This Thus

There are two kinds of people in the world: ones who believe there is only one proper and valid epistemology to approach an understanding of the world and the others, who are wrong.

I don’t like this claim in religion or politics or in academia. There is too much room for someone to assume that they have the one true answer and curtail discussion and freedom. However, I do not think that every single thing in the entire whole universe is completely relative in value and that you can never make moral, philosophical, or scholarly judgements about the worth of a fact/idea/argument/theory. You can claim that there are multiple means of organizing our ways of knowing about human culture, psychology, and literature without necessarily claiming that the truth value inherent to those various epistemologies is equivalent to a mathematical proof or a scientific theory.

Thoughts?

Everyone has some sort of todo list. Some people keep it in their head, some on paper, some on notecards, some in various forms of technology. I use Things because it syncs with my iPhone and my iPad and I like the user interface and the ease with which I can use it with Geektool. Because I like having a constant reminder of what I most need to do, I use Geektool to get all items in my Today list and put them directly on my desktop, like so:

However, as every grad student knows, that list can be intimidatingly large even if you are just looking at what you want to accomplish in one day. I don’t know about you, but the bigger that list is, the less eager I am to sit down and start getting things done. So the last few days I’ve started trying a new strategy. In Things, there is an area called “Inbox” and each morning, I will put all but 3 or 4 of my Today tasks back into the Inbox until I finish my Today tasks, then I’ll go and pull out several more tasks, put them in the Today list and proceed from there. Lather, rinse, repeat.

While this requires me to be diligent about moving items from Inbox to Today, I am finding that I’m much more likely to finish a list of todo items and feel some sense of progress using this method rather than staring down a list of 15 or more items and just wanting to give up.

Andy Ihnatko has a interesting article up on the Chicaco Sun-Times that should be read by every graduate student. In short, he summarizes a few of the key points made by Matt Richtel on a recent interview with NPR’s Fresh Air about how the brain doesn’t really multi-task and that whenever we try to do so we are cheating ourselves out of our potential. I haven’t listened to the Fresh Air interview yet, but I’ve been becoming more and more aware of how important it is to focus on things you care about, whether that is writing creative fiction, returning emails, putting together a lesson plan, or reading an article, etc. Now, we are, it appears, wired to lose focus pretty quickly. As Ihnatko put it (with his usual flair for style and humor):

Distraction is a feature of our OS, a bit of legacy code designed to keep us alive as cavemen. We were smart enough and creative enough to figure out how to turn a chunk of volcanic glass into an axe head, but we’d get killed if we got so wrapped up in the creative process that the sound of a hungry growl from the nearby bushes failed to instantly command our full attention.

So in a way, every time there’s something clamoring for our attention in our peripheral perception — be it a sound or something visual — some old part of our brain processes it as a downscaled version of a panther attack.Distraction is a feature of our OS, a bit of legacy code designed to keep us alive as cavemen. We were smart enough and creative enough to figure out how to turn a chunk of volcanic glass into an axe head, but we’d get killed if we got so wrapped up in the creative process that the sound of a hungry growl from the nearby bushes failed to instantly command our full attention.

So in a way, every time there’s something clamoring for our attention in our peripheral perception — be it a sound or something visual — some old part of our brain processes it as a downscaled version of a panther attack.

Ihnatko proceeds to cover some of his own attempts to change his relationship to distraction.

I suggest you read his entire article here and you can find the Fresh Air podcast here.

Of course, as graduate students, our attention is finite and our tasks seemingly infinite, so how do we try to minimize distractions and focus on the task at hand when our brain keeps worrying about the 12 other articles we need to read, the research that we should have done yesterday, the grading that needs to be done, the paper that needs to be researched, and the laundry, grocery shopping, apartment cleaning that somehow don’t magically happen by themselves?

