We got a new robot. It washes windows.
It is very hard for me to believe that this is a readily available consumer appliance that is cheaper than many a vacuum cleaner. I remember reading a “visionary tech” type article just a few years ago, saying that one of these was in development. Obviously as soon as I knew there was a robot that could climb vertical surfaces, I had to have one - but at the time, it only existed as a prototype. Oh well, I thought, I’ll just file this away with all the other incredible prototypes that never come to market, like the laundry-folding robot. By “never” I mean we’ll have to wait anywhere from 10-25 years. This time, though, I was caught wrong-footed. I went to check on this supposed window-washing robot, as part of a discussion about the innovation curve - and discovered that there are actually several different styles put out by multiple robotics companies. They sell in the $200-500 range. The one I bought, based on reading a bunch of reviews, turns out to be the least expensive one on the market. I’m going to pause for a moment here and say that the main reason we can afford to buy robots like this is that we have chosen not to own a car for the past four years. What I spent on this robot is significantly less than our car payment used to be, and not much more than what we paid for car insurance per month. A lot of families could drop a vehicle without too much inconvenience and suddenly discover a distinct lessening of pressure in the finance area. Okay, so what does it do? I decided to find out. It can clean glass windows. Can it clean other stuff, too? There are other types, one based on magnets, but the style we got works on vacuum suction. You hold it in place and turn it on, it revs up and makes a whirring sound like a vacuum cleaner (which technically it is), and then you can let go of it. It stays sucked onto the glass and then it can drive around. I didn’t figure out until the second time I used it that if you push the button twice, it will scoot around by itself, find the edges of the frame, and clean the whole window itself. It also comes with a remote control. If you are very careful, you can use it on glass without an edge, like a shower door. If you are not careful, it will start to go off the edge, lose suction, and fall off. The window-washing robot has two tethers. One, the power cord must be attached for it to work. At this stage of development I don’t think there’s a way to make them rechargeable and also lightweight enough to do the job. Two, there is a cord with a carabiner on one end. It can be knotted through an aperture on either end of the robot. What did I do when I found that I was supposed to belay the bot to keep it from crashing to the floor? Why, I asked my Eagle Scout husband, of course! He worked out a complicated rigging system on the curtain rod. It took a bit of finagling to make sure that the cord was short enough for it not to hit the floor - but then this made it impossible for the bot to reach the bottom of the window. I did the exteriors on the balcony the next day. There was no curtain rod outside, of course, and in fact I couldn’t figure out where else I would tie the safety cord. I decided to wing it and just watch carefully. It was fine. Then I did the same thing on the bathroom mirror, and when it reached the bottom right corner, it managed to hit the frame, unsuck itself, and fall off. Fortunately it was only about a one-foot drop to the counter, and it survived intact. The test with the glass shower doors was tricky. I did have to watch carefully while I used the remote. It is not advised to use the window-washing robot on any glass with no edge. I always read the instructions carefully, but that doesn’t mean I always wind up following them! Our robots have names, because now we have three of them and there are reasons to disambiguate. This one is now Squeeg-Bot, since I also have several squeegees and don’t want to confuse things. Unlike the other robots, Sucky and Swiffy, Squeeg-Bot can’t be trusted to work alone. On the other hand, he works quickly. The sliding glass doors only took about 15 minutes, which is, believe it or not, faster than I do it with a squeegee and a bottle of glass cleaner. I have lived in apartments and houses where I doubt I washed the windows once the entire time I lived there, or at least not until the day I moved out. I am a bit obsessive about always getting my cleaning deposit back. In this apartment, though, we only have two windows, one in the bedroom and then the slider in the living room. That slider is essentially our only source of natural daylight. In addition to this window we have a small gray parrot who loves to pulp fruit and throw it everywhere. This is why I feel the need to clean the window so often - because my beloved, spoiled little parrot is a filth machine and because this window is visible on-camera all day while I’m at work. I still have some games to play with this new device. I haven’t tried it out on the inside of the shower yet, because it needs a dry surface and that means a bit of prep work. I haven’t tried it on the fridge, although I will because it gets smudgy. I also haven’t tried it on a plain old painted wall, and again, I will eventually because it is fun to play with robots. I told my husband, This is like driving an RC car! When I was a kid, I never got to play with remote-controlled cars because they were evidently not for girls. So I went out and bought my own remote-controlled robot, and now I can play with it as much as I like. Jobs and romance are exactly alike. The same sorts of myths about perfection and fate and destiny are attached to both. In many ways, what people imagine about a “dream job” is a lot like a “dream wedding.”
