Puppet Slam 2008

It’s a buzzing.

I just watched an incredible episode of an incredible show. I’ve never been more affected by a TV show. Thanks to my brother Karl for the fervent recommendation. After the show, I sat down to continue checking out unread items from my RSS reader, and after about 2 minutes I couldn’t take it anymore. I could feel the pure emotion and potential seed of inspiration slipping away, muted and diluted by the oncoming buzz. Inside the buzz, I can’t have passion, only curiosity. In the middle of the buzz, I can’t feel sorrow, only a vague dissatisfaction. And in the sound of the buzz, my inner monologue is pushed steadily closer to the word I hate the most: “Meh.”

I show terrible symptoms of the buzz.

• At least once a day: I am inspired to write somebody. I open my email, notice unread messages, breeze through them, file them away, and then exit my email, content that I have accomplished what I meant to do.
• In the summer of 2002, I was paid to sit for 40 hours a week at the circulation desk with a sweet laptop and a blazing Internet connection. Most days, I shut down the laptop after 8 hours unable to tell you what it is I did that day.
• My girlfriend has learned to completely disregard my assurances that I will be ready to join her for dinner in “just a minute”, or that I will be to bed “in just a little bit”. My word means nothing.
• Often, I will have a 2 minute personal errand to do during the work day, yet will not pull away enough to do it. This errand could stay undone for days, weeks, or months.

Many people have mastered the buzz. In fact, many thrive on it. Their brains search best breadth-first, and multitasking is their natural way. Like these people, I have adapted to my profession and my workspaces by embracing these patterns. Unlike these people, it does me incredible harm.

I am blessed with a brain that can achieve great focus, perform well at mechanics and intuition, and often with great speed. But you’d never know it to talk with me—I ramble, and repeat myself. And you’d never know it to watch me code—I make mistakes and then fix them, in a repeating cycle, doing both with such speed that it tends to come out “average”. I am also highly susceptible to distraction.

So I’m not fast, and I’m not efficient. My frantic and ambitious lifestyle doesn’t help, where I hardly ever take breaks I’m not forced to, and I sleep only when I’m tired. But the way I’ve evolved to interact with my computer and its constant buzz is an equal partner in the story of my wasted potential.

I’m not saying I need to smash in my computer screen with a bat, as I first imagined doing at the age of 12, for reasons prophetically similar to these. The buzz is not evil. Put more positively, the buzz is a hum, the hum of life and the people living it. It is possible to approach the hum with a purpose, to remain centered inside it, and to grapple with a tendril of it that you wish to change. But if you approach the hive with only the desire to kill some time, the cry of your time’s death will be drowned out entirely by the sound of the buzz.