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. Mostly it’s advice columns. I had no idea there were so many of them. I start reading through people’s highly specific dilemmas, and I’m swept away. All of these situations are so unlike mine that I forget my own life for a while.
Then I realized that I had a backlog of news articles (advice columns included) that dated back before the pandemic. Aha! Now I could skim to my heart’s content. Roommate drama! Classroom hijinks! Traveler’s tales! Yes, please. Give me your petty complaints about life before breathing could kill you. Realizing that there was a date cut-off, after which was all COVID all the time, and before which was... normal daily life... was a revelation. It’s like the tide washing up on the beach, dry sand on one side and wet clumpy sand on the other. I have other backlogs! I started going through the 30+ G of podcasts that had built up on my phone. Some of my automatic downloads went back to 2018. Such bliss! Do you remember how much time people used to spend going back and forth on each other’s true crime shows? One of my shows started covering conspiracies around the JFK assassination. Now there is a classic non-pandemic storyline that seems to go on forever. This weekend my hubby and I might watch a JKF conspiracy documentary together. (Not that we are conspiracy-minded; we’re actually more like debunkers. If you are into conspiracies it probably wouldn’t survive extended social contact with an engineer). (If you’re curious, I think it’s obvious that Oswald was the lone shooter, first of all because the passing decades have shown how common it is for a lone shooter to go out and kill people. Second, he got his job at the book depository over a month before the assassination, and it just makes much more sense that being on the motorcade route was a coincidence. Third, there are so many widely divergent conspiracy theories that for all of them to be in play in the same place at the same event is, well, it’s ludicrous. But for any of them to be true they have to give reasons that invalidate all the others, so they all fall in the crossfire). See? It’s intriguing. The story isn’t so much about what happened on a certain day; the story of conspiracy theories is how a particular notion captivates so many people who are then so determined to convince others of their version. I mean, what earthly use is it to play armchair detective to events that happened that far in the past? My telling someone that I think Oswald acted alone is about as useful as my telling someone that I also think Lizzie Borden was guilty. Or that someone else wants to tell people the Earth is flat. Why does it matter? Because stories matter, because we love telling stories to each other and we just want someone to listen. I sometimes wonder what it’s like in the afterlife, whether all the dead folk tell each other stories and whether they can tell whether these stories are true or not. I like to imagine that there’s an all-access pass to a sort of library, where you can look up any answers about past events and finally know what transpired, even centuries before your lifetime. The princes in the tower? Whodunnit! Even more so, all the stories about UFO sightings, Sasquatch... Sasquatch flying around in a UFO... How great it would be to finally know what really happened, to know the end of the story. What then, though? To know the end of every story is to be at the end of story itself. Closed book. Isn’t it better to get to the end of a story, knowing it isn’t over and that you’ll never really know? An ambiguous ending gives you something to think about, something to puzzle over and something to talk about. This is why we want to be around other people so much, because of our existential need for story. We need to know what everyone else is up to. Me? I’m mostly working, and that’s a story in itself. Once upon a time there was a sick lady who nearly died, but then her dream job opened up and her husband submitted her resume. Then she sat at a tiny little desk in a tiny little corner upon a velvet cushion, and there she will sit forevermore. The rest of the time, it’s story that’s getting me through. Novel after novel after novel. Tough boarding schools! Blended families! Murder plots! Sorcery! Cowboys even! Not that long ago, I was wondering what would be the last book I ever finished, or the last movie I ever watched. Paranoia about ending with a mediocre tale caused me to start being more selective. No movies rated below 70%. No boring books. The story that we exist in today is boring me sideways right now. Thuh pandemic. Ughhhh. Chances are, at a certain point in the timeline, people who were lucky enough to be born past our era may look back at these times and find them interesting. Perhaps they will develop a deep curiosity about us and what we were thinking and doing. Probably mostly about what we were thinking. What stories are we going to tell these future people? More relevant to my interests, what books are they going to be reading that have not yet been published? It’s my desire to still be around to read these future unwritten stories, or at least glance at them as I wander around a bookshop. At some point, we will have gotten through, and there will be that many more stories yet to tell. I’m putting together my Hallow-tober reading list, and that includes a few other types of media. By the end of the month, no way will I have gotten through everything on the list, but that’s okay. It’s aspirational. Like a bag of jellybeans, it’s more fun when there’s a wide selection.
