A bamboo stick of thoughts

I think I've had this realisation before.
I cannot multi-task.
"Modern life" or whatever you want to call it, tempts us to multi-task, or maybe the better word would be multi-procrastinate. Normally I am the devil's advocate for anyone who claims the evils of today's society. But with this, I am on board with the naysayers.
Facebook. iPhones. Oh god, my iPhone. Everything 'more interesting' than the current task at hand is only a click away.
It was never impossible to procrastinate. There were always windows to look out of. Doodles to sketch. Daydreams. But now, with electronics and the internet, distractions are so close to the surface, so near. Got a spare second before starting law readings? How about you have a quick look at that new blog you found. Or, you know, read ALL THE ARCHIVES over an obsessive three days. Or that.
My habits haven't let me down in any major way. From an outsider's perspective I think I'd look like I was doing pretty fine. I have a good GPA. I seem to balance the different parts of my life well.
It's silly, to compare the 'success' of me-now to a me-as-kid. Small pond, big pond. But at the moment I miss feeling effortlessly capable.
This is from a passage about deaf children that I recently read for linguistics, that I wanted to skip back and read again and again:

"The normal hearing child has a constantly expanding linguistic experience and is constantly experimenting in his own use of it. He is bathed in language and we can safely trust that some of it will flow into channls of utterance." *

I don't anyone can produce their best at something until they're 'bathed' in it. At the end of listening to my con law lecture I tuned out and clicked onto facebook, because the lecturer had finished with the content and moved on to some kind of quiz about high court judges and historical moments. But, you know, (and I know this sounds stupid) when I was in primary school I dug that kind of stuff. I didn't separate the big picture from the facts I needed to know for the test. It was all knowledge, it was all interesting, and from being bathed in the big picture I ended up nailing the little picture stuff with no difficulty. Maybe I need to take some tips from my 11-year-old self.

It's not that I lack curiosity in general - it's the directing of my interest towards the topic at hand that I need to work on. I need to stop seeing my current uni work as stifling my interest for [insert obsession of the moment] and realise that its something I can engage with in itself.

And I do, sometimes. What begins as superficial 'work' often works its way into me, albeit slowly.

This is not the entry that I sat down to write. I was going to talk about pub crawls, lying in bed with DW, the awesomeness of limewire and new music, the affection I feel for the hostel and its 'characters' after hearing H describe situational mishaps.

Instead, I'll leave you with another passage.

"She could see it all so clearly, so commandingly, when she looked: it was when she took her brush in hand that the whole thing changed. It was in that moment's flight between the picture and her canvas that the demons set on her who often brought her to the verge of teas and made this passage from conception to work as dreadful as any down a dark passage for a child. Such she often felt herself - struggling against terrific odds to maintain her courage; to say: 'But this what I see; this is what I see,' and so to clasp some miserable remnant of her vision to her breast, which a thousand forces did their best to pluck from her. And it was then too, in that chill and windy way, as she began to paint, that there forced themselves upon her other things, her own inadequacy, her insignificance, keeping house for her father of the Brompton Road, and had much ado to control her impulse to fling herself (thank Heaven she had always resisted so far) at Mrs. Ramsay's knee and say to her - but what could one say to her? 'I'm in love with you?' No, that was not true. 'I'm in love with this all', waving her hand at the hedge, at the house, at the children? It was absurd, it was impossible. One could not say what one meant." **

*M. M. Lewis, Language and Personality in Deaf Children
**Virginia Woolf, To the Lighthouse

Sorry for the weird entry.

- khere was already the past.