The RedMolly Picayune-Democrat

Physics makes us all its bitches

Sam posted a music video (Dead Prez's "Hip Hop," totally worth watching), and so I thought I ought to post one too. Bandwagons for everybody!

This is Of Montreal's "Gronlandic Edit," one of my favoritest songs ever. And a head-hurty strange video. And the line I loved so much I made it into a t-shirt.

And, in the endless quest to Get Shit Handled, I went through and archived all my e-mail messages. And accidentally deleted a whole bunch of them, because, y'know, my shit ain't that handled yet. So if you were expecting an e-mail from me and I didn't e-mail you back, um, that's my excuse.

And now, because at least I can see the top of my desk and I feel like maybe there is a light at the end of the tunnel ("the light you see at the end of the tunnel is the headlamp of a fast-approaching train"... anyone? anyone?...), I have about an hour or so (wow, profligacy!) to work on the beautiful gorgeous wonderful CD of super-high-quality music I'm going to send to all you mo-fos who commented on the third anniversary post (thankyou thankyou, and I think we still have like 5 slots left if you don't want to miss out on the excitement) and do my utmostest to get out on Friday (yeah that'll happen, let's make it next Friday and maybe then we'll be living in the realm of realism).

(You know what's great about being in a manic phase, besides the generally cheery mood? The sheer number of parenthetical statements one can cram into a single sentence, that's what.)

(Wow, it's going to be a doozy a couple days from now.)

My exciting so-called life

This to-do list is mostly up here for my benefit... please feel free to ignore.

Sunday

• finish Photoshop tutorial article Done!
• watch Packers defeat Giants in a thrilling, ultimately rewarding game which allows Eli Manning to retain his quarterbackial dignity OK, we know how well that turned out. Nice do on the QBial dignity, though, Eli.
• choose photos for travel photography article Done.
• start writing travel photo article Done. Thoroughly outlined, and I could either work on the intro or go to bed. I think bed might win.

Monday

• meet with designer to discuss my "business identity," ha ha ha Done! Apparently I need to have a business identity. I don't even have a personal identity.
• renew domain name registration Done.
• write 3 more pages of comic script Notes made, not really written.
• submit articles & illustrations for June/July issue: 2/3 done
• schedule haircut for Wednesday Done. Well, I left a message for the flaky receptionist, anyway.
• give boys week's assignments for reading & math

Tuesday

• finish travel photography article (2/3 done on Monday.)
• revamp blogroll
• work on hospice newsletter articles (haven't gotten the notes I need to start yet)
• convert newsletter to Word format (ugh)
• send in hospice volunteer forms
• go to boys' first Campfire meeting Good fun! Saw Elizabeth! Met new fellow homeschooling mommies!
• write 3 more pages of comic script
• wash/dry/fold 2 loads of laundry Jim is going to do this, 'cause I seem overworked. Thanks, sweetie!
• help Fisher outline report
• go to library Done already
• draft 5 article ideas to pitch
• choose 1 idea to develop into pitch this week
• date night! make nice dinner, drink quality bottle of wine [moved from Monday to Tuesday] Done. Hanger steak with a red pepper-goat cheese sauce, mashed potatoes and spinach salad. Mmmmm.
  
• ...but first, shop for makings of nice dinner [moved, yeah]

Wednesday

• call in for weekly magazine meeting
• finish hospice newsletter and submit
• make tracking sheet for June/July issue
• finalize planner design (currently trying to decide whether to bite the bullet and go with the fab but super-pricey Circa system or just keep muddling along with my disorganized Miquelrius notebook in which I love to write but which has degenerated into a hopeless morass of notes, shopping lists, to-do lists, comic script pages and the like)
• open business bank account
• get haircut
• make sack lunches for Thursday classes
• wash/dry/fold 2 loads of laundry
• cancel Booksfree account (we live in a town with a real library! hooray!)
• write pitch letter
• write Web extension for photo column
• help Fisher finish report
• buy petroleum jelly for Rhys' class project (papier-mache eggs!) Duly bought.