Books TANA FRENCH has a new book coming out!!! She is one of the few authors who, whenever I see they’re publishing something new, I audibly gasp and start flailing my hands around. RUTH WARE too! All things Johannes Cabal, forever and always. On the short list of fewer than a dozen books I would re-read, and these are five ***WAIT*** 7 of them!!!! Hoping to finally read more Adam Nevill, David Wong, Nick Cutter, and Vivian Shaw. Planning to re-read The Dark Dark and wishing there was just more Samantha Hunt in general. Forlornly checking and re-checking for something new from Audrey Niffenegger. Podcasts I’ve been hoarding: Lore The Black Tapes Disgraceland Movies Green Room - I think I’m finally over my resentment about missing it in the theatre. I also might re-watch all the Addams Family movies. There are other things bookmarked on my list that might or might not be good. Believe it or not, as much as I love this genre, I save almost all of it up for October. If I enjoyed it all every day, eventually I would RUN OUT, and that’s the scariest thing of all. That’s the title I would choose for the movie where no new books are written and no new movies or podcasts are made. Scared ya, didn’t I? It just so happens that Independent Bookstore Day is the last Saturday in August. I told this to my husband, and he laughed, because it coincides with our wedding anniversary. He should have known.
What are we doing to celebrate? And by “we” I don’t mean my husband and me, I mean “me and all y’all readers out there.” Is there an independent bookstore near you? Did you already know the answer to that, or is it inspiring you to check? I live within a half-hour walk of the nicest indie bookstore in our area. I love that place, and not just because one of the clerks is a super-smart and mega-fine surfer boy. I love it because I can count on the selection including plenty of interesting books I haven’t already read. I also love it because every time I’ve gone in there, I’ve gotten into a conversation with at least one other customer and one of the women who runs the place. These are people who live and breathe books, just like me. I want to make sure they continue to have somewhere to do what they do. Where will they go if people like me don’t shop there? More in my self-interest, where will I go if people like me don’t shop there, and there quits being any “there” there? There’s a big mall bookstore in the next town over. I can never find anything in there that I want to read, even though it’s twenty times bigger than the little indie store within walking distance. The manager spent ten minutes trying to hand-sell me a book that fell far outside my area of interest. “Your husband told me you like true crime.” Yeah, but not that kind! Know your audience, my guy. One night, we went into the big mall bookstore for half an hour while we were waiting for a movie to start. I wanted to buy what I call a BFB - “Big Fat Book” - for an upcoming camping trip. It’s family tradition to treat the Great Outdoors like a living room and sit around in camp reading for much of the day. { *** I MISS THAT *** } I wandered around, looking for any book more than an inch thick, only to discover that I had read almost all of them already. “Them” being the books that show up the most often on the “100 best” lists. All that was left was The Corrections, which I bought, and which was a terrific choice, but the process definitely poked one of my buttons. I found my husband, who always leaves the big mall bookstore with at least 2-3 good choices. “What am I going to do? I’ve already read everything!” I wailed. “No you haven’t,” he said, which was both entirely false and technically accurate. Hmph. I was there to comfort him when he realized he had exhausted the entire catalogue of Patrick O’Brian. It turned out, though, that my real problem was trying to find things that 1. suited my tastes and 2. had not already been read by me in the big mall bookstore. Growing up within easy traveling distance of Powell’s Books tends to ruin a person for any other bookstore. Nice try, Strand. Might as well call it a day, Green Apple. There is only one Powell’s. And if we keep on going like we are, there might not even be that. It’s our buying habits that determine whether there are any good bookstores. Anywhere. We can’t all afford to book a trip to London just because we need to stock up at Daunt Books. Soon we may be stuck with nothing but big, anonymous mall bookstores - or not even that. I admit, I really only consume ebooks and audiobooks now, as I have for the last few years. I do make an effort, though, to support indie bookstores. Whenever we go on a trip I seek out whatever is tiny and local. This is where I buy all my blank books and greeting cards. This is where I buy books as gifts for others. I only wish there was a way to buy ebooks directly from these indie stores, too, so they could have at least a percent of the sale. People who prefer paper books may scoff at this, but it raises the question which I must ask. Are your paper books bought at retail price from indie bookstores? Or are you buying off the remainder table? Or are you buying used? Or are you swapping with other people? Because at least when I buy an ebook, some of the proceeds go to the publisher and the author. Those other formats of paper books aren’t doing all that much to support the publishing industry. We treat books differently from other consumables. If we go to the movies, we’ve had the entertainment once, and we leave with nothing to show for it but the memory - and maybe a staircase moment when we realize there was a glaring hole in the plot. If we go to a restaurant, we’ve eaten the meal, and again we leave with nothing but the memory. When we read, there can be this expectation that we can cash it in, either by lending it to someone else to read for free, or selling it to a used bookstore. Maybe it’s time to question this. We’ve all been stuck at home for quite a while now, and books are the best way I know to be in one place while feeling like we are somewhere else. Cooler weather is coming. Maybe that’s why Independent Bookstore Day is scheduled at the end of summer. What are you going to read next? Where are you going to buy it? Once upon a time there was a little gray parrot named Noelle. She was a tiny bird with an enormous dream. One day, when she grew up, she wished that she could live in a cardboard box.