Good question. Though I think minimizing distractions from Facebook and Twitter and email might be a good place to start. Also, I think the admonishment that Ihnatko takes from Richtel about letting yourself have some time to do nothing and to not fear boredom is very important. I know that often I’ll be in such a hurry to get through my reading for a class that I don’t take the time to reflect on an article after finishing it, or even just let my brain rest for a few minutes before going on to the next task. I’m definitely going to start being more aware of taking the time to let my brain take a break. Next week I’ll try not to check Twitter and Facebook and my RSS feeds on my phone while on the bus to school and instead just relax and soft focus on the world around me and let subconscious do its thing without my conscious mind being bombarded with information–much of it not even remotely important–constantly.

I’m coming to the realization that one of the cornerstones of making sure I stay healthy and balanced as a grad student is making sure I get enough sleep on a regular basis. Sure there might be times when deadlines are tight that I have to stay up late working, but I need to start working on getting to bed earlier than I have been. And being smarter about preparing for bed. A lot of sleep folk talk about staying away from bright screens before bed, and not getting in the habit if reading or doing other things in bed before trying to sleep. Every time I read something along those lines, I shrug and think briefly about changing my reading and bedtime habits and then I don’t.

The challenge this week is three-fold:

• Lights out by 11 pm. No exceptions.
• If I’m reading before bed, I do it downstairs on the futon and not actually in bed like I normally do.
• No iPhone next to the bed. It’s too easy when I can’t sleep to check Facebook or Twitter and turn on that relatively bright screen which then probably tricks my brain into not being sleepy and so I can’t sleep when I turn the iPhone off and then get restless so turn it back on to read or whatnot.

If I’m not tired, I can get up early enough to workout at the beginning of my day, which means that I start off the day with getting myself moving and feeling good about myself, and that can translate into a better day in general and more focus during the day. So it’s not just about getting enough sleep, it’s about sleep as a foundation for a lot of other things, including my writing, my schoolwork and my general outlook on life.

One of my seminars this semester is called “The Formation of the Americas” and in it we are looking at theatre and performance in Central and South America from pre-Hispanic times to conquest and then colonization. Of concern to many of us in the class is how we can even begin to imagine what the world was like for people 400 years ago and from a culture so different from our own.

We read about different notions of time and the universe. Of sacrifice and cannibalism. Then we read about the actions of the Spanish and the violence they delivered upon the native bodies in those times and places and we temper our horror with a notion of cultural relativism (neither of which are entirely wrong, neither of which are entirely right).

Are we so different?

We do not sacrifice men and women on an alter by cutting out their hearts.

We do not order the rape and slaughter of thousands of indigenous people.

We go about in a world so seemingly different than the “New World” of 400 years ago that one instinct is to make of that time, that place, an alien world.

But who makes our clothes? Who assembles our precious electronics? How many children are killed in our name in far off lands when entire villages are destroyed in firefights and missiles? How many people died for that diamond ring encircling a loved one’s finger?

When Guantanamo Bay holds people that are known to be innocent of terrorism but still detained because . . . well, just because, how is that not sacrificing the bodies of the innocent upon an alter of power?

One might say that the population at the time, in that place, didn’t see those acts of sacrifice and power as wrong in any way and I wonder, do we? Do we really see the acts perpetrated in the name of national security as wrong? Do we see those sacrificed on the altar of unbridled capitalism as wronged or simply unfortunate? Might we not be as culpable in the destruction of lives as any of the Mexica Priests or the Conquistadors. Our technology is built upon the destruction of resources and, quite often, the health and lives of millions. Our economy is predicated upon the necessity for poverty. The comfort and relative luxury of our lives (even those of us who are grad students) is built upon the blood and sweat and, yes, lives of others less fortunate than us.

Are we so very different or do we just hold the priestly knives and the conquering swords at a distance? Or do we simply (there is no simply about it) allow ourselves the illusion that we are not like the past, that we are not like them, or that they are not like us. Because if they are like us, if we are like them, what responsibilities would such a recognition unleash?

Let me be quite specific here and stop talking about some general and unnamed plurality:

Do I really have less blood on my hands than those in the past when I make no effort to stop the injustices committed and the blood that flows in my name for my material wealth, for my technological fetishes, or for my luxuries that stem directly from the inequalities and violences that the American Empire has meted out on many parts of the world? Is that blood any less attributable to issues of power and wealth and ideology now than 400 years ago?