Thursday, May 6, 2010

At the risk of sounding like a cut-rate afterschool special, I had set out to teach this blog a thing or two–and ended up learning far more about myself. Segue to heartwarming music. I’m just fuckin’ with you, naturally. A more accurate recap would read like this: faced with the monumental headache of migrating a website, I reclaimed an important skill and bent the very gigglebits on the server to my will. Here’s what happened.

Initially I was paralyzed by how much there was to do. I had installed WordPress easily enough, but before me stretched a widening morass of tasks. Diving into the mess with gusto only worked for so long, because I would start revising a single post, then veer off to edit the main index file for a minute or two, before searching the WordPress codex for pearls of PHP wisdom. I would do a little of this, a little of that, and effectively accomplish jackshit.

I needed to focus, and to this end I deployed pen and paper and began parsing my outstanding items into groups of three, then banging them out, one item at a time. Disable commenting. Repair the permalink structure. Clean up the header. Bam! Reroute all my legacy links. Delete tag references. Remove categories. Pow! Streamline the sidebar. Rearrange widgets. Set post count. Shazaam! The list steadily shrunk, group by group, and by day three the site had regained most of its original functionality, with a little extra.

Multitasking, I realized, is a grotesque, artificial conceit, and if it does occur in the natural world, it’s certainly hidden well. Birds don’t make nests and simultaneously preen themselves. Dogs don’t mark their territory while digging for bones. They mark, then dig. Nest, then preen. You’d never find a woodchuck chucking wood and whipping out, like, a Blackberry, even if a woodchuck could chuck wood or thumbtype. These are all animals, of course.

People can think beyond the moment. We project and plot, aspire and calculate. But I don’t think this means we should apply makeup while driving, chat on the phone while paying for something at the cash register, or juggle five instances of Internet Explorer to counterbalance the six active windows of Excel. Something feels inherently off about these situations, and I wonder if to focus and dream should be the extent of our multitasking. Change color scheme. Repopulate blogroll. Make the parrot clickable. Shalom.