Thursday

• take boys to Village Home classes
• revise current comic script
• clean guest room
• clean bathrooms
• wash/dry/fold 2 loads of laundry
• wash kitchen floor
• revise pitch

Friday

• send pitch letter
• write 3 more pages of comic script
• clean bedroom
• vacuum house
• do Weekly Review
• greet the lovely Miss Zara on her arrival at our house
• go out with Miss Zara and get a little crazy... woo-hoo!

Saturday

• hang out with Miss Zara all day, seeing the exciting sights of Portland
• wash/fold/dry 2 loads of laundry

Bah, now I'm tired. Need to get started... maybe after just one more game of FreeCell...

All is well, or, irrelevantish newsy bits

Tell you what, this Getting Sh*t Handled stuff really makes a difference.

My parents (Hi Mom! Hi Dad!) and brother (Hi Benjamin!) were up from California for Thanksgiving, and a lovely time was had by all. Except that I readily forget how to handle housecleaning stress and food-prep stress and children going insane when surrounded by beloved relatives stress, and so I was in a cranky-ass mood Thursday morning (Clean that! Sweep that! Pick that crap up NOW before it goes in the trash!) and then again on Friday (when I think I may have given my mom a turn by drinking three glasses of wine before 2 p.m.... Mom, I swear I'm not a budding alcoholic, honest. You just saw me on a bad day.) and then again on Saturday evening (rage, rage against the badness of the minis).

So by Sunday, I was pretty much useless. Which manifested itself as feeling cold--I think because I react to feeling cold by putting on jammies and snuggling up under a stack of blankets, not by anything actually warming like performing brisk exercise. And cranky. But nothing eating homemade pizza and watching a couple of Simpsons episodes en famille couldn't cure, or at least lessen temporarily.

Yesterday: a little better. Blogged, albeit uncharacteristically briefly. Gave the children an official homeschooling assignment: writing, in their best handwriting, a few of their favorite animals from the stellar book One Small Square: African Savanna, then drawing a picture of said small square packed with a bunch of critters. But, once again, nothing major accomplished. (I did do yoga for fifteen minutes, though. Until my hip was bugging me too much and I had to quit. Have I old-lady-griped at you yet about my stupid hip and its stupid bursitis? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Consider it mentioned, and I'll never mention it again.)

So today: had to make up for things undone. And with my brand NEW timer-on-a-string around my neck (plus my "Wheaties: Breakfast of Champions" ball cap... I looked like a psychotic gym teacher), I started setting times and Getting Sh*t Handled.

Fifteen minutes. Kitchen clean, including hand-wiping the floor--necessary because I broke the Swiffer handle in an orgiastic outburst of power-mopping the other day.

Ten minutes. Toilet dosed with bowl cleanser, sink wiped out, dining room table cleared off, glass tabletop cleaned, amaryllis watered (thanks, Benjamin!), miscellaneous books and Legos put away, living room generally tidied, toilet scrubbed out and wiped down, hands well scrubbed, sink wiped out again 'cause I just re-messed it up.

Twenty minutes. To-do list reviewed and all sorts of fine things added to it. Now I just need to go back and add some time estimates to it (I'm trying to fight procrastination the Julie Morgenstern way).

Five minutes. Responded to a fellow about his Craigslist ad looking for people to blog about games. Hey, we play a lot of games! Heard back from him already, and he sounds enthusiastic... cool. Looking forward to blogging about the intersection of gaming and home education.

Plus, managed to carve out about an hour and a half total in which to finish To Say Nothing of the Dog, the very funny Connie Willis book which my book group will be discussing tonight. And download some OpenOffice templates for the hospice newsletter I appear to have volunteered to put together. And print out some new calendar pages for my planner. And go into the boys' room and enthusiastically admire their latest Lego project: a 3-D portrait of Harry Potter. (Must take pictures.)

So, the moral is: over-busy and hyper-verbose is better than depressed. Right? And I'm making progress ever onwards and upwards and shouldn't go tiptoeing about waiting for the inevitable post-energy burst crash. Right? Right?

In which one book is finished, another begun

The boys got back from Colorado Wednesday night--it was un-freakin'-believable how much I missed them--and while Jim and I were waiting at the airport for the cutest little unaccompanied minors in Portland, I finished Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience by Mihaly Cziksasome'nwhattheheck. I'm the original anti-selfhelpbook girl (except GTD! GTD is not a book! It's a lifestyle! Join us... join us...), but this book sounded interesting when I first heard about it from Stacy Julian a million and a half years ago, and in the last several months it just kept popping up in conversations and on blogs and whatnot until I finally felt helpless to resist and compelled to purchase it.

