Tuesday: Theory of the Day

I'd like to start experimenting with purposeful thinking, ontologies and heuristics. Actually, I wish someone had introduced me to these notions in particular twenty-five years ago, but introducing these into kindergartens hasn't yet caught on even with me behind it now.

The Theory of the Day experiment is the notion of privileging certain ways of thinking and (therefore) conclusions and actions over others (and, ideally, over the paralyzing effect of having 500 Theories Every Day). A "what-if" made as concrete and non-negotiable as the weather. In the experiment, I'm also hoping to analyze each theory on its strengths and weaknesses both in relation to me and in relation to time and tasks.

Most broadly, I am tangled in the liminal. I get tied up in categorizing, sorting, prioritizing, and managing the things that can't easily be articulated or contained. Physically, it's the projects in progress, the pieces that would, in the age of Teh Internetz, receive multiple tags. I don't do well with recognizing borders, though I am drawn to them and dance around them. I don't do well with endings (and what else are borders?). And I don't do well with rote, simple tasks and things that have no flirtations with other categories. I want my foods and things and tasks to be more that just what they are. I need to be able to read more into them, project more onto them, get more out of them. In that, they are the ends as well as the means.

Because I'm not great at borders and categorizing, I tend to be all tangents. Rather than being a circle with clear borders and solidly filled color, I'm threads and lines of different colors that, at a given distance, will look like a circle. The side effect of pieces of life thick with meaning is that they're also full of questions and challenges. I'm constantly trying to articulate who I am in the world, and this self-definition is always in a conversation with the world. I examine my borders of who I am, and the world challenges me right back. Grocery shopping is a political and ethical dialogue, job hunting places me in discourse with my religious beliefs, going to the bank makes me reconsider my relationships and human evolution.

Reducing pressure

I find the biological differences involved in reproduction to be some of the most disturbing bits of gender disparity that exist. In so many ways, the gender roles determined by and the stereotypes resulting from these feel suffocating, perhaps because they're so inevitable and so deterministic.

Pregnancy disturbs me. More specifically, the notion of me being pregnant seems incredibly unnatural and wrong. Yet I would like biological children for a number of reasons*. I feel like in this realm, I have a certain amount of gender dis-whatever. That's the level of discomfort I have with it. Part of me concedes that this might be transient--maybe when I'm older, it'll seem like a more natural notion--but then I'm faced with the limits of female fertility. And then it's hard not to get upset all over again at the realities of the world and how I'm supposed to come to grips with these notions in a limited amount of time and that even then, there are no guarantees.

But this (http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2010/02/100224102220.htm) seems hopeful. I mean, if you extrapolate. Could one have part of one's ovaries removed pre-"natural"-menopause and then reinserted in the future, if one decided one wanted to produce eggs again? Because this seems more promising than the whole freezing eggs thing (my understanding is it doesn't really work) and more open-ended than embryos (because that's part of the decision to not make).

Really, I just don't like the idea of not having options, or of closing doors. I especially don't like deadlines and time limits. Or inequality, even if it's biologically determined, and especially when it leads to evils such as:

old mothers getting much more condemnation than old fathers

women having to wake up at night

stretch marks

no drinking

hormonal changes

pain

nausea

having another human being growing inside one (I'm not particularly fond of even having organs)

expectations

The end.

* Mostly political. I really don't know if I could abide with a self-centered, Republican child. And politics, political involvement, and other related tendencies seem to be more genetically determined than previously thought.

Tuesday:emptying

Tomorrow's errands, so today got laundry thrust upon it like greatness. And not so much telephoning, though I mostly did answer when rung.