Then her wish came true! First, she had one box. Then, she had two boxes. Then, she had three boxes. Before she knew it, the little parrot named Noelle had so many boxes she could hardly count them all. She could climb out of one box and into another box and then climb out again. Best of all, the little gray parrot was allowed to chew up as much cardboard as she wanted! She could rip it and tear it and shred it and kick it over her shoulder until it fell all over the floor like so many brown cornflakes. What could possibly be better than living in a box and chewing on cardboard? Mm, mm, delicious! After a while, Noelle would chew up her boxes so much that they would start to fall over. Then, the very next day, there would be brand-new boxes to munch. What happened to the old boxes? They fell on the floor in hundreds of little pieces like so many brown cornflakes. That’s what happened to the old chewed-up boxes. The little parrot named Noelle loved living in a cardboard box. She loved starting all over again with a fresh box whenever she chewed up the old one. There was just one problem. Every time she went to her box house, she got stuck there. Her box house had no toys, because whenever she found a toy in her nice cardboard house, she picked it up and threw it off her porch. That was her choice. All cardboard, no toys. But the cardboard house didn’t have any food or water, either. Worst of all, it didn’t have a bathroom. Poor Noelle. Every time she really started to have fun tearing up her cardboard house, she would start to realize that she needed a break. Then she would have to wait for a cab ride to take her back to her perch. Whistle, whistle! Whistle for the taxi cab! Then, one magical day, a new box showed up. It was very skinny and very flat and very long. Where did this box come from? What was in it? A LADDER! A ladder with every rung a different color! This was very scary. Whenever there is a ladder, it’s best to stare at it for a while and make sure it doesn’t make any sudden moves. The next day, the ladder wasn’t scary any more. It had learned to mind its manners. All of a sudden something happened. The ladder reached from the box house to the perch! Hooray! Now the little gray parrot saw that she could walk back and forth across the ladder bridge whenever she wanted to. The first day she went back and forth, back and forth, back and forth, just to try it out. She shuffled sideways, hanging onto the side of the ladder. On the second day, she found out she could walk straight forward if she put one foot on the side and the other foot on the rainbow-colored rungs. Then the little parrot decided that the ladder bridge was the best place to be. She sat in the middle. Sometimes she stood on one foot, because that’s the most comfortable thing to do when you want a nap. Don’t you stand on one foot when you’re tired and you want to sleep? Another thing you can do on a bridge is eat a piece of lettuce, or maybe some cucumber. Be sure to hold onto it with your toes so you don’t drop it. Cardboard might be delicious, but it’s good to save room for some vegetables too sometimes. At the end of the day, the little gray parrot named Noelle walked back and forth on the ladder bridge so many times, and ate so much cardboard, that she got very tired. It was almost nine o’clock, and that’s much too late. She went to bed, where she dreamed of eating lots and lots of cardboard the very next day. ... I used to write book reviews on Fridays, but I haven’t seemed to be able to finish reading a book for a while. I hope that this children’s story was mildly entertaining and that someone might actually read it to a little kid. I’m going to do a book club at work, how nuts is that?