So. Anyway. IANAP (I am not a psychologist), but I think Czickasawzallmighty might be onto something here. His basic argument is that those times when we are the most genuinely happy are not those when we are necessarily "relaxing" (boy, does he have a bone to pick with TV), but when we are engaged in an activity that stretches us to the limits of our capabilities and which absorbs us to the point that there's no room for negative thoughts (which he calls "psychic entropy") to leak in.

This corresponds pretty closely with what I've been thinking about as far as GSH (Getting Sh*t Handled, if'n you missed it the first time around--the "art" and "science" of using GTD principles to fight depression). Essentially, I've found that if I stay busy enough and always have a task or activity ready for any level of energy, there's not much opportunity to dwell on self-fulfilling bad thoughts. If I have only 10 minutes to spare, I can usually knock out 3 to 5 things on my to-do list (funny how they always take half as long as I anticipate), and the boost of having Gotten Things Done usually propels me onward and upward to a new Thing To Get Done.

So I started a new book, one which I bought oh untold zillions of ages ago. You know how sometimes you buy a book and then when you have time to read, you look at that book and you think "oh, no, that's a GOOD book; I'm going to save it for when I have time to REALLY read; I think I'll re-read this three-year-old copy of Cook's Illustrated instead"? (Please tell me I'm not the only person who does this. Regularly.)

Anyway, I decided to just pick up the book and read it, and the book is March by Geraldine Brooks. And the first 68 pages--all I've read so far--are already the saddest damn thing I've read in years. But not sad in a falling-off-the-GSH-wagon kind of way. Sad in two ways: both, of course, in an enormously affecting way, because the character of March and the events he describes are so true-to-life and heartrending, and sad because I could write thirty-seven hours a day from now until 2083 and not have the literary talent in my whole body that Geraldine Brooks has in her little finger.

But that didn't stop me from sending off the first 28 pages of (yet another!) possible novel (it's OK; I wrote it last year) to the esteemed azureavian, who seemed to like it OK. Thaaaaanks, Rachel. I'm going to try to get another chunk hammered out in the next few days. I kinda dig the story.

(Also: my current light bedtime reading: The Oxford Illustrated History of Greece and the Hellenistic World. Wanna hear about Thucydides?)

Getting Sh*t Handled

David Allen is my own personal guru.

Not really personally. He wouldn't know me from a crack in the sidewalk; he wouldn't know me if I walked up and kicked him in the kneecap. But though we've never and probably shan't ever meet, his book Getting Things Done--more particularly, the audiobook version, as read in David's own engaging yet soothing tones--has been more helpful in... well, getting things done... than any other "motivational" book, seminar, Web site or other resource out there. At least in part because it doesn't try to be inspiring. It just lays the steps out there for you and tells you how to start doing them. The bare bones of the GTD system are provided; customizing it is up to you.

If you've been reading this blog for more than three days or so, you've probably noticed that I also experience intermittent episodes of moderate-to-crippling depression. The grey days, the low times, the mornings it's all I can do to roll my mopey ass out of bed. I was thinking about this last night, and realized what a vicious circle (not cycle) it becomes:

1. Wake up feeling crappy about low level of personal accomplishment. (Sidebars: feeling crappy about such things as personal appearance, cranky and unlovable personality, messed-up state of world affairs and one's failure to get involved in changing them.)
2. Spend day feeling too horrible to get anything done.
3. Realize nothing has been accomplished. Fall asleep, miserably.
4. Return to step 1.

And so on, and so forth, ad nauseam.

Fortunately, it appears to slowly but surely be dawning on me that one can effectively shortcut this process with kind of a tweaked and foreshortened version of the GTD principles. By forcing myself to start getting things done, I've found I can refocus my thoughts away from the constant muddy whirlpool of self-referential depressive thought and improve my mood just through simple distraction. I'm calling what I'm doing, for lack of a less profane name, "Getting Shit Handled" or "GSH." Because seriously, sometimes when the black curtain comes down, it's not about actually getting things done so much as it is just handling your shit.

