Therapy or Creative Outlet?

I'm new to the blog party, but I've often thought my life would make a good sitcom - or horror flick, I haven't figured out which. So instead of writing the next great American novel, I decided to inflict my random musings on the blogisphere.

I write for a living. Nothing deep or truly meaningful, but it pays the bills. But I've noticed that since we've had our second child, my brain has melted.

It may have started before that -- I mean really, how can you really tell your brain has melted until you're standing in a puddle of gray matter. But at some point my synapses just stopped firing correctly.

There was a point in my life I was the smart kid. (I was also the fat kid, but that's an entirely different set of neuroses! ) But now I find myself in conversations with department heads and other office staff, and I try to say something intelligent.

And *poof*.

That entire lexicon of vocabulary - gone.

Thankfully I'm a writer and not an orator, but still. What happened? Is it the sleep deprivation gnawing away at portion of my brain? I can function on 6 hours of sleep. But I've found that 2 hours + 2 hours + 2 hours does not give you that same feeling of being recharged.

Perhaps it was the years of writing those "watch-or-die" news promos early on in my career? You know the ones. "Tonight - what you don't know might kill you. And we won't tell you until 11 o'clock tonight."

Hopefully, those few hours between seeing the spot and watching the news didn't actually claim any lives.

It really is amazing that any parents stay together after having children. When you actually do get time together, one or both of you are so numb that you kind of stare at each other. It was bad enough before kids and you end up in one of those, "What do you want to do? I dunno, what do you want to do" conversations. Now it turns into a bad combination of Tim Allen and the Frankenstein Monster.

"Aruah?"

"I duhnuh"

It's gotten so bad that I've actually started doing crossword puzzles online just to stimulate some neural activity. I've always HATED crossword puzzles. My wife gave me that "who are you?" look when I told her.

Am I alone? Is there hope? Or is this just symptomatic of hitting my mid-30's?

How do we fight back?