More interestingly, I had a fantasy book club idea back before COVID, and I appear to have manifested it into being with my thoughts alone, because I was invited to one of the same description and I didn’t have to organize it myself. Let’s get to that in a minute What I’ve been thinking about lately is what to do now that the world is upside down, and looks like it will be for quite a while. The natural response to this would be to run down the street screaming in your underwear, and if you’ve been doing that, cheers. Don’t blame you at all. One of my most common ideation tools, though, is “What would be the opposite of this?” This is my idea of a Zen-like koan, a nonsensical idea, because most things are not binary and thus do not have an opposite. Like, what’s the opposite of a watermelon? The creative part of the mind really seems to like this type of question, and it can spin out endlessly. Okay, so, what would be the opposite of isolated misery? Connected contentment? Sounds good, let’s go with that! What kinds of things provide both a feeling of connection and a feeling of contentment? That’s a sector where I feel like ‘online book club’ would be a natural fit. The book club I had in mind was a Toastmasters club where all the speeches would be about books. I figured the members could just show up and talk about whatever they were reading, or related topics. Books they loved in the past, books they bought and couldn’t get into, favorite bookstores, new releases they had pre-ordered, TV and movie adaptations of books and how they compare, book podcasts, reading technology, buying new shelves... Anything and everything book-related. This was my secret plan for a discovery process. One of my least favorite things about book clubs is that basically all they are is 1. An excuse to get together and drink wine while 2. Confessing that nobody finished the book (except for me) and then 3. Complaining that they didn’t really enjoy it. Since I don’t like wine and I usually enjoyed the book, my presence was more or less an annoyance. I figured if I made a club where everyone just talked about whatever book they wanted, or a book they had read at any point in their life, then people wouldn’t feel guilty about “not doing their homework.” They wouldn’t have to prepare. We could connect over our shared love of reading, rather than over our feelings of guilt for not measuring up in the social comparison contest. My goal here was to have a medium-sized group of people share whatever books were exciting them, and then I could take notes and go off and read whatever sounded the best to me. Before COVID, I had a plan to meet in our one little indie bookstore, two miles up the street from me. They hosted three monthly book clubs, I knew that, and I had it on my calendar to attend one and then pitch the owner. I had already been by to scope out where they held their meetings and how much space there would be. Ah, but then the shutdown happened just in time to cancel the very meeting I was planning to attend. Imagine my surprise to discover, when I went to their website to check what book they were doing back in March, that - THEY ARE MEETING IN PERSON ALREADY. Whoa, that’s brave. This bookstore is like the size of my apartment. How many people are they planning to cram in there?? Anyway. Not happening. Not sure that holding an open book in front of my face counts as PPE. I didn’t have a lot of time to fret over my lost book club, the one that never existed, before we had a lot bigger problems on our minds. Everything started happening online almost immediately. That was when I started thinking about doing a virtual book club. Three months later, I got an invitation. My local Mensa group was hosting an online book club. Guess how it was going to be organized?? Since the first meeting was held right before my birthday, I took it as a sign that my desire had been met. I put the thought out there into the collective imagination cloud, and it rained down on me, in perhaps a better format than the one I would have made. The only issue so far has been that I’ve already read about 80% of the recommended books. Another way to look at that is that this club is right on my wavelength, and that we will all probably enjoy one another’s suggestions. After meeting twice, we decided to hold meetings twice a month. One meeting would be a free-for-all, and the other would be a theme, where we could either read a suggested book that we all voted on, or something related to the theme. We’re doing ‘time travel’ and ‘history of Southern California’ for our first topics if you want to do a sympathy read with us. BTW I love Perry Mason how about you??? Safe-at-home is probably the best time in history to host a book club. You could wind up with people who share your reading tastes but live on another continent, several time zones away. This is probably why I keep getting requests at work for a recommended reading list. I gave a talk about ideation a few weeks ago and people are still buzzing about it. I figured, what the heck, rather than post a reading list that is three pages long, why not just host it as a non-time-dimension discussion group. We’ll do a book a month, with specific chapters each week, and everyone can read them together. If there were ever a time when we could use more creative ideas on how to solve problems, that time is now. How about you? Do you think it’s time to start a new book club? Something happened. Something happened at work and I’m not sure what the ramifications will be until next week, maybe later.