Here's what I've come up with as my GSH principles so far:

1. Break things down into itty-bitty steps. Then write those steps down. (David Allen calls these "Next Actions." A Next Action is the smallest step required to move a project along; frex, rather than adding "Organize office" to my e'er-o'er-weening to-do list, I might put "Sort magazines and throw out old issues," "File company information from trade show" and "Complete and return homeschool notification forms" all as separate items.)
2. Pick an action from to-do list. Estimate how long it will take to do it; then subtract 10% from that time. Set a timer accordingly and get cracking. Four times out of five, I find I finish whatever the task at hand is before the timer goes off. Juvenile and Skinnerian, I know, but it sure seems to work.
3. As an alternative, choose a fast, bouncy song that runs about as long as you think it will take to accomplish the task (or slightly shorter) ; crank it up and get to work. My current favorites for this process are Daft Punk's "Harder, Better, Faster, Stronger" and LCD Soundsystem's "Yeah", followed closely by Teddybears' "Yours to Keep." I can sweep and mop the kitchen and bathroom floors in the 9:21 it takes for "Yeah" to play.
4. Go on to the next thing on your list; note that "next thing" doesn't necessarily mean the very next thing written on the list, but rather something that corresponds to the "context" in which you're working. David Allen describes contexts as situations where you have the tools, time and energy necessary for a specific type of task; frex, if you're at your computer, you could naturally take care of e-mail tasks. If you're going out to the grocery store, you could bundle your additional errands into a single trip. And if you're going to be driving your car somewhere, you can handle all your phone calls ha ha ha ha ha ha yes that's exactly what I do when I drive.
5. Break up your more-fun and less-fun tasks, and be sure and mix in some physical activity with all the screen-staring and keyboard-tapping. Today, I put together a six-song playlist that lasted just under half an hour and went outside to rake mulch, sweep the sidewalk and pull weeds--it was a much-needed break and now I'm happy 'cause my front yard looks better.
6. Reward yourself after a chunk of well-accomplished tasks with something as simple as vegging out with a gardening catalog and a glass of ice water, or as elaborate as getting a bunch of friends together for cocktails.
7. Keep your to-do lists in a bound notebook or someplace else where they'll all stay together. Because when you start getting down on yourself, it feels really really good to flip back through the pages and look at all the things you've done in the last week/month/whatever that prove you're not nearly as much of a giant loser oxygen-wasting inertia-ball as you seem to keep telling yourself you are.

So anyway, that's the basics of Getting Shit Handled. Updates to follow as the system is refined, or as it proceeds to collapse around my head in a swirl of ash and disappointment.

Small things that make an unexpectedly large difference

(Wow, if Morrissey would've just come up with a song by that name, he really coulda been a contender.)

So as part of my associate-editorial responsibilities, I need to complete these dreadful things called "tracking sheets" that list the name/address/phone/e-mail of each contributor plus the title/details/payment for each contribution. Have to do one for each project I have for every issue. It takes forever and I'm really bad at it. ("Name: Shelley Snowflake. Address: [click over to Firefox, copy, paste] Phone: [click back over to Firefox, copy, paste] E-mail: [I wonder what's going on over at Pharyngula?]")

And so I tried this cunning trick yesterday. I set the timer for fifteen minutes and challenged myself to finish the tracking sheet for one article before the timer rang. It actually took me about sixteen and a half minutes.

So for the next article, I was ruthless. Twelve minutes, max.

Got it done with fifteen seconds to spare.

Tracking sheets for a whole issue usually take me about two and a half hours. I got this one done in under forty-five minutes.

So now I am the proud owner of this adorable new lime-green egg-shaped timer. (The boys wanted their IKEA timers back.) And I am setting it for *everything.* Hooray for old Jedi new Jedi Temple Academy mind tricks!

Also: here's a picture of Fisher.

(If you're ever in Portland and want great lighting for photos, check out Hotlips Pizza in the Pearl District. About an hour or so before sunset, the sun comes in the big windows along the side and bounces off the kitchen wall and makes the most incredible reflected-light effect.)

And here's one of Rhys, not taken at Hotlips but pretty darn cute regardless.

And for good measure, one of Jim with his M8, taken in our bathroom mirror.