I’ve been diagnosed with ADD, and my shrink has too, and something we talk about pretty often is how it’s 1,000,000 times easier for me to stick with a task if it’s on the computer (which my paid work mostly is, these days, but my art stuff isn’t), and even easier for me to waste hours doing nothing in particular on the computer when I want to be doing other things. This has been true since I was 9 or 10, but it got worse when the Net came along. I do have techie aptitudes but it’s not all about that, because a note about gardening (reading it or writing it) can be just as entrancing as coding, as long as it’s on the screen. I never was much of a TV watcher, though.
Although our discussions haven’t done a whole lot so far to reduce my time-wastage, they’ve been pretty illuminating. I can’t be arsed to find studies now, but what I’ve heard anecdotally fits with my shrink’s opinion that for ADDers, the Internet is a double-edged sword (double-edged tube?). Of course it can be very, very, very, very distracting; there’s an apparently infinite selection of different visual snacks at any time, and because of variable reinforcement, the fact that many of the snacks are nothing special actually makes the compulsion worse. This is a good trap even for those “normal” brains I’ve heard about. “Duh”, as the psychologists say.
The part that’s more specific to those with weird wiring—which is both the good edge and the bad edge—is that a computer is just an awfully attractive medium for doing things in general, if you have trouble with linearity and time and space. Nitpicker says: “Wait! A computer is a linear-minded thing, so wouldn’t people with well-organized minds like it better? I’ve seen robots in movies and they don’t have ADD.” Sort of a good point, you annoying nitpicker. Yes, the machine works that way inside; but now that we’re not using punched cards any more, we have interfaces that are built around the general idea of tasks and objects that have lives of their own, like my room and my head, but more reliable. Never mind icons and menus—even in old command-line systems, you had some form of multitasking, and the basic idea that if you put something in a file it stays there even when you can’t see it. This is awfully comforting; there’s almost no way for me to drop a digital item behind my desk or put it in the pocket of my other pants. And word processing might as well have been invented for people who can’t figure out the point they were trying to get to until they’ve typed 3 paragraphs of digressions—I can write by hand just fine, but good luck trying to read all the stuff I added in the margins and corners and in between the lines. There’s some good work going on these days with adapting computer tools to suit the needs of ADD students even better (and I hope that’ll carry over into better user interface design for everyone).
So there’s the basic organizational thing, but there’s also an experiential thing that’s harder to quantify. If you have trouble juggling sensory inputs, and holding a fixed model of your environment in your brain, that screen is great. In many work and life situations that wouldn’t seem chaotic to you, I tend to feel sort of like a crazed little fish flopping around inside a gumball machine: every little move makes all the gumballs slide and bump all over, and if you can manage to get your little fish mouth around a gumball, it fills up your whole head until you spit it back out. The computer takes a mini-universe of stuff and presents it all through a single surface. There can be a jillion things going on visually and conceptually, but you can sit comfortably outside of them, using a limited range of two senses. It’s like being a big fish who can stand in front of the gumball machine and have gum dispensed to you as you’d expect. The down side of this is, it’s such a relief that you may be tempted to keep standing at that machine even when you don’t need gum.
Another good thing: if you’re going to go off on mental tangents every few minutes anyway, it’s less disruptive to flip over to the Net and find that temporarily essential random fact than to get up and mosey across the house to see if you have a book about that, and notice that you haven’t put away those other books, and decide to get rid of some of them, and start looking for other things to take to Goodwill, and play with that wind-up dinosaur one last time before you get rid of it, etc., etc., which is not the kind of dérive I really enjoy.
[also sent to her directly, and to California State University East Bay]
dear Marianne Kearney-Brown,
I know a letter of support is no substitute for having your job back, but here's one anyway. Cal State's action was morally, intellectually, and (I'm pretty sure) legally ridiculous. I hope the publicity around this will lead to changes in their management (not to mention whoever is giving them such bad legal advice); at the very least, it should make people think a little more about their relationship to their jobs and their state.
I signed one of those things too, as a nurse for the S.F. Department of Public Health. Even though I'm not one now, I took being a public employee very seriously: we're working for our neighbors, and the government only exists because we've agreed to some ground rules. So I had no problem with promising to support the Constitution (something I wish our elected officials would do, too), and the document didn't seem like a commitment to do anything I shouldn't. Probably.
As a Quaker, I did have the same concerns that you did, but I didn't mark up my own copy or complain in any other way. I'm timid about these things -- too timid a lot of the time, so most people have no idea what I believe in. I didn't feel like I was breaking faith, because I never thought anyone could seriously construe "support" as anything other than "nonviolently support"; I thought the phrase "swear or affirm" made it redundant to cross out the "swear"; I rationalized that "allegiance" means being an ally, rather than being blindly obedient; and I cringed at the thought of trying to argue with a misinformed official over something with no real consequence. I certainly didn't imagine I could be fired... but now I think that makes it worse. If the thought of just having an annoying argument keeps me from being clear on where I stand, even when I think no other harm will come from it either way, then how much resolve will I really have when the stakes are higher? Thank you for reminding me of this.
The writer Tim O'Brien says that as a young man, he avoided situations that might call for a little bit of courage, on the theory that he could save up the courage and use it in an emergency. He found that it didn't work. Still that theory remains popular.
Anyway, I wish you the best in everything you're doing. Please stop by our Meeting if you're in San Francisco.
