Please Don’t Eat/Drive While You Read This

“Look at me! Look at me now!” said the cat. “With a cup and a cake on top of my hat! I can hold up two books! I can hold up the fish! And a little toy ship! And some milk on a dish! And look! I can hop up and down on the ball! But that is not all! Oh no. That is not all . . . “

--From “The Cat in the Hat,” by Dr. Seuss

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I am going out of town on business/pleasure, and, look! I have taken care of everything. I have finished my work. I have fed my family. I have taken a shower, shampooed, rinsed, repeated and, lo, changed out of my husband’s T-shirt. I have tucked my plane tickets into the briefcase/purse that isn’t crumby with half-wrapped Pop Tarts. While paying the sitter, I have stocked the freezer/kissed the kids.

And now, because there is exactly enough time left to make the plane, the notion has struck that two bills that have just now landed with a soft flumpf! in the mailbox must be paid. Now. Not next week when they’re due, but now, when paying them will cause me to accidentally leave my checkbook/wallet on the kitchen counter/bill area, with my driver’s license/ID inside--the license/ID without which the FAA will not permit me to board my airplane, thus causing me to miss that airplane. Thus forcing a return to the airport at 1:30 a.m. to take the red-eye. Thus causing me to arrive at the business/pleasure destination unshowered, unshampooed, unrinsed and unrepeated, thus causing me to use the word, “unrepeated” just now as if it meant something, not to mention the word “thus,” which, in this sleep-deprived state, I keep mentioning, repeatedly.

Do you see?

If so, you, like me, suffer from the heartbreak of multi-tasking, which is to say, the doing/planning of way too many things at once/simultaneously. This is a valuable knack if you’re the computer on which this is being written while my children clamor for the Dr. Seuss CD-ROM on the backup disk drive, but problematic for people. People crash if the tasks get too multi. Or, as Dr. Seuss himself notes after the Cat’s boast about all the tasks he could juggle: “This is what the Cat said. Then he fell on his head.”

This would just about say it all if this were the era of saying it all. But it isn’t. This is the era of doing it all. Which is not to be confused with having it all, which was last decade’s imperative. That was supposedly a woman thing. Doing it all--a.k.a. multi-tasking--is a techie thing, an equal-opportunity compulsion and probably more of an epidemic in California than any place else in the nation. Just check out the step machines at your local health club, and count how many people of every imaginable race, creed, gender, etc., can’t work up a sweat without simultaneously talking on the cell phone, reading the paper, monitoring their heart rate and keeping a disco beat and watching TV.

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For example, an Orange County health club has bolted Internet terminals to its recumbent bicycles, so you can send e-mail while pedaling. Naturally, the service has its own built-in multi-tasking component--a frequent flier promotion that gives you a free mile for every minute on the exercise machine. Nor is it just the health clubs. The Banana Republic in Santa Monica now lets you recharge your cell phone while shopping, and a Palo Alto group lets you do grunt work for charity online, so that you can simultaneously manage your household and be a Virtual Volunteer.

It is now taken for granted that, as a Southern Californian, you will be able to shave, call the office, read the paper and knock back a double latte while driving to work. When a friend at a basketball game whipped out an electronic gizmo and started sending wireless e-mail to fans who couldn’t get tickets, nobody batted an eye. This multi-tasking thing is why a politician now has to present himself as a wonk/hunk/liberal/conservative/author if he wants to be president.

It is the imperative that has spilled over from this era of technology-without-limits--and it has turned human limitation into an embarrassment.

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Now, some might argue that if you aren’t embarrassed several times a day, you probably aren’t living much. But the common attitude is that we must deny our limits, do a million things in overlapping batches so as not to seem slow and passe.

And it is embarrassing, at a sort of existential level, knowing that you can’t do it all, understanding that every clock ticks inexorably toward the point where the multi-tasks end. Still, there’s that other embarrassing question, posed so succinctly in the Cat classic for which the clamor has reached critical mass now: “Did you have any fun?”

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Shawn Hubler’s column appears Mondays and Thursdays. Her e-mail address is shawn.hubler@latimes.com.