Two loads laundry

Counseling

Checked store for favorite reuseable bag in a color I want -- they don't have it and probably won't be getting it in the foreseeable future

Entertained father and hooked him up with email and facebook accounts

Showered

Emptied fridge of random stuff

Put off 'til tomorrow what could've been done today

Monday: resoluting

The task of self-improvement would be significantly helped by less self-implosion. February is a cruel month if Lent didn't start during it, the suffering would seem completely pointless. At least in Lent one attributes some portion of the the misery to the realities of self-reflection and improvement and fasting and guilt. It's sort of like being depressed right before one's period: even if there's not a causal relationship, there MIGHT be and that is enough of a promise of a better tomorrow to pull through.

February really doesn't have much going for it. The snow and cold are no longer novel or charming, nor is the new year. The winter wardrobe is getting boring but even the clearance winter items are thin in the stores. Holidays and vacations are done with. It's too early to be glad for (unseasonably) warm weather and too early to let oneself anticipate spring. The winter body is no longer deniable (a jiggliness that Bill Cosby would be proud of, if not actual weight gain). The mail is all bills and 1099s and other reminders of the existence of money (and therefore evil) in the world. Anyone silly enough to make resolutions in January is feeling the sting of failure. The streets and sidewalks are rutted with ice and puddles, making footwear choices impossible. Our vitamin D levels are low. Our TV shows are getting cancelled. Cabin fever is setting in but there's nowhere we want to go.

Hyperbole? I think not. FEBRUARY is the sting of death. The restless, unmotivated, pouting, tired, trapped and trapping sting of death. It's Douglas Adam's long dark teatime of the soul writ large, magnified from a few hours of Sunday afternoon.

But this post is about today's accomplishments (with the weekend's thrown in for an exaggerated sense of self-worth):

called various places about medication (doctor wrote prescription wrong and I am out of the Thing Which Keeps The Doom At Bay)

made cheddar jalapeno cornbread muffins

emailed client

emailed printer

did large load of dishes

went to grocery store twice

cooked meal

labeled recycling boxes (which I have been promising roommates I would do for, oh, two and a half years now?)

made salad dressing

showered (probably twice, but my memory is as weak as my intellect is strong (weaker, actually; I have a very strong intellect))

sorted through office stuff and office area

Hasta el libro

I suddenly recalled tonight, as I was hanging up the phone with my father, that I don't end conversations with "good-bye" or its variations. At this point it's not a conscious thing, nor, as far as I can tell, noticeable, but it certainly was when I was younger. Not a choice so much as a compulsion. I *couldn't* end things with a final ending. Perhaps it was the influence of those (apocryphal?) stories about languages with no word for "good-bye" or perhaps it was something I came to on my own. But I couldn't do it. I remember phone conversations in fourth grade, when I started using the phone on my own, ending with "good-bye" followed by "see you". Always the "see you". Always. Nor could I be the first to hang up the phone.

I think it's a Death Thing. Maybe that's a stretch but it seems to fit the pattern. I didn't, and don't, like good-byes. Or finality. When my brothers and I would tell stories to each other at night, mine often (almost always? always?) ended with "to be continued..." (We'll ignore the painful knock-knock joke I embedded that in.) My favorite (or at least most frequently read) books, having achieved literacy, were serials: Trixie Belden, Nancy Drew, the Bobbsey Twins, the Secret Seven, Danny Dunn, the Baby-Sitters Club, the Hardy Boys, the Oz books, Anne of Green Gables, Madeleine L'Engle's books, Bruno and Boots. It held through tween years and teen years: the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy trilogy, the Belgariad and Mallorean, the Pern books, Jean M. Auel's series. And not only did I prefer books with recurring characters, I was a chronic rereader of my favorites of these. At some point in highschool, I realized I'd read the Belgariad series of five books at least ten times through.

Not only was my reading series serial, but my reading of books in general didn't abide well with ending points. I often "chainread" books, starting the next one almost before I'd closed the cover of the last one. For years, this meant that I'd read into the wee small hours of the morning, stopping only when I couldn't keep my eyes open or when the first chirps of birds told me that it wouldn't stay night forever. The directive I'd give myself, "one more chapter," was useless because one more chapter never came. And this wasn't a matter of gripping adventure and page-turners; these were books that, often, I could practically recite from memory. Two book nights weren't uncommon and three books nights were not unheardof.