But do you even have a dream job? I know I never did, until I did. I had no idea whatsoever what I wanted to do. All I knew was what I didn’t like about whatever I was currently doing. I hated getting up so early and commuting. I hated having a dress code and I felt very intimidated by that each day. Roughest of all was managing my attitude and facial expressions around customers and coworkers, no matter what they were doing or how I was feeling. When I imagined having a better job - not a “dream job,” mind you - all I could think about was earning more money doing basically the same thing. It wasn’t even in my mental landscape what would be different if I did earn more. I couldn’t really imagine living in my own place and not needing roommates. I couldn’t really imagine having my own washer and dryer and not having to haul everything to the laundry room. I couldn’t even imagine being able to afford to go on a vacation. There wasn’t even really a connection in my mind between the way I lived/struggled and the amount I earned in a month or a year. I was thinking one week at a time. There was a blank cloud in my heart where “dream job” could go, and all that was in there was “earn more money somehow.” Which basically translated as “be less broke.” I didn’t particularly know anyone who had a great job. If I met someone like a nurse or an engineer, all I knew was that I wasn’t qualified to do those things. There wasn’t anything magnetically attractive about those careers to me. It’s different now. I’ve met all sorts of people who do all sorts of fascinating things. Opera singers and martial arts instructors, astronauts and surgeons, public speaking coaches and restaurant owners, hair stylists and plumbers. We grew up. In your forties and fifties, a lot of people have had time to figure out what they want to do, and they’re either doing it or training for it. In my twenties I hung around with people my own age. Almost everyone I knew either worked in retail or as a waiter, except for one guy who worked in a hotel laundry and obtained a lot of second-hand tablecloths for our theater experiments. I was one of the only people in our friend group who had an office job. What I learned to appreciate about my boring, dull office job was that I knew I would have Saturday and Sunday off, not just a week in advance but *years* in advance. So much of a dream job has to do with the lifestyle around it, not the work itself. Hair stylists are an example. From my perspective, they’re on their feet all day long! I always ask, when I’m getting a trim, “Did you always want to cut hair?” Almost every time, they answer that they started when they were kids, cutting their friends’ hair, and they can’t imagine doing anything else. There must be something compelling about spinning someone around in the chair to marvel at the transformation you have just worked. There’s also no real upper limit to how much a hair stylist can earn or the level of fame and prestige of their clients. I learned to cut hair in 2020, first my husband’s and now my own. It turns out that it’s kinda fun. It is satisfying to see that you’re up to at least the level of a $6 barber. It’s also made me even more inclined to appreciate the artistry of a good stylist and eager to pay someone else to do it. I’ve arrived at my personal dream job after learning about, and ruling out, a lot of other professions. I realized that I didn’t want to run my own business because I’d have to spend so much time hustling and marketing and promoting whatever I was doing. I knew I didn’t want to do anything that involved working nights, weekends, or holidays. I didn’t want to drive from site to site. As I looked around, I realized that what I loved was the predictability and decorum of the business world. There’s a code of conduct - one that I didn’t understand quite so well when I was younger, but that makes me feel at home now. I think business jargon is funny and endearing, but we can circle back to that. It happened when I was just an impressionable child. I saw “His Gal Friday” and the arrow struck me in the heart. When I grew up, I would need to work in an office with a typewriter and that’s all there was to it. What would I be doing with that typewriter? Who cares? I call my job my “dream job” because I had in mind a specific position in a specific company. When the opening came up, nobody could have been more enthusiastic than me. THIS job! Working for the specific person I had in mind! In the interview, I said I wasn’t even applying anywhere else, that my passion was for sending things to space and becoming part of a multi-planetary civilization. That I could see myself spending the next twenty years there. All true. Not everyone who works where I work is all that enamored of the space industry. That is strange to me because many of the jobs are prosaic, the likes of which can be found in any industry. Planners and purchasers and managers and recruiters and facilities crew and security and all the rest. Not everyone does orbital mechanics or propulsion engineering, although if you do, DM me, we’re hiring. I just would have figured that every space geek in the world would want to work in a place like this, and there wouldn’t be room for someone who would just as soon be working for a sports franchise or a mortgage bank. The first secret of having a dream job is to have a field that you find incredibly interesting. The second secret is that the more you learn about it, the more interesting it gets. At that point, even a straightforward and unglamorous role can at least feel like something dynamic and purposeful. A dream job isn’t like a dollar bill that you find in the street. It’s a starting point. It’s