It basically went like this. I got a brand-new job, partly based off a project I’d been doing on spec for not quite two years. Right after I started, I reached out to someone who knew about that project to ask for advice on choosing a grad school in her field. She invited me to meet, which I thought was very generous, and it turned out she wanted to talk about my project. Then she asked me to give a presentation, which I did. What I thought I would be doing was giving a brown-bag lunchtime talk to about a dozen people. I’d tell them how I came up with the idea for my project and how I put it together. I’d share the specific work tools I use and maybe teach some of my techniques. Fun, right? Then there were 80 people there, at least one of them a director, and the response wound up being at least 10x bigger than I expected. WELL THAT ESCALATED QUICKLY One of the slides in my presentation came from notes I scribbled on my phone in the middle of the night, when all I wanted to do was sleep. During the Q&A everyone wanted to go back and look at that slide and discuss it some more. Now I’m realizing that my original idea might have legs. I may have accidentally and sleepily created something good enough to be an entire book. This kinda happens to me all the time. The thing about ideation and creativity is that it comes out of a pipe. For some people, that pipe has been shut off for many years, and it will take more than a pipe wrench to get it turned on again, trickling out in brown sputters that nobody wants to drink at first. Then the water starts flowing pure and clean and cold. Then it really starts flowing and spraying all over the place. Then it’s like a fire hydrant blasting every kid in the street and it takes an entire crew to get it back under control. This is my fountain, a high-pressure water main continually pumping by the thousands of gallons, and here I am in rubber boots, trying to collect it all in buckets and cans before it washes away my entire building. BAIL! Part of my remit now is to put together a reading list of books on imagination and creativity. I’ve read dozens of these, and if anyone can do this task, certainly I can. The trouble is keeping it under eight pages... although maybe I don’t need to... Being a natural ideator often feels like trying to keep a beach ball under water in the pool. It keeps finding ways to pop back out and then everyone wants to play with it. The process of pushing that beach ball back underwater is ungainly, and it feels very exposed to do it in a swimsuit. The idea is often ready before we are. I’ve been working on capturing more things at the beginning phase of the process, the early curly part of the ideation arc, so that people can watch something unfold in realtime. Wouldn’t it be interesting if my little grid illustration, born in the dark of night on my pillow, eventually turned into a published book? And we all got to watch it happen together? I know what I am. Over the past several years I have developed myself into a working artist, and I have that confidence in my identity that is necessary to succeed in the creative world. What I don’t necessarily have yet are the world-class ready-for-prime-time skills that develop from practice and experience. I also don’t have the validation or credentials of having millions of fans. (Yet - but it could happen). Possibility thinking includes anything and everything with a non-zero chance. There’s a zero chance that I will personally go to Mars, because I’m scared to get in a rocket and I just don’t want to. But there’s definitely a non-zero chance that people will go to Mars in my lifetime. Mars is a thing, me on Mars is not going to be a thing. In that same light we can say, what else is there a non-zero chance of happening? In the past 25 years there’s been a non-zero chance of me working on a llama ranch, sorting recycling in Antarctica, winning $15,000 on a game show, or teaching MMA classes. This is because I am curious and I give serious consideration to options and opportunities that would not cross someone else’s mind as acceptable outcomes. Is this awesome? Y/N Would this be good for the blog? Y/N Will this cause me to go viral for the right or wrong reasons? Then what happens? Sometimes I don’t believe my own hype. I can document the fact that I came up with the idea to backpack around Iceland for three weeks, and then rooked my husband into it. I can document the fact that I studied knife fighting and situational combatives. I can document the fact that I can solve cryptograms while listening to audio books on triple speed and using chopsticks left-handed. But that all makes me sound like a cartoon character. Inside I still think of myself as the world’s most boring person, because just as much of my time goes toward basic domestic tasks as everyone else. It’s probably inevitable that I’ll wind up publishing a book, and/or giving workshops, and/or putting out a cartoon or an advice column or something. Those are just locations on the other end of the innovation arc that I’m traveling on. I can’t stop running my mouth, in realtime or behind the scenes in my own mind. Myself talks to myself a lot. It will turn into something eventually. What remains to be seen is whether it will take 3-5 years, like I originally estimated, or whether it will happen more quickly because I have already dreamed it into obviousity. People often used to ask me how I found so much time to read. Now I’m wondering that myself.