I turned to reading after death rather like some would turn to alcohol in the same position. And perhaps I would've turned to alcohol if it'd been a more easily acceptable and accessible escape for a six year old. But books were widely available and the messages I received about reading them mostly encouraging. I wasn't an early reader by any means, but I spent no time dallying with picture books once I had learned to read and was introduced to chapter books (notably Trixie Belden). By the end of first grade, my book limit at the school library was twice that of my classmates and my choices were word-heavy (in comparison).

To be continued...

Monday: repeating

Mondey (Freudian slip of Money + Monday already? I hope this bodes well!) tasks taken care of:

Other tasks:

email stacy

email jennifer

open mail

start sorting stuffs (get it all in one spot)

Friday: Funning

Friday:

made banana bread

entertained pa (and ma, a bit)

made empanadas

made chocolate

hosted a par-tay

thursday: waiting

Done:
More stuff bagged to give away
Cabinet moved
Closet reorganized
Chair given away
Sewing machine table fixed
ikea
Stuff dropped at thrift store

Wednesday: Trying

Washing Wednesday is self-evident.

washed a load of clothes

worked on the work for the moniez

washed linens

dinner w/ two brothers and friend of the family

Tuesday: Continuing Commencing

Telephone Tuesday:

sent invoice

listened to back-log of non-family phone messages

showered

saw counselor

made and finished three arm warmers

sewed draft dodger for friend

tried to find out about boots

changed prices to reflect Feb discount

responded to convo

emailed customer

went through more stuff to get rid of

tried to figure out contacts

washed dishes

made stew

Monday: commencing.

I've determined that February 1 is a much better start date for new year's resolutions as it properly gives one time to make them and plan for their implementation. Also, 28 days hath February and according to a headline I read when I was about eleven, that's precisely how long it takes to form new habits.

Therefore:

Today is Monday. Money-Monday (because who *doesn't* work better to alliteration? it's the sweet music of productivity).

Monday, I rocketh thee:

Calendar sent

Items dropped off at thrift store

Groceries purchased

Watered plants

Appt made w/ organizing person

Chipped in for dude at thrift store who wanted a chess set and was $0.50 short

Made soupy stuff

Paid rent

Paid utilities

Invoice prepped to send

Went through some stuff for things to get rid of

Quality time w/ friend who just broke up

Made arm-warmers (well, conceptualized and wore -- stitching still needs to be done)

Brought Herman Miller chair in from the snow, defrosted, cleaned, and put in room

Quality phone time w/ bother parents

Time Motion Study -- Traits of the Observed

With the assistance of Counselor, better delineated some of the issues underlying my lack of productivity. And you know they're real issues when talking about paying bills leads to repressed sobbing at the role of the IMF in the suffering of individuals. Seriously, people, how can I be a responsible member of German-based society when the thought of money has me crying about colonialization, repression, and people hurting other people?

Some notes on what motivates me and doesn't:

The money carrot doesn't motivate.

The money stick does unless I am ethically opposed.

The people approval carrot motivates me as long as I think highly of the people involved and also believe them to be correct on the issue.

The people approval stick motivates me inasmuch as I feel varying levels of guilt about letting people down. This is not very productive since it doesn't cease for things I cannot change and the stick beats me years later even with no possible resolution.

The justice-for-all carrot motivates me as long as I believe a) I can make a difference, and b) I am needed to make a difference.

The justice-for-all stick motivates me in that I won't be able to sit still. But this is harder to use productively and much more akin to an unfocused and uncontrolled sci-fi movie weapon.

The goal carrot doesn't really motivate me unless it comes from growing the carrots. If it's a reward I'm earning, I tend to not follow through.

The goal stick doesn't motivate me and sometimes anti-motivates me by activating my anti-authoritarian tendencies.

I am process-driven. I get engrossed in the doing of things and that's when I get things done.