a role. Just like the fabled “dream wedding,” it’s not over when you get your offer letter. It’s a relationship that is just beginning. People keep asking about flying cars, but would you really want one? Why? Let’s do a quick Google image search on “car through roof” and take a look. Those right there are regular old ordinary Earth cars that drive on the ground. Explain me how making them airborne will be an improvement? As I was skimming through these, I noticed that my search for “through roof” had brought up at least one story about car insurance payments going “through the roof.” That’s a point that I hadn’t even considered. Any of you who think you want a flying car, have you thought out what it would cost to insure one? Do you want your teenagers driving it? I think about three things pretty much all the time, and they are futurism, wishing, and capybaras. This story is only going to include two of those. I think it’s extremely interesting when people express a heartfelt wish. I always want to know what those wishes are. They say a lot about a person. I also happen to believe that almost all wishes are easily attainable. They exist within the laws of physics. Some wishes may take longer than others, but even then they can probably be construed to have been granted in some way. The trick is that wishes always include technicalities. Technically, you can make any car into a flying car. You can even drive it for a few seconds. Oh, you mean you want it to fly all the time, in a way as ordinary as a commute in a traditional coupe or sedan today? You want the sky to look like it did in The Jetsons? ...are you sure? To me, this is sort of thinking too small. You get the ultimate dream image of THE FUTURE - a flying car, for goodness’ sake - and you want to copy what you were already doing in the past? You want seventy years ago, only a few hundred feet further up? Let’s imagine everyone who currently owns a car is popped into the future and now owns a personal flying vehicle instead. Internal combustion engine, room for passengers and cargo. Is it the same size as a regular car, only it has wings or helicopter blades? Okay, where are you going to park it? You’re going from your house to... where was it, exactly? Work? The grocery store? The movie theater? Okay, you were thinking you were... going to hop out and leave it hovering outside while you went in to eat dinner and enjoy your movie? Okay, no. I understand. You were thinking you were going to... park it on the roof like a helicopter landing pad? And then take an elevator or escalator down to the food court level? What about all the other flying cars that your neighbors bought? Are they parking on the roof, too? Are you sure? No retrofitting involved? Oh, I see. You were just going to park it in the parking lot the way you used to with your regular old Earth car. Except for the wing part. Do they retract? Into the chassis? Or where do they go? You remember in the showroom how they explained that your flying car needs a more powerful engine and more fuel, of course. I guess you’re right. You would need a way bigger parking space than you used to. That probably explains why you now have to walk so far from your parking spot to the main entrance. Remember when we were talking the other day about how we wished we could have flying cars so we could just fly above all the traffic? Remember, you were mad because you were just in a fender bender and the other guy turned out to be uninsured? Isn’t it a bummer how everyone else had the same idea and now we’re stuck here, hovering in traffic? But at least we have plenty of time to laugh about how we used to always say we wished we had our flying cars. Flying cars and jet packs. Those were the most futuristic things we could imagine. The trouble with trying to create the future is that it’s so hard for us to picture something that is wildly different than the way we live now. We think of the future and we picture a mid-20th-century suburban neighborhood, complete with single-family dwellings and personal vehicles. That means long commutes. Studies show over and over again that commuting is humankind’s least favorite activity. (Dancing is #1 across cultures). If we’re going to reimagine a better, cooler, and more interesting future, why would it have commutes in it? Personally I want no part of a flying car. I doubt I would get in one. I don’t care how much training the driver (pilot?) has, I just don’t feel the need. If I did, I already would have gone on a helicopter ride somewhere, and I have no desire to do that. I’m the kind of person who walks my bike down steep hills because I don’t like going that fast. I remember how I got my chin scar and that’s plenty for me, thank you. When I sit and wonder what I would want my future to be like, if I got to be principal designer and I had unlimited funds, I realize that I don’t usually have an instant, clear answer. I do know that the first thing I would want was a better quality of life, and flying cars aren’t particularly part of that image for me. I picture a future where I am certain of the general well-being of the people I care about. I picture a future where I have interesting things to do all day, without the stress or anxiety or burnout or the Sunday scaries. I picture a future where I can spend ample time in pristine wilderness, where I am continually delighted and amazed by the activities of the wild creatures who live there. In that future, I have the coolest smartphone you’ve ever seen. Want to hold it? Suddenly the entire attic slid off her house. She was standing right there, watching it happen. She did what anyone would do - she leapt into the air and landed ten feet away.
