I think I must have ADD (or one of its derivatives).  Ok, not really, I guess, because I know that that is a medical condition, and that there are people who truly do suffer from this disorder.  The ADD that aflicts me (and about half the people I talk to and overhear in conversations at the grocery store) is more of a virtual ADD — a self-inflicted attention deficiancy that has come as a result of withdrawals from the perpetual stimuli and a steady stream of instant sensory gratification.

My computer at work is broken today, and as I’ve been sitting watching the hour glass float for twenty minutes (if not literally, awfully close) between each step I take towards fixing it, I have run out of things to do. I have drawn up an object model for my current project on the white board in my cubicle — three times over — and I have documented its many details in the same notepad I am now drafting this blog entry.

Last night, Naomi took the kids up to Hunstville to visit her brother Nathan, which left me as a bachelor for the evening.  I don’t normally watch much television, but last night, FX was broadcasting American History X which I had never seen before, and I like Edward Norton, so I decided to watch it.  (It was flipping interesting, but the freaking censorship overdubs were a bit awkward and funny at times).  During commercial breaks, I alternately strummed my guitar and went online.  The adverts didn’t get any longer, but my distractions did, and by the end, I was surfing the web with a guitar in my lap as I watched the movie out of the corner of my eye.  I had to stop and turn for the dramatic parts, but the last half was a blur, and, while I don’t want to spoil the ending for anyone else out there, I’m pretty sure it had something to do with a seagull that flew off into the sunset.

All that to say that I cannot keep still.  I also know that I am not alone (judging from the cellphone conversations I’ve eavesdropped on in supermarkets).  We are a society of tremendous and mobile technology.  We have mechanisms to keep us connected to entertainment and information at all times: 100 Gigabytes of our most (mostest) favorite music, Wifi connections to the World Wide Web, and cellphones that feed the voices of our friends and family into our ears with hands-free, on-the-go convenience, and increasngly, all-in-one devices that offer us this world in one small, self-contained box.  We’re the generation that invented the box that holds the world, and we’re doing our best to ensure everyone has one.

We’re also the generation of ADD (and its 31 flavors), restless leg syndrome, and commercials for medicine that we should remind our doctors that we need;  Pills that sound, increasingly, like they were named after alien life forms or killer robots or something (Greetings, Human! I am Prozac, from the planet Zoloft.  We Prilosec are a gentle race, and We come in peace (heh heh), Earthling, to bring you this magic medicine)

We are a generation for whom the world is always at our fingertips, and yet, sleep elludes us…as the streaming flow of info is quick to remind me.  I’m pretty sure I saw Abraham Lincoln, a talking beaver, and a technicolor butterfly last night while my guitar gently screeched, and no, I’m not referring to some far-out, psychodelic experience, man…Insomnia commercials are my anti-drug. 

 But enough of the chit-chat…I think I need to tweak the drawing on my dry-erase board just a bit more.