20190401.0430

In an earlier entry into this webspace, I suggested that I might look at my LinkedIN feed for articles to read and respond to, with the idea being that my doing so would oblige me to pay more attention to that social media platform--with the intended effect of making me more overtly marketable if I find myself on the job market again. (I have no desire to be back on that market; I spent long enough looking for work already, thank you. But I am not so cocky as to think I'll never need to do so again. Indeed, I expect to be working until I die; I'm a Millennial, after all, and I know better than to trust that luxuries like retirement will be available for me. Maybe I can set Ms. 8 up such that she'll have a chance at it, though. Maybe.)

When I looked at the feed, though, I found it a jumbled, disordered thing, throwing information at me haphazardly. And it was a strange thing to be so inundated. I am trained as a scholar, accustomed to taking in large amounts of information quickly and parsing it out so that it makes sense (at least to me; I am well aware of the trope of scholars being unintelligible to those outside their fields), and I work in social media in at least two of the jobs I still have. (There remain several, and, while I know it is bad for me to be stretched as I am, I also know that I need the money now; the health concerns that are sure to arise will arise in a "later" that may well never come. And I do have good life insurance policies, even if I have not got health insurance. Matters will be less ill than they might otherwise be when the time comes--and it will come, as it does for us all.) I ought not to have trouble handling multiple streams of data coming in, even or especially if they're coming in from a single source.

Something about how the LinkedIN feed is laid out, though, stymies me. Or else, and this is more likely, I was not as good about curating my contacts and media feeds on the platform as I ought to have been. Some of it has to do with my teaching; there was a while that I asked my students to set up profiles on the platform, and I had them connect to me so that I could review their work. (I had had some thoughts in that line, as well, that I might exploit my connections to them. But I do not think I have done well enough as a professor to warrant reaching out to my students for aid; I do not think I helped enough of them well enough to deserve help from them in return.) As my students have gone on to divergent careers, their interests have changed in such ways, as well, and so my own feed reflects what I have to think is a strangely wide set of influences.
Some of it, though, has to do with my trying to be too many things. One of the difficulties that I have faced--such as anything in my life has been really difficult, with my multiple positions of privilege; I know I've been playing the game that life is on easy mode--is that I lack focus. I have been interested in a great many things, and I've tried to do a great many of them. Consequently, I've not been able to devote myself to some of them--many of them, if not most--in the ways that they have deserved. And so I am less good at them than I would prefer. I'm sure it has shown up; I am not good at hiding things, really. If it has shown up, then I should not be surprised at someone seeing it, nor yet that, seeing it, they act upon it.
We are supposed to change our behavior based on new information, after all.