On beating the machine

A couple months ago, this strip came out on xkcd, a webcomic that I read:

(www.xkcd.com/862)

What really made me stop and pay attention wasn't the punch line, which is kind of inscrutable really, but the alt-text, which is a thing this guy does where some words pop up when you hover your mouse over the picture when you're reading it on the site. The alt-text, unusually long, goes like this: "After years of trying, I broke this habit in a day by decoupling the action and the neurological reward. I set up a simple 30-second delay I had to wait through, in which I couldn't do anything else, before any new page or chat client would load (and only allowed one to run at once). The urge to check all those sites magically vanished--and my 'productive' computer use was unaffected."

I don't know if I've talked about it much, but for a long time I've had the same exact problem that Luke here had. I became addicted to the internet—I'm convinced that that's the best way to explain what happened. Most nights, if I had a computer (which I usually did) and nothing in particular to do, I would stay up until about 3:00 reading things I didn't really have a compelling reason to read. Mainly it was webcomics and funny things. I enjoyed the stuff I was reading, but the problem with funny stuff on the internet is that even though you enjoy it, there's just so much funny stuff on the internet. Everyone knows the internet is first and foremost full of porn, but underneath that, there's another thriving layer of funny stuff. It's impossible to read and watch it all. But for a long time I tried my darnedest. It was really a problem. It cut into my sleep schedule, and it cut out my interactions with real people. I knew it was a problem, too, and I wrote about it in my journal night after night. Each night I would say something like: "Then I spent too much time on the internet and then went to sleep." At first this would be accompanied with, "No more of this. I will improve." Later on it became, "All right, that was ridiculous. No more internet for the rest of the week, outside essential stuff like emails." And then there were variations like, "I went way over the one hour I allotted myself for internet today. I'll take it out of tomorrow's allowance." But I always slipped back into the same old patterns.

Then that xkcd comic came out, with an alt-text that talked about a solution that sounded downright workable. I had no idea how to implement a 30-second delay like the one he talked about, but I found an add-on that I could install on my browser that does something similar. It's called StayFocusd. It only works on Chrome, but there are things like it for other browsers, like Firefox. The basic principle is that you give it a list of sites where you waste a lot of your time, and it allows you a certain amount of time per day to spend looking at those sites. There are all sorts of customizations you can do, depending on how much self-control you have and how high your standards are for yourself. You can allow yourself certain unproductive hours each day, when you're free to visit whatever sites you want, if you're not too concerned about that. Or on the other hand, you can set it so that to change any settings (like to give yourself more time, or to take some sites off the list), you first have to type a paragraph about procrastination, letter for letter, with no typos and no backspacing. I've tried it. It's pretty much impossible.

It's sort of a booster for self-control. I have it set to allow me 15 minutes a day. By now I've gotten pretty used to not going to all the sites I used to go to for screwing around. In fact, I feel like I may even have managed to get myself to lose the taste for them—although I haven't tried taking turning off the add-on yet. I might do that sometime in the future, but for now it's too useful, and my life is too stressful—I always want to blow off some steam by watching stupid YouTube videos or something. What I'm getting at, though is that I feel like I've finally succeeded at kicking my years-long internet addiction, and, well, it feels really good.

Speaking of a stressful life! The past couple weeks have been possibly the busiest ones I've ever had here. In the last nights, I've pulled an all-nighter, then slept for five hours, then slept for 3½ hours. I've also slept partway through two classes while napping off my sleepless nights. It's because my due dates for all of my classes all coalesced in these two weeks. On the all-nighter, I was writing up the results of my analysis of the data from my MAP. It took forever, but in the end, it was cool, because it confirmed my hypothesis, or at least one of them. On the five-hour night I had to write a methods section for an imaginary research proposal, like the MAP proposal I wrote, except that I'm not actually going to do this project. Last night was the 3½-hour night, which was when I was writing a literature review for my class about mapping stuff. All very time-consuming stuff. Before that was more, different, time-consuming stuff. I've been pretty much unable to breathe for two weeks. This weekend I can catch up on sleep, and then do things, things that I want to do.

I could write about how I interviewed with Flying Cloud today, or about how I sent off my documents to the government to get apostilles for them, which are basically super-notarizations, so the South Korean government will accept them, or about how I went to the bank because I left my checkbook at Ohio but instead of checks I got $2 bills and then went and bought money orders (but not with the $2 bills). But I'm tired, so I'll just give a rundown of how cool today was. I went and saw True Grit for free on campus, and it was excellent; then on my way back to my room there were people selling frybread from a window, and one of them was even a Native American (Tlingit, from southern Alaska—I mentioned Smoke Signals and we agreed it was good that I was finally getting an authentic Indian frybread experience); then there was a bunch of standup comedy and stuff. I'm feeling more content than I have in a while. But less eloquent, more rambly. So I'm going to quit writing before this gets any more incoherent. Someday, my blog entries will stop being boring and aimless. But that day is not today.

Heights

Spring break is basically over. It's been nice. It wasn't long enough. There are still more buildings to climb, more paper to write, and above all more forms to fill out. Two weeks with no obligations and it seems I've still barely even made a dent in what I need to do. I did get a good amount of work done on my MAP, which is nice. But the "everything else" part of my life remains a problem.

Here are the good things. I got to climb a lot of stuff over break. For example, I celebrated my birthday by getting together with a mildly crazy friend of mine and climbing buildings around town. We nailed a pretty broad variety of them, including the high school, some anonymous buildings downtown, the town library, and a fancy church that doesn't look like it could possibly be climbed if you look at it from the usual angle. It was a night of stupendous views and inventive climbing. We added these four buildings to our already respectable tally of other buildings we'd climbed, which included three major ones and a few minor ones on campus, and two others downtown. Later on during break, we conquered another major campus building, and I have ideas for two more—possibly the last two, as the rest seem impossible without grappling hooks or really tall ladders or something.

