CAPÍTULO II HUELLAS DACTILARES
PROCESAMIENTO DE HUELLAS DACTILARES
3.1 Reactivos y polvos para el revelado de huellas dactilares
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v o g u e a p r i l 2 0 1 4and a general aura of looming catastrophe. My father had grown up with most of the same tendencies—he barely made it through high school and lasted only a week at City College—but he found a novel solution to his problem: a writing partner. For more than six decades, my father wrote Broadway and Hollywood musicals with Betty Comden, and though they were very much equal contributing part-ners, Betty had to compensate for his inability to sit still or stay focused. He’d show up at her brownstone every day at noon (how civilized), and she wouldn’t let him leave until they had done their day’s work. She typed (he never learned how) as he paced and smoked and talked. My father had es-sentially outsourced most of his brain’s executive functions.
Somehow I managed to get through high school, get into an Ivy League college, and make it to graduation by the skin of my teeth and a lot of panicked all-nighters. After school, I took a page from my father’s book: When I was hired to write for Saturday Night Live, I teamed up with a very funny—and nonprocrastinating—woman named Margaret Oberman, and later, I wrote several screenplays with my friend John Weid-man. But I had always wondered whether my father, despite achieving so much as part of a team, had given up something essential by never fnding out what he was capable of on his own. I decided to follow a diferent path.
It didn’t work. I almost always turned in my writing drasti-cally late, whether it was a screenplay or a magazine article.
Once, I was in the waiting room of a producer’s ofce in Hol-lywood before a meeting and noticed a script of mine—the title was written down its spine—next to some other scripts on a shelf. I took it down to thumb through it, and there, on the title page below my name, was the note: “Great writer but a New York fake.”
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ver the years, I’ve made many attempts to conquer my problem, and I’ve amassed a world-class collection of self-help books on the subject. When I first signed up for conventional talk therapy, under the watch-ful gaze of a series of wall-mounted African masks in a series of Upper West Side ofces, it left me with more questions than answers about my self-defeating behavior. Did it stem from fear of failure? How about fear of success? Was I unconsciously punishing my parents by denying them the gratification of seeing me do well? Or was I “putting of” happiness out of guilt to atone for my perceived sins? Was I crippled by low self-esteem? Or did I withhold my best eforts because I thought that I was special and the world owed me a living? Food for thought but thin gruel when it came time to sit down and write.In my early 30s, I hit a wall and found myself unable to work at all. A doctor diagnosed me with attention-deficit disorder, and it turned out that Adderall helped. So did cre-ating a stable home life with my girlfriend, finding a good therapist, and taking up the practice of Zen Buddhism, whose discipline gave me structure and whose practice of meditation has allowed me, on rare occasions, to let my thoughts go and experience clarity and stillness—not an easy thing to do when, for no good reason, the 1980 disco hit “Funkytown” gets stuck in your head. Though writing remained an often agonizing
endeavor, I was able to make a successful career at it, notably as this magazine’s theater critic.
But I still continued to turn in work late. One recently pub-lished long-form profile took me so long to complete that, afterward, I sat down with a calculator and fgured out that I could have earned three times as much working the same number of hours at McDonald’s. When a Vogue colleague was moving to California not long ago, the ofce presented her with a mock Vogue cover, one of whose headlines was “Adam Green Meets a Deadline.” I chuckled good-naturedly when I heard about it, but it stung to realize that my name had become short-hand for “Don’t hold your breath.” Worse was the dread that I’d started to feel month after month as each new assignment
rolled around, knowing that, despite my best intentions, I was probably going to put myself—not to mention my poor editor, my girlfriend, my dog, and a few lucky friends—through the wringer as I stalled, spun my wheels, and fnally fogged myself over the hurdles of self-doubt, self-contempt, and sheer terror to the fnish line.
One afternoon last June, after almost leaving a large hole in the editorial well of a major national publication, I went surfng to try to unwind. I still felt bruised and of-kilter, but I hoped that this would restore my equilibrium. For some reason, even though it was a perfect day and beautiful waves were rolling by, I couldn’t bring myself to take any of them. I felt frightened, paralyzed. I’d start to paddle into a wave only to pull out at the last second, telling myself that I’d catch the next one. Suddenly, it struck me that the unridden waves were like all the moments of satisfaction, achievement, meaning, and joy that I had let pass me by. Procrastination, I realized, was costing me money, jobs, and opportunities; it was wear-ing on my personal relationships, keepwear-ing my anxiety level perpetually high, trapping me in an endless cycle of deadlines, and stopping me from using my talents, such as they were, to their fullest. Not living up to his full potential, indeed. As the waves continued to roll by, I thought to myself, I don’t want to live like this anymore. I don’t want to miss my life.
And so, a few days later, when my editor told me that a colleague at the magazine had suggested that I write a piece about overcoming procrastination, I was more grateful than alarmed. I knew that I was setting myself up for a stif chal-lenge, but I really wanted to change, and I was determined to use this as a lever.
I had no interest in rehashing the past with a therapist.
What I needed was someone to teach me concrete strategies and tactics, spur me on, and hold me accountable—a coach. I decided on an Englishman named Mark McGuinness, a poet and psychotherapist. Mark’s suggestions—freeing your mind by keeping a to-do list, establishing a routine for creative work, and building walls around your writing to protect it from the vicissitudes of daily life—were hardly