Fragmented self

I haven't been able to settle down since school started in October. Part of it is because I'm single again, and there's nothing quite like that for making you feel like a boat adrift. Another reason is that I'm involved in too many school activities that keep pulling at me in about 10 different directions. I field e-mails and attend meetings for a business conference I'm helping to plan, do inanely time-consuming things like design a T-shirt and police a Yahoo Group for a very active school club of which I'm an officer, and generally juggle too many little tasks related to all these activities. Plus I'm trying to start a business (www.mrfob.com) with some classmates, find a few hours a week to devote to my part-time job, and do just enough freelance writing assignments to keep that door open. And I have about 3 friends I've promised to have dinner with and a handful of others to whom I owe an e-mail or phone call big time.

But there's a more pernicious reason why I'm feeling like I have been splintered into a thousand little pieces: The information age. It's causing me to adapt in ways that apparently include losing some key mental faculties. While my typing speed is faster than ever (when I really get going, my fingers practically all hit the keys at the same time), my attention span is about 2 seconds because there's always an IM or text message to attend to or one of my four e-mail accounts to check or something that I just remembered I have to look up on Wikipedia.

My ability to recall information has become very weak (I suspect that my brain knows it can just Google almost anything, so it's packed up and gone on an extended vacation or something). My ability to focus is completely shot. I've become the ultimate multi-tasker, in that I do everything okay but nothing very well. Needless to say, I've been spending precious little time engaged in quiet study and my grades are suffering. But you'll find me in a bar on a Wednesday night, with my cell phone on "vibrate" in my back pocket!

It's a really unsettling frame of mind to be in. It reminds me of how I feel when I have coffee that's a little strong, and my brain kind of starts to itch. But unlike with a cup of coffee, which I have no problem throwing away once I've had enough, somehow I don't learn my lesson with the things that help me achieve this indispensable feeling of connectivity. I almost never leave my cell phone behind, and the first thing I do when I get home is plug in my laptop. If I don't do it right away, I'm really conscious of the fact the entire time until I do plug in.

I have in mind some advice that my father often gives me. There's no good translation for it in English, but it's literally something like "Don't get flustered," and what it really means is "Chill out." Brent's mom has a similar take on things, in that she always told him not do do more than one thing at a time, like don't cook while talking on the phone. They would both be very disappointed in me.