When I was young, I took the bus everywhere, and I would often have a 40-minute work commute. Reading created a privacy bubble and kept me comfortable. It also meant I always had a hard-cover library book in my bag, a bag that probably weighed 15 pounds on average. When I had a car, I eventually discovered audiobooks, but the CDs only played at one speed. It would take me all week to finish a book. When I quit my day job, I might read five hours a day. Then I got a smartphone and eventually rediscovered audiobooks. Over the course of a few years I learned that I could play them back at 1.25, then 2x, and now 3x. I could finish half a book on a distance run. I’d listen to the other half while I cooked dinner and did laundry. Then I figured out how to speed-read ebooks. I can read a digital book at double the speed of a paper book. Sometimes I would read two books a day. Then I got COVID-19 and I couldn’t really read much of anything at all for a couple weeks. Then I got a day job again. When do you people find all that time to read all those books?? I don’t have a work commute. My desk is 20 feet from my bed. I used to read during my breaks and at lunch. Now I find myself doing chores or running errands. We work a 9/80 schedule. That means we work 9 hours Monday through Thursday so that we can have alternate Fridays off, which means two three-day weekends a month not including holidays. This is magnificent! It also means we’re done for the day at 6 pm. Four hours until bedtime. Hour to cook and eat dinner Hour to work out, half an hour to shower That leaves 90 minutes of leisure time. But... that’s not enough time to read a book! *sigh* I hear that other people supposedly watch 5 hours of TV a day on average. When, is what I’d like to know? Do they start at 6:00 and just leave it on until 11 pm? Aren’t they tired?? This is the great danger for me, the fatal attraction: the desire to read “one more chapter” until it’s 1 am. What I need is a sleeping helmet that somehow delivers entire plots directly into my brain so I wake up knowing what happened. ...although if that were possible, surely it would work while we were awake and doing other things? I looked back at my records, and I’ve read 14 books in the last three weeks. Others might think that was quite a lot. For me, doesn’t it mean it’s taking me a day and a half to read a book? This is why I’m thinking it’s time for a reading weekend. Reading is relaxation. Reading is my way of connecting with an outside world that I’m not spending much time visiting lately. Reading is the thing I do that makes me me. If I can’t do it during the week, then I’m hereby canceling everything else and doing it over the weekend. Somehow I will eventually adjust and figure out how to make more time for reading on weekdays, too. All I really need is another hour, an hour created out of waking time and not robbed from sleeping time. Now I have only two questions: What should I read this weekend? What are you reading? As I was planning my wedding, I asked the readers of my old book blog what would be their pick for the absolute worst book to read on one’s honeymoon. I got a lot of darkly humorous responses. I took the advice not to pack them with my trousseau, but out of curiosity I did read a few later. I’d have to say the winner was Revolutionary Road. A close second was The Shining, and wouldn’t that top the list of books not to read during quarantine? In a similar spirit, I offer here a sampling of Books Not to Read Right Now. They are all great and well deserving of a read, but let’s just maybe save them for a brighter day, shall we? The Stand. The most light-hearted of these selections, this book might be worth reading, as many chapters are quite practical. Let’s also be glad we aren’t dealing with Captain Tripps. The Siege. ...of Leningrad. Only read this if your pantry and freezer are full and you’ve just eaten an extra-large stuffed crust pizza. Room. A young mom entertains a small child in a single room using only the craft supplies she has on hand. The Hot Zone. If you really want to understand the concept of contagion or zoonotic disease, here ya go. From today’s perspective, it has a somewhat happy ending, which my roommates and I did not know when we were trading this book back and forth in 1994. Rats, Lice, and History. Another nonfiction book that wants to scare us with something (bubonic plague) that was much more contagious and a much bigger threat in its time than it is now. The Coming Plague. If you’re disgruntled about top-level responses to COVID-19, have I got a little something for you. Publication date: 1994
I still haven’t done anything so far this January! I’m proud of this because sometimes it’s a difficult commitment to keep. It’s more important to me to work my goals ten months of the year than it is to try to maintain some kind of “””perfect””” “””streak””” starting on Day One. Because January is a basically impossible time of year to do anything, other than maybe sleep more or spend less money.
The one thing I have done is to reframe one habit by thinking of it as something else entirely. That’s where the News Machine comes in. I have a terrible habit - actually many of them - and I also have a good habit, or at least one that I can invoke from time to time. This is part of my secret of habit change and personal transformation, the discovery that a good habit can be harnessed to flip over a bad one. It’s called “anchoring.” Peanut butter and... jelly. Socks and... shoes. Floss and... brush your teeth. Trampolines and... ice cream cones. (Ooh, messy). There is a reverse of this, as there is of most things, and that is when two bad habits are anchored together, or when a good habit triggers a bad one. If a pattern like this is recognized, then it’s time to brainstorm and figure out how to separate the two things. Like, every time I walk into the craft store I spend $40, or, every time I get a coffee I also get an ooey gooey pastry. Usually the “bad” habit is the thing that we feel is an intrinsic part of our very personality. I quite literally AM an ooey gooey pastry! On the molecular level! I don’t ever want to be the kind of person who is not that! This is why I usually refer to them as cute habits. Not “bad.” We weren’t born bad, we were born interesting! Okay, so, confession: my cute habit is that I’d rather be reading than doing basically anything else. And the bad version of that habit is that the more I read, the more I bookmark, and the longer my “to read” list gets. The reason this is bad is that it interferes with my enjoyment. I start to think of my favorite thing as a must-do. Rather than having 100% fun, I start to feel like I “need” to get “caught up.” Do you ever feel that way? Crafty people often start to feel like they “need” to “finish” projects, like they’re “behind” on scrapbooking or “finishing” a quilt. What is supposed to be nothing at all other than a relaxing hobby somehow transmogrifies into a guilt machine. I promised! I owe! It’s late! Those emotions come from anchoring the hobby to something else, like giving gifts, showing affection to friends and family, trying to save money, or earning approval. The pressure also comes from shopping for materials, where the more focus there is on the hobby, the more accumulation of materials, and the more space they take up in the home. We think the only ways to relieve those practical and social pressures are to craft faster, rather than to stop buying supplies and stop trying to create 100% handmade gifts. Get back to making it about relaxation! That’s turning into an entire separate piece, but I’m not going to claim that I’ll ever write it because I’m trying to reframe my personal concept of procrastination. Why do I feel like I’m procrastinating on personal projects? Why do I sometimes feel this way even when there’s no deadline, nobody is asking for anything from me, and literally nobody cares but me? Is this true for you, for anything in your life? As with a lot of things, it’s easier to just go with it than it is to try to change the emotion. I recognize that I feel “behind” on my reading, and I figure out what I can do with that feeling that will lead directly to a positive action. In my case, I use it to work out on the elliptical. There! I said it! I lied, I cheated! I’ve actually been crushing it this month down in the workout room! I just didn’t want to admit it while talking about New Year’s Resolutions, because it makes other people feel bad. Like my weird little goals have anything to do with anyone but me... I’ve found that I seem to read faster when I’m on the elliptical for some reason. It makes the time pass quickly. I’ve tried other types of habits to keep me working out. I tried running on the treadmill, and it makes me feel like my brain is slowly dying. (Current gym does not have a treadmill). I tried the exercise bike but it makes me sore and I don’t think it gives me any results. I tried watching TV shows on the elliptical, but it makes me feel like every minute is really 18 minutes. The thing I’ve settled on is that I can read through news articles. Whatever works! I can’t emphasize this enough. If you think in terms of “supposed to” and “because” and “everyone else” and “not doing it right” and “fail,” you’re stopping yourself before you start. Try thinking in terms of “works for me” and “not sure why, but” and “for some reason.” You like what you like and you’re allowed to like it. This is why I’m not thinking about my workout as a workout. I’m thinking about it as the News Machine. When I change clothes, I’m thinking about how many articles I’m going to read, and *that* is my personal burn rate. My metric is that I started out with nearly 400 articles in my news queue, and now I’m down to 120. Yay! After that, there’s my *other* news queue, and then my “read at leisure” email folder, and then my open tabs... According to my phone, I’m burning 18% more calories per workout after only two weeks. That comes from the feeling that I call “getting the lead out.” Like I threw off some lead weights. If my starting goal had been to “burn calories” or “move faster” I’m sure I would have been discouraged and I would already be feeling like I aimed too high. Instead, I’m really just excited about finally feeling that elusive satisfaction of being “all caught up.” I can see it, a month or two from now. If I can keep reading this fast, if I can keep getting a spot on the News Machine... I’ll probably just keep adding more stuff and making my list longer. Because who would I be without a to-do list or a never-ending stack of things to read? |
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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