Louis C.K. said there are two kinds of people in the world: people who admit they pee in the shower, and f*cking liars. I think there is another way to split people; there are people who close a tab when they’re done with it, and people who always have about fifteen tabs open. I am the latter. I don’t know why I don’t close them, often I’ll hand my laptop to a friend and hear the familiar, “Why the hell do you have so many tabs open dude?” It’s oddly compulsive, I had an ex-girlfriend who would close all of my tabs when she used my laptop and it drove me round the bend. It gets even more bizarre when I realize that I have all of those websites bookmarked to the top of my browser, essentially eliminating the need for keeping any of the tabs open. I literally have a Chrome extension, called TooManyTabs, that lets me save tabs for later so they don’t use up too much of my GPU. I literally found and downloaded an app to save tabs because the number of them was slowing my computer down. I could have just started closing tabs, now instead the app reads twenty-one saved tabs. I’m a tab hoarder, if the internet had it’s own version of TLC I’d be on it.

The problem with this is that every time my eyes wander there’s a tab calling to me. Like a little square friend peeking over a wall and quietly yelling my name. Right now I have three Youtube tabs and a Netflix one at the top of my bar. Why I would need three tabs for Youtube when I’ve already seen the videos in them is beyond me. They are a distraction waiting to pounce whenever I get writer’s block. It’s like I’m a chicken who just kind of likes hanging around near the edge of a forest full of wolves, just because I ate some nice worms there last month. Over the course of this term I’ve really seen a trend emerging; most of my distractions are self-inflicted or easily avoidable. Why don’t I just put my phone on silent when I start my homework? Why don’t I say, “No thanks, I’ll hang out with you guys later,” why don’t I just close the tab that is only open because I couldn’t remember the lyrics to Fluorescent Adolescent? Writing this has been mildly cathartic though, but I don’t know if I feel good because I acknowledged the problem, or just because writing is one more distraction.

It certainly seems the internet is the biggest distraction in history, and perhaps the internet facilitates these compulsions we have; it could even be a healthier alternative. Better to hoard tabs than something physical, right? It seems everyone does it in some fashion; people’s iPods are full of music that they never listen to. People save everything they’ve ever written, or taken a picture of, on their laptops, even though they know they’ll never need to read a Writing 121 essay they wrote freshman year. Although… the internet and the abundance of storage could also exacerbate people’s compulsions. Maybe, instead of my hoarding spreading to my tabs, will it spread to other parts of my life? As our lives become more and more digital, will we start running out of space online too? Will the line begin to blur? Someday there could be no distinction between a digital distraction and a physical one. I make an arbitrary distinction between reading a book as a distraction verses reading an article online. Does the medium of a distraction matter? Is deleting tabs, or never removing unread emails from your inbox, on par with saving every card you ever got, or keeping clothing in your closet that you literally never wear? It really depends on what you personally define as a distraction verses a nuisance or a quirky habit.

I turned 23 this week and, despite the lack of Taylor Swift songs to summarize my experiences, it’s been a good week. Of course, as Murphy’s law dictates, I had a midterm, on Wednesday evening, which cut my plans to have a pint with every meal short.

Surprisingly though, it was not my birthday that distracted me the most. It was a game called Agar. Here’s a link to it, if you wanted to wonder where a few hours of your life just went: http://agar.io/.

The premise of the game is that you are a dot, and you grow bigger by eating other dots, or other players. That’s it. Oh, and there is a leader board. Now, for the life of me I don’t know why I wanted to be on the top of that leader board so badly. That freaking leader board has been the bane of my existence.

I think it’s my ego that is to blame. You see, you can name your little blob. Be warned though, you can literally name it anything, so the game is a minefield of racial slurs, and inflammatory language. That’s another problem, I couldn’t play the game in public for fear that someone would just see me staring at a huge dot on the screen emblazoned with, “NAZI”; them not realizing my own smaller dot was locked in a life or death struggle to get away.

But I digress, I really just wanted to see my name at the top of that leader board. And the longer I played, and the closer I got, the more invested I became. So I retreated to my room and this festering sore of an obsession grew. Of course, I am exaggerating, creative license is a blessing, but I was like a meth addict, and the key to Walter White’s lab was sitting at the top spot.

Most ironic of all, when I eventually consumed the player, “Go Study,” (I’m not joking, that was their name), I took the top spot. And that was it. I just kind of looked around my room at 3 in the morning and decided I should probably go drink some water.

In terms of hours spent, versus pay off, it was kind of like someone in a wheel chair entering a raffle then winning a treadmill. Now that example is extreme but you get the point.

I could of course analyse the game’s dynamics, the greed of it, the need for caution and risk, the parallels with consumerism. But really, it was just a stupid game, and I didn’t really have that much fun playing it, but not every distraction has a purpose. Still though, I wish I could become obsessed with my history homework for once. So I guess if you felt that reading this was a waste of time then that’s a little fitting.

 

So, my room has a smell. Not a nice smell, like scented candles. Not a smell that invokes good memories either though. Cinnamon reminds me of Christmas, if this smell reminded me of anything, it was probably a memory I repressed.

So, I left for Portland last week. I left my room smelling, well it smelled like a dude’s room. When I returned on Sunday, two of my housemates came tumbling out of their respective rooms, asking what the hell I’d left rotting in my room. Confused, I opened my door, and a distinct smell of death smacked me in the face. I turned, and politely asked, “What the fuck did you guys do to my room?”

I turned on my friend Michael, we’d been roommates freshman year, and had lived together since (I’m a senior now). I reminded him that my room had never smelt this badly in 3 years, so either something died in there, or there was something they weren’t telling me.

My two roommates went pale.

It wasn’t from fear though, the smell had just crept out of my room like a decrepit hobo that was rubbing himself on the furniture. I closed my door and we went outside. Luckily the hobo did not follow.

Of course, we did not find the source of the smell, and returned to the crime scene. They wished me luck as I dove into the tangy air that hung in the hellish place. The only thing preventing me from vomiting was the enraged belief that I would find the carcass of a skunk somewhere in my room. My roommates provided moral support by periodically sliding lit scented candles through the briefly cracked door. I took their gagging as words of support.

Every window was thrown open. The room looked as bright as day from the sheer amount of scented candles. But no matter where I looked I could not locate the source. I cleaned that room more spotless than it had probably been in history. But the smell remained, as if a giant fish had stolen Harry Potter’s invisibility cloak and was circling me. The smell was so thick I wouldn’t have been surprised if the candles had gone out from lack of oxygen.

Needless to say, sleeping was difficult. I arranged the candles around my bed to try and create a barrier of smell. It looked like I’d planned a romantic evening, right beside the dump.

My windows have not been closed all week. And I’ve taken to doing my homework in the garden. The smell, has luckily abated by now. Who know’s what caused it, or why it went away. Maybe something ate whatever was causing it.

So, that was a novel distraction. Usually my nose distracts me when something delicious is in the vicinity. I can’t complain too much though, at least my room is clean.