Tag Archives: focus

Echo chamber…

Posted on by

Turn on the news and it’s impossible to miss the steady drumbeat of stories about Trump, or Biden, or the health of The King and Princess of Wales depending on which side of the Atlantic your news provider of choice is based. Throw in a sprinkle of Russia, China, Iran, Hamas, and a few unavoidable human interest stories and the whole thing becomes an echo chamber. It doesn’t particularly matter if you’re getting your stories from cable news, the internet, or what passes for newspapers. The mashup is more or less the same, just with a slightly different agenda being pushed.

That’s fine. The news is a business just like any other. Without eyes on screens or pages, there is no news. Like it or not, whether it’s “good for us” or not, the more confrontational the headlines, the more eyes will end up on it. Outlets are doing whatever they have to do to compete. 

This weekend, though, I found myself doing what I do more and more often. I opted out. Sure, I scanned the headlines in the morning, but after that, I shifted over to music or podcasts, or parked my television on a couple of channels that were either running old movies or old TV shows and that didn’t have any interested in trying to sell me the news of the day. Honestly it made for some terrific background noise. I highly recommend it.

I’m not sure if it’s something about getting older in general or about my response to the annoyance of modernity in particular, but my god is it getting hard to give a shit about anything other than the five or six “Big Things” I’m already interested in. Beyond that, most everything is beginning to resemble a wacky waving inflatable arm flailing tube man vying for attention.

I seem to revisit this topic a lot. Every time it feels like it’s becoming more and more imperative. I’d love to know whether that says more about me or about the world. Maybe both. 

Temporary pause…

Posted on by

If you’re going to write a lot, reading a lot just comes with the territory. It follows that since I’ve written a lot of blog posts, I’ve also read a lot of them written by other people. I’ve been enchanted by a number of blogs over the years. The single most frustrating thing about many of them is sometimes they sort of stop without any rhyme or reason. The stories these people tell just end. It’s deeply unsatisfying and I can’t help but wonder what series of events led someone who may have been so committed to posting regularly for years to suddenly stop.

This isn’t a post to say I’m suddenly stopping. It is, however, a post to say I’m going to take a (hopefully) brief pause. Maybe a week or two. Maybe a little longer.

My intent is to get back at it as soon as I’m feeling like I can give the written word the kind of attention I’ve always believed it deserves. The effort is worth a lot more mental horsepower than I’m currently feeling able to put in. So yeah, I’m giving it a temporary rest.

Not to worry, though. My notes pages are already filling up with dribs and drabs that will be the kernels of future posts. Given the state of the world and the inevitably of bumping up against human stupidity, I’m sure I’ll feel the undeniable urge to rage about something sooner rather than later. I’d just like to be able to do it when I’ve got a little less brain fog and a lot more ability to focus on fine details. 

In the meantime, you’ve got almost 4,000 old posts ranging all the way back to 2006 sitting here, so don’t be afraid to dig around the archives a little. Some of what’s buried there are real gems.

Undue strain…

Posted on by

Focus is a funny thing. I say that because for most of the day today seven minutes seemed like just about the maximum amount of time I was able to focus on any one thing before my eyes started going twitchy. By ten minutes, I’d be working on a dull ache in the back of my head. Past fifteen and the ache would be running down my back and I’d find my shoulders somewhere up around my ears. Good times.

Honestly it reminds me of nothing so much as the one time, many years ago, when I had inflicted a mild concussion on myself by falling over and bouncing my head off the driveway. I’m just assuming it’s all some kind of reptilian brain trauma response running in the deep layers of the human operating system. I’m sure the brain is a remarkable organ, but sometimes it’s a real pain in the ass.

It’s well that no one came along asking me to do something that required any level of academic rigor, because I’m not at all sure I could have managed it even under duress. Getting out a few unremarkable emails and sitting through a thoroughly a probably necessary, but thoroughly uninteresting meeting seemed to be just about the limit of my mental prowess today. I’m sure I won’t win any prizes for the off the cuff word salad I spit out during that last meeting of the day, but I’m putting it squarely in the pile of things I’m choosing not to care about. 

Even under those conditions, today felt like putting a lot of undue strain on the engines.

The agitating present…

Posted on by

Having spent the last week and a half taking in a steady diet of new from the UK, I tried this morning to adjust back to information from sources closer to home. It wasn’t a particularly happy reunion.

