It’s so simple!

Problem: At work, you check email, read the news/gossip/Facebook, or just generally use your mouse for non-work-related stuff a little too often, and because all of that stuff is infinitely more interesting than whatever task you’re putting off, a little too many minutes out of the day are devoted to it, and you end up not getting as much work done as you’d hoped.

And by “you” I mean “I.”

But from what I hear this isn’t an uncommon problem.

So, Joachim Posada, the “Don’t Eat the Marshmallow” guy, says that the habits of people who are best at resisting these kinds of temptations are the ones who take their own will power out of the equation. In other words, the kids who were able to resist eating one marshmallow in favor of getting two marshmallows for their efforts weren’t necessarily endowed with superior willpower, they merely found ways to distract themselves. They didn’t just sit there concentrating on not eating it, they changed the subject. It’s like the AA 12-Step Program or any good Quit Smoking plan. You don’t beat cigarettes by staring angrily at a pack of Camels, you do weird things like hide them or get a buddy to slap you every time you reach for one or glue your fingers together so you can’t hold a cigarette right. Willpower is like a muscle, it weakens easily, and you shouldn’t rely on it (after all, 88% of resolutions end in failure, so say that Sciencey people).

The upshot is: Don’t get determined to beat your bad habits, find a way to take them out of the equation. Don’t be a willpower hero.

Or . . . block all of your favorite sites on your work computer. Yup, treat yourself like you’re 14.

I’m telling you, this really works for me.

There are a few ways to do it; here are two:

1) Put the blacklist addresses into your hosts file. Good explanation here. It’s the more hardwired way of doing it, getting all up in your computer’s business.

2) Add a site-blocking extension to your browser, like this one for Firefox. You can add password protection, which may sound dumb because you’ll know the password, but it’s one more step to give your willpower time to check in before you’re back on PerezHilton.com for the 18th time before 11:30.

It doesn’t eliminate the need for willpower, of course. But this has really helped me. I’ll be at work, about to start a tedious task, and just looking for any excuse to goof off. I start eyeing my bookmarks. I might even click on one. But I’m promptly denied access to my fav blog (The Daily Dish) or news (The Christian Science Monitor) or whatever slackoff vehicle I was about to employ. My brain stalls for a second, and I go about my work. It’s not as much fun, but it’s a sight better than realizing 15 minutes later (okay, 30 minutes later) that I’ve just wasted 15 30 minutes cruising the Facebook.

If you don’t need to do this to stay focused, then you either have a better job than me (in which case, Well Done!) or you’re not nearly as ADHD as me.

Yup.

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Jay Mariotti

Anger is the second of the five stages of grief. Hand-in-hand with anger goes blame.

Jay Mariotti, whose perspectives I generally appreciate, is pissed off and outraged about the death of the Georgian luger (a word which spell check doesn’t recognize). Of course, in today’s environment, “outrage” is way, waaaaay overused. It’s the way our more cynical politicians score political points–demanding apologies and resignations and all of that junk for things which, divorced of their political implications, wouldn’t cause much more than an “Oh really, they said that?” and a shrug from most people.

I don’t think Jay’s totally fulla crap here–they probably should’ve done more to honor the guy’s death–and possibly delaying the opening ceremonies would’ve been the right move–and it does seem a little jerky for some athletes not to have had time to practice on the track.

BUT.

Things which are outrages: Darfur, price-fixing, bribery, racism, the plot of LOST.

Things which are tragedies, because shit just happens: Dale Earnhardt’s death (b/c they’re driving cars at 300 mph for your entertainment to begin with), JFK’s assassination (b/c you can’t stop every crazy asshole from doing crazy stuff), Haiti, recessions, and the death of Nodar Kumaritashvili (because they’re racing sleds at 90 mph for our entertainment to begin with).

Why is the difference important? Because with tragedies, you need to hang your head and grieve with the grieving, and swallow a hard pill. With outrages, you need to get mad and DO something about it.

And when everything’s an outrage, nothing’s an outrage. If we get equally worked up about genocide and one luger dying, we’ve got some priorities out of place.

Somebody oughta stop Robert Mugabe. He’s an outrage lots of people die and wallow in misery because of him. But no one needs to get on the warpath against the IOC or the Canadians. A little perspective here. We need some tasteful mourning, not distasteful finger-pointing.

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Where was I?

Remember the beginning of Mary Poppins? Mr. Banks calls for a constable on the telephone, for to seek out his runaway children. No sooner does he dial than one shows up at his door with Jane and Michael in tow. He says, “Oh, what wonderful service!”

When I called the cops after my place got broken into, they were literally knocking at my door in less than one minute. I still wonder how they did that.

