Michael Jackson was wrong...

...it DOES matter if you're black and white. Let me explain...

As many of you know, I'm in Social Work program at Northern Michigan University. Some of you don't know that. For those of you that don't know, I am in the Social Work program at Northern Michigan University. Now that everyone is up to speed, we can begin.

Over the past two years, I have taken six social work classes, and I'm taking two more this coming semester. That's normal, and expected. That's not where my beef lies.

My problem with these social work classes lies in the textbooks. They're big, boring, and...black and white! I mean, some of them had some light blue shading, or whatever...but black and white! No color pics, no color graphs, just hundreds upon hundreds of boring pages of information!

If I had known that it was going to be like that, I would have majored in the Alphabet. Or Counting. Even Going Potty Without Missing. Just something to get me some more colored pages!

It's not that I adverse to reading...anyone that knows me knows that I like to read, I'm fairly competent, and that when I was a child calling me a 'bookworm' or a 'nerd' would have been putting it mildly. Some of you don't know that about me. For those of you that haven't known me very long (or at all), I like to read, and I'm fairly competent at it. When I was a child, calling me a 'bookworm' or a 'nerd' would have been putting it mildly. I'm also a fan of redunant repetition for the sake of wasting time. Moving on...

It's sad, because the material is interesting- I mean it's talking about helping people solve their problems, and there aren't too many things more interesting than people's problems. Maybe that's why the books are constructed so boringly- otherwise everyone would want to get in on this action.

It's just that...I have a short attention span. Really, it's a miracle that I've managed to stay somewhat coherently consistent in my journey to get this post done- I'm not quite ADD...although I do think that I fit the classic case of the kid that falls through the cracks...I think that I DO have ADD and that I was tragically misdiagnosed as a child as being 'normal'. There is no way to tell the damage that could have been averted would I have been properly diagnosed.

Compounding the problem is that I have two young children...who don't get really excited when daddy is reading Understanding Generalist Practice to them. I have to get homework done, but you can only string a two year old along for so long with 'wait, maybe there is a graph or a blatantly and poorly posed picture of a happy family on the next page', before they start screaming and ripping pages. So I am left with very specific, small chunks of time to get my reading done.

The problem is that when you add short attention span with finite block of time, and then multiply it colorless, odorless, tasteless text that dissolves instantly in liquid (also known as Iocaine), you get Bang Head Into Wall. This is the formula version:
(Short Attention Span+Finite Block of Time)Colorless, odorless, tasteless text that dissolves instantly in liquid=Bang Head Into Wall.

So if you see walking around with brick-like lacerations on my head, or if I have a series of concussions, or if I just happen to post a random blog entry...there is a reason. I'm just not sure what we're talking about right now.