Noelle has been dividing her time between chewing cardboard, as one does, and standing on one foot. We haven’t rebuilt her fort since mid-October, and we hadn’t been paying much attention to its structural integrity. Let’s just say it wouldn’t have passed inspection. Code violations included holes in exterior walls, excavations of entire sections of floor, and an unpermitted tenant-installed skylight. What a parrot beak is able to do with corrugated cardboard is to gradually excise the inner layer, leaving only a thin veneer that looks like a regular box on the outside. Sometimes all that is really left is a strap of packing tape. The exterior lists slightly in sections, but otherwise appears sound, a sort of Potemkin village. When the attic fell off, the fort was reduced to its original three stories, but was otherwise intact. Noelle is no dummy. She has been known to gnaw off a basket handle in segments, leaving one intact coil so that it doesn’t break and she can continue to perch on it. She can untie knots. She undid the latch on her travel cage and let herself out. She figured out how to operate my sewing snips to try to file her beak. I’m pretty sure that if I let her, she could open a pop can. Therefore, it was unsurprising when, returned to her bridge, she refused to go back into the fort. This is the proper reaction when regarding a condemned building! We were on the clock and not in any kind of position to start rebuilding a new fort, especially since we have been debating some modifications to the original blueprint. With hours left of our workday, we needed to entertain that busy little beak. The only thing for it was to coax her back into the remains of the fort, like a group of truant teenagers exploring an abandoned mental hospital. The fort in its various iterations has been a part of our flock since the early days of the shutdown. Just like the gameboard for Clue, it has named areas. There’s the erstwhile attic, the atrium, the kissing booth, and the watchtower where she goes to derp. (Derping is when she stands around with her beak hooked over the edge of a box, making her look like some kind of buck-toothed lollygagger). The area where I set my nervous bird was the porch, where she often sits, as if waiting to welcome guests to her Air Bird and Beak. An anxious parrot is a comical creature. She twitches and jumps and flaps her wings and leans farther to the side than would seem physically possible. She cranes her neck around, adding nearly two inches to its visible length, and bobs her head up and down. Her eyes become round as saucers. You can almost hear the spooky soundtrack playing. BooooOOOOooooooOOOooo Spewky We returned to work. Within minutes, once she realized that there was no need for an exorcism or silver bullets, she was back to business, scooting around the remaining rooms of the bird fort and continuing to shred everything within reach. It’s been days, and Noelle is continuing on with her cardboard-rending hobby the way that only a saliva-free creature could do. Bright as she is, she does not seem to have made the connection between her habit and the gradual destruction of her play area. I identify with this a little bit? But also, the great thing about her is that she operates in constant and perfect faith that all her needs will be satisfied, usually on demand. There’s this little thing she does, where she’ll be walking back and forth on the back of the couch, and suddenly she will decide that she wants to descend to the cushions. One would think that a flighted avian unit could simply flap twice and land wherever she liked. Instead, she grabs some piping with her beak and lowers herself off the edge, scaly toes dangling in mid-air, in certain knowledge that someone will rush to her aid, offer her a hand, and carry her down. She’s learned awfully quickly that she has to work harder to get our attention since the advent of the noise-canceling headphones. She also has to get her message across without a lot of guessing games. This is how we started to get such a clear “good morning” out of her when she informs us that it’s time to be escorted out to the porch. “Good morning” has proven such a useful phrase for her that she’s been testing it out to see what else it can get her. Not so much a greeting as a “garçon, coffee.” She has separate and distinct signals for getting fresh parrot kibble vs vegetable parings, turning on the space heater, or being invited into a video meeting. There are differences between a parrot and other members of the household. She is smarter than a dog and more affectionate than a cat, yet filthier than