In our class we have talked non-stop about time, ironically non-stop like a clock. Time is relative to everything, things are structured from the construct. I just wish we had a grasp of it. Sometimes I dose off in conversations and don’t realize what’s happening in the now. Wishing that I had the remote of my life to rewind and pause for a moment. Sometimes thing go so fast that I can’t resonate it all. I just want to go from one thing to the next naturally without having an intention.

I try to write sometimes for classes or for things that I need to try and create stuff for (projects). This is when time feels stone cold. Time acts as that tomb stone Moses mounted. It reflects on your actions and thoughts making you choose how to react. I don’t enjoy it and I just want to write things out of instinct and spontaneity. Preparation is good in amounts but sometimes its overbearing. I don’t know where my rant was going and maybe I’m just mad because I don’t get enough Linkdin endorsed Time Management skills. I just want to dwell in the current.

Initially, I thought I knew what I was going to write for this blog post. I was going to talk about how people get distracted through observing others and what they’re doing. This was inspired mostly by the millions of blog posts on how the blog post writers espy people on their phones in public.  However, I got stuck on this idea about what distraction means…It means you are becoming unfocused. Dictionaries describe it as “an extreme agitation of the mind or emotions” or a “diversion”. So backtracking to the phone peeping authors, are these authors witnessing distractions..? Yes and no. That’s a little too subjective to what the situation could consist of. I started to think about how these authors are so focused on trying to get a story about how society is so disconnected and anti-social. I wondered if these authors would look even closer into peoples’ phones and maybe get distracted from their work. They could see that this person is looking at photos of their family members or playing a game to kill time. Maybe the authors get infatuated with the person’s attractiveness, or they see that the person has been biting their nails. I find this to be the inception of distractions. Inception, as in like the movie inception where Leo is just going to a dream within a dream within a dream, etc. And how inception means the start of something. The inception of distractions is started from people trying to stay focused, getting their work done and then any little meticulous thing will be start the distraction. I feel as if in this class we have given distractions a negative connotation. But the inception of distractions can be good or bad.  Humans have the free will to be curious, and most importantly to think. If we were able to read each others heads we would probably all say What The Fuck. I feel like distractions play a role in how we shape ideas, thoughts, even other realizations. I mean why do people say “Focus” rather than “Don’t Focus”, it’s because we’re inclined to do so.

(I attempt an approach similar to Chuck Palahniuk in Fight Club) You go to the library, you sit down and gather your things. You place everything where it needs to be to get work done. The setting needs to be right so you put a full length album of Radiohead on to cancel out the noise of the person 5 desks down from you eating cheetos. What a distasteful way to do homework, your keyboard is going to need to be dusted off after every new cheese curd. Not to mention that your breath will be similar to a basset hounds. The work is about to start but you realize something, that you want to make a doodle and personal poetry about Thom Yorke and how he is making you feel.

School work gets in the way of personal work. I find myself getting distracted from my bountiful homework to try and pursue something that I’m intrigued with and that I can find catharsis within. These distractions lead me to not getting my school work done in time to be proficient in school. But am I gaining more value out of doing something that I’m generally interested in? I think I gain value out of both, but sometimes I just have to go with my inept feeling of doing something that just pops into my head. Go with the gut.

When we watched the scene in Fight Club where the narrator (Norton) says people act as slaves to corporations like Starbucks and IKEA, I started to hone in how he described it as a slavery. As if these Starbucks workers were wearing giant Mermaid heads, like those on the sleeve of their drinks, and were whipping customers to not use so much cream for their coffees. I really got lost in this parallel the narrator sets up, as if all these people that buy into a brand are actually buying into a brand’s morals. Starbucks was running in my head about things they stand for, and they are a pretty awesome company with how they run things. I remember seeing a video in my advertising class where a bunch of Starbucks company internal employees discussed race on an open floor (this was around the time of the Mike Brown incident). I thought this was such an interesting thing for a brand to do since race is such a touchy subject.    Once I saw Norton on the screen again, I started to wonder about Palanuick being pretty cynical. Maybe he doesn’t like really sweet coffee or Sweedish furniture, after all he is from Portland where anything local is supported with a cult following.

The world as we know it will not fall victim to Starbucks taking over the planet, even though I would love to see their workers wearing giant mermaid head masks. But then I thought about our society, and how America is a victim to the corporate heads (a victim to a lot of things) who are dishing out lobbyists and political think tanks to cater to the corporate heads needs…Oh I mean just the very top .01 percent of America. That absurd gap of inequality that is reality. So Starbucks wasn’t my worry on this mental walk that I had. I was worried that maybe someone will get inspired from Fight Club and try to rebel against corporations to make everyone start on ground zero again. Let’s hope they look like Brad Pitt.

Focusing on a subject seems to be a difficult task for me, is this because I was told by a peer’s parent in pre school that I had ADHD? I personally don’t know. When I was sitting in my Environmental Literature class, I started to doze off in the words on the projection screen. I started to take mental walks just thinking about words that we were using to describe environmental writers.

They were called “Campfire Philosophers.” This triggered me to search for the closest people I knew that were considered among these campfire philosophers. My friend named Nathan, goes by Nat, popped into my head. He was an eagle scout who would show me his poetry influenced by nature. I thought of a particular poem he wrote about the ocean and how it talked about the waves having a contrast of serene and violent characteristics. How a wave can crash and be calm at the same time; this always reminds me of a perfect incongruity.  In class, now we are talking about Thoreau. I initially think to a time when someone told me Thoreau was a poser and didn’t visit the “Real Outdoors”. They told me that he was just on his mother’s land in the back of their great estate camping out in the big ol’ wilderness. I think this was my Dad or my high school senior year professor Mr. Ward.

The class started to get into small groups to discuss the readings and I was initially engaged with our conversations until I heard two people in the class arguing. They were arguing about Thoreau and if he was arrogant or not. The one in favor of Thoreau being a human of his own decent, changing the world one book at a time, was talking in a manner that reminded me of a raspy horse. It seemed like he had a voice that was scratched by forks and I thought of him as a cartoon because the other person arguing was not agreeing with one thing he said. I thought of this because of his tone of voice. I started to think of how your tone reflects off of you and when he speaks like a pompous donkey that people really won’t like you or your opinion.

I got off my mental walk and started to help my group again answer the questions. But you learn a lot on those mental walks. Good thing I can’t stop myself from going on those.