Aside from the local weather forecast, I’d be hard pressed to tell you about a single story covered my go-to station out of Baltimore that I could gin up any interest in at all. Murder, mayhem, hints of corruption – nothing new under the sun. Switching over to CNN it was the predictable drumbeat of catastrophic weather, rerunning the election of 2020 and the general fuckery surrounding it, and all manner of talking heads I’m increasingly convinced don’t have the first idea about what’s happening or why. 

I’m sure there are a host of things I should be interested in, or that I should at least have a bit of general knowledge about, but friends I’m here to tell you that I just don’t. Maybe it’s simply news overload. Maybe it’s too many sources peddling a decidedly weak product. Whatever the cause, I’m far more interested in reading analysis of what happened a continent away 500 years ago than I am in lending my eyes and ears to what happened yesterday thirty miles from home.

I’m sure once the midterm election gets a little closer or the case against the former host of The Celebrity Apprentice ever gets a bit of traction, I’ll tune back in – or at least gin up a modicum of interest. For the immediate future, if it’s not coming through BBC, The Times, or one of the news aggregators I glance at in the morning, I’m going to be ok not paying attention.

If something legitimately important happens, I’m sure it will break through the static. Until then, I’ll be perfectly content studying the past rather than being thoroughly agitated by the present.

A non-fiction problem…

Posted on by

I’ve got a problem with non-fiction. Well, technically that’s not true. I’ve been devouring non-fiction since I was a kid. What I have a problem with is my own non-fiction section. Aside from the decided focus on Western Civilization that’s sure to mark me out as an unenlightened, un-woke heretic of the modern era, titles are wildly wide-ranging. I have books in the to be read stacks ranging from the Greeks and Romans to biographies of Thomas Wolsey to volumes on the western water crisis to sweeping door stops covering Imperial Russia. It’s an embarrassment of riches at my fingertips. 

I wonder, though, if it’s not time to close the aperture a bit and pick a few periods on which to concentration my interest. Is it time to shift gears from being a generalist consumer of history to something more focused?

If so, what periods? Republican Rome though the fall of the western empire surely make the cut. Britain from the age of Victoria back to the dawn of time for sure. America from colonization through the Federalist era. The age of fighting sail. World War II. The American presidency. I’m sure there are others that I’ve missed at first blush. I know that doesn’t feel particularly focused, but all things are by comparison. 

I’m sure this is just a revisiting of the minor panic attack I had a few months ago about the fiction section being too wide ranging. Still, I think it’s worth considering if and how I should reevaluate what I’m reading. Time, by definition, is limited… and unless we stay in plague mode indefinitely, I won’t have a year to match the reading I did in 2020 and 2021 until 2035 at the earliest. That’s a depressing thought – oddly more depressing in my mind than the idea of quarantines and lockdowns continuing into the future.

I suppose all this is just another reminder that I need to do another round of curation, free some titles back into the marketplace, and relegate others to deep storage in anticipation of the day when I won’t have to be quite so selective about what book comes off the shelf next. 

The fog of Monday…

Posted on by

Some days everything you touch turns to gold. Other days it all turns to shit. Today wasn’t either one of those type of days. It was more like everything I attempted to touch was wreathed in fog – no sooner was I just about to put my finger on it than it melted off into thin air. Days like this are far more obnoxious than the other type. At least when things are turning into gold or shit you know exactly what to expect.

Days like to day mostly leave me wondering what circuit is tripping in my head keeping me from focusing in on anything at all. I hope a post work drink or two and a good night’s sleep will reset things one way or the other – because spending two days in a row lost in this kind of fog sounds like an utterly awful idea.

Against the tyranny of the cubicle…

Posted on by

I spent most of the morning having another close encounter with modern dentistry. It was a little “warranty work” on a filling that failed way earlier than it was supposed to, so at least I wasn’t out of pocket for the extra pain and aggravation. That said, my general hatred for visiting the dentist’s office isn’t really the point.

Since I was a slobbery mess and the day was more or less half over, I plugged in my laptop and spent the late morning and afternoon working from home. If I’m going to spend a few hours dribbling coffee down my chin, I’d rather do it in the comfort of my own office than in the open bay cubicle hell where I practice my trade most other days.

Let me start by saying that I’ve missed working from home. Circumstances the last couple of weeks have conspired to make it something like too hard to do. eventually I hope to get back on a semi-regular schedule. Instinct tells me that’s going to be a long time coming, so I’ll need to steal a day wherever I can.

