Focus and SATs

An attempt at improving my focus.

I'm finding lately that my focus on...well...*waves generally at everything* has been dwindling badly. And I blame my phone. I spend way too much time on it, and not nearly enough time doing whatever I need to. It's depressing. Worse, I find decreased stamina or endurance in doing things ranging from going for long walks to reading long passages. And this is just not a good thing. At. All.

My writing has suffered as well. Look at what I'm barely able to come up with. I read what I wrote, say, fifteen years ago, and I was full of spit and vinegar, piss and vitriol, vim and spizzerinctum. Now I barely say anything of note.

So what's my remedy? I have an account with FocusMe, one that I've used for over a decade because I found similar difficulty keeping my browsing eyes off the socials while at work. I decided to see if I could tailor it to very specific tasks, like....hey! Writing on Blogger!

Turns out that I can. Very easily. FocusMe will close any page other than Blogger if I try to open it. I've set a timer for this setting for 30 minutes. And if I can devote 30 minutes to just writing without any other interweb distractions, then maybe I can improve my writing, and by extension, my editing.

And working on my writing would be a great thing.

Those Darned SATs

Made me think of when I took the SATs way back in the day. I took a practice SAT test with a tutoring company back then just to see how I might do. Turns out, pretty stellar. My test was run through the automated grader, and it only beeped once on my math section, on the very last question, indicating only one error. So...my math skills were pretty spot on. But moreover, the company was so impressed that they offered me a tutoring job on the spot, which I accepted almost as quickly.

Alas, it was not to be. A week or two later, the company filed for bankruptcy, and my job was lost. I was bummed...it could have been fun. My SAT skills happily remained, though.

You would think that for a spelling bee champion, a high verbal score on the SATs would be guaranteed, and almost certainly higher than the math score. In my case, no. In fact, my final math score was a full 60 points higher than my verbal score. On paper, it would indicate either a less-than-ideal reading, comprehension, and vocabulary ability, or a superlative math ability. Considering my scores, the latter is probably the case, though I acknowledge that my ability to read and understand and (especially) infer from subtle cues is not 100%.

You would also think that for a spelling bee champion, a very high SAT score across the board would be equally guaranteed. Well, given what I just wrote, you can infer that I did not get a 1600. The highest I could claim would be a 1540. And I was hoping for something close to that. Relative to my peers, I did quite well...scored probably the third-highest SAT score in my class. But getting a 680 verbal/740 math for a 1420 total was, to me, disappointing. It, perhaps, was also an indication that "I ain't as good as they said I was," the likes of which I ignored until Deep Springs rejected me. It was barely comfort to see the impressed reactions of others who considered anything above a 1400 to be virtually unachievable.

So There

And there you have it. Journaling for a half hour on end. And I was kept from searching for what good SAT scores were in 1992 relative to other years. Who knows? And why the fuck do I go back to something so stupid? For validation that the SATs were unusually difficult that year? And what if they weren't? Who cares? At the age of 50, I shouldn't. Oh well.

Off to enjoy some tea or something hydrating and refreshing. And to continue tending my garden, as Voltaire advised.