Now I’ve gone and done it — I downloaded a Google toolbar that claims to keep everything at my fingertips. As someone who looks for ways to simplify my life, it seemed like a good idea. Yeah! Right! Google’s claim is probably valid but now I need to figure out how to put everything on the toolbar and how to access it when I want it. And there is the problem of remembering that all the information is easily accessible.

Everytime I begin to get comfortable with one way of doing things, something new happens. A good example is the recent change Facebook made. The latest change is the second one since I signed up last year.

Change is one reason I was never particularly good with math. When a concept was presented, I needed an extra day to get comfortable with it. Did that happen? No, the teacher moved on to the next idea and I was left to struggle and play catch up.

We live in a time of exponential growth of information. Just look at the screen on one of the news channels. The anchor is rattling off the latest news, there’s a sidebar of unrelated information, and more unrelated information scrolls across the bottom. I read a book, “Information Anxiety,” in the 1990s. Every page looked just like the tv screen I just described. And the darn book was over 300 pages long! Gee, I can’t think of any reasons for information anxiety.

So now I go back to trying to figure out how to organize this stuff.