After they’d filled out their report, they sent in someone to dust for fingerprints. They actually dusted for fingerprints! It was one of those rare times when you think you’re being childish for expecting something, and then it happens. In the end, I ended up with nothing but a router, doorknob, and TV that resembled powdered donuts. Ironic, right? Cuz of the . . . donuts . . . they were, you know . . . . . they were cops it’s . . funny . . . .

The duster-lady confirmed: They never come back, at least not for several months. So oddly enough, I could now afford to be pretty blase about my security.

I’m rather excited about the fact that they staked out my house and left with perhaps $30 worth of merchandise. I’ve broken it down into an hourly wage: Figure they got about $10 worth of change, and they sold the hard drive out of my fried laptop for $20 (the motherboard was dead and the RAM had been scavenged already). I assume it was two people. Dunno why, but let’s go with that. You don’t just march in and steal something, either. You find out someone’s habits, as well as the habits of the other people in the building, so you can plan a time when no one will hear you bust in. I figure at least 5 hours casing the joint, and 2 hours planning it. The whole “job” probably took an hour. Then, you try to boot up your laptop prize (surprise! It doesn’t work), and realize you’ve got to open it up and take out the memory just to get any worth out of it. Another hour. You take it down to your buddy Pinche to take it off your hands for $20. Another hour.

So that’s a total of 10 hours. Times two people it’s 20 hours. Divided by $30, that comes to $1.50 an hour for your hard work, asswipes! Also, I think it provides some lovely inverse/reverse irony about racial profiling (I’m, uh, the only white American-born person in my building, I think, and quite obviously not rich).

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Alright. Just this once. I’ve gotta say this.

I really hate LOST. I think it is a terribly, horribly written show with a lot of great actors and crew involved.

Ahem. First season was kinda cool. Sorta gritty for network TV–characters with real pasts and intertwining motivations for, y’know, plausible things: redemption, closure, Daddy-issues, running from the law, etc. The characters acted like characters. We got teased a lot with mysteries, but they were fairly contained. The introduction of a gun was intense and dramatic, and lent itself to a few really fascinating moments with actual gripping consequences.

And then Season Two happened, and the show has never recovered. (Yep, I’ve watched it all, for some masochistic reason. Hey, she’s cute.) Guns EVERYWHERE! Millions of people apparently living on the Island. Time travel! No one ever explains anything to anyone, even when it would clearly help everyone in involved to just go, “Okay, so here’s the sitch.” And, of course, everyone killing everyone else–not in a cool Lord of the Flies sort of way, but in a Steven Seagal kind of way. It all started when Michael inexplicably shot Libby and Anna Lucia for no particular reason whatsoever. As if taking his cue, everyone started doing completely ridiculous things, throwing away almost entirely the great characters lovingly sculpted by the first season. Locke builds a sweat lodge or something so that Eko can die. Rousseau battles insanity and loneliness long enough to find her daughter and then die. We meet this Jacob person just in time to see him kick the bucket. A couple of completely unknown, impossibly attractive twentysomethings show up and get bitten by a spider so they can . . die. Remember Walt, the kid they made such a fuss about with his crazy charmed life? Yeah, he’s gone. Dad died too.  At least Charlie got a nice water death with music and stuff. Plus, all new characters have two things: 1) a gun, and 2) an itchy trigger finger. It’s not gritty anymore, guys. It’s lazy, lazy, lazy, awful writing.

Think I’m off base? Alright then: Name one LOST character who hasn’t pointed a gun at someone. Go. I’m all for violence, but this show turns “plot devices” into plot bitches, to be kept locked in the basement and sodomized at will.

People talk about the show like there are all these great unknown wonders and they wanna know how they all fit together. Am I the only one who understands that the writers didn’t know what the hell they were doing, and they just kept writing manipulative garbage with lots of threats and jungle chases and because it would keep people hooked? We’re not watching Hitchcock here; it’s not part 1 of a finished classic. Why do you think they needed a year-long hiatus? They had to figure out how to finish it! It’s like hanging a sign outside your new restaurant that says “World Famous Souffle,” meanwhile in the kitchen the cooks are reading Cooking for Dummies. It’s all smoke (monsters) and mirrors, and boy have we bought it.

Take a show like 24. Very, very different. The show wouldn’t work if the folks writing the 8 p.m. episode don’t know what’s happening at 2 a.m., because they can’t just kill off characters randomly, invent new supernatural occurrences, and completely abandon plot points in favor of starting new ones.

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I think that’s the most common way it’s stated: “Yeah, my place got broken into.” I think it’s grammatically pretty slummy, but whatevs.

