Distractions

Last night, I watched the State of the Union address. Some of it I found quite interesting, but most of it was merely political nonsense. Most of the SOTU is merely political posturing. It would be nice if Congress would sit their quietly and listen instead of clapping and not clapping to make a political statement every five words, then we could listen and the President could finish. Interruptions aggravate me and I get bored. My students often love to interrupt me in hopes of getting me off subject, or to cause me to lose my train of thought, resulting in what they think will be less work for them. They never have caught on that it ends up being more work for them, not less work, but back to the SOTU. I did like Obama’s idea of free community college education. It should expand the need for more college teaching jobs, which would be good for me and hopefully get me out of teaching high school and back to teaching college. The thing is, with a Republican Congress, I don’t think it will pass. Republicans seem to be allergic to the word “free.” And I know, it won’t actually be free (I just taught in economics the idea of TINSTAAFL–There is no such thing as a free lunch). The American people will have to be taxed more, and we all know that if Republicans raise taxes it will be on the lower and middle class and not the upper income levels, where I think there should at least be less loopholes if not higher taxes for those who can afford them.

However, the SOTU address was not the major distraction of the night. I’m not for sure what came up in the SOTU, but something started me googling a topic. Oh, I remeber what it was, they showed Ruth Bader Ginsburg, and I thought how ancient she looks, which made me wonder just how old she actually is, so I googled it. That lead to me researching Sandra Day O’Connor and other Supreme Court Justices, including Hugo Black from Alabama. Research and learning is one of my favorite things. Even as a kid, I used to go pull an encyclopedia off the bookshelf to look something up, and as I was trying to find one thing, I’d see numerous other things I wanted to read about, so I’d mark those with a finger. I’d read the one I’d started out to read then read the others. Before I knew it, I’d looked at a dozen or more articles in that volume of the encyclopedia and then I’d have some other interest that I wanted to look up, so I’d put that encyclopedia volume up and get down another. This could go on for an hour or so until I got tired.

Now with the internet, I can begin searching for something and open numerous tabs in my browser and then read each one. Often there is a hyperlink or two that I also want to check out, so I open a few more tabs. It’s a lot easier than getting down another volume of the encyclopedia, but it traps me in a vicious cycle of never ending curiosity and research. Eventually, I exhaust myself or I just can’t absorb any more information at that time, so I close my browser. But like last night, this can last not just and hour but three or four hours.

The biggest problem is that sometimes I get so carried away in reading different things, that I forget what my original plan was for the evening. Last night, I’d planned on answering about a half a dozen emails that need to be replied to and writing a blog post for today, but then I realized that it was almost 11 pm and I needed to get some sleep. So the email replies and the blog post I’d originally planned will have to wait until tonight when I will have the time to write them. Since I will have limited internet access tonight (I’m staying with my grandmother, long story but she asked and since she’s my last grandparent, I could hardly say no), I will hopefully get those emails replied to and be able to write the post I’d originally intended for today.