In the press coverage and on blogs, a lot of people have responded to this story with bewildered remarks like “They don’t really require teachers to shoot people, do they?” (since Kearney-Brown got fired for adding the word “nonviolently”) or, more generally, “What does defending the Constitution have to do with teaching math?” (since most people don’t know that this is a universal requirement for state employees). Some of Cal State’s original statements seemed to be meant to head off that argument, by saying that it’s not about the specific words—it’s just that this is a standard oath and you’re not allowed to change any part of it.
Now, to my non-lawyerly eyes, it looks like the more Cal State and Brown lean on the Smith case, the more they’re making it about the specific words: that is, they’re saying that the word “nonviolently” is incompatible and inconsistent with the duties of a public servant. So it would seem that they do require teachers to shoot people.
Added: Some writers have been referring to this as a “loyalty oath” and wondering whether it goes back to Cold War anticommunism. They’re more or less right. What we have here is an amended version of the 1952 “Levering oath”, which was made mandatory for all public employees after UC got in trouble for firing professors who wouldn’t sign a McCarthy-type loyalty oath. The original version required you to swear that you weren’t “a member of any group advocating overthrow of the government”, but that part was struck down in 1967, leaving just this vague remnant.
I have a new PO box address. Not many people were using the old one, but it's still printed on a bunch of mini-comics so you never know. The new one is on my contact page.
The old box was used by a plumbing company years ago, and no matter how many "no longer at this address dammit" cards I sent and how many times I asked the post office to check the name on the label, I got about 20-30 plumbing supply catalogs there every few weeks for the last three years. Can't wait to find out what I'll get at the new one!
Teacher fired over annotation of loyalty oath gets back job, with apology. (Actually, it's just the SF Chronicle that's calling it an "apology"; Cal State's statement was more along the lines of "You didn't have to make a big deal out of this, we were right, but let's just forget about it now.")
What the...?!!? I mean... buh... wha... it...
My God, it’s full of stars!
I’m linking to this video instead of embedding it on my page because I’m afraid if it appears on too many people’s screens at the same time, it’ll come to life and beam out of the screen and we’ll all be sucked into a cosmic vortex of swirly colors and blurry children and randomly appearing text and military geezer orations.
If you’re afraid to look, here’s the gist of it: John McCain is (a) the successor to Churchill and Teddy Roosevelt (in that order, which I guess means he’s moving backward in time); (b) grateful to America; (c) possibly a new Microsoft product; (d) somehow related to exploding galaxies and zooming traffic lights; (e) sort of imposing-looking, or at least taller than a podium, if you film him from below; (f) going to make sure we’ll spend our days fighting and fighting and fighting and fighting.
It’s really a challenge to try to count the unusual creative decisions in this ad. Dear Republicans, please, please, PLEASE keep making these.
(Added: Despite its total lack of making sense, this ad still seemed to say something real to me, and I finally figured out what: McCain just makes me kinda sad. I think he’s a dangerous politician, because he has a ton of aggressive energy and isn’t all that smart, but he’s clearly pretty damaged and I feel sorry for him. And this ad, instead of the Fox News-style martial thing they probably had in mind, has a kind of bleak, lost in time, slightly paranoid and lonely vibe. It’s like an ad for loading up on No-Doz and Robitussin and driving your truck all night down I-80 in the rain while wearing your grandfather’s Navy dress uniform and singing along to a dance remix of “Mairzy Doats”.)
When a guy like that goes around nailing people to the wall for financial shenanigans and busting call-girl houses, and then commits financial shenanigans in order to rent call girls, I’m guessing it’s not exactly hypocrisy in the traditional Oral Roberts mode. I’m guessing that he was totally sincere about the former, and that he really feels like a schmuck for the latter now that he got caught. Some people, especially smart people who’ve won a lot of hard fights, think winning proves the gods were on your side—so if you get caught, then you deserved to, but if you don’t, you’re cool.
So the hooker story is no big surprise. Some people think he was set up, and that wouldn’t be a surprise either, these days. In any case, I don’t think this kind of thing should force a Governor out of office, unless he was actually embezzling from the state, but I can’t say I’m sorry that he won’t be up for Attorney General. Not tragic, just stupid.
“In a surprise announcement, the Republican National Committee has revealed it is bankrupt. A spokesman for the party said they had plenty of money in their accounts last week, but today they just don’t know where the money has gone.”
At almost the same time, I caught up with this non-fictional story:
(last week:) “An official close to the NRCC said preliminary reviews of its bank statements and reports to the Federal Election Commission demonstrate clear discrepancies between ‘what [money] we have and what we should have.’ ‘We don’t know if it’s a big number or a small number,’ the official said. ‘It looks like something was stolen. But we don’t have an accurate number. We don’t know.’ .... [T]he committee discovered that no independent audits of the organization’s books had been performed since 2003.”
(today:) “The former treasurer for the National Republican Congressional Committee diverted hundreds of thousands of dollars—and possibly as much as $1 million—of the organization’s funds into his personal accounts, GOP officials said yesterday ...”
“Less sympathetic to our aims was Dr. C. S. Lewis, author of two of the very few works of space fiction that can be classed as literature—Out of the Silent Planet and Perelandra. Both of these fine books contained attacks on scientists in general, and astronauts in particular, which aroused my ire. I was especially incensed by a passage in Perelandra referring to ‘little Interplanetary Societies and Rocketry Clubs’...
“An extensive correspondence with Dr. Lewis led to a meeting in a famous Oxford pub, the Eastgate...Needless to say, neither side converted the other. But a fine time was had by all, and when, some hours later, we emerged a little unsteadily from the Eastgate, Dr. Lewis’ parting words were, ‘I’m sure you’re very wicked people—but how dull it would be if everyone was good.’”
—Arthur C. Clarke, “Armchair Astronauts,” Holiday magazine, 1966