an entire kindergarten of human children. (You might think your kids are messy, and maybe they also fling fruit on your windows, but do they gnaw chunks out of your baseboards or bite through your headphone cords?) The great thing about this particular bird is that she lives in this abundant, shameless space. She doesn’t wait or sneak around to steal food the way a dog will. She just marches up and starts eating it. She doesn’t beg for things, she insists on them. Yet she also has her little rituals for saying thank you, like grooming your fingers when you bring her something like a bowl of fresh water. She kisses everyone and everything, from her toys and her swing to the wall itself. Fortunately she kisses a lot of stuff before commencing to tear it to pieces, which sometimes gives us a chance to intervene. This weekend we’ll most likely rebuild the bird fort, bigger and better than ever before. It’s hard not to just give her anything she asks for. At least one little soul in this shared experience we apes call “the pandemic” is living her best life, waited on beak and talon. I’ve been thinking a lot about vaccine hesitancy lately. The conversation I had with my hesitant friend last week is still on my mind quite a bit, especially the part where she said she was worried about the long-term effects. There’s a part of the conversation that I didn’t report.
When she told me she was concerned about the long-term effects of the vaccine, I blurted out: “You drink Coke and you’re worried about the vaccine?!?” She laughed in spite of herself, realizing that it was actually pretty funny. I went on in that vein, that if you eat junk food then this is not a valid criticism. What about all the people who eat Chipotle?? Or drink blue beverages? Or wear Axe Body Spray? It’s true, though. My type is the much-reviled health nut, the scold, the “preachy” person who is out to ruin everyone’s fun. Sure, I’ll go with that. Why, then, am I so eager to get this radically new, weird, and suspicious substance injected directly into my bloodstream, when I’m not willing to eat, say, Hot Cheetos? Contrariwise, why are these people who are so laid-back, natural, normal, fun, whimsical, and popular about food and drink - why are these socially correct people so nervous and reluctant about one tiny little squirt of fluid? The very same people who follow the 14-second rule? If there is a single individual out there who will drink a Mountain Dew but will reject the vaccine, I would like that person’s number, so I can call them and laugh hysterically in their ear. Oh ho ho ho, NOW you care about what goes into your body?? Of course I realize that there are tons of alternative-health people who are vaccine deniers. This makes even less sense to me. You spend all your spare time reading articles and going to conferences and watching videos to educate yourself about your health as much as possible - yet you’re willing to write off one of the single greatest boons to health of all human history? This is such a mystery to me. Epidemic disease, the greatest scourge of human health of all time, dating back to the proto-hominids. Not even including the fatalities, epidemic diseases can cause permanent brain damage, skeletal deformations, hearing loss, blindness, skin lesions, heart and lung damage, infertility, and entire volumes of other health problems. Sure, it’s natural, but then so are death and old age and wrinkles and gray hair. There is a woo-woo belief out there that if you’re only just perfect enough, if you eat right and do your affirmations, then you can somehow be spiritually immune to disease. As fascinating a hypothesis as that is, there is a rather large spiritual component that is missing from that formulation. That is our moral duty to care for others, to be considerate of other sentient beings. Maybe you don’t care at all whether you spread COVID-19 to other humans - maybe you have your reasons for believing that people do not rate - but what about gorillas and tigers? ?? There are dozens of mammals that are susceptible to this coronavirus, just like humans are, and some of them are highly vulnerable to species loss. There are a lot of long-term effects of letting COVID-19 spread as far as it has. Animals are dying. Medical waste and packaging are proliferating like crazy and hurting and killing birds and sea life. We could put a stop to these things if we put a stop to the pandemic, and a massive global vaccination plan appears to be the only way to do that. I’m assuming that anyone who is as interested in health food as I am would also be interested in spirituality, ethics, animal