They broke in through the front door. Pretty audacious, because they had to come through 1) The front gate, which probably wasn’t closed, as is its usual state; 2) The door to the lobby, which has no lock; 3) The door from the lobby to the wing, which also has(had!) no lock. They took a crowbar to the door jamb, and then pretty much pushed hard enough that the old deadbolt broke.

They opened all the closets and rifled purposefully through things. But they didn’t leave a mess, interestingly enough. They looked in places where they suspected I might have things of value, but were apparently only after very specific things. For example, the drawer beneath the TV was open, but they didn’t take a nice microphone I had in there. They opened my Pictionary board game, which I found amusing. They dumped out my box-o-tech-junk. You know the one: USB cables, old router, old Gameboy games, old mouse. Oddly enough, they didn’t take any of that, or even my 2 GB flash drive or a nice battery charger I had in there. It was dumped out on the bed.

So what DID they take?

This is where it gets good. Their main score was a laptop. It was a 2-year old 15 inch HP one with a built-in webcam. But: The laptop didn’t work. A friend had given it to me in hopes it could be salvaged, but I’d determined that the motherboard was fried. I’d already scavenged the RAM cards. And seriously now: I’d literally been leaving that laptop out on the shelf right by the entrance as a decoy for possible burglars. I’m still somewhat incredulous that it . . well, it worked.

The only other thing they took was a very small jar of dimes and nickels, worth somewhere in the neighborhood of $8. I was actually more disappointed to lose that, to be perfectly honest, because there’s this entertaining video game that I like to play with my friend Victor at the Nickel Arcade, and I’d been salting away the those coins for a few months in order to go and nerd out for awhile.

Lingering impressions:

1) I have this picture of burglars who really weren’t all that bad. I mean, they left several things that they could have taken. And they didn’t make a total mess. I mean, I’m sure they were shitting themselves the entire time it was going on, looking over their shoulders. And the cops have told me they keep their little visits to less than 5 minutes before they split. Still, I did appreciate the nice stack that they left my papers in when they dumped out a box of old records.

2) You know that “I felt so violated” thing? I wasn’t expecting to feel that, thinking that it was simply the domain of excitable, hysterical, pampered people. Turns out I’m a bit judgmental (and colon-happy today): I did feel kind of violated. And I don’t consider myself excitable, hysterical, or pampered. It was sort of like having someone in the room while you’re pooping. “This is my space, where I walk around in my britches and eat cereal and sing Lady Gaga to myself while staring at the items in my fridge for no good reason. And you were in here, judging me for owning old Gameboy games.” Unsettling.

It took about five days to fade. Now I feel fine in my place. Really.

More on this to come.

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In one of those “Well, yeah. Right. Of course.” studies, researchers assert that they keep your brain young. (Via NY Times)

For awhile now, I’ve guarded an aphorism that I really should be quoted for someday when I’m famous: “People start turning into old farts the moment they get what they want.”

Seriously. Can anyone name something that turns the active brain off and closes the mind faster than 40 acres and a mule? You finally got that job/house/wife/tranquil neighborhood you wanted, so you settled in a bit. Cut off ties with friends you never really liked anyway. Subscribed to your favorite newspaper. Settled into a routine. Stopped keeping up with the latest trends in fashion/thought/art–after all, you’re tired of youthful hedonism and all of the keeping up with the Joneses. Surrounded yourself with like-minded folks–after all, it was all well and good staying up until three arguing in college, but now you’ve got real responsibilities.

Lickety split, you’re an old fogey. Your opinion hasn’t been challenged in 20 years, so naturally any challenge to your point of view, your routine, or your way of life comes as a slap in the face. You haven’t exercised that part of your brain in so long, you’re like a swimmer who’s been doing laps in a hot tub. When someone brings up the the pro-life movement or Obama’s immigration policy, you don’t just disagree with the other side, you literally don’t know how “those people” could think that way. Your face becomes a mask of revulsion, and the angry, platitudinous bullshit flows from you like exhaust from an old tailpipe.

I swear I’m not writing this because I just visited home for the holidays. I actually gotta give my parents props–they’re reasonable folks.

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I own a video game called Brain Age, for the hand-held Nintendo DS. In this game, I’m told by the esteemed Professor Kawashima that changes of scenery are good for the brain.

As I sit here in a room the size of a prison cell, to which I am confined for four days, that thought makes me wonder just a bit less why it feels like a vacation. Yes, I do have the internet, a good book, and my trusty DS to pass the time between spit samples, but I had all those things at home, too. Yet this feels nicer, more like I’m unwinding. Why izzat?

