Hail to otters and others

I have been meaning to write something about what it means to be a person who has stationary (a tangent provoked by receiving a letter from a friend who has both stationary and a business card), but I had something of a revelation while checking my email a few hour ago and I am always willing to put a more immediate rant in front of one that’ll keep. I will also take this moment to note that I haven’t been posting with my usual hell-bent regularity, and to pretend that you’ve noticed. I’ve been busy; I’ve had a recent change in occupation and though I wrote a few things about it last week I decided that they were too dreary and self-reflective for this venue. This, obviously, is a fun blog. If it was a sad blog it would be on Deviant Art and have some dragon background. (Is even typing the title Deviant Art dating me? I think so.)

Anyway, it occurred to me while I was checking my email that I am the worst multitasker of all time. I’m expecting a couple of emails, and I thought (wrongly) that I could just pull up the email and shoot around a couple of messages while still working on an essay. But I couldn’t move forward with one until I was finished with the other – in this case until I had bantered back and forth with a few people, sent off a couple of link to the houses that we’ve bid on, and with the sudden realization that it had been 20 minutes, signed violently off.

This probably isn’t that surprising to those of you who know me personally to be the sort of person who becomes freakishly overwhelmed at the drop of a hat, but as usual, I was shocked. I thought of all of the time that I had spent multitasking in my life – in college when I would never shut down my AIM window, all of the reading that I’ve done while eating dinner and at stoplights, and the rude but cost-effective habit I have of reading my email while on the phone.

I realized, thinking of these instances, that in multitasking I was probably doing a really crap job at both tasks. That’s really depressing. It is depressing to think that you’ve done bad work in the name of efficiency or boredom, and to realize that you might be one of those post-internet zombies who needs two forms of input to stay happy. I hate the idea that I might be that sort of zombie, the kind of person who is always mentally reviewing other options and checking their messages under the table.

This is, of course, related to other recent discussions about the ways that prolonged internet use can really limit a person’s ability to sustain interest over time. We lose our attention-spans and we gain the ability to see a different picture of an otter every day of the year. Don’t get me wrong, fellas, I still love the internet and all of its glory. Hail to blogs and to free information and all that. Yee-haw for Twitter.

But sometimes even I get a little creeped out by the way that a person like me, a person who rarely picks up their circa-1996 cell phone, can get the idea that they are a great multitasker. Multitasking is assumed now, as a character trait and as a habit and we never stop to assess our actual aptitude for it. Fortunately (or unfortunately), I’m a unitasker, hardcoredly.