Defeated Again

IX: Defeated Again
How am I, personally, going to be able to do adapt to the world’s new kinds of distractions? Everyone needs to find her or his own way, obviously, since everyone’s brain is different. I expect I ought to start by categorizing my distractions: Those I could get rid of, and those I don’t want to get rid of but need to learn how to manage. For the distractions I choose to absorb (within limits I set), there’s then the question of how to harness them toward productive goals, as well as the problem of deciding what to absorb when I don’t know how it will serve me in the future. I guess that makes The Distraction Project an integral piece of my plan, then.

Oh my god, this is some of the best people watching of the past year. I swear that guy is German: His style is at once far to cool and too ridiculous to appear on any American. Somehow I’m surprised to be more distracted by something I’m enjoying, but duh. Of course it happens that way. I’m going to chalk this one up as a good distraction, though. The kind that feeds me, that will do me well in the long run. I’m just going to try to not get too pulled away by it, to the point that I don’t get any work done. I’m starting to realize how huge the element of novelty is in determining whether something’s distracting. The newness of this is killing me; killing my concentration. I just desperately want to get a sense of it before I tune it out.

This place is full of people now, dozens walking around and chatting and exploring, as well as quite a few of my friends stopping to say hello, although thankfully most of them aren’t trying to have much of a conversation with me. There is actually a dog in here. It’s a long-haired dachsund and it’s obviously having a smashing time. People are actually commenting on what a great time the dog is having.

Oh, Jesus, major major perfume blast. Total overload. How can anyone stand to smell like that? Ha, she walked around behind me just as I typed that last sentence, and I had to quickly scroll up so she wouldn’t see. Especially because I’ve met her before, although she doesn’t seem to remember me, but she’s a friend of a friend and very nice and I wouldn’t want to be rude to her. But this whole rigmarole is much more than an idle distraction—it’s a full-on interruption.
I can’t even count how many times I’ve gotten interrupted at this point. There’s a semi-steady stream of people commenting, asking questions, saying hello, or just doing something so silly that I have to take note of it. I mean, the dog. At least that was a welcome interruption. The dude who tried to pick up my books and look through them, on the other hand? Not welcome.

I was editing something I wrote earlier and I just realized that successive interruptions caused me to construct a completely nonsensical sentence. It read: “Zoning out seems to give networks that, when we’re engaged in focused tasks, don’t communicate with one another.” Yuh. Then I figured out how to fix the sentence, but before I had a chance to, my roommate sat down next to me and asked how this was going. So I told her it’s really pretty hard right now, just as her friend showed up and expressed her amazement that I was getting so much written. When I went back to the sentence I had absolutely no idea what I’d wanted to do with it. By now I was really frustrated, and I stared at it all pissed off for a couple of minutes, reading and rereading the paragraph until finally, magically, it came back to me and I typed in my corrected sentence as fast as I possibly could, before I got interrupted again.

Whew. This almost feels like a sporting event. And I’m getting tired of talking to weird strangers.

I’ve noticed in every writing session so far, something in me breaks at around two hours and 20 minutes. Actually it’s more like something shifts and goes clunk, and I have to pause and reset for a few minutes before I can continue. It almost feels like I can’t continue at that point, but what I’m learning is that, if I just take the time to chill out (and zone out) for a bit longer than I would usually allow, I’m able to really go back to work and get back into a groove and keep going, even sometimes at the highest level of engagement—generating new ideas, solving sticky problems of structure and logic, all of it. One key to this, actually, is simply deciding to. The other is preventing distractions from happening, because clearly, there’s a point at which one is simply incapable of blocking them out. Like when they take the form of intrusions that force you to respond before you can go back to what you were doing before.

Perfect example: A few minutes ago Justin and Nick T were standing beside me, and Justin asked about the idea I’d tossed around of having my words projected somewhere else in the space. It didn’t work out because Dave forgot the cord, and I said so. Then he asked if I knew how to make my computer read my words aloud while I type. I said no, and he explained that all you have to do is PDF them or something. But, he said, it’s kind of weird because the computer reads it all in a robot voice.

Up to this point, my participation was entirely voluntary; I had only myself to blame for being distracted. Then before I knew what was happening, Justin and Nick were reading aloud everything on my computer screen, in robot voices. Different segments of visible text, at random. This made me instantly insane, suddenly flooded with all those feelings of writers’ insecurity and overwhelmed by hearing incongruent snippets of my own words, as well as somewhat disturbed by the robot voices.

Now they’re reading what I write, as I write it, about them. This is slightly less cacophonous, but even creepier. Also my friend Erin, who appeared in the middle of this, is trying to help by offering words of advice: Just ignore them. Don’t stop reading.

Oh. Boy. That was one of the most intense moments in recent memory. Now Will is showing me a picture of his son on a skateboard. I still have 15 minutes left, but coming up with a real thought might be hopeless at this point.

Actually, I’m sure it’s hopeless. My sister is ow standing over me telling a story to our friend Katherine about a weird perverted guy named Pablo. And after I told Katherine about Justin and Nick T, she decided to read this aloud as well, although thankfully not in the robot voice. She’s a little slow, though, because she’s dyslexic. I thought that would be less distracting, but now I think it’s even more so. Has anyone taken over your keyboard yet???

That was my sister who wrote that last line.