And I’m thinking it probably will require more than thirty minutes of attention a day, so something’s got to give, and I think I’ve exhausted the slack in the laundry department.