What struck me most today, though, was how easy a time I had getting through something that I’d spent the last two days in the office trying to knock out. It wasn’t a particularly hard task, but it required integrating information from a couple of different sources into a reasonably coherent whole. It’s the kind of thing that requires attention to detail… and frankly I can’t think of any place worse than a standard office cubicle to try to make sense of something that requires focused attention. Between the random meetings, people dropping by just to chat, the gods on Olympus deciding you need to work on other “priorities” for a few hours, and the general hum and buzz of 30-odd people all working in the same 25’x75′ space, it’s a bloody marvel that anything ever gets finished. Of course that’s assuming that anything actual does ever get finished, which could easily not be a valid assumption.

In conclusion, whoever decided that cubicles represent the best way for information workers to get their job done was a fucking idiot and I hope his soul is condemned to eternal torment… like by never getting more than 37 uninterrupted seconds to try completing a fairly simple and routine task.

Vague and hazy…

Posted on by

It’s a short week and I should feel better about that. I mean no one looks forward to these Friday schleps around antique shops, thrift stores, and used book dealers more than I do… but getting through to Friday this week has felt like a lot more than half the battle. The week has been a long trail of stupid.

I know it’s not just me, either. I’ve listened to other people express much the same opinion that the week has just been “off” somehow. Maybe everyone is mentally checked out for the long holiday weekend marking, more or less, the official end of summer. Maybe there’s a long-discarded canister of nerve gas under the building leaking and causing everyone to operate at half speed in a mental fog. It’s not strictly impossible.

I shouldn’t admit to knowingly giving anything short shrift, but the fact is that at the moment, I’m really performing no better than the rest. The only milestone I see at the moment is 4:00 Thursday afternoon. Past that, the world gets awfully vague and hazy.

Three weeks or: Planner in the hands of an angry god…

Posted on by

Even if I didn’t have a calendar I’d know that we were inside the last three weeks of planning before our latest Big Event kicks off. I’d know it just based on the number of emails that are currently sitting in both my in and outboxes. I’d know it because my phone was ringing when I got to my desk this morning and was ringing when I walked away from my desk at the end of the day. 

The current Big Event is now close enough on the calendar that it’s starting to attract the attention of the gods on Olympus… and they’re asking questions and very much interested in making sure their thumb prints are present and undeniable. 

That’s fine, of course, none of this is a point of personal pride for me. I’ve long ago accepted that staff work is a land where blame piles up like cord wood and all credit is owed to the gods. As a poor simple planner in the hands of an angry god, though, it would be nice if time to time, the Olympians took a passing interest way the hell back in December when I started agitating about needing to kick off the planning process… and when grand sweeping changes are awfully easy to make. 

We all have our own twisted fantasies about how things are supposed to work. I don’t suppose there’s any real problem with that unless you start laboring under the delusion that there’s any chance they might accidentally work that way at some point. 

What Annoys Jeff this Week?

Posted on by

1. Energy. It’s the stuff which lets us stay awake after dinner instead of falling asleep on the couch with a book in our hands. My level has never been high enough to run the risk of becoming a distance runner, but at a bare minimum I could usually stay awake until my already geriatric bed time rolled around. For the last few weeks, though, mine has been missing entirely. It’s a small thing, yes, but it’s altogether frustrating and I need it to stop right the fuck now.

2. It’s never been worse. Three separate times this week I’ve heard either a talking head on television or someone in real life say that “our country has never been more divided” or “It’s never been worse.” One of the main problems with the laughably short human lifespan is that only being around for a few score decades and a lustrum or two means most people who don’t study it have no sense of history. You see way back in 1814 a foreign army burned the nation’s capital to the gound. I’d say that could be considered objectively “worse” than where we stand in 2019. Fifty years after the burning of Washington our country conducted a viscous, bloody, and protracted civil war. Now I’m not an expert, but that seems significantly more divided that we are just now. 

3. Waiting. There’s never been a doubt in my mind that I would eventually get back to being a two dog household. I planned for a reasonable period of adjustment. I also wanted wanted to wait for the winter weather gave way to spring because housebreaking in the winter sounded infinitely more awful then doing it when it’s temperate. There’s also the fact that March and April constitute my  “busy season” at the office. Thanks to one of my distinguished colleagues, though, I’m currently obsessing over any one of four English mastiff mix puppies up for adoption through a rescue outside of Baltimore… and trying to come up with a way to make jettisoning the plan sound at least passingly logical and not at all like something that would be a batshit crazy idea.