I am beauty-driven. I will work better and more and get more done in a pretty space. The trade off of making things prettier is often worth the time.

I am categorizing-driven. I like to sort things, and the tasks I hate, like filing, are less odious when done in a batch. I also feel more in control when I know the categories of things and know where they go, even mentally.

I am novelty driven. I will get up happier in the morning with a new shirt to wear. I'll be a more enthusiastic when cleaning after I've moved furniture around. I'll work harder when I have a great new idea I'm playing with or implementing.

I'm purpose-driven. If I know that my work makes a difference towards a goal I care about and I feel empowered, I can actively enjoy otherwise distasteful work (digging through trash for recyclables).

I'm control-driven. I work better in environments where I feel in control. A clean house begets more productivity. Beauty too.

I am creativity-driven. I like to have room to come up with new and better ideas. I like having the space to try out ideas and have them fail as well as succeed. I need to know that in the brainstorming stage, nothing is off the table and in the physical environment, efficiency trumps tradition.

I am people-driven. My default is to make time and space for friends and family, at the expense of work. I will accept a lot of losses to keep this open. I will tell you when they need me -- not ask you if it's okay.

I am ethics-driven. I will take the long route and/or the painful route if necessary to avoid doing things that I consider wrong. I will not apologize for choices I have made. I will not change my moral/ethical framework for your convenience, for money, or for my convenience. And you will be asked to justify your decisions that run counter to your purported ethics. But I do not claim to have a static or infallible framework.

I am risk adverse. Change must be weighed against the status quo. All else being equal, change wins for at least a trial period but if I'm forced into a decision before I've weighed my options, then the answer is generally NO. To purchases, dates, whatever. Unless I've addressed that category in my head and am experimenting with other mental systems.

I am busy-work adverse. If it seems like a waste of time, I can pick my own ways to waste time, thankyouverymuch.

I am oversight/direction-adverse. I cannot function with people looking over my shoulder, especially literally. I don't want to be told how to accomplish a task -- you might as well program a robot or do it yourself. I am a value-adding individual.

And other work-ish tendencies:

I enjoy editing. Highly highly enjoy.

I enjoy thinking about the resulting grey areas after categorizing. What to do with them? How to approach them? How are they used? What if we come at them from this angle? How necessary are they?

Doing the same thing every day and knowing what I'll be doing a month from now makes me feel trapped in a terrible way.

I like learning and being challenged in tasks.

I loathe textbooks and cannot use them. I learn by doing, asking, thinking, researching, and experimenting.

Making to-do lists tends to be overwhelming more often than helpful.

While I enjoy categorizing, I am terribly indecisive and this includes being able to settle on one category.

And work-related beliefs:

Rachel Maddow made me cry

Not in a bad way. In a genuine and hopeful way (and possibly influenced by having a head cold and being PMSy and tired but that might be me trying not to seem like one of those people with human emotions and crap). Last night on her program she showed footage from around the world of individuals who train and are at the ready for catastrophes like the earthquake and building destruction in Haiti. Lines of men and women whose vocation it is to know what to do, to be ready to drop everything else to go across the world and find those whose status right now hovers between "survivor" and "casualty." Some are sent to find, to tally, to inventory, save, number, bear witness, prove our humanity to those who are suffering. Some go to block out of their minds and hearts the pain that is going on in order to focus on the logisitics; they must be like horses with blinkers on, focused on the path, the way out, not the chaos and destruction.

Maddow showed these people from around the world, China and the UK, Iceland and Taiwan, LA and Brazil, Israel and Cuba. The BBC too described some of them, sitting on planes snowed in at airports while airline workers labored to get them out as quickly as possible, clearing runways. This is when it makes sense to me that we have in place militaries and trained corps of individuals whose roles are rigidly and clearly defined. Just as we each often find that we can handle more than we think, that we can keep our heads in circumstances we think would break us, we seem to do this as a species. Or perhaps we choose to do this as a species.