I've mentioned climbing buildings before, but how about a little flavor of what it's like? Well, first off, the guy I climb with—I'll call him "6", for obscure reasons—is kind of a ninja. He's sneaky, he does lots of swordfighting, and whenever we climb, he wears all black. On my birthday expedition, we started out by going to the high school, and though it was a very good climb, I'm going to tell about the row of anonymous buildings that we conquered next, because I think it's a better story. So we came downtown around 11 at night, which was really a bit early for this sort of thing, but it didn't seem to matter. 6 had been casually scouting out possible climbs in this area lately, and this row of buildings was one he'd considered a possibility. The starting point was a concave corner in the alley in the back, where two buildings' corners didn't quite align and there was a small piece of metal sticking out of the wall. The flat roof we needed to grab was about nine feet up, probably. That meant it was too high to jump in a straight shot, but the wall was basically smooth, so we couldn't climb it well either. So we would need to count on the piece of metal in the wall—something that looked like it used to have a bolt of some sort screwed into it. But then even that was too small to get a good foothold on. "If we had a box," 6 said, "this would be much simpler."

"Or a pallet," I said, and pointed to one leaning against a wall a little ways away.

I brought it over and set it up like a rickety ladder. Standing partway up it allowed me just the height I needed to grab onto the roof. Once I had my hands on the roof I scrambled and muscled my way up until I was entirely on the roof.

"Well, how is it?" 6 asked.

"Pretty standard." It was sturdy enough to walk on, and covered in a black sort of rubbery, plasticky sheet that most flat roofs have. I stood out of the way a bit, but offered 6 a hand as he came up, in case he needed it. He's admitted that, despite being a ninja, he can't yet do a pull-up. But for a guy who can't do a pull-up, he sure does a pretty good job of pulling himself up. He managed this one without any trouble, and we stood and looked around.

We couldn't really tell what we were on top of, but that wasn't important. What was important was finding the summit. In this case, there were two ways to go higher: in either direction, roofs stair-stepped in height, each step a very easy clamber. We went to the west first. The highest roof was much the same as the low one, except with a white sheet instead, and a special feature: a wrought iron fence around the top, with a concrete ornament. At such a visible point, we made sure to keep stooped low so no one on the ground would see us, but really, there was no one, and anyhow nobody looks at the tops of buildings. We looked out at the town, afforded a better view by our height. We weren't at the highest point in town, so there were still some buildings in our way, but a lot of stuff around here is about equal in height, so nothing's going to offer a particularly commanding view. Whatever the case, we still felt pretty masterly. After a while we went to the other summit, which was just as good, except without the wrought iron. And then we came down. And that was that.

I think I wrote that mainly because I don't feel like thinking about all the other stuff I have to deal with very soon. I'm so entangled in so many webs. These are the sorts of things that drive me to want to be a primitive or a hobo.

First, the classes I'm in all involve long-term projects that are going to really start gearing up once classes start again. In one, I'm going to have to call about 50 random people from around here and survey them. In another, I'm going to have to put frog eggs in water that has varying concentrations of motor oil. In another, I have to basically write another MAP application, but for a project that's imaginary and that I'll never do. And the last is my MAP itself. All the due dates are coming up with some really alarming speed, the kind you might feel while cliff-diving. And then there's also Press, which has to send all its books to the printers within the next two weeks.

Then, there's the Korea stuff. It's ironic that I wanted to go to Korea because of the lack of bureaucracy. Theirs is just as bad as Japan's, it's just that it's not as easy to see in the beginning, because what you see are recruiters' sites, and those are all staffed by friendly people (sometimes)—who are there to help guide you through all the massive amounts of bureaucracy. The JET program is the kind that might reject you if your forms aren't in the right order in the envelope you send. The Korean programs seem to be like that too, but there are also more of them, with different standards, and none of the deadlines are public, and they can change their mind whenever they feel like it, and also my time for applying is becoming awfully slim. My next hurdle to overcome is getting two reference letters from a former employer and a professor, letters that, the internet tells me, will quite possibly never get read, but still must be printed on professional letterhead and signed in blue ink. (If it's black ink, they'll think it's a photocopy and maybe disqualify it.) I also have to figure out whether I'm applying through EPIK (English Program In Korea), or through GEPIK (Gyeonggi-do " " " " , where Gyeonggi-do is the province that encompasses a lot of the perimeter of Seoul and contains its satellite cities), or just independently. Meanwhile I'm in touch with two recruiters who both don't know about the other one yet, and I have to write a 500-word personal essay about why I want to teach on Korea and what's my teaching philosophy.

It's enough to make a man want to put all his stuff in a bindle and walk down to the railyard. But—I realized this the other day—because of my student loans, I can't do that, because if I don't pay those consistently, every one of the numerous institutions I now owe money to will begin making my life miserable. This is to say: I am too poor to be a hobo.

Kind of puts college education in perspective. In order to achieve even an absolutely free-of-cost life, I must now pack up my belongings and move to a strange country and eat kimchi every day, and even once that's done I'll still be only temporarily financially comfortable enough to be a hobo.

But I'll soldier on, and eventually, I'll live a free man. There's a light at the end of the tunnel—it's the Year of Adventure—but it's an awfully long tunnel, and it's hard to see the exit from here.