welfare, and the natural environment? But maybe not. Maybe it’s all just anxiety in the form of an obsession with body purity. Which, again, really makes me wonder. Why aren’t people more concerned with the aftereffects of COVID itself? When my friend told me she was concerned about the long-term effects of the vaccine, I reminded her that I’ve been dealing with serious symptoms of COVID for ten months and counting. Did she really think that the vaccine would do anything worse than that?? All she could do was shrug. I ask again. If you, too, are concerned about the long-term effects of the vaccine, do you think they would include: Tachycardia Shortness of breath Memory loss Hand tremors Do you?? I’m 45. I used to think I had a good chance of living to 111. Now I worry all the time that the virus took decades off my lifespan or that I will suddenly drop dead. A lot of coronavirus patients are sent home from the hospital, supposedly cured, only to die days, weeks, or months later. I’m so worried about this early death problem, in fact, that I took a job largely to make sure I had life insurance. If there are “long-term effects” of the vaccine, then when would they supposedly kick in? A year? Five years? Ten years? Twenty years? Forty years? It seems funny to me that so many people, who had half a dozen or more vaccinations in childhood and were perfectly fine, are suddenly hesitant about yet another one. The same people are likely to get their tetanus boosters without question, because even the most die-hard vaccine skeptics realize that tetanus has a 10% kill rate. I’ve never once heard someone say they were concerned about the long-term effects of a tetanus shot. Having had COVID-19, though, I don’t think I would care that much even if there were proven permanent negative effects from the vaccine. That’s because I have reason to believe that if I got COVID again, I would be dead within days. At time of writing, over 26 million Americans have had at least one dose of the COVID-19 vaccine. By the end of the week, that will probably equal the population of Texas. Isn’t it strange how so many people are getting their shots and yet they appear to be perfectly fine? I don’t really know how to get more people to remember that they have had vaccines lots of times in the past, and that is probably why most of us don’t know anyone personally who had measles, or mumps, or rubella, or diphtheria, or whooping cough, or the others. All I know to do is to try to help my audience work on talking points for those who are close to them who may be swaying, who may be close to the side of reason once again. All I know to do is to keep talking and refuse to pretend that it’s perfectly okay to reject the vaccine. Because if only half of us get it, then there’s not much of a point. And what are the long-term effects of social loafing, slacking, and expecting others to do all the hard work of sustaining a human society? Darn those pesky New Year’s Resolutions. When you pick one that will actually make a difference in your life, it’s hard to push it to the side and forget about it.
I knew it was time to confront my digital hoarding. Predictably, it was worse than I thought. For some people it’s probably photographs and videos, and yes, I have a lot of those too, but that’s not my goal for right now. I have plenty of storage and they’re all backed up to the cloud. They don’t eat up my mental bandwidth, which is the real issue. I have a problem. When I was a little kid, I wished I could read everything, every book in the whole world. I’ve never really figured out how to un-wish that wish, only now it’s spread to include, apparently, every article, newsletter, and blog post ever written. The better I have gotten at sourcing and bookmarking information, the worse my digital hoarding has gotten. I found some apps and learned to speed-read, at which point it got still worse. I’m following that same line now, although in a new direction, and I appear to have passed Peak Bookmarks. At least so far in 2021, I’m trending downward. What kind of hoarding are we talking about? I don’t hoard physical books like a lot of dedicated readers. This may unsettle you, but I [whispering]... I think most books look bad! Physical bookshelves are a problem in my life for several reasons, not the least of which is my parrot, who has come by the nickname Sneaky Beaky honestly. They take up too much space in our tiny apartments, it’s a pain to have to keep unpacking them, and, finally, whenever there is a bookshelf in a room, my eyes will obsessively wander to it. Much too distracting. It was around the time