It's the innate and internalized response that I see every couple of days in the city: emergency vehicle sirens blare, approach. Traffic slows imperceptibly as each driver takes note and figures out the direction of the sound and where to move. And then, of a sudden, all the cars are pulled to the sides, the path is cleared, and the people whose vocation it is to live in the adrenaline rush of ticking clocks and drama rush past. And we resume, with little more than a blink of a thought to the systems in place. The hierarchies of how to deal with chaos and dying and living and false alarms.

When I see this, when I see the unspoken movement of people on the bus to help and clear the way for a parent with stroller and children, or a wheelchair, my heart is full. It's more active and more thoughtful than holding the door for someone or thanking a store clerk. There are decisions to be made, even minute, about where the stroller can fit, how many seats the children need. There are those who move out of the best seats to clear a few together, others who get up and fold up the seats to clear way for the stroller and bags, another who might help the parent lift the stroller onto the bus. There is no conversation -- this is public transit and there is a certain privacy we afford to one another -- but it gets done each time. And when it doesn't start to happen on its own, when its infrequent riders or people too engrossed in books in the key seats, there is something that jumpstarts it, looks or throat clearings or the sense of all the rest of the eyes on the bus communicating a silent honk to get a move on.

I want to harness the empathy and action of the species here. This is where we look out for each other. This is where the woman nine months pregnant and the elderly man with a walker and groceries argues about who should get the seat. This is the dance where we take turns lifting each other up or being lifted, accepting help graciously or offering it with an open heart, creating those tiny bonds between us. When I slipped coming off the bus in the snow and ice and night, my heavy backpack rendering me a graceless flailing beetle, a flight of hands lifted me up so quickly I wouldn't've known I'd fallen if it hadn't been for the snow on the back of my pants. It was like the graceful creatures of wings and eyeballs and goodness in Madeline L'Engles "A Swiftly Tilting Planet" that I read in gradeschool. There was no individual person to thank, no need to. Just a flurry of hands, teeny connections, as we switched places.

After hurricane Katrina, I was trying to organize relief efforts in a large church downtown, near a significant homeless population, the kind stable enough that we refer to it as a "camp". I knew, as I set up a table with information and sign-up sheets, that the homeless individuals often came in for the donuts and coffee along with the parishioners, and I was nervous, feeling guilty. What would they think, the chronically homeless, the men and women whom I saw every time I crossed the street at those corners, the ones who I occasionally (but not often enough) shared food and talk with? Would they see me as the problem, eager to alleviate homelessness as long as it didn't have a face, the further away the better?

Perhaps some of them felt that way. I certainly would've understood. As the first man I recognized from those corners approached me, I tensed up, feeling guilty and contrite until he opened his mouth. What, he asked, could he do to help? He had worked construction, didn't have a job or family to keep him here and could go right away. What busses were leaving and when? The empathy was tangible and the only apologies were his, for not having money to donate.

A sense of kinship with one another seems to be the default position, especially those in distress. Somehow politics and the complexities of helping to change the world get in the way and we devolve into blithering arguing bumbling idiots caught up in ideologies and economic systems and our own self-righteousness. Paralyzed by each cog calling to task the others until the machine of humanity seems poised to self-destruct.

And then catastrophe happens, chaos of nature made deadly by our own failings in planning, in long-term aid, in regional squabbling centuries of politics. And we sit up straight again in our seats as the sirens blare, clear a way for first responders, second responders. We text our money from bank accounts to charities, read articles about countries we've nearly forgotten, say frantic prayers, curse our politicians or theirs. We cling to the news stories, even through the pain and confusion. It's an apology for having almost forgotten you, Haiti. It's a desire to suffer with you, to hear your story, to be mud upon the bee sting and draw the stinger out for you, keep the swelling down.