I think it’s because we don’t always acknowledge how important a change of scenery is to hitting the reset button on our brains. It’s why going for a walk is pleasing, and why sitting by a campfire or watching the ocean is so relaxing: The scenery is constantly changing, rippling, or flickering, and that soothes and quiets the gray matter.

This lady agrees, and applies it to the work environment. The staler your surrounds become to your eyes, the staler your thought processes become at work.

Time for me to go take down all the New Kids on the Block posters in my room.

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Sleep study!

For the past week and a half, I’ve been wearing a little medallion and a watch that measure how much light I’m getting and how much I’m moving around. Several days ago, they sat me in a darkish room in a lazy boy for 11 straight hours and measured my spit for melatonin every half hour. Now they’ve got me in a small room for 4 straight days, and they’re going to feed me melatonin pills awhile before bed each night, then have me stare at a bright light box in the morning, and see if they can move my bedtime up incrementally from midnight to 8 pm.

Makes sense to me. Morning light helps kick-start your day, as I understand it. It sort of chases the melatonin out of your system.

Why am I doing this? Well, the fact that it pays $800 for two weeks of participation doesn’t hurt. In fact, one of my fellow participants, Tracy, does this in lieu of working. I wouldn’t get too excited, though–you can’t really make a living off of just participating in studies like these.

I’m also looking forward, honestly, to the boredom of being forced to be in a room with not much to do, since I agree with the NY Times that boredom is underrated. Personally, it slows me down, lengthens the “thought-loops,” and makes my thinking feel more deliberate and deeper, which is always a good thing.

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Now that everyone’s a critic (see: Yelp, IMDB, etc.), there’s way too much hating going on out there. As illustrated beautifully in this, one of my favorite xkcd comics, there is a surplus of people expressing their awful opinions.

Clearly, people with asinine things to say are speaking up more than normal, sane people. From “ur a looser. stupid @ss” to “This pizza sucked! IT TASTED LIKE CARDBOARD!!!” we’re getting neck-deep in inane, pejorative babble (which is another reason why I love Andrew Sullivan’s blog: No comments allowed. You email him if you want to say something).

How did we get here? Well, I’d venture it has something to do with the nature of expressing one’s opinion in public. It seems to steadily transform you, in a not-good way. (Am I aware of the insidious hypocrisy at play here? Yes.)

My favorite Pixar quote, from the mouth of Anton Ego, the evil food critic in Ratatouille who has a change of heart:

“In many ways, the work of a critic is easy. We risk very little yet enjoy a position over those who offer up their work and their selves to our judgment. We thrive on negative criticism, which is fun to write and to read. But the bitter truth we critics must face, is that in the grand scheme of things, the average piece of junk is probably more meaningful than our criticism designating it so.”

When you’re no longer the one putting yourself out there with your own art, idea, or creation, and your purpose is merely to appear to have something interesting to say, it seems that you forget what it was like to put yourself out there.

Of course, fawning praise is just as bad as shrill and unreasonable criticism, there’s a vital place for hatin’–in fact, one of my favorite weekly columns is The Onion’s The Hater. But Jeez Louise. Let’s not get carried away.

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The liberal versus conservative distinction fascinates me, mainly for the fact that while most bifurcations of people into a mere two groups oversimplify, liberal vs. conservative seems to be a pretty standard, reliable meter in America. While, of course, there are moderates and libertarians and everything in between, still this bipolar distinction seems to be a pretty fair predictor of how someone is going to view a situation.

My contention has always been that at the root of the inclination to be one or the other is one’s priorities. Liberals don’t think that the sanctity of the family is an evil concept, nor to conservatives think social justice is a bad idea. Instead, they hate each other’s agendas. Springing from core priorities of justice, care, and dignity, liberals craft an agenda–let’s say the ACLU. The ACLU is an end product. Conservatives, on the other hand, build more on purity, tradition, and loyalty to craft an agenda–let’s say Focus on the Family. Focus on the Family is an end product. And thus we have end products whose different agendas are in conflict. Enter name-calling, teeth gnashing, and lots of accusations and pronouncements.

They even did a study!

And, the same guy gave an excellent TED talk about it!

I think a big problem comes when both sides argue that they’re more centered or reasonable, laying claim to “moderation” or “common sense.” Really, a moderate stance is just the domain of a fence-sitter with little conviction. Rather, I think the trick is to acknowledge one’s bias and then try to act moderately from an assumption of polarity. Lemme say that better: Go ahead and be a liberal/conservative, but then don’t be a jerk and claim the moral high ground.

I’m a liberal, and so I’ll cite this article in The New Republic, which begins by attacking Glenn Beck, but uses it as a means to explain a non-partisan concept: how common sense is on on hand overrated, and on the other hand neither common nor consensual.

There. Are we all cool now? No? Rats.

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