Relax, Everything Is Deeply Intertwingled

Four Wordpresses and My Ever-Shortening Attention Span

In my everything is everythang life, I work pretty much every waking hour, and yet somehow in the last few weeks I've borrowed a little time to type a little in four wordpresses...

Wednesday is the new Thursday

Giving 2.0

Adam Rifkin wordpress

Renkoo Blog

Oh, the first and the fourth wordpresses are the same. So that's three wordpresses, not four. Off-by-one error. :)

I also updated my Favorite Places a little. And realized an alarming trend about my attention... a trend that MJ has also noticed...

In 2002 and 2003, I had the attention span and energy to create an entire website using my vast knowledge of 1995-era HTML -- ifindkarma.com. Yes, it's ghetto in its use of TABLEs -- but I'd like to think that it's ghetto fabulous.

In 2004 and 2005, my attention span and energy shrank to the size of blog posts, and even then I was often bloviating, like in this post about weblications.

By 2006, I barely had the attention span to squeeze out a picture on flickr or a bookmark on delicious.

And now, if I've got the energy to send fewer than 160 characters at a time to twitter once or twice in a given week, I'm happy.

In five years I've gone from websites, to blogs, to pictures, to bookmarks, and now (barely) to SMSs. If I don't pull out of this tailspin soon, the next likely step is complete silence. And/or paying someone else to write what I'm thinking. Hmmm.

Now that I think about it, that doesn't sound half bad. :)

You must express!

Never look back, darling.
It distracts from the now.
    -- Edna Mode, the diminutive fashionista in The Incredibles

Flow State

Citing the book Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience, by academic Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, Joe Kraus suggests that people performing at a high level -- in sports, the arts, and other endeavors -- attain Csikszentmihalyi’s “flow state”: Time slows down, concentration comes effortlessly, distraction melts away.

“I think the flow state is addictive,” Kraus says. “And the only way I know to get there is through being in a startup.”

    -- John Heilemann,  October 26, 2005, Business 2.0, Retooling the Entrepreneur

Unstuck In A Moment

I'm sending this message in a bottle through time. I'm pressing the send button on 03/03/05 and sending it back to January 15, when the first draft of this message was written. A dozen typepad drafts separate this moment in time from that moment in time. If I leave enough breadcrumbs as I drift between moments, I believe I can eventually find my way back to the present. My hope is that I just need to block out an entire day "to do nothing but ketchup on my typepad"; the pessimistic Slim Shady inside of me believes I will fall further and further out of real-time. I wonder if I can ever fall behind enough that it will seem like I'm ahead?

me on January 4: "Why does having a blog mean feeling perpetually behind?"

Frank Paynter on January 10: "I think the answer is to let go of the immediacy compulsion."

Elayne Riggs in response: "I don't think it has anything to do with blogs. I think it's more a type of personality, as well as the greater and greater variety of entertainment choices coupled with less and less free time as we get older and take on more responsibilities (and interests!)."

Annette in response: "My list of post ideas keeps getting longer, and yet my posts are getting shorter... think there is some weird connection?"

Dr. R. James Steffen: "What you really want from life and work drives EVERY action, and... EVERY action takes you step by step to what you really want."

Xian on January 10: "For me the repeated lesson of blogging is to let go, stop worrying, and learn to love the drift. Trust your subconscious ability to do triage and spend your attention where your heart's priorities lie. The wheels will squeak when they need grease. Just stay in the moment and keep paying attention. It's not your job to document the entire cosmos let alone your entire flow of awareness."

Choke me in the shallow water before I get too deep. Even when I first drafted this post, I was five days later than Xian, who with the others had had an entire conversation without me. In the seven weeks since, they have all moved on, and I've somehow managed to find my way back to that moment, for a moment.

For some reason I'm reminded of a line by George Carlin in the very first Saturday Night Live back in 1975 which I believe I saw at the time when I was a young child, but got jogged into my memory recently during a re-broadcast of that show at 3am on Sunday, February 27:

Oh! There's a moment coming... there's a moment coming. It's not here yet. It's on the way... still in the future... Here. Here it is! Awww... It's gone, man. There's no present -- everything is the near future or the recent past. No wonder we can't get anything together -- we've got no time, man.

Ok, it's time to cork this bottle, it's 03/03 and time's a-wasting. Certainly the clarity of time puts March 3's problem into perspective as back to January we go. And when I'm in San Diego March 14-17 or in Arizona March 20-23 I wonder if that problem, too, will seem distant and evanescent. And when I look at this typepad post many years from now I wonder if it'll even matter that I was 47 days late in publishing it.

Maybe this is what Vonnegut meant when he said that Billy Pilgrim has come unstuck in time. I'm starting to wonder if time itself is an illusion created by one too many sips of the moron bowl. Whatever it is, I'm not afraid. As I get unstuck, I think of Bono, who said,

I'm not afraid
Of anything in this world
There's nothing you can throw at me
That I haven't already heard

I'm just trying to find
A decent melody
A song that I can sing
In my own company

I never thought you were a fool
But darling look at you
You gotta stand up straight
Carry your own weight
These tears are going nowhere baby

You've got to get yourself together...

I close my eyes, only for a moment, and the moment's gone... Dust. Wind. Dude. Hmmm...

Bill: Socrates; "The only true wisdom consists of knowing you know nothing".
Ted: That's us, dude.

...

[after arriving in the middle ages with Billy the Kid and Socrates]
Bill: Billy, you are dealing with the oddity of time travel with the greatest of ease.

Whoa.

Xeno's Paradox in Real Time

John Roberts has the blog byline,

Time [is] the only true currency.

In reading the Cryptonomicon Gedankenexperiments, I've been thinking a lot about Zeno's Paradoxes:

• You can never catch up.
• You can't even start.
• Motion is impossible.

Despite compelling proposed solutions to these paradoxes, I think about how everything in my life keeps happening faster and in ever-more-real-time like ripples in the pond -- blogs, news, feeds, web, email, instant messaging, social networking, work, gedankenexperiments, home -- and how it all leaves me with the feeling,

The more things happen in real time, the more impossible it is to keep up...

So maybe the goal shouldn't be to keep up. Maybe the goal should be to figure out a way to enable the most important things to bubble to the top...

Time

Time is merely an illusion created by our minds due to our inability to perceive everything in the universe at once.
     -- civilinufan on a commercial break from Aqua Teen Hunger Force

MY NAME IS....
Shake-zula, the mic rulah, the old schoolah.
You wanna trip, I'll bring it to ya!
Frylock and I'm on top, rock you like a cop.
Meatwad you're up next, with your knock-knock.
Meatwad make the money see. Meatwad get the honeys G.
Drivin in my car, livin' like a star. Ice on my fingers and my toes and I'm a Taurus
Ha, check-check it, yeah
'Cuz we are tha Aqua Teenz, make the homeys say ho 'n the girlies wanna scream!
'Cuz we are tha Aqua Teenz, make the homeys say ho 'n the girlies wanna scream!
Aqua Teen Hunger Force - Numba one in tha hood, G