Tuesday

The done:

laundry in

dishes put away and more washed

called about contacts

listed furniture to Craigslist

sorted recycling

called multiple places about health insurance*

items dropped off at thrift store

grocery shopping

hung out w/ cousin

counseling

got more quarters

dinner w/ brothers

more laundry

*health insurance is an entire doom-laden rant of its own

Wherein Tiny learns about humans

While I may have been born a rather gregarious person, a spate of moving and deaths of relatives from ages 5-8 removed that from me like a sponge being wrung dry. Since then I've been relearning that side of me, the part that enjoys making new friends and talking to people. Of course, most gregarious 29 year olds have years of honing their natural tendencies, while I was raised by the silent wolves of my walled off self. Now I'm back to human interaction but with huge gaps in my knowledge, a socially awkward and perpetually confused dog trying to run with a pack.

I'm reminded of my lack of fluency in humanness often: when making small talk at parties (apparently my ice breakers (death, politics, jobs, and punctuation) are less ice breakers and more normal-people-repellents); when missing basic social tools (how *do* you end a conversation?); when dating; when talking about my life or values or goals. Since I've been working to shed the layers of insulation and break down the Berlin walls of fear of loss, I've realized that I'm still really just as socially savvy and with as much finesse as the five year old I stuck beneath those layers and behind those walls. I have trouble with the nuances, the gradual progression from acquaintances to friends. Partly it's confusing, but partly it seems unnecessary. To love, to make friends, to care about people, is to be open to pain. Why bother with the defenses of testing the waters or feigning less interest than one has?

I'm not brutally honest--I lack the self-awareness of my own feelings and desires for that--but I also have decided to embrace the notion of being authentic with people, of sharing my humanity and my foibles and my talents rather than guarding them jealously as knowledge others might use against me. The world has responded in kind.

Part of this process has been a conscious decision to temper my judgmental nature. Unlike my years of introverted exile, a tendency to evaluate the effects of actions (my own and others) and weigh them against purported expectations seems innate. The notions of fairness and equality and justice have always been attractive to me and their antithesis repulsive. I remember the frustration of my new baby brother getting to sleep with my parents when I and my other brother didn't, and this memory still has emotional resonance even decades after I was able to understand the difference in needs between babies and three year olds.

And while the products of a focus on equality and justice may be fruitful, the same standards applied with swift justice to individuals (including myself) is much less so. By replacing judgments of actions with curiosity about the context in which those actions take place, I've learned to listen better and, I hope, further the causes I care about. The carrot is stronger than the stick and there is more to be gained in changing structures than in attempting to change the individuals bound by those structures. At least that's what I tell myself and then humans are a bit less foreign.

Resolutions

Firstly, a folk etymology of "resolution". I think we're dealing w/ basics here, a prefix, a root, and a nouning suffix. Again-solved-thing. According to etymonline.com, solve's roots mean "to untie, loosen" and it's originally, in PIE, a reflexive verb.

THEREFORE...

I would like to suggest that I think of my resolutions as ways in which I will untangle myself. I'm not entirely sure what this means, but it seems rich in potential meaning.

I resolve to...

Do a new art "thing" each week (eeek! better get started!).

Be better at being timely in business and friendship

Treat myself like a kindergartner in unpleasant tasks -- pretend they're fun and make them as easy and game-like as possible.

Sunday

We're skipping the past few days on account of the things that were done were not, inasmany words, accomplished. I think that in some views of "cleaning" the room becomes easier to walk through rather than more of an obstacle course. But of course this is sorting cleaning so piles are required: things to give away, things to return to people, things to recycle, good on one side paper, receipts, things to deal with, things to file, socks, tights, things to fix and/or mend... And all of that brings up deep thoughts about time-motion efficiencies and what categories really ARE useful and resolutions, let's make some.

Today's done list:

Relisted items that sold whilst I was sleeping

Renewed public transit card

Thursday

Productivity? Can't we just look at the year as a whole?

Items shipped

Voicemail working

Learned to transfer files to phone

Dishes done

Thoughts, as Pooh would say, thunk.