that I got my first smartphone that I started feeling able to release my physical book collection. Once I knew I would always have something to read in my pocket, my brain decoupled from the bound object and latched itself onto the digital variety like a lamprey. *schlorp* A plausible formulation would be that I would eventually learn to trust that there will always be more news than I can read every single day, and that information will always come at me in waves, a sea I can never drink down. In that formulation, I would quit bookmarking things and chill out, floating ineffably in an intellectual innertube on an endless ocean of content. Yeah, that never happened. Periodically, pun intended, I would skim through my various hoards, intending to delete a bunch of stuff that was no longer relevant to my interests. I don’t think I ever even deleted 0.5% that way. The experience would just leave me peevish, feeling starved for time and yet more committed to eventually reading through this backlog. What? I can’t just... not know what is in those articles! In some ways it got still worse when I started my tech newsletter. It is extremely stochastic what I will and won’t find on any given day. I’m at the point now where, on rare occasions, something I post will actually spark a white paper or an invention disclosure. Obviously this is super-exciting! For the first time in my life, my chronic reading habits have direct practical application to real-world results! This has led to FoMO of the very worst kind. If I miss something, it’s not just me missing it, it’s all my readers, too, and what then?? I’m on top of it, though. The work stuff, at any rate. I’m gradually chipping away at my personal stuff, too. How am I doing it? Since I am apparently powerless to delete things and simply change my mind about letting things go? I found a couple of apps that will speed-read text aloud. It turns out this capability had existed in my all-time favorite bookmarking app, Pocket, for who knows how long. I could have been doing this for perhaps years. I just didn’t realize because the majority of my free mental bandwidth is quickly squandered on reading. The best thing about it? Most audio apps top out at 3x, but Pocket goes to 4. I’m currently at 3.4x and it’s still crisp and clear. Pocket is genius. I’ve been using it for years, to the point that I have gotten email from them saying I’m in their top 5% of users worldwide. I don’t know how many people have this app installed, but it is maybe a little alarming that I’m on their radar to this extent? That being said, it can’t pick up everything. The formatting on some publications is unreadable by Pocket. It’s still possible to read in web view, but my speed-reading app Outread can’t transfer these. In the past, I would sometimes copy and paste the text from the original article into Outread, a fussy process. Then I found Text to Speech. The same text I was copying and pasting into Outread could be dropped into Text to Speech instead. It doesn’t read as quickly as Pocket, but it was a way to listen to articles while multi-tasking. Not long after that, I stumbled upon an ad for Elocance. I paid $35 for it, which is beyond the pale for most apps, but in the range for old-school CD-ROM software or a hardcover book. While it can only read at 1.5x, it’s able to handle almost all the weirdly formatted publications that Pocket can’t. It can also read email, newsletter subscriptions, Word docs, PDFs, and whatever other random text you want to throw in there. Another improvement it has over Text to Speech is that it lines everything up in a playlist like a podcast app, rather than one-off selections. The way all this works, I’m listening through my news queue when I would previously have been listening to podcasts. While this has completely replaced podcasts in my life for the moment, I am actually consuming news content faster than I can bookmark it! It’s entirely likely that the novelty of blasting through my news queue with these new toys will soon wear off, and I will replace them with a new information source that will have me right back where I started. I give myself all year to work on a resolution, though, and for now, I’m making progress and feeling proud of myself. Skip January, I always say. I think the reason most people quit on their New Year’s Resolutions is that they feel like they need a perfect streak for it to really count. New Year’s Eve, in this formulation, is a magical portal that only exists for a few hours, and if the perfect streak is not maintained, then the spell is broken and the new habit is now forever off-limits.
I just added in a loophole that January is for getting ready, and nothing counts until February. February is a good sampler month because it’s the shortest month, the weather in the Northern Hemisphere is usually terrible, and there’s not much else to do unless you love Valentine’s Day - which I’m gathering most of you don’t? I made a bunch of New Year’s Resolutions, most of which I haven’t touched yet. Worse than that, I haven’t even finished filling out my goal planner, which is absolutely unprecedented in my life. I actually feel really bad about that because it’s a gift I give myself, and if I can’t find time once a year for something I find very fun and rewarding, then what is going on?? Scope creep and overkill? A lot of us feel like we’re letting ourselves down in some way. We don’t like setting goals because we feel like failures when we aren’t able to crush those goals in some kind of world-record timeframe. Slow and steady is realistic, yet too boring to be inspirational. What I’ve found from tracking my resolutions and goals on a quarterly basis is that it’s a lot easier to achieve these goals when they’re layered. Trying to do every single thing at once basically guarantees that none of it will happen. The first goal for everyone should probably be baseline contentment. This is something that’s been tougher for me. I always feel like I should be strenuously Doing Something. It’s an ADHD problem. I’m not great at simply sitting. This concept of “Netflix and chill” is a little mystifying to me. My work buddy mentioned that she binge-watched an entire series over the weekend - something on cybersecurity - and I blinked in surprise. A whole series?? But you’d have to watch three or four hours a day! Is that even possible?? What would you do, just sit there?? What did you do the rest of the weekend? It’s actually something to think about. What can you add to your baseline habits that would be fun? ‘Habit’ always seems to be seen in the context of ‘bad.’ When we think ‘habit’ we think of removing or stopping or quitting or taking away. This is very tough on human psychology, and probably not a useful formulation for a goal. An example would be our poor old dog Spike. When he was a young dog, we got him a laser pointer, and he reacted to it about the way that any grade-school kid would react to getting a PlayStation 5. We would try to hide it, and he would sniff out where it was, and he would stare at that spot and bark obsessively. The day we moved from that house, we took down the wall sorter where the laser pointer had been kept. He barked at the movers and showed them the blank spot on the wall and barked some more, asking if they would play with him, even though there was nothing there anymore. See, it’s hard to eliminate a habit! It’s much more tempting to think of something positive that you want to add to your life, and make it as easy and appealing to do as possible. By this method, you can gradually crowd out habits that you wish would go away, and eventually, they will. For someone like my work buddy who likes to binge-watch TV, there are a raft of habits that can be added without letting go of the binge-watching. Putting on lotion. Doing your own mani-pedi. Stretching or doing PT exercises. Folding laundry. Brushing out your pets. Using a percussion massager or a facial steamer. Mindlessly eating a large salad. Who knows what else? It’s also possible to watch TV on fitness equipment, like a treadmill or elliptical, although personally I find that this makes both the show and the workout feel ten hours long. As I said, I haven’t done much on my goals yet this year, because I don’t take January seriously as a goal month. I have done a few things, though, in the spirit of getting ready. I set up my new bullet journal, which is bright yellow and which I like very much. I lost four pounds, a great start, although a pound a week is not exactly magazine-feature material. I started using a language app to learn to speak Italian, and according to the app, I’ve already learned 78 words, even though I can’t seem to maintain a streak. *** I hate streaks *** I upgraded my phone and my fitness tracker and got them both up and running. I got a laptop charging station and organized all the cables at my desk for work. I scheduled up my periodontist appointments. I learned how to order grocery delivery through multiple services. I went through my digital hoard and got numbers. Confronting the extent of a problem is the most painful part - the clarity, the wake-up call - but that cold clear reality is what helps drive change. So... I had a thousand items in my ‘Read at Leisure’ email folder, 700 in one news queue, 1000 in another, and yet another 1000 in yet another. This is not including various library app bookshelves. Nearly four thousand articles, why?? I got some apps and started making a dent. I’m now reading through stuff faster than I’m accumulating it, which means there is hope for me yet. While it’s still true that I haven’t done a single thing toward most of my goals and resolutions for the year, I have done *some* things to make my life easier. Many of the things I have done in January are set-up tasks that I won’t have to do again. I’ve streamlined a few areas and bought myself some time. Now, as I do at the first of every month, it’s time to pause and look at my list of goals and resolutions, where I wrote them longhand in the front of my bullet journal. Are these things I’m still committed to doing? Okay, then when am I going to do them? It’s February and it’s time to get started. |
AuthorI've been working with chronic disorganization, squalor, and hoarding for over 20 years. I'm also a marathon runner who was diagnosed with fibromyalgia and thyroid disease 17 years ago. This website uses marketing and tracking technologies. Opting out of this will opt you out of all cookies, except for those needed to run the website. Note that some products may not work as well without tracking cookies. Opt Out of CookiesArchives
January 2022
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