I tend to be a bit unfocused when I'm taking in information (or trying to get myself to do pretty much anything), and over-specific (and thus, wordy) when I'm trying to get it out
To illustrate what I mean, here's what I've been doing for about the last two hours:
(And I'm NOT trying to humblebrag! Honestly, I feel like I should be the opposite of proud for my habits. Ultimately, I'm trying to show how very scattered my thinking is.)
I was watching the newest game grumps video about Pokemon art academy. They were drawing froakie, and so I wondered what the name of the 2-D shape a football makes is actually called. That lead to a mentalfloss article (turns it's called vesica piscis) which then lead me to a video called Nonagon by They Might be Giants on YouTube. I wondered if that was by the same band made by the people who wrote the song "Get a Clue" (turns out it's not; it's actually Simon and Milo. Also, I realized the only reason I remembered that song was because I had a crush on the animated guitarist when I was a tween, and I couldn't believe that it took me as long as it did to realize I was gay.) After that, I went back to the nonagon video, which lead me through a few animaniac videos, until it came to the one about the presidents. That caused me to wonder two things, who was the first photographed president, and how were the elections handled during the civil war. Turns out William Henry Harrison was the first photographed president while in office, and he died on his 32 day in office, which roughly means that there were only 8 different presidents in the white house before photography "existed" in the United States (or at least, the daguerreotype process, which was developed by a French man, which I learned next, thanks to searching Wikipedia for term "daguerrotype" that appeared in the Atlantic article that was the result of my Google search for my first question. Oh, and I also used Wikipedia to learn about William Henry Harrison somewhere along the way as well). The civil war question was answered by another two google searches for "us civil war" and "Abraham Lincoln presidency" which gave two more Wikipedia pages, which confirmed that there was an election during the civil war. Since Lincoln was the 16th president, I started with a first guess in Google with the "16th presidental election" and got lucky with the Wikipedia page on the 1860 U.S. election. That lead me to a funny picture of Abraham Lincon
and a link to the actual page I was looking for, the election in 1864. It turns out that only Kentucky and Louisiana held votes since they were occupied by union forces, but that they didn't count. They both voted for Lincoln, along with all the other states at the time, except for Delaware, Kentucky, and New Jersey. There was a weird cartogram of the election
and I considered learning more about this type of map, but decided against it. However, I saw a link to a page called Radical Republicans on the 1864 election page, and clicked on it, since I was curious about what that meant, since that was roughly around the time the parties "switched". The last thing I did in my first hour was read the first two paragraphs of the new Wikipedia page, which read:
"The Radical Republicans were a faction of American politicians within the Republican Party from about 1854 (before the American Civil War) until the end of Reconstruction in 1877. They called themselves "Radicals" and were opposed during the war by the Moderate Republicans (led by Abraham Lincoln), by the Conservative Republicans, and by the pro-slavery Democratic Party. After the war, the Radicals were opposed by self-styled "conservatives" (in the South) and "liberals" (in the North). Radicals strongly opposed slavery during the war and after the war distrusted ex-Confederates, demanding harsh policies for the former rebels, and emphasizing civil rights and voting rights for freedmen (recently freed slaves)."
(Personally, my reaction was thinking about how weird it is how times change sometimes.)
My second hour consisted entirely of two forum posts to KYM, both pretty long, like this one.
So, what I have to ask is, is this behavior bad? I mean, to be fair, I had just woken up so my drugs hadn't quite kicked in yet. And while I actually do tend to retain a good amount of information from binges like this, it also means that I can easily distract myself from doing productive things by mistake, whether or not I actually want to do said proactive thing, not to mention such information typically isn't that useful. And at the same time, my wordy writing style tends to decrease the chance of people misunderstanding what I meant, and still yields me the occasional compliment on my better posts from the fraction of people willing to slog through my huge pages of text; but at the same time, I'm always worried about a barrage of tl;dr's and it understandably discourages a lot of people from reading (which is why people tend to "forget" responding to my e-mails.)
I ask this, since I don't know what to think, since I'm only really familiar with my own mind. Should I be worried? Or is it something that, while it wouldn't hurt to change, isn't exactly necessary, either? And if so, what changes would you suggest, and how would I encourage said changes in my behavior or thinking?
If you managed to read this whole thing, thanks so much for reading the whole thing, and sorry for bothering you with what may ultimately be a frivolous issue.
