Normal

Today was a glorious spring day with warm sunshine and breezy, however not the 26c of Calgary yesterday which daughter # 1 gleefully reported (short memory of the arrival blizzard I enviously thought) but I'll take it. I managed to retrieve a few things out of the shed / outhouse across the road and dog walk to take advantage. This week with three trips to the district facility will be intense so I rewarded myself in anticipation by attending writing group.


Tonight at Write Away one of the exercises we did was prompted by one of three quotes and the example I chose was…I’m not as normal as I appear by Woody Allen. Not that I’ve ever considered him usual but…I titled my piece –

Normal is Just a Setting on Your Dryer

To most casual observers I am a normal 50 something Caucasian female who could shed a few pounds, use a consult with ‘What not to Wear’ and the majority of the time is so tightly scheduled as to be completely overwhelmed.

I have never worried about public opinion, scenes made in public places or what others have. To me this is normal, although this thinking appalls my husband of over three decades.

However, I am a woman who has made the transition to digital age fairly unscathed meaning I know how to share information but hopefully still leave something for the imagination. I’m able to embrace new skills while preserving memories through scrapbooking, blogging genealogy and memoirs, which I consider my legacy as opposed to a large estate.

The normal retirement would have happened several years ago if I’d become a pension prisoner like my nursing school classmates who are now counting down the months until those regular reward cheques arrive. The pay off for staying with one employer for years + age = 80.

I am however, looking forward within a few years as offspring tuition ceases, to meeting my next developmental stage of semi to more permanent retirement. And if that sounds almost normal let me explain this will include overseas volunteer work and cruise ship speaking. Regular normal has never really appealed to me.

And as a postscript to the digital age I'm providing this link to today's Sunday Herald:

Digital generation wizards with gadgets, multi-tasking
By JOHN HARLOW The Sunday TimesSun. Apr 13 - 11:18 AM

You may think 24 hours are not enough in a day — and a new generation of multi-taskers would agree with you.

Researchers have found that typical middle-class city dwellers now have so many time-saving gadgets that they can cram into 24 hours the same quantity of tasks that a decade ago would have taken 31 hours to complete.

For many, the frenzy starts over breakfast, reading e-mails on a hand-held BlackBerry while making toast. It carries on in the car where the driver with a Bluetooth earpiece holds a conference call while keeping an ear on the radio and checking the sat nav.

Work is then a blizzard of e-mails, phone calls and meetings, often happening simultaneously. The most intense period of multi-tasking, however, is in the evening, according to OTX, an American think tank.

"People will be pushing the television remote control while surfing on a wireless laptop computer balanced on their knee, e-mailing and texting friends on a mobile phone and holding a conversation with friends or spouse," said Patrick Moriarty, one of the authors of the report, which will be published this summer. "They may be far more mentally engaged than they are in the office."

According to the study, which questioned 3,000 people, while television remains the main focus of attention in the evening, nearly half the respondents were also using computers and phones to catch up with friends, update their Facebook or My-Space social networks, or download and listen to music.

Even eating took second place to Internet activities in half the households questioned.
"It makes you wonder what people were doing in the mid-1990s, when all the devices were far rarer. It must have been a lot quieter," said Moriarty. "Or maybe they talked to each other in the evenings."

Moriarty’s team calculated that the tasks carried out in a typical day by participants in their study would have taken 31 hours using the primitive e-mail systems and mobile phones of 10 years ago.

The findings make predictions from 30 years ago seem absurd. Then, scientists who first borrowed the word multi-tasking from computing, warned of "brain overload" and that people would not be able to cope with more than three tasks at once.

Mark Vickery, 35, from Medway, U.K., agreed that for him and his wife Susan, a trainee consultant, the evening was the peak of multi-tasking in a day that could sometimes include as much as 18 hours in front of a screen.

"Both of us are out of the house during the day," said Vickery, a marketing manager. "When we come back in the evening we tend to have a lot of technology on the go. We’ll be using online banking, Facebook, e-mail and using Sky Plus (a television recorder) to program what shows we want to watch.

"On the one hand it’s good — you get more done. On the other hand, when I left university seven years ago, life was much simpler. There was more talking face-to-face and more time spent over dinner."

Moriarty said limits to technology may mean multi-tasking is now peaking.

"I suspect smarter phones may add another couple of hours onto that, but we are probably at the limit of multi-tasking for this generation," he said.

David Meyer, a psychology professor at Michigan University who advises the American government on the implications of multi-tasking, said the 31-hour day sounded both believable and depressing.

He said that observations of the brain made during multi-tasking showed that working out individual tasks took longer than if they were undertaken individually. He also warned: "Forty per cent of the time people cannot remember the previous task they were doing, so they lose track. This can be fatal on the roads."