People ask me how I manage to do so much research. My secret is my tiny notebook and my autistic brain. I have these tiny notebooks that I take everywhere with me:
Whenever there is a moment (at a dentist’s, at the restaurant when my companion goes to the bathroom, etc), I whip the notebook out and write my article.
Right now I have done some good, useful writing for the first chapter of my new book during a departmental meeting:
The magical part is that I can actively participate in a meeting, make comments, argue, etc while writing my book. The two activities don’t interfere with each other.
Clarissa's Blog 
I think we discussed this before. I cannot multitask like this. I know lots of women, but no men, who can do it. Once again, I would like to see a proof that this is not a hard wired gender difference. (As a mathematician, I know what a proof is; it is an argument that leaves no possible doubt, no matter how farfetched.)
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It’s autism, that’s all. As I have pointed out before, science has found no proof of “hard-wired” gender differences. Even autism is not “hard-wired.” I think I have described enough of my childhood to make it clear where my capacity to disassociate comes from.
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It looks mostly in Russian (my skills in decoding handwritten cyrillic are very meager but I can make out a few words) with some English (mostly traffic control) and Spanish (references). What percentage of each language do you usually write notes like this in?
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That depends on how closely the Chair is sitting to me. 🙂 Usually, I write in the language the piece itself is. But not when people are looking over my shoulder.
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In younger days I had a secret alphabet just for that kind of eventuality (no Chair to worry about but there were nosy teachers and peers). Later, when I was dabbling in journalism I made up my own shorthand system (though I had to transcribe it fairly soon after an interview or it would disappear into unintelligibility).
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This is a great way to advertise foreign languages: learn a foreign language and ensure that your parents